Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at how British expansion projects to the mountains of South Asia, especially to Western Ghats resulted in the formation of hybrid knowledge and the reorganization of the natural world, including both non-human and human lives and the role played by tribal and non-tribal populations

Paper long abstract:

The paper looks at how British expansion projects to mountains of South Asia resulted in the formation of hybrid knowledge and the reorganization of the natural world, including both non-human and human populations. The paper focuses on the native lives of the Western Ghats, particularly the region parallel to the Malabar coast, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Western Ghats are a mountain chain with tropical evergreen forests and home to various endemic faunal and floral species, home to hundreds of Adivasi communities, and one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world. Along the lines of Richard Grove and scholars, the paper looks at modern forms of knowledge were not the product of “northwest Europe” but emerged as a result of global encounters across different colonies rather than as a unique fruit of Enlightenment, with the resulting knowledge being hybrid in nature. The paper will trace back both the role played by non-tribal and tribal populations in understanding the extent of the natural world of the Western Ghats and the impacts of colonial/global knowledge transfer on indigenous lives and ecologies. The paper will also try to trace back the forgotten tribal voices that were often missing/drifted in the state-centered postcolonial archives. I will use both South Asian and colonial sources, including oral testimonies, folklore, travel diaries, personal letters, official correspondences, and others, to have a collective understanding of various historical actors.