The Silverfish

“Bahugana said – ‘Don’t eat the salt of anyone, you will be beholden for life.’”
“Nature is diverse, of course we need to be too.”
“They call us the B-team of the Forest Department.”

With humour and passion, the members of the Wayanad Prakrithi Samrakshana Samithi (WPSS) shared the history of their decades-old participation in complex issues of conservation, land rights and tribal rights in Wayanad, Kerala.

The organisation, which has been active since the 1970s, is supported by a loose structure of members from different backgrounds including farming, banking and photography, and funded by small donations from individuals within the community. It has a rich and fascinating history, and in 2023, the Archives received papers from a few members of the organisation, which includes documents capturing their work and activism towards the conservation of wildlife and culture in Wayanad. The papers were received through Abhijith A V, a former student of the Masters in the Wildlife Biology and Conservation course at NCBS and spiderhunter architecture enthusiast from Wayanad, and Samira Agnihotri, a bioacoustics researcher working in BR Hills. Both of them are associated with the archives to examine the place of ecology in the history of science in India.

The WPSS collection, like other papers at the archives at NCBS, contains correspondence, photographs, research references, media coverage, and administrative documents created by and relating to the organisation. However, the processing archivist Parvathy V also notes that a unique part of the collection are the various legal documents, notices and publicity materials like pamphlets and booklets in malayalam. These are not only different from papers that are usually found at a science archive but are also instrumental as they help us understand what kind of space, activism and public awareness occupy in our envisioning of science.

After the WPSS papers were launched at the Archives when the repository turned 5 in February, some members of the organisation paid a visit to the Archives on April 18, and generously participated in an interaction in which they fielded questions about their activities. The visiting team comprised N Badusha, his son Arul Badusha, Thomas Ambalavayal, Babu Mylampadi, and Manoj Kumar A V (Abhijith’s father). They spoke about their involvement in protests as wide-ranging as those in support of Narmada Bachao Andolan, the issue of sickle-cell anemia amongst Adivasi populations in various forest regions of Wayanad, and the latest issue that concerns them – human-wildlife conflict and vehicular collisions. But they also pointed out that crises such as long-term farmer distress deserve greater, sustained interest over the cause celebre of the moment. Badusha emphatically stated the need for long-term vision, beyond the cycles of elections and bureaucratic changes.

Other resources that must be examined for interconnections include the PK Sukumaran collection. Sukumaran worked on describing cases of sickle-cell anaemia among the Irulas, Badagas and Todas. We will also soon launch the Panduranga Hegde Papers, which deepen our understanding of the Appiko movement – a citizen’s movement like the WPSS that aimed to protect the forests of the Western Ghats.

In light of the devastation caused by landslides in Wayanad in July/August 2024, archivist Parvathy V has this to say:

The WPSS papers contain documents that put the current disaster in Wayanad into perspective.

A 2010 document written by Thomas Ambalavayal, a member of WPSS, recommended that Wayanad be designated as an ecologically vulnerable area. Around the same time, the central government constituted the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel (WGEEP) to assess the ecological situation of the Western Ghats under the chairmanship of Madhav Gadgil. The Panel submitted its report in 2011. The report, also widely known as the Gadgil Report, designated the entire Western Ghats as an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) and also classified 64 per cent of the Western Ghats into Ecologically Sensitive Zones – ESZ1, ESZ2 and ESZ3; ESZ1 being the most sensitive region.

It comes as no surprise that Meppadi in Vythiri taluk, which is very close to Mundakkai and Chooralmala, which has now been affected, was designated as one of 18 ecologically sensitive zones, and Vythiri comes under ESZ1. The report cautioned against indiscriminate development in these areas. The WPSS had vigorously campaigned to implement the Gadgil Report, as shown by different notices they have deposited at the Archives, which call for the same.

Their efforts didn’t stop at public awareness campaigns. WPSS also initiated a court case in the form of a Writ Petition in 2016 against the construction of high-rise buildings in Wayanad. This Writ Petition extensively mentions Wayanad’s susceptibility to landslides, its history, and the associated fatalities. The outcome of the petition is unknown.

As an archivist and memory-keeper, I see the result of not heeding these voices so clearly – it is heart-wrenching and harrowing, especially because this was not a “natural disaster”, and it could have been mitigated or avoided. It is easy for me to say this sitting in a location far from the tragedy, but perhaps we would all do well to pay attention to the creators of these documents, who have been part of this landscape for at least six decades. They are intimately familiar with the terrain and its capriciousness, and work to educate the people about the consequences of indiscriminate developmental activities. For this, they are stigmatised as being anti-development. Their voices are either ignored or die down, unnoticed.