Reimag(in)ing the Western Ghats

Collaboration with: Anuradha Mathur & Dilip da Cunha, University of Pennsylvania

With its recent designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Western Ghats of India has become an extremely contested terrain between environmental and developmental concerns. Rather than perpetuate the environment-development divide, we propose to consider the Konkan Railway Corridor as an agent in reimaging and reimagining the Ghats, going beyond its many identities and relationships as a global biodiversity ‘hotspot’ of flora and fauna, one of the oldest cloud and rainforests that are home to rare species of frogs and flowers, dwindling population of tigers, ancient practices of agriculture and conservation, sacred groves and national parks and the laws that govern them, monsoon catchments, human settlements and the natural resources that support them, all coexisting in a fragile balance in this place that demands negotiation and rights-of-ways in time, multiple scales, practices and relationships – rather than as enclaves and segregation in space.

The Ghats are popularly seen as a range of hills on the west coast of India. Geologists see it as an escarpment of basalt in the north turning to gneiss and laterite in the south, but also, as a fertile ground of minerals, particularly iron, that is exploited by industry. Ecologists see it as a distinctive zone of moist deciduous forest, which absorbs the force of the southwest monsoon and over millennia, has used it to gather a unique natural habitat. Social ecologists and anthropologists see it as a distinctive place of cultures that have made a home for themselves between a particularly active global coast with the Arabian Sea to the west and the Deccan Plateau to the east. On this basis, UNESCO, in July 2012, has sought to designate the Western Ghats a World Heritage Site.

It is a designation that is facing stiff opposition from developers, prospectors and politicians, making the Ghats a contested landscape where environment and development, as much as culture and nature, are being predictably positioned in opposition with one another, creating tremendous amount of conflict at multiple levels – from human-animal and development-conservation, to conflicts over natural resources and citizen-government disconnects.

We believe that an entirely new approach is needed if the UNESCO designation is to become an agent for positive change. In place of a regional or spatial plan, which must inevitably operate by zoning or a regulatory policy that defines boundaries and disconnects complex interdependencies, an approach is necessary that begins with a new visualization of the Ghats and its complexity in space and time.

To negotiate the Western Ghats, we brought to the project critical theories and practices, reflections and insights, diverse research interests and experience, to contribute to creating a new way of seeing, representing and engaging the region; through modes of design and reflexivity, cognition and imagination. The project was a 2-year collaboration among faculty and researchers from the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.