The Rule of Sanctuary: Security, Nature, and Norms in the Protected Forests of Kerala, South India Goutam Gajula Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 ©2015 Goutam Gajula All rights reserve ABSTRACT The Rule of Sanctuary: Security, Nature, and Norms in the Protected Forests of Kerala, South India Goutam Gajula The aim of this dissertation is to understand how worries over nature’s degradation, ensuing securitization practices, and emergent norms intersect in environmental protected areas. It concerns the Nilgiri Biosphere in Kerala, South India, and how regimes of nature protection effect the lives of its human inhabitants, the Kurumba, a so-called primitive adivasi tribe. Combining ethnography with archival research, it asserts that the labors and logics of nature protection, present and past, participate in a distinctly liberal problematic of competing securities, manifest in the tension between sovereign discretions and the freedoms of legal rights and market interests. This study makes two overarching claims. First, that during the colonial era, nature’s inessential character allowed for flexibilities in legal interpretation that furthered imperial ambitions. In the silence of the law, norms mediated by colonialist pejoratives operated to satisfy those ambitions, while supplementing the knowledge necessary for government. Second, analysis of recent environmental movements and ecological projects surrounding the Nilgiri Biosphere shows how norms derived from civil society are produced to intervene between security prerogatives and social freedoms. The upshot of these normative practices, I argue, is to depoliticize natures and agencies, while extending and intensifying security’s command of unruly natures. While ensuring lives lived in accordance to it, this normativity endangers those who fall short of or otherwise elude it. To understand this endangerment, I provide an interpretation of adivasi resistances and rejections, in particular the Kurumba turn to illicit cultivation of ganja in the Biosphere’s core area. I contextualize this turn within the history of forest-adivasi relations, recent adivasi actions elsewhere within the Nilgiri Biosphere, and the global discourses of indigenous peoples and the environment. I argue that by operating not through a putative politics of rights and interest, but through counter-conducts and illegalities, the Kurumba present a challenge to the political as such. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Dedication iv Introduction 1 Part I 1 Crisis 11 2 Imperium 35 3 Jurisdiction 52 4 Privilege 69 Part II 5 Forest-Village 86 6 Bhoomikannan (or, the Earth Gazers) 111 Conclusion: The Rule of Sanctuary 132 Bibliography 146 i Acknowledgements I must above all thank the people of Attappady, who generously invited me into their villages, homes, and lives. I dedicate this dissertation to them, as a small gift returned for their trust and friendship. I remain grateful and ever in their debt. In spite of their well-earned skepticism toward the work of visiting researchers, it is my hope that my representation and analysis does some justice. My fieldwork also owes much to Dr. P.R.G. Mathur who encouraged my in situ shift from sacred groves to the protected forests of Attappady. Without his support, friendship, and guidance, I would have never found my way in Attappady. It was only with his good name that this stranger was welcomed and trusted by the Kurumba. Sivan was not only my research assistant, he was a trusted interlocutor, who charitably listened to my theories, and provided firm and learned criticisms. My dissertation fieldwork would not have been possible without the generous Fulbright-Hays DDRA grant and the sponsorship by Dr. B.R. Ramesh at the French Institute, Pondicherry. I appreciate their faith in this project. For their patient guidance and service I thank the librarians and assistants at the Tamil Nadu State Archives, Kerala Forest Research Institute, Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, and the British Archives. The faculty at Columbia University has inspired and challenged me in ways I could never have expected. As a frustrated student in the religion program, I was initiated into anthropology by Michael Taussig’s innervating lectures on taboo and transgression. In his work and teaching, he has been a constant source of inspiration. He cultivated my concerns about the sacred in modern life, while pushing those concerns in new and critical dimensions. Nicholas Dirks was an early and steadfast supporter of my research interests, from whom I have inherited the unanticipated pleasures of the archive. From Nick I learned the responsibilities of historiography and its power/knowledge in the ii making of modern worlds. E. Valentine Daniel, who has been so much more than my teacher and advisor, has taught me above all the ethics and humanity required of a scholar, but also demanded of a person, even and especially in troubled times. He has endured my journey, going easy on my missteps and encouraging my perseverance. His critical mind, intellectual responsibility and dedication to the work of words have set my striving as a scholar and writer. I owe my defense committee—E. Valentine Daniel, Paige West, Brinkley Messick, Barney Bate, and Eliza Kent—a great debt for their patience, understanding, and commitment to me and this dissertation. I can only hope to honor their investment with the future work that this dissertation might make possible. I am grateful to Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tireless assistance as graduate advisor. Over the years at Columbia University I have had the fortune of meeting many many great and kind people, who have been dear colleagues, trusted friends, and respected interlocutors: Ryan Chaney, Yogesh Chandrani, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Deirdre de la Cruz, Rodney Collins, Kristen Drybread, Daniella Gandalfo, Nadia Guessous, Pamila Gupta, Ron Jennings, Vishnupad Mishra, Lisa Mitchell, Dard Neuman, Juan Obarrio, Todd Ochoa, Poornima Paidipaty, Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, David Podgurski, Seema Rizvi, Antina von Schnitzler, Sarah Vaughn, Roxanne Varzi, and Ka-Ming Woo. Joyce Monges, Juana Cabrera, Marilyn Astwood, and Michael Chin have been not only coworkers, but friends and family. Thank you for your kindness over the years and forgiveness for my absences. Thanks will not suffice for the unquestioning support of my parents and brothers over what has probably seemed an interminable process. They have been there throughout, ready to absorb any hardships and deflect any doubts. Finally, Megan Huston has been part of my life for as long as this project has been underway. She has been my constant companion, beloved friend, and refuge throughout. Thank you for bearing my worries and keeping me in your care. iii Dedication For The Adivasis of Attappady and MMH without whom this work would not be possible and for whom this author has endured iv The victors—for the present—are we, the discontinuous. The swamp- forest, defeated is still around us; we have barely opened a passage with blows of our machete in the thicket of mangrove roots; finally a glimpse of free sky opens over our heads, we raise our eyes shielding them from the sun: above us stretches another roof, the hull of words we secrete constantly. As soon as we are out of the primordial matter, we are bound in a connective tissue that fills the hiatus between our discontinuities, between our deaths and births, a collection of signs, articulated sounds, ideograms, morphemes, numbers, punch cards, magnetic tapes, tattoos, a system of communication that includes social relations, kinship, institutions, merchandise, advertising posters, napalm bombs, namely everything that is language, in the broad sense. The danger still isn’t over. We are in a state of alarm, in the forest losing its leaves. Like a duplicate of the Earth’s crust, the cap is hardening over our heads: it will be a hostile envelope, a prison, if we don’t find the right spot to break it, to prevent its perpetual self-repetition. — Italo Calvino, “Death” in Priscilla I wonder what to mean by sanctuary, if a real or apprehended place […] sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the word's sound is the one place to dwell: that's it, just the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place. — A.R. Ammons, “Triphammer Bridge” ...nowhere in the universe can be A final edge, and no escape be found From the endless possibility of flight — Lucretius, Book One, On the Nature of the Universe v Introduction The Rule of Sanctuary What originally inspired my dissertation was “sacred groves.” Like so many before me, I had first encountered them in Frazer’s Golden Bough. In the opening pages, Frazer recounts how his imagination was captured by the English Romantic J.M.W. Turner’s phantasmagoric painting of the sanctuary of Diana, goddess of fertility, in Nemi, Italy. Next to the shrine, Frazer explains, was a “little woodland grove” called ‘Diana’s Mirror’. What Frazer discovered in that grove was a “scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.” Skulking around the sacred tree was the grim priest, the “King of the Wood,” who with drawn sword and his very life protected that manifestation of Diana. What the priest feared most was his own successor, who would someday murder him to claim his title and his beloved. Candidates to this succession were runaway slaves—men in flight from capture and execution—who by prevailing in the contest at Nemi could win refuge from the law. The priest-king enjoyed sanctuary for the time of his fearful and worried life. And with his death, he provided security and well-being. The murder of the priest-king was an act of sacrifice: in his dying and rising, he renewed the lives of each and all. This recurring tragedy of succession by the sword, and sacrifice of a life for the flourishing of all life, Frazer said, was “the rule of sanctuary.” When I went to Kerala looking for sacred groves (kavu), I also found a scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.