Movement and Place-making in a Monsoon Terrain

• Main Author: Deepta Stateesh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad de Los Andes 2019-09-01
• Series: Dearq
• Subjects: colonialism; western ghats; environmentalism; design research; imagination
• Online Access: https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/full/10.18389/dearq26.2020.02

The territorialization of the Western Ghats, India, is an act of colonial power either by settled or marginalized particular peoples, practices, and ecologies, privileging a wet-dry binary and spatializing a monsoon landscape. The environment of the Western Ghats, in particular, has been politicized and polarized. Today, indigenous peoples and other ‘forest dwellers’ have been compromised through the inherited colonial framework; they are excluded by conservation action as is their knowledge that is based on dynamic everyday relationships with place. Efforts to be inclusive are fraught with inadequacies of colonial imaging and use the language that continue to objectify and spatialize nature and culture, which, in turn, propagates the wet-dry divide. The disciplining of the Western Ghats is perpetuated through environmental laws: from the Indian Forest Act, 1865, guarding the land for production, to the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which gives rights to forest dwellers to protect it. Despite these laws, conflicts over access to land and resources continue as the lives of these inhabitants and their relationship with the ground, or world, were never considered on their own terms. How can design unravel how these inhabitants lived prior to colonialism? There is the possibility that they understand place by moving, occupying, and temporally appropriating dynamic conditions of ‘wetness’ in their ordinary everyday lives. What can be assembled from existing clues, and from a new imagination, to design futures that correspond (Ingold 2011) to a changing environment? This paper will reveal the possibility of a local/indigenous ‘wet ontology’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015) which privileges everyday practices across time and continually ‘makes home’ in this monsoon terrain.