Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India's Northeast

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Unruly Hills is one of the most original and provocative books on environment and politics in India. Communities supposedly control most land, forests, and other natural resources in the hills of Northeast India. However capitalist transformations have rendered those hill communities quite powerless: they are hardly able to control the local resource base. Behind the legal fictions of community ownership lie the ugly reality of a "resource frontier" where there is massive privatization and accumulation of land by local elites and serious environmental degradation as the result of the crude exploitation of forests, water, and mineral resources. Karlsson's book brims with fresh insights on the crisis of legitimacy of India's democratic institutions in this border region. Sanjib Baruah, Bard College, New York and Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

The questions that inspired this study are central to contemporary research within environmental anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history: How does the introduction of a modern, capitalist, resource regime affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples? Can sustainable resource management be achieved in a situation of radical commodification of land and other aspects of nature? Focusing on conflicts relating to forest management, mining, and land rights, the author offers an insightful account of present-day challenges for indigenous people to accommodate aspirations for ethnic sovereignty and development.

BENGT G. KARLSSON is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People's Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (Routledge 2000) and two edited books, Indigeneity in India (Kegan Paul 2006) and Human Rights: An Anthropological Enquiry (Earthworm Books 2005).

It was already late afternoon when the lyngdoh (the traditional priest) of Hima Khyrim, Mr. P. Lyngdoh Nongkrem, and his assistant welcomed us into their office in Smit. My friend Pam and her two children had come along to shop at the weekly market that was being held that day. After hours of haggling in the crowded marketplace, we were all rather exhausted. And as we waited for Mr. Lyngdoh to turn up, I had several cups of sweet tea, which added to the stress I had been feeling during the day. I was going back to Sweden early the next morning, and had still to sort out a number of practicalities. In short, it was not an ideal day for anthropological field engagements. But again, I did not want to miss the opportunity to get some new bits of information about how the sacred forest of Shillong Peak had been felled.

Shillong Peak, or Lum Shyllong as it is locally known, is one of the most important sacred places of the Khasi people. It is the place from which the nine streams originate that provide people with drinking water and make the land fertile. As Kong Sweetymon Rynjah, a prominent interpreter of Khasi customs, put it, the peak is regarded a "Natural Guardian of Khasi land." Shillong Peak is also the highest point in the Khasi Hills, with an astonishing view of the surrounding landscape. Because of the regions' strategic location, the Eastern Air Command established its headquarters in Shillong in the 1960s and built a radar station on lands close to the peak. The station covers a large area, parts of which used to be sacred forests. But the peak itself had been spared and remained densely covered with impressive oaks and a variety of other species of trees. As I heard, in March and April when the trees blossom the grove was magnificent. It was a paradise for bird-lovers, especially during the migratory season, when a number of rare species could be spotted. People would go there for picnics on weekends. In earlier days, though, as an old woman running a tea stall at nearby Elephant Falls told me, many people were afraid of the place. She said that when she was a child they never dared to enter the sacred forest, fearing to upset the spirits. If you just broke a branch of a tree or plucked a leaf, the elders had warned them, you could fall ill or even die.