Famine and Elephants: Remembering Place-Making Along Travancore’s Forest Fringe

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History book series (PSWEH)

Abstract

This chapter explores a series of personal narratives among migrant settlers situated at the centre of a contested conservation landscape in Kerala, India. Facing starvation and unemployment associated with World War II, impoverished villagers from the plains of Travancore were encouraged by the State to move to its eastern mountain frontier. There they faced an impenetrable forest and the unwelcome presence of crop-raiding elephants. Settler remembrances of this period are dominated by articulations about daily elephant raids and by repeated references to famine. This study shows that memory born out of collective distress plays an important role in how migrant societies reflect on their lives, construct their identity, respond to exigencies and effect land use change. Alongside an analysis of non-human agency and memory, they serve as invaluable tools in understanding contemporary conflicts around conservation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Notes

Acknowledgements

The local community members of Angamoozhy, who must remain unnamed, are gratefully acknowledged for their contributions to this study. I would like to thank Heather Goodall, William Gladstone, Katie Holmes, Kartik Shanker and M.O. Ipe for discussions on various aspects of this work. This study was supported in part by University of Technology, Sydney and has been carried out under approval (2012-183A) from the UTS Human Ethics Research Committee.

Bibliography

  1. Adas, Michael. The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.Google Scholar
  2. Appadurai, Arjun. “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988): 16–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Barua, Maan, Shonil A. Bhagwat and Sushrut Jadhav. “The Hidden Dimensions of Human–Wildlife Conflict: Health Impacts, Opportunity and Transaction Costs”. Biological Conservation 157 (2013): 309–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. Chiyo, Patrick I., Phyllis C. Lee, Cynthia J. Moss, Elizabeth A. Archie, Julie A. Hollister-Smith and Susan C. Alberts. “No Risk, No Gain: Effects of Crop Raiding and Genetic Diversity on Body Size in Male Elephants.” Behavioural Ecology 22, no. 3 (2011): 552–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Collingham, Lizzie. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. London: Allen Lane, 2011.Google Scholar
  6. Drèze, Jean. “War and Famines.” In The Companion to Development Studies, edited by Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter, 1–6. London: Arnold, 2006.Google Scholar
  7. French, Scot A. “What is Social Memory?” Southern Cultures 2, no. 1 (1995): 9–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. Goodall, Heather. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics, 1770 to 1972. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996.Google Scholar
  9. Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. London: Random House, 1966.Google Scholar
  10. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. Johnsrud, Anne. “Postcolonial Arrivals: Place and Identity in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and David Dabydeen’s Disappearance” [Master’s thesis]. Oslo: University of Oslo, 2006. http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-21855.
  12. Knight, Henry. Food Administration in India, 1939–1947. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954.Google Scholar
  13. Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978.Google Scholar
  14. Lorimer, Hayden. “Herding Memories of Humans and Animals.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 497–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. Lovatt, Heather and Peter de Jong. Above the Heron’s Pool: A Short History of the Peermade/Vandiperiyar District of Travancore. London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 1993.Google Scholar
  16. Nugent, Maria. “The Politics of Memory and the Memory of Politics: Australian Aboriginal Interpretations of Queen Victoria 1881–2011.” In Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, edited by Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent, 100–21. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. Ó Gráda, Cormac. “The Ripple that Drowns? Twentieth Century Famines in China and India as Economic History.” Economic History Review 61, no. S1 (2008): 5–37.Google Scholar
  18. Ó Gráda, Cormac. Famine: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
  19. Oommen, Meera Anna. “The Elephant in the Room: Histories of Place, Memory and Conflict with Wildlife Along a Southern Indian Forest Fringe.” Environment and History. Forthcoming.Google Scholar
  20. Oostindjer, Marije, J. Elizabeth Bolhuis, Kristina Simon, Henry van den Brand and Bas Kemp. “Perinatal Flavour Learning and Adaption to Being Weaned: All the Pig Needs is Smell.” PloS One 6 (10): e25318.Google Scholar
  21. Raffles, Hugh. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
  22. Rodman, Margaret C. “Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality.” American Anthropologist 94, no. 3 (1992): 640–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress Related Disorders and Coping. New York: W.H. Freeman Publishers, 1998.Google Scholar
  24. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
  25. Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
  26. Shepley, Cara. “Democritising History.” Anamesa: The Democracy Issue Spring (2007): 17–30.Google Scholar
  27. Sih, Andrew and Marco del Giudice. “Linking Behavioural Syndromes and Cognition: A Behavioural Ecology Perspective.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 367 (2012): 2762–72.Google Scholar
  28. Sivanandan, P., D. Narayana and K. Narayanan Nair. Land Hunger and Deforestation: Case Study of Cardamom Hills in Kerala. Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 13 (1986): 546–50.Google Scholar
  29. Sivaswamy, Kodangallur G. Food Famine and Nutritional Diseases in Travancore (1943–1944). Coimbatore: Servindia Kerala Relief Centre, 1945.Google Scholar
  30. Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern. “Introduction.” In Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, 1–15. Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003.Google Scholar
  31. Sukumar, Raman. The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behaviour and Conservation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
  32. Tauger, Mark B. “The Indian Famine Crises of World War II.” British Scholar 1, no. 2 (2010): 166–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  33. Tint, Barbara. “History, Memory and Intractable Conflict.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2010): 239–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977.Google Scholar
  35. Varghese, V.J. Land, Labour and Migration: Understanding Kerala’s Economic Modernity. Working Paper 420. Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies, 2009. http://www.cds.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2012/09/wp420.pdf.
  36. Werbner, Richard. Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, 1998.Google Scholar
  37. Woodcock, George. Kerala: A Portrait of the Malabar Coast. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.Google Scholar
  38. Zahran, Sammy, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, David G. Maranon, Chakrapani Upadhyay, Douglas A. Granger and Susan M. Bailey. “Stress and Telomere Shortening Among Central Indian Conservation Refugees.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 9 (2015): E928–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Dakshin FoundationBangaloreIndia

Personalised recommendations