Heading into the hills of Kodaikanal in the center of balmy April was already a deal with. Then, to sit on the lush grounds of a boutique resort with almost 150 individuals, the cool air speckled with a gentle drizzle, listening to ‘Music from the Mountains to the Skies’, was merely magical.
The distinctive live performance held at Mountain Retreat Kodai towards the starry night sky, kicked off with the sonic stylings of the Dindigul Mavattam Kodaikanal Poombarai Gramiya Kalai Kuzhu. The band of 9 musicians of the indigenous Arunthatiyar neighborhood performed their conventional percussion and wind devices, together with the kombu, an S-shaped brass instrument that appears like an elephant’s raised trunk.
Members of the Dindigul Mavattam Kodaikanal Poombarai Gramiya Kalai Kuzhu with Mary Therese Kurkalang (far proper), advisor for Sky Islands
A musician enjoying the kombu
They had been adopted by singer Seema Ramchandani, a Kodaikanal resident and previously of the pop band Viva, who belted out covers of Joni Mitchell to Jason Mraz. Finally, lit by highlight and moonlight, indie artist Suman Sridhar closed off the present together with her authentic songs that mix jazz, Indian classical music, spoken phrase, opera and Afro-beat. She concluded her set together with her underground hit Plastic, a monitor that’s Sridhar’s commentary on the rising plastic air pollution round us.
Suman Sridhar
The live performance marked the launch of Sky Islands, an unbiased digital platform that “aims to connect communities across the Western Ghats towards engagement, action and storytelling”. Rajni George, its founding editor and writer, thinks of the hill station in Tamil Nadu “as a special place” having grown up right here.
Rajni George
Nearly twenty years in the past, the widespread protests towards the Hindustan Unilever mercury contamination of the space was her first reminiscence of native teams “proactively coming together to stop Kodaikanal going the way of other hill stations around India”. Inspired by this formidable older technology who took on business and the state, George began wanting round for others to band collectively “to preserve and protect” their piece of the earth.
Speaking of their experiences
George introduced her expertise and connections from the publishing and media subject into play, and since 2021, together with editor-writer Neha Sumitran, “ran a hyperlocal publication called The Kodai Chronicle to speak of the environmental degradation as well as the amazing things happening in this region”. After 4 years of operating it, George needed to convey different citizen-led conservation and care to the centrestage, and so she determined that whereas the Chronicle’s web site will stay as “an archive for the hyperlocal stories”, the new Sky Islands platform, administered by the Kodai Chronicle Trust, will mature this imaginative and prescient.
‘Sky islands’ are geographically remoted high-elevation areas which have distinct natural world from its lower-elevation environment. Like islands, “they’re cut-off but still share so much”. For George, the poetry and potential of this title was the purpose for adopting it for the platform. With it, she seeks to convey collectively stakeholders alongside the Western Ghats — from the Nilgiris and Anamalais (Eravikulam, Munnar, and Meeshapuli mountains), to Banasura Hills, Chembra Hills, the Palanis and extra — to collectively share and pool concepts on conserving and celebrating the area.
Chinnamalai in the Western Ghats
She intends for “local news to be sustainably reported from the perspective of lived experiences”, to convey extra adivasi voices into the debates on what must be occurring in the hills, and turn into a confluence of the bigger neighborhood taking up the environmental struggle, to take possession of their island. “Each month, we will publish an audio format and longform story from the region, which speak directly to issues and initiatives that affect the people living here. There will be an ‘engage’ section, which will highlight the various citizen conservation campaigns and map out the opportunities for the people of the Western Ghats to take part. Sky Islands will also run outreach programmes and workshops led by indigenous and other environmental stakeholders to help locals navigate the bureaucracy to make change happen,” she explains.
Opening up the mandate to highlight the whole area signifies that the platform can entry a bigger pool of assets, financially and people-wise. They’ll be networking with unbiased researchers and environmentalists, personal organisations and authorities our bodies and as a node for vital data. “With Sky Islands, we’re helping locals across the Western Ghats feel ownership and engage with conservation initiatives in their regions,” she says. For occasion, the day after the fundraising live performance, Murgeshwari, a contributing author and a day by day wage agricultural labourer from the Paliyar adivasi neighborhood, carried out an outreach programme. “She spoke to schoolchildren in Kodai about the importance of the forest to the indigenous way of life and taught them songs as well,” says George.
Murgeshwari
Adivasi voices
Over the years that Murgeshwari reported for The Kodai Chronicle and now Sky islands, she discovered herself having the ability to inform tales which are usually missed by the mainstream media. Now, with a grant from Shared Ecologies, a programme by the non-profit Shyama Foundation, to proceed writing from her lived expertise as one among the authentic indigenous stakeholders, she says it “gives me a sense of self-respect, and allows me to provide for my four-year-old son without constant worry”. “While previously, I’ve focused on writing about my own community’s challenges with the outside world, the expanded focus of Sky Islands allows me to swap the knowledge that the many adivasi communities hold about the forests and this land, and present it to one another and the world.”
She believes that involving the adivasi stakeholders in defending these areas is the solely method ahead. “We’ve absorbed the knowledge about the forests. We can tell things by looking at a leaf or the sky,” she says, highlighting the significance of passing on this information. “If people know, they will care.” For her, conservation insurance policies are well-meaning and well-intentioned, however aren’t enforced in any respect. “Each time I see garbage in bins shaped like the Indian Gaur, it breaks my heart. Who thought of this? Does it really translate the message,” she asks.
Connecting stakeholders
The commonsense studying over these a number of many years of conservation work has been that the struggle should be tailor-made to the area. “It’s important to distinguish between the footprint of the capitalist-industrial complex and those of individuals,” says restorationist and rewilder Suprabha Seshan of Wayanad’s Gurukula Periyar Botanical Sanctuary. She factors out that blame can’t be equally shared between these classes “because the destruction of these bio-diverse regions are being done with impunity by the former hand-in-hand with the state”. She has spent a lifetime marking out this distinction, however “it hasn’t caused much dent”.
If individuals take possession of the lands round them, nevertheless, mainstream conservation discourse will step exterior of the “individual blame game” in the direction of encouraging cooperation and neighborhood dwelling. “First, we need to protect what exists before beginning to restore what has been destroyed,” says Seshan, who, for over twenty years, has been working with the botanical sanctuary to struggle species extinction. They run “search-and-rescue operations” for native vegetation, “bring them back and multiply them”, and if the “climate and the social climate allow, they would return these plants to the sites of origin”.
Suprabha Seshan talking at the Sky Islands launch
Highlighting these native conservation initiatives, compounding their affect and connecting stakeholders of the Western Ghat are a few of the duties laid out by Sky Islands. “We need to understand what it means to cooperate in the long run because the odds against resilience are so high,” Seshan factors out. And these sorts of locally-birthed, participative responses would possibly simply be one other arrow in the quiver of saving the hills — and a guiding gentle to encourage different such particular geographical areas in the nation.
The author and poet relies in Bengaluru.
Published – May 09, 2025 02:39 pm IST
