Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? · FEATURES Essay · Mauritius Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could endure after the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Gardens Planting Subsoil Indigeneity Fungi Botany Horticulture Invasive Practices Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 3rd Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Sabrina Tirvengadum, On the Walk (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. When slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Sabrina Tirvengadum, Fruit (2023) This pattern continued with indentureship. When their indenture contracts expired, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ Add paragraph text. 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Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Artist · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Gardening at the End of the World LOCATION AUTHOR . AUTHOR . AUTHOR . 3 Feb 2025 rd . Letter from our columnist . Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could endure after the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Sabrina Tirvengadum, On the Walk (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. When slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Sabrina Tirvengadum, Fruit (2023) This pattern continued with indentureship. When their indenture contracts expired, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. 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Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Gardens Planting Subsoil Indigeneity Fungi Botany Horticulture Invasive Practices Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

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Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Artist Mauritius Ben Jacob 3 Feb 2025 rd · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could endure after the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Sabrina Tirvengadum, On the Walk (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. When slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Sabrina Tirvengadum, Fruit (2023) This pattern continued with indentureship. When their indenture contracts expired, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 BEN JACOB is a writer and historian whose work looks at the relationship between colonialism, labour and the environment. Based in London, he is an academic adviser at the Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies. SABRINA TIRVENGADUM (b. 1984, deaf British Mauritian) is a London-based visual artist and graphic designer. Blending AI-generated art, photography, graphics, collages, and digital illustrations, her work delves into themes of identity, relationships, and heritage. Inspired by her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism, Sabrina's work bridges the past and present, questioning the narratives we accept as truth. She has two upcoming exhibitions: Sabrina Tirvengadum: Who Were They? Who Am I? at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (7th February - 6th April 2025), and I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies at Autograph, London (8 Oct 2025 – 18 Mar 2026). Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Gardens Planting Subsoil Indigeneity Fungi Botany Horticulture Invasive Practices Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. · THE VERTICAL Features · Peru For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. Photograph courtesy of Tania Wamani. Police repression against Andean Indigenous Quechua-speaking women from Puno occurred in the capital city, Lima, during the demonstration for justice for the civilian victims killed by the police during the protests in Puno in January 2023. Lima's Forsaken For 24 days , Mariano Isacama was missing. Calls to the indigenous leader’s phone suddenly stopped going through on June 21, following threats he had been receiving through WhatsApp messages. The 35-year-old was a spokesperson for the Puerto Azul community, which is part of the broader Kakataibo indigenous group in Peru’s Ucayali province. He worked with the Kakataibo federation, FENACOKA, one of many indigenous-led organizations across Peru that aims to provide self-governance for communities. Coworkers quickly filed complaints with the police and human rights prosecutors against people they suspected of involvement and launched search parties. Isacama, like many leaders in Peru’s native communities, was not facing abstract threats. In the past nine years, 35 indigenous leaders have been killed in the country amid threats from various organized criminal groups. Leaders face near constant harassment for their public positions defending the environment. Illicit trades have grown around these native communities, so leaders are routinely threatened to either turn a blind eye or participate. Almost none of the murder cases have led to arrests or support for impacted families and communities. What happened to Mariano Isacama “They had time to find him alive,” said Herlin Odicio, a Kakataibo leader who helped search for Isacama, incessantly filing complaints with the state for weeks. “Unfortunately the justice officials did nothing in that respect.” Odicio had been working with Isacama for a while. The two would attend conferences and workshops together, or if one couldn’t go, the other would represent the Kakataibo community. Isacama’s deep involvement with the work made him a target. On July 10, more than two weeks after his disappearance, 40 members of La Guardia Indígena’s Kakataibo division arrived to search. As an autonomous, fluid structure that has gained support among Latin America’s indigenous communities in the past two decades, La Guardia Indígena attempts to train communities to protect themselves in ways the governments won’t. They carry out patrols and build strategies to confront armed violence through collective and grassroots action. The volunteer program is neither a political body nor an armed resistance organization, but rather a loose mechanism that’s been adapted and replicated within communities across Latin America. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. In Ucayali, they put together teams to head into the woods to look for Isacama. While they were searching, threats to the search party themselves were reported from nearby non-native settlers. Isacama’s body was found on July 14, hidden away in the wilderness. “We’ve already identified suspects,” Odicio said, “We hope the justice system will do its duty, which we’ve pushed for. If they don’t, and they do the opposite, the justice system we have as indigenous people is going to be something very different.” Odicio himself has been facing threats for years, and lives on the run as a result. In 2020, he was approached by cocaine producers and asked to ignore planeloads of the drugs flown off makeshift runways on his community’s land. He rejected the money, making him a target. His continued advocacy work and public profile as an environmental defender further puts him at risk. He reports having to change his location constantly, moving his family between cities and homes, and routinely receiving threatening messages—even from other members of the community. “Emotionally, I’m not doing well,” he said, after four years of living under threat and reflecting on Isacama’s murder, “It’s complicated, you know? But what else can I do? Keep working, that’s it.” How militarism gave way to cartels In recent years, lethal threats facing Peru’s indigenous leaders have grown into a crisis as various illicit trades in the Amazon and Andean regions flourish under state negligence. Indigenous leaders, local journalists, and human rights researchers have all documented growing cases of cultivation and transportation of cocaine, illegal logging and mining , construction of unplanned roads that facilitate these extractive programs, and the violence and corruption necessary to keep these operations functional. These problems started several decades ago in the wake of a shifting political and economic reality within the country. Peru’s government spent decades centralizing its population and economic policies around the capital of Lima. Rural areas struggle under neglect across the country, but in the particularly remote indigenous communities in the country, this has evolved into a crisis. Ángel Pedro Valerio, president of the indigenous organization Central Ashaninka of Río Ene (CARE), noted that the problem has grown over the past 40 years. Valerio’s Ashaninka community is located in VRAEM, a region that’s become defined by cocaine production, poverty, and the presence of the Shining Path militant group. “Inside our communities, since the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, the Ashaninka people and the entire central region of the rainforest have suffered from terrorism,” Valerio said. “Many of us have had family members disappeared or killed. This political and social problem hasn’t gone away.” During an era of violence between the Shining Path and the central government, areas like Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) were particularly hard hit. They were caught in the crossfire between a communist group accused of brutal attacks on civilians (including children) and a military run by dictator Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights violations. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024, several months after being released from prison for medical reasons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lima’s population exploded as the armed conflict drove people away from Peru’s provincial areas. According to official state inquiries , Fujimori’s government was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and executions, including the killing of journalists and children , all under the guise of fighting terrorism. Civilians in rural areas were the most at risk, so many fled to the capital . In 1993, Lima had six million residents. In 2024, the city’s population is about 11 million –nearly one-third of all Peruvians live there. In the aftermath, rural areas were broadly left without infrastructure or police presence, as all modernization efforts focused on the capital. While skyscrapers fill the wealthier neighborhoods of Lima, infrastructural basics characterize much of the rest of the country. A 2023 United Nations report highlighted how hundreds of thousands in Peru live without basic nutrition, education, and healthcare. Earlier this year, a report in Infobae showed that 92% of the country’s high schools lack basic resources. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. VRAEM, though, has become defined by poverty and neglect. It’s known to be the home of what’s left of the Shining Path. “In recent years, the presence of illegal coca leaf growers has grown exponentially,” Valerio said of VRAEM. “They’re coming to invade the territory of native communities and those of us who live there can’t do anything about it. They’re opening large farms and deforesting the area, contaminating the water and the environment, degrading the soil. These coca leaves take a lot of chemicals to grow.” He pointed out that each time his organization files a complaint about threats from narcotraffickers, the state refuses to take action. He adds that state inaction puts them at greater risk. “Many of our brothers mention that they can’t file complaints because if they do, the first thing that happens is more threats,” Valerio said. “They brand us snitches and send us a warning.” A prosecutor’s vision In Lima, the central prosecutor’s office attempted to address this problem after years of neglect. In late 2023, they announced funding secured through the European Union to launch three task forces or workshops which would oversee environmental crime, human trafficking, and assassinations of indigenous leaders. “These problems have certainly grown because of a lack of attention from the central government,” said Jorge Chavez Cotrina, who oversees the attorney general’s division on organized crime. “Because the problem isn’t just to fight organized crime through police and prosecutors and the courts, but also has to be addressed by the executive branch. That is to say, before taking corrective actions we also have to take administrative actions—as in, prevention is key.” Cotrina said the three teams are mainly focused on partnering with indigenous leaders and working on building trust in the state by sending more officers into the field, participating in training programs, and sponsoring events. He said they’ve dismantled organized crime networks and opened investigations into murder cases of indigenous people. He argued, however, that this work is complicated by the lack of funds the central government provides them, pointing out that of the $3 billion budget his office was officially granted, they’ve only been disbursed $80 million. As a result, he said, they lack staff, forensic equipment, judges, and the ability to reach native communities that are the most remote. On top of that, Cintora points out that the problems can’t simply be addressed through arrests, and that prevention must consider economic development and increased governmental presence in the area. The centralized perspective of the government can exacerbate the problem by creating easier conditions for organized crime to flourish. Late last year, Peru passed a so-called “anti-forest law” swiftly denounced by activists, indigenous organizations, and leading environmental groups. The SPDA, a Peruvian legal watchdog and environmental NGO, declared that the law would openly promote and legalize deforestation in the Amazon, while putting local agriculture and communities at risk. Their legal opinion showed that the country would be violating its own laws by allowing this through and ensuring Peru's failure to meet international commitments regarding climate protection. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. “The legislature definitely has put in place a series of regulations without knowing the reality,” Cintora said. “When someone writes a regulation from their desk without knowing the reality, these are normally well-intentioned. But when you explain to them the reality, it’s counterproductive. And that’s what’s happening with issues like deforestation, illegal mining and the environment…The idea instead should be to call upon the rural communities that can give their opinion on regulations that would affect their territories.” A balance in trust Leaders like Odicio and Valerio remain skeptical of the state. Cintora’s vision is to work alongside communities, so they begin to trust police and prosecutors with time. “Our job is to gain their trust,” Cintora said, “and through these task forces, we’re having many meetings with different communities in the Peruvian Amazon, and we are on the right track.” One case took prosecutors and police a decade to resolve . In 2014, in the small town of Saweto, four indigenous leaders were killed. The case didn’t go to trial until 2022, when the state eventually won convictions against four men they accused of being involved. In 2023, those cases were declared null by a regional judge. For many in Peru’s activist communities, this signaled an important lesson: even in the rare case that the state seeks a conviction in these murders, the courts can’t be trusted. Only in April 2024, did the case finally go to the Superior Court of Ucayali and the sentences were restored. Cintora saw the case as a win, as it affirms faith in the prosecutor’s office for native communities. Despite funding problems, he hopes that this kind of work can make a difference in restoring collaboration with these communities. “With the small amount of resources we have, we do what we can,” Cintora said, “because we can’t sit around crying that there’s no money.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Peru Lima Indigenous self-governance Ucayali Rural strategic underdevelopment VRAEM Valle de los Rios Apurimac Ene y Mantaro Shining Path Central Ashaninka of Río Ene Kakataibo Militarism Cartel Drugs Cocoa Plant Amazon Rainforest Andres Mountains Trade Route Illicit Trading Forced Disappearance Free Speech Militant Anti-Forest Law Journalism Execution Underdevelopment Development Filmmaking Photography Human Rights Activism NGO Agriculture Climate Change Deforestation Community Security Climate Security European Union Human Trafficking Assassination Whatsapp Puerto Azul Conflict Justice La Guardia Indigena Volunteer Program Latin America South America Protest Search Party Aviation Transportation Logging Mining Construction Violence Corruption Politics Economy Poverty Terrorism Disappearance State Sanctioned Violence Policing Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 18th Nov 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. Photograph courtesy of Tania Wamani. Police repression against Andean Indigenous Quechua-speaking women from Puno occurred in the capital city, Lima, during the demonstration for justice for the civilian victims killed by the police during the protests in Puno in January 2023. Artist · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Lima's Forsaken LOCATION AUTHOR . AUTHOR . AUTHOR . 18 Nov 2024 th . Letter from our columnist . For 24 days , Mariano Isacama was missing. Calls to the indigenous leader’s phone suddenly stopped going through on June 21, following threats he had been receiving through WhatsApp messages. The 35-year-old was a spokesperson for the Puerto Azul community, which is part of the broader Kakataibo indigenous group in Peru’s Ucayali province. He worked with the Kakataibo federation, FENACOKA, one of many indigenous-led organizations across Peru that aims to provide self-governance for communities. Coworkers quickly filed complaints with the police and human rights prosecutors against people they suspected of involvement and launched search parties. Isacama, like many leaders in Peru’s native communities, was not facing abstract threats. In the past nine years, 35 indigenous leaders have been killed in the country amid threats from various organized criminal groups. Leaders face near constant harassment for their public positions defending the environment. Illicit trades have grown around these native communities, so leaders are routinely threatened to either turn a blind eye or participate. Almost none of the murder cases have led to arrests or support for impacted families and communities. What happened to Mariano Isacama “They had time to find him alive,” said Herlin Odicio, a Kakataibo leader who helped search for Isacama, incessantly filing complaints with the state for weeks. “Unfortunately the justice officials did nothing in that respect.” Odicio had been working with Isacama for a while. The two would attend conferences and workshops together, or if one couldn’t go, the other would represent the Kakataibo community. Isacama’s deep involvement with the work made him a target. On July 10, more than two weeks after his disappearance, 40 members of La Guardia Indígena’s Kakataibo division arrived to search. As an autonomous, fluid structure that has gained support among Latin America’s indigenous communities in the past two decades, La Guardia Indígena attempts to train communities to protect themselves in ways the governments won’t. They carry out patrols and build strategies to confront armed violence through collective and grassroots action. The volunteer program is neither a political body nor an armed resistance organization, but rather a loose mechanism that’s been adapted and replicated within communities across Latin America. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. In Ucayali, they put together teams to head into the woods to look for Isacama. While they were searching, threats to the search party themselves were reported from nearby non-native settlers. Isacama’s body was found on July 14, hidden away in the wilderness. “We’ve already identified suspects,” Odicio said, “We hope the justice system will do its duty, which we’ve pushed for. If they don’t, and they do the opposite, the justice system we have as indigenous people is going to be something very different.” Odicio himself has been facing threats for years, and lives on the run as a result. In 2020, he was approached by cocaine producers and asked to ignore planeloads of the drugs flown off makeshift runways on his community’s land. He rejected the money, making him a target. His continued advocacy work and public profile as an environmental defender further puts him at risk. He reports having to change his location constantly, moving his family between cities and homes, and routinely receiving threatening messages—even from other members of the community. “Emotionally, I’m not doing well,” he said, after four years of living under threat and reflecting on Isacama’s murder, “It’s complicated, you know? But what else can I do? Keep working, that’s it.” How militarism gave way to cartels In recent years, lethal threats facing Peru’s indigenous leaders have grown into a crisis as various illicit trades in the Amazon and Andean regions flourish under state negligence. Indigenous leaders, local journalists, and human rights researchers have all documented growing cases of cultivation and transportation of cocaine, illegal logging and mining , construction of unplanned roads that facilitate these extractive programs, and the violence and corruption necessary to keep these operations functional. These problems started several decades ago in the wake of a shifting political and economic reality within the country. Peru’s government spent decades centralizing its population and economic policies around the capital of Lima. Rural areas struggle under neglect across the country, but in the particularly remote indigenous communities in the country, this has evolved into a crisis. Ángel Pedro Valerio, president of the indigenous organization Central Ashaninka of Río Ene (CARE), noted that the problem has grown over the past 40 years. Valerio’s Ashaninka community is located in VRAEM, a region that’s become defined by cocaine production, poverty, and the presence of the Shining Path militant group. “Inside our communities, since the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, the Ashaninka people and the entire central region of the rainforest have suffered from terrorism,” Valerio said. “Many of us have had family members disappeared or killed. This political and social problem hasn’t gone away.” During an era of violence between the Shining Path and the central government, areas like Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) were particularly hard hit. They were caught in the crossfire between a communist group accused of brutal attacks on civilians (including children) and a military run by dictator Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights violations. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024, several months after being released from prison for medical reasons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lima’s population exploded as the armed conflict drove people away from Peru’s provincial areas. According to official state inquiries , Fujimori’s government was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and executions, including the killing of journalists and children , all under the guise of fighting terrorism. Civilians in rural areas were the most at risk, so many fled to the capital . In 1993, Lima had six million residents. In 2024, the city’s population is about 11 million –nearly one-third of all Peruvians live there. In the aftermath, rural areas were broadly left without infrastructure or police presence, as all modernization efforts focused on the capital. While skyscrapers fill the wealthier neighborhoods of Lima, infrastructural basics characterize much of the rest of the country. A 2023 United Nations report highlighted how hundreds of thousands in Peru live without basic nutrition, education, and healthcare. Earlier this year, a report in Infobae showed that 92% of the country’s high schools lack basic resources. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. VRAEM, though, has become defined by poverty and neglect. It’s known to be the home of what’s left of the Shining Path. “In recent years, the presence of illegal coca leaf growers has grown exponentially,” Valerio said of VRAEM. “They’re coming to invade the territory of native communities and those of us who live there can’t do anything about it. They’re opening large farms and deforesting the area, contaminating the water and the environment, degrading the soil. These coca leaves take a lot of chemicals to grow.” He pointed out that each time his organization files a complaint about threats from narcotraffickers, the state refuses to take action. He adds that state inaction puts them at greater risk. “Many of our brothers mention that they can’t file complaints because if they do, the first thing that happens is more threats,” Valerio said. “They brand us snitches and send us a warning.” A prosecutor’s vision In Lima, the central prosecutor’s office attempted to address this problem after years of neglect. In late 2023, they announced funding secured through the European Union to launch three task forces or workshops which would oversee environmental crime, human trafficking, and assassinations of indigenous leaders. “These problems have certainly grown because of a lack of attention from the central government,” said Jorge Chavez Cotrina, who oversees the attorney general’s division on organized crime. “Because the problem isn’t just to fight organized crime through police and prosecutors and the courts, but also has to be addressed by the executive branch. That is to say, before taking corrective actions we also have to take administrative actions—as in, prevention is key.” Cotrina said the three teams are mainly focused on partnering with indigenous leaders and working on building trust in the state by sending more officers into the field, participating in training programs, and sponsoring events. He said they’ve dismantled organized crime networks and opened investigations into murder cases of indigenous people. He argued, however, that this work is complicated by the lack of funds the central government provides them, pointing out that of the $3 billion budget his office was officially granted, they’ve only been disbursed $80 million. As a result, he said, they lack staff, forensic equipment, judges, and the ability to reach native communities that are the most remote. On top of that, Cintora points out that the problems can’t simply be addressed through arrests, and that prevention must consider economic development and increased governmental presence in the area. The centralized perspective of the government can exacerbate the problem by creating easier conditions for organized crime to flourish. Late last year, Peru passed a so-called “anti-forest law” swiftly denounced by activists, indigenous organizations, and leading environmental groups. The SPDA, a Peruvian legal watchdog and environmental NGO, declared that the law would openly promote and legalize deforestation in the Amazon, while putting local agriculture and communities at risk. Their legal opinion showed that the country would be violating its own laws by allowing this through and ensuring Peru's failure to meet international commitments regarding climate protection. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. “The legislature definitely has put in place a series of regulations without knowing the reality,” Cintora said. “When someone writes a regulation from their desk without knowing the reality, these are normally well-intentioned. But when you explain to them the reality, it’s counterproductive. And that’s what’s happening with issues like deforestation, illegal mining and the environment…The idea instead should be to call upon the rural communities that can give their opinion on regulations that would affect their territories.” A balance in trust Leaders like Odicio and Valerio remain skeptical of the state. Cintora’s vision is to work alongside communities, so they begin to trust police and prosecutors with time. “Our job is to gain their trust,” Cintora said, “and through these task forces, we’re having many meetings with different communities in the Peruvian Amazon, and we are on the right track.” One case took prosecutors and police a decade to resolve . In 2014, in the small town of Saweto, four indigenous leaders were killed. The case didn’t go to trial until 2022, when the state eventually won convictions against four men they accused of being involved. In 2023, those cases were declared null by a regional judge. For many in Peru’s activist communities, this signaled an important lesson: even in the rare case that the state seeks a conviction in these murders, the courts can’t be trusted. Only in April 2024, did the case finally go to the Superior Court of Ucayali and the sentences were restored. Cintora saw the case as a win, as it affirms faith in the prosecutor’s office for native communities. Despite funding problems, he hopes that this kind of work can make a difference in restoring collaboration with these communities. “With the small amount of resources we have, we do what we can,” Cintora said, “because we can’t sit around crying that there’s no money.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Peru Lima Indigenous self-governance Ucayali Rural strategic underdevelopment VRAEM Valle de los Rios Apurimac Ene y Mantaro Shining Path Central Ashaninka of Río Ene Kakataibo Militarism Cartel Drugs Cocoa Plant Amazon Rainforest Andres Mountains Trade Route Illicit Trading Forced Disappearance Free Speech Militant Anti-Forest Law Journalism Execution Underdevelopment Development Filmmaking Photography Human Rights Activism NGO Agriculture Climate Change Deforestation Community Security Climate Security European Union Human Trafficking Assassination Whatsapp Puerto Azul Conflict Justice La Guardia Indigena Volunteer Program Latin America South America Protest Search Party Aviation Transportation Logging Mining Construction Violence Corruption Politics Economy Poverty Terrorism Disappearance State Sanctioned Violence Policing Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. Photograph courtesy of Tania Wamani. Police repression against Andean Indigenous Quechua-speaking women from Puno occurred in the capital city, Lima, during the demonstration for justice for the civilian victims killed by the police during the protests in Puno in January 2023. Artist Peru Jack Dodson 18 Nov 2024 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Lima's Forsaken For 24 days , Mariano Isacama was missing. Calls to the indigenous leader’s phone suddenly stopped going through on June 21, following threats he had been receiving through WhatsApp messages. The 35-year-old was a spokesperson for the Puerto Azul community, which is part of the broader Kakataibo indigenous group in Peru’s Ucayali province. He worked with the Kakataibo federation, FENACOKA, one of many indigenous-led organizations across Peru that aims to provide self-governance for communities. Coworkers quickly filed complaints with the police and human rights prosecutors against people they suspected of involvement and launched search parties. Isacama, like many leaders in Peru’s native communities, was not facing abstract threats. In the past nine years, 35 indigenous leaders have been killed in the country amid threats from various organized criminal groups. Leaders face near constant harassment for their public positions defending the environment. Illicit trades have grown around these native communities, so leaders are routinely threatened to either turn a blind eye or participate. Almost none of the murder cases have led to arrests or support for impacted families and communities. What happened to Mariano Isacama “They had time to find him alive,” said Herlin Odicio, a Kakataibo leader who helped search for Isacama, incessantly filing complaints with the state for weeks. “Unfortunately the justice officials did nothing in that respect.” Odicio had been working with Isacama for a while. The two would attend conferences and workshops together, or if one couldn’t go, the other would represent the Kakataibo community. Isacama’s deep involvement with the work made him a target. On July 10, more than two weeks after his disappearance, 40 members of La Guardia Indígena’s Kakataibo division arrived to search. As an autonomous, fluid structure that has gained support among Latin America’s indigenous communities in the past two decades, La Guardia Indígena attempts to train communities to protect themselves in ways the governments won’t. They carry out patrols and build strategies to confront armed violence through collective and grassroots action. The volunteer program is neither a political body nor an armed resistance organization, but rather a loose mechanism that’s been adapted and replicated within communities across Latin America. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. In Ucayali, they put together teams to head into the woods to look for Isacama. While they were searching, threats to the search party themselves were reported from nearby non-native settlers. Isacama’s body was found on July 14, hidden away in the wilderness. “We’ve already identified suspects,” Odicio said, “We hope the justice system will do its duty, which we’ve pushed for. If they don’t, and they do the opposite, the justice system we have as indigenous people is going to be something very different.” Odicio himself has been facing threats for years, and lives on the run as a result. In 2020, he was approached by cocaine producers and asked to ignore planeloads of the drugs flown off makeshift runways on his community’s land. He rejected the money, making him a target. His continued advocacy work and public profile as an environmental defender further puts him at risk. He reports having to change his location constantly, moving his family between cities and homes, and routinely receiving threatening messages—even from other members of the community. “Emotionally, I’m not doing well,” he said, after four years of living under threat and reflecting on Isacama’s murder, “It’s complicated, you know? But what else can I do? Keep working, that’s it.” How militarism gave way to cartels In recent years, lethal threats facing Peru’s indigenous leaders have grown into a crisis as various illicit trades in the Amazon and Andean regions flourish under state negligence. Indigenous leaders, local journalists, and human rights researchers have all documented growing cases of cultivation and transportation of cocaine, illegal logging and mining , construction of unplanned roads that facilitate these extractive programs, and the violence and corruption necessary to keep these operations functional. These problems started several decades ago in the wake of a shifting political and economic reality within the country. Peru’s government spent decades centralizing its population and economic policies around the capital of Lima. Rural areas struggle under neglect across the country, but in the particularly remote indigenous communities in the country, this has evolved into a crisis. Ángel Pedro Valerio, president of the indigenous organization Central Ashaninka of Río Ene (CARE), noted that the problem has grown over the past 40 years. Valerio’s Ashaninka community is located in VRAEM, a region that’s become defined by cocaine production, poverty, and the presence of the Shining Path militant group. “Inside our communities, since the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, the Ashaninka people and the entire central region of the rainforest have suffered from terrorism,” Valerio said. “Many of us have had family members disappeared or killed. This political and social problem hasn’t gone away.” During an era of violence between the Shining Path and the central government, areas like Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) were particularly hard hit. They were caught in the crossfire between a communist group accused of brutal attacks on civilians (including children) and a military run by dictator Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights violations. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024, several months after being released from prison for medical reasons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lima’s population exploded as the armed conflict drove people away from Peru’s provincial areas. According to official state inquiries , Fujimori’s government was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and executions, including the killing of journalists and children , all under the guise of fighting terrorism. Civilians in rural areas were the most at risk, so many fled to the capital . In 1993, Lima had six million residents. In 2024, the city’s population is about 11 million –nearly one-third of all Peruvians live there. In the aftermath, rural areas were broadly left without infrastructure or police presence, as all modernization efforts focused on the capital. While skyscrapers fill the wealthier neighborhoods of Lima, infrastructural basics characterize much of the rest of the country. A 2023 United Nations report highlighted how hundreds of thousands in Peru live without basic nutrition, education, and healthcare. Earlier this year, a report in Infobae showed that 92% of the country’s high schools lack basic resources. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. VRAEM, though, has become defined by poverty and neglect. It’s known to be the home of what’s left of the Shining Path. “In recent years, the presence of illegal coca leaf growers has grown exponentially,” Valerio said of VRAEM. “They’re coming to invade the territory of native communities and those of us who live there can’t do anything about it. They’re opening large farms and deforesting the area, contaminating the water and the environment, degrading the soil. These coca leaves take a lot of chemicals to grow.” He pointed out that each time his organization files a complaint about threats from narcotraffickers, the state refuses to take action. He adds that state inaction puts them at greater risk. “Many of our brothers mention that they can’t file complaints because if they do, the first thing that happens is more threats,” Valerio said. “They brand us snitches and send us a warning.” A prosecutor’s vision In Lima, the central prosecutor’s office attempted to address this problem after years of neglect. In late 2023, they announced funding secured through the European Union to launch three task forces or workshops which would oversee environmental crime, human trafficking, and assassinations of indigenous leaders. “These problems have certainly grown because of a lack of attention from the central government,” said Jorge Chavez Cotrina, who oversees the attorney general’s division on organized crime. “Because the problem isn’t just to fight organized crime through police and prosecutors and the courts, but also has to be addressed by the executive branch. That is to say, before taking corrective actions we also have to take administrative actions—as in, prevention is key.” Cotrina said the three teams are mainly focused on partnering with indigenous leaders and working on building trust in the state by sending more officers into the field, participating in training programs, and sponsoring events. He said they’ve dismantled organized crime networks and opened investigations into murder cases of indigenous people. He argued, however, that this work is complicated by the lack of funds the central government provides them, pointing out that of the $3 billion budget his office was officially granted, they’ve only been disbursed $80 million. As a result, he said, they lack staff, forensic equipment, judges, and the ability to reach native communities that are the most remote. On top of that, Cintora points out that the problems can’t simply be addressed through arrests, and that prevention must consider economic development and increased governmental presence in the area. The centralized perspective of the government can exacerbate the problem by creating easier conditions for organized crime to flourish. Late last year, Peru passed a so-called “anti-forest law” swiftly denounced by activists, indigenous organizations, and leading environmental groups. The SPDA, a Peruvian legal watchdog and environmental NGO, declared that the law would openly promote and legalize deforestation in the Amazon, while putting local agriculture and communities at risk. Their legal opinion showed that the country would be violating its own laws by allowing this through and ensuring Peru's failure to meet international commitments regarding climate protection. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. “The legislature definitely has put in place a series of regulations without knowing the reality,” Cintora said. “When someone writes a regulation from their desk without knowing the reality, these are normally well-intentioned. But when you explain to them the reality, it’s counterproductive. And that’s what’s happening with issues like deforestation, illegal mining and the environment…The idea instead should be to call upon the rural communities that can give their opinion on regulations that would affect their territories.” A balance in trust Leaders like Odicio and Valerio remain skeptical of the state. Cintora’s vision is to work alongside communities, so they begin to trust police and prosecutors with time. “Our job is to gain their trust,” Cintora said, “and through these task forces, we’re having many meetings with different communities in the Peruvian Amazon, and we are on the right track.” One case took prosecutors and police a decade to resolve . In 2014, in the small town of Saweto, four indigenous leaders were killed. The case didn’t go to trial until 2022, when the state eventually won convictions against four men they accused of being involved. In 2023, those cases were declared null by a regional judge. For many in Peru’s activist communities, this signaled an important lesson: even in the rare case that the state seeks a conviction in these murders, the courts can’t be trusted. Only in April 2024, did the case finally go to the Superior Court of Ucayali and the sentences were restored. Cintora saw the case as a win, as it affirms faith in the prosecutor’s office for native communities. Despite funding problems, he hopes that this kind of work can make a difference in restoring collaboration with these communities. “With the small amount of resources we have, we do what we can,” Cintora said, “because we can’t sit around crying that there’s no money.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 JACK DODSON is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Peru after four years in Palestine. He has reported forVice , BBC , The Intercept , and Middle East Eye , among many others. He primarily covers state violence, corporate abuse, and attacks on human rights workers. TANIA WAMANI is a documentary photographer based between the Peruvian Andes and the Amazon rainforest. Her work, rooted in indigenous heritage, focuses on human rights, environmental justice, and collaborative projects with native communities. Her projects have been featured inThe Nation and local independent media. Features Peru Lima Indigenous self-governance Ucayali Rural strategic underdevelopment VRAEM Valle de los Rios Apurimac Ene y Mantaro Shining Path Central Ashaninka of Río Ene Kakataibo Militarism Cartel Drugs Cocoa Plant Amazon Rainforest Andres Mountains Trade Route Illicit Trading Forced Disappearance Free Speech Militant Anti-Forest Law Journalism Execution Underdevelopment Development Filmmaking Photography Human Rights Activism NGO Agriculture Climate Change Deforestation Community Security Climate Security European Union Human Trafficking Assassination Whatsapp Puerto Azul Conflict Justice La Guardia Indigena Volunteer Program Latin America South America Protest Search Party Aviation Transportation Logging Mining Construction Violence Corruption Politics Economy Poverty Terrorism Disappearance State Sanctioned Violence Policing Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Kashmiri homes and livelihoods are disintegrating, with major infrastructural developments and mining projects inducing landslides, disrupting water and electrical channels, and destroying agricultural trade in the region–all in the name of increasing Kashmir's connectivity. Impractical in scope, these infrastructural projects defy all recommendations geological researchers have urged developers to consider for decades: and the government is content leaving Kashmiris in unlivable conditions, so long as the homes are not yet one with the earth. Kashmiri homes and livelihoods are disintegrating, with major infrastructural developments and mining projects inducing landslides, disrupting water and electrical channels, and destroying agricultural trade in the region–all in the name of increasing Kashmir's connectivity. Impractical in scope, these infrastructural projects defy all recommendations geological researchers have urged developers to consider for decades: and the government is content leaving Kashmiris in unlivable conditions, so long as the homes are not yet one with the earth. Asif in front of the ruins of his home (2024). Photograph courtesy of the authors. Artist Ramban AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 2 Dec 2024 nd · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Cracks in Pernote When Aasif Katoch returned home from work in the evening of April 25, he heard a loud voice from his cousin’s house, just over 100 metres away. “They were calling us urgently,” he recalled. “When we arrived, we saw cracks had developed in their house.” But before Katoch could begin to do anything about it, his children began frantically calling out to him from his house. He rushed back, only to see cracks starting to appear there too. “Within minutes,” he said, recounting the scenes of his house sinking, “we watched in horror as our homes which we built with hard work were damaged in front of our own eyes.” Katoch’s family isn‘t alone. Pernote village, seven kilometres from Ramban district in Jammu and Kashmir, became a disaster zone in April when 28 houses, including Katoch’s, were destroyed completely by land subsidence, affecting around 500 people . The road linking to Pernote village was severely damaged, cutting off connectivity. Cracks stretched several kilometres, disrupted electricity and water supply, adding more difficulties to the affected residents. Unmitigated Development is to Blame Since 2010, there has been an unprecedented rise in land sinking incidents near the national highway and railway tracks in Kashmir. Many attribute this increase to the rise in large-scale developmental projects , such as railway construction , widening of roads like the National highway , which links Ramban with Banihal, tunnel digging in the mountains , and hydro power projects, all constructed without proper precautions. For instance, around 12 hydropower projects are either constructed or are under construction in the Chenab region of Jammu. “One of the main causes of the increasing landslides in the region is unregulated developmental activity,” G.M Bhat, a Kashmir-based geologist, explained to us. “While landslides due to natural conditions existed before, human activities like mining have accelerated the frequency and severity of these incidents. The fragile nature of these mountains demands careful handling, yet we are doing the exact opposite.” For Bhat, the collapse of an 800-metre tunnel in Ramban on 19 May 2022, in which ten people died, should raise serious concerns. Recent land sinkings, like those in Pernote , he reasoned, are clearly the result of human activities, specifically poorly planned developmental projects. “We have been raising these issues for the last 30 years,” Bhat said, “with reports filed repeatedly. I can’t understand why the government continues to ignore our warnings.” The portion of a road in Pernote damaged after land subsidence. Courtesy of the authors. He blamed authorities for not involving experts and ignoring their warnings before starting work, saying the region has now become vulnerable to disasters due to excessive constructions. The residents also blame the construction agencies for land sinkage. “Since we live in a hilly area, rainwater used to flow naturally through canals and streams, eventually reaching the river at the bottom of the hill,” said Akther, a local resident of Ramban. Moreover, he added, during the extensive drilling for the national highway and tunnels, agency workers dumped tunnel waste near Chenab river banks, blocking these natural water channels. Despite raising concerns with the authorities, the residents were ignored. “As the waste blocked the streams,” Akther shared, “water began accumulating, saturating the land, making it unstable and unable to bear the weight of the mountain, which led to the sinking.” The situation worsened with the frequent blasts carried out during tunnel construction. The explosions were so loud that residents’ houses would shake, resembling powerful earthquakes. “We often rushed outside in fear that our homes might collapse,” Akther said. “The blasts were terrifying, and our children were left crying, traumatised by the repeated tremors.” In response to these concerns, the residents wrote to the District Magistrate (DM) in 2014, 2022, and 2023, highlighting that the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) was violating environmental norms by improperly dumping waste, blocking canals, and having a poor drainage system. Despite assurances of action from the DM, no visible steps have been taken. Now, the residents are taking the matter to court. “We feel neglected and unheard,” Akther expressed. “We want the authorities to fully compensate us for our losses and provide immediate rehabilitation, but they continue to ignore us.” Why is unprecedented development happening? Jammu and Kashmir has long been viewed as a region in need of better infrastructure. Poor road connectivity, especially in mountain areas like Pir Panjal and Chenab, has hindered trade and access to services for decades. Both these regions have undergone several development projects over the last decade, which includes tunnelling, road widening of NH 44 , construction of bridges, dams and railway lines to improve connectivity with the rest of India. For example, the new Katra-Banihal railway line and the widening of National highway 244 from two to four lanes is expected to be a game changer for the region's economy, as it will reduce travel time from Jammu to Srinagar and improve transportation for both locals and businesses. In 1999, Bhat explained that the local government invited a team of experts––including geologists, geographers, and landslide specialists from various countries––to Kashmir to study the Himalayas. “They warned that large-scale projects in the region would be extremely dangerous,” he said. A collapsed transmission tower damaged after land sinkage in Pernote. Courtesy of the authors. Since then, however, “massive developmental projects have been undertaken,” Bhat added, “with post-1999 projects being far larger in scale compared to those before that time.” According to Dr. D.P Kanungo, engineering geologist and landslide expert from Delhi, the “lithotectonic setup, rocks, and tectonics of the Pir Panjal range are extremely sensitive.” Any development in this region, therefore, must follow proper technical and scientific guidelines. “While I’m not opposed to development,” he clarified, “it’s clear that projects in the Pir Panjal region have not been carried out in a technically sound or scientific manner.” “Disrupting its fragile ecosystems can have fatal consequences,” Dr. Kanungo added, explaining why the excessive blasting for tunnelling is dangerous, particularly in these areas where the mountain range is young, still rising, and undergoing significant neo-tectonic activity. “When I visited the area, I saw that the work was being done in an unplanned way,” he noted. “Incidents like the land sinking in Pernote and cracks in nearby village homes could have been avoided.” The Detailed Project Report (DPR) outlines the scientific and technical methods to be followed, including when and how to support a cut slope. It also specifies where and how to cut particular rocks. However, our investigation revealed that the DPR is frequently violated and scientific techniques are often not followed on the ground, especially in the Himalayan regions. The Dangers of Improving Road Connectivity to Cut Travel Time The challenging terrains of the ecologically sensitive Chenab and Pir Panjal regions make travel difficult on the Jammu-Srinagar Highway, especially in the harsh winter months when snow and landslides frequently block the road. With the aim to decrease travel time on the Jammu-Srinagar Highway and increase connectivity to the Kashmir region, the government has spent almost 16000 crore INR to widen the two lane highway into four lanes. To date, 210 kilometres, including 10 tunnels, have been finished. The project, which will decrease travel time from 8 hours to 4-5 hours, is set for completion by 2025. Between 2010 and 2020, around 1750 people have died and more than 12,000 people have been injured in over 8,000 accidents on Jammu-Srinagar highway. “The construction of a four-lane highway on the Srinagar-Jammu route, in fragile areas, would be dangerous in coming years,” according to Bhat. “A two-lane road in sensitive zones, with four lanes only in the plains, would have been far more appropriate. Instead, we’ve made the mistake of widening roads and toe-cutting mountains, which has triggered land sinking.” As Raja Muzaffar Bhat, a social activist, noted, “construction in the Himalayas is incredibly challenging, hazardous, and complex.” For him, “building large four-lane highways and similar projects in such mountainous regions might be impractical and could have serious long-term consequences.” “The extensive tunnelling and mountain cutting required could lead to more frequent landslides and sinkholes, as well as negatively impact water systems,” Muzaffar Bhat warned. “These areas have unique geological and ecological characteristics, with intricate rock formations and small water channels that are easily disrupted.” Additionally, constructing very high pillars for bridges in earthquake-prone regions poses significant risks of natural disasters. In the last 10 years, the pace of construction of four lane highways, bridges, and tunnels has increased which has also increased landslides on the Jammu-Srinagar highway. According to the last data available, over 4,200 people lost their lives on Jammu-Srinagar national highway from 2018-2022 in the Kashmir valley. Locals are Losing Both Homes and Work Opportunities As construction continues, it is the locals living in these terrains who are paying the price for this development. Tunnelling through the mountainous areas of Pir Panjal and blasting for road expansions has led to the increase in landslides and land subsidence in these areas. The land subsidence of villages like Pernote is attributable to excavation of highways and other developmental projects. For residents of Pernote and several other adjoining villages, this development has come at a great personal cost. Families who lived in these areas for generations are now forced to abandon their homes and move to safer ground where they pay rent. “Where are we supposed to go?” asked Beer Singh, a Pernote resident. “We don't have any other lands and the government has not given us any answers.” Many families have been forced to live in nearby government buildings, rent out temporary shelters, or move in with relatives. “Our homes were everything we worked for,” Singh stated. “My whole earning was in that house.” As families grapple with the loss of their homes, the emotional toll is palpable. “I do not sleep properly at night,” Singh shared. “I keep thinking the wall will crack again and we won’t be able to escape.” Cracks visible in the house damaged after land subsidence in Pernote. Courtesy of the authors. Beer Singh is one of five brothers, whose parents are no longer alive. “We were doing well in life,” he said, recalling his land where he and his brothers cultivated pomegranates, tomatoes, and peanuts. “Farming was our livelihood throughout the year, and we sold our produce at good prices.” Living in a hilly area with a favourable climate, their crops were of high quality. "In our village, only a few people had government jobs,” he noted. “The rest relied on farming because it was profitable.” However, since the tragedy, only two or three families remain, and they live far from Singh and his family. “Now, no one comes to my shop because hardly anyone is left,” he said. “I sit here all day, unable to make sense of what happened.” The biggest issue, for Singh, is his loan repayments. He no longer receives any income and doesn’t have the money to repay his loan. After the land sinkage, many officials visited the area and promised compensation to residents of Pernote. Till date, however, these people have gotten nothing. "We were denied the initial compensation of 1,30,000 INR that others received, with the reasoning that our house had only developed cracks and hadn't collapsed entirely,” Singh shared. “However, the cracks are so severe that it's unsafe to live in, as no one can predict when it might fall.” The authorities initially issued a notice stating that the villagers would be given 10 marlas each and compensated for all damages caused by the disaster. However, the order was later changed, and they were told they’d receive only 5 lakhs INR and 1 kanal of land. As of September this year, it has been five additional months, and they still haven't received any compensation. Land sinking and landslides are not new The land sinking and landslide in these regions is not new; several incidents have been reported in the last decade. On February 1, 2023, for instance, a landslide hit Nai Basit hamlet in Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir, causing land subsidence that geologists attributed to the poor drainage system and continuous seepage from households and the movement of geological fault zones. The incident damaged 19 houses and caused a mosque with several structures to develop cracks. It forced many families to leave their homes and relocate to temporary shelters in a local government school. It also created panic in nearby villages of Ramban, where many houses had developed cracks. “It was all good until these projects started,” said Saqib, a local student. “We were living our life happily in these mountains. The government may increase the connectivity through these projects but it will make life miserable for thousands of villagers living in these mountains.” The unchecked development to increase connectivity within the Kashmir region has left residents like those in Pernote village devastated. With homes collapsing and lives uprooted, locals blame reckless infrastructure projects for these disasters. “I’m not opposed to developmental projects,” Bhat said, “but they must be carried out with proper environmental precautions and procedures.” For Muzaffar Bhat, too, it is necessary to follow sustainable development practices. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “recent political manifestos have largely ignored these environmental concerns.” Bhat suggested that if major development projects stop now, the Himalayas will likely stabilise in the next 50-60 years. “However, if these projects continue,” he warned, “the impending disaster will be unimaginable.” Specifically, the area falls in seismic zones 4 and 5, which are highly earthquake-prone. “If these projects continue and the mountains weaken further,” Bhat added, “even minor earthquakes could devastate the entire region, posing a severe threat to those living on the mountain slopes.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. 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Reportage Ramban Demolition Kashmir Urbanization Development Connectivity Pir Panjal Infrastructure National highway Pernote village Pernote tunnel waste Border Roads Organization National Highway 44 National Highway 244 Katra-Banihal railway line Srinagar lithotectonic lithotectonic sensitivity Detailed Project Report Climate Change rock fracturing land subsidence Jammu-Srinagar Highway mountain toe-cutting forced migration forced displacement ecological displacement hill farming terrace farming Nai Basit Colonialism Colonization Gentrification Urban Development environmental decay environmental hazard Seismic zone 4 Seismic zone 5 earthquake Himalayas ecological disaster Cosmopolitanism Construction Colonial Boundaries Displacement Geology Mining Chenab River Chenab Valley Ramban District Jammu Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In the 2010s, local blessing pills made in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang were replaced by those made on the Indian mainland. The shift in production is also a story of nationalist transformations in this borderland. THE VERTICAL Tawang's Blessing Pills In the 2010s, local blessing pills made in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang were replaced by those made on the Indian mainland. The shift in production is also a story of nationalist transformations in this borderland. Bikash K. Bhattacharya Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hundred million times. They would do so to bless mani rilbu , red globule-size pills made from roasted barley flour, herbs, and a fermenting agent called phab gyun . “We would sun-dry these pills for weeks and chant the mani dungyur mantra round the clock seeking blessings from the deity Avalokiteshvara,” recalls Rinchin Norbu, an octogenarian who volunteered in the Tawang monastery in the 1960s. These pills, which were highly valued by Tibetan Buddhists and took weeks to make, were eventually distributed to the public because they were believed to ensure the well-being of the people. The practice continued until the 2010s when these local blessing pills were replaced by ones made on the Indian mainland. Intriguingly, this shift in production also tells the story of nationalist transformations of this borderland. In 1959, Tawang became a major asylum route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation . The 14th Dalai Lama entered India via Tawang and a large number of Tibetan refugees who followed him settled here. Thus, the population of the region grew to include Indigenous Himalayan tribes who follow Tibetan Buddhism as well as ethnic Tibetan refugees. Upon settling in India, Tibetan refugees started rebuilding famous Tibetan monasteries across the country, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the south west. These monasteries produced various blessing pills of their own, which started to circulate among the Himalayan Buddhists. They have become so popular since the late 1990s that they have replaced the mani rilbu made by the Tawang Monastery. Eventually, by 2010, the Tawang Monastery decided to stop making mani rilbu due to lack of demand. Thus, Tawang blessing pills, among the most prominent locally-produced Tibetan “power objects ’ in the region, disappeared. Today, Rinchin Norbu mourns the disappearance of the Tawang mani rilbu tradition. But his 37-year old son Leki Wangchu, who is an ardent supporter of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, says he has always preferred blessing pills produced by Tibetan monasteries in mainland India over Tawang’s mani rilbu. “The pills from Dharamsala [Himachal Pradesh] are produced by doctors and monks trained in Sowa Rigpa [Tibetan medicine]. Most people these days choose these national jinden [pills] made by Sowa Rigpa experts rather than local mani rilbu. The mani rilbu produced in Tawang Monastery was only a local tradition brought over from Tibet by some monk in the nineteenth century,” Leki tells me emphasizing the ‘Indianness’ of the mani rilbu from Dharamsala in contrast to the obscure Tibetan origin of Tawang mani rilbu. Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government as an “Indian system of medicine” back in 2010. The popularity of the practice is rising across India following its government recognition. Anthropologist Steven Kloos has captured in rich ethnographic details the tussle between the Himalayan Tibetan Buddhists and the exiled Tibetan community in India over the ownership of Sowa Rigpa. He wrote in the journal Medical Anthropology Today , “While Tibetan medicine had been known and practiced for centuries in the Tibetan-influenced Indian Himalayan regions, it was only with the arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in 1959 and their subsequent institutionalization of Tibetan medicine there that this health tradition developed into a ‘medical system’ with sufficient standards, popularity, and political clout to be recognized by the Indian state.” While Leki Wangchu attributes the decline of Tawang mani rilbu to the rising popularity of standardized Sowa Rigpa medicine, the disappearance of various local, spatialized care practices is also triggered by the rise of right-wing nationalism in the region. In the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), the ruling party in India and its affiliated cultural organization that champion Hindu majoritarian religious and cultural nationalism, have made a strong ideological inroads in Arunachal Pradesh. As their vision of ‘greater India’ gains acceptance in this borderland, there is an increasing tendency among the locals to assert “Indian” identity through various means, including through purchase of commodities made in India or consumption of cultural products associated with the Indian mainland. Sowa Rigpa's increasing popularity rests to a considerable extent on its supposed “Indianness” following its recognition by the Indian government. For old-timers like Rinchin Norbu, however, the locally made mani rilbu was much more than just a medicine. It was a care practice deeply rooted in the relations humans and local deities share in this landscape and their local understandings of disease etiology. People here believe in a range of deities and spirits connected to mountains, rivers, and other geographical features of the landscape, such as yulha (land deity), tsen, and nyen (deities of the mountain). Some of these deities are like human beings with worldly emotions such as anger and jealousy. “If you contaminate the dwellings of yulha or tsen, or offend them by visiting their places in ungodly hours, they may catch you and cause illnesses such as skin disease and nerve pain,” Rinchin Norbu tells me, “If you eat mani rilbu the spirit will leave you.” Not only did mani rilbu help the local people navigate the anxieties of unpredictable encounters with local deities and spirits, but it was a traditional way of co-production of care in a specific landscape. “The production of Tawang mani rilbu itself was a localized collaborative process between monks, nuns, and lay people, as well as Avalokiteshvara, the divinity that blessed these pills,” writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an acclaimed writer and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh explained to me. In contrast, Rinchin Norbu says, the blessing pills brought over from outside are “just medicines” with no relations to the landscape. “They aren’t as effective as the Tawang mani rilbu we used to make simply because these pills [and their makers] don’t know the local deities causing illnesses in our bodies.” The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has triggered new spiritual practices intended to reify a sense of homogeneous “Indianness.” They often emerge at the expense of long-standing local traditions that relate to place, community, and tradition. The replacement of Tawang mani rilbu by blessing pills made by Sowa Rigpa practitioners from the Indian mainland is just one of many such examples.∎ Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hundred million times. They would do so to bless mani rilbu , red globule-size pills made from roasted barley flour, herbs, and a fermenting agent called phab gyun . “We would sun-dry these pills for weeks and chant the mani dungyur mantra round the clock seeking blessings from the deity Avalokiteshvara,” recalls Rinchin Norbu, an octogenarian who volunteered in the Tawang monastery in the 1960s. These pills, which were highly valued by Tibetan Buddhists and took weeks to make, were eventually distributed to the public because they were believed to ensure the well-being of the people. The practice continued until the 2010s when these local blessing pills were replaced by ones made on the Indian mainland. Intriguingly, this shift in production also tells the story of nationalist transformations of this borderland. In 1959, Tawang became a major asylum route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation . The 14th Dalai Lama entered India via Tawang and a large number of Tibetan refugees who followed him settled here. Thus, the population of the region grew to include Indigenous Himalayan tribes who follow Tibetan Buddhism as well as ethnic Tibetan refugees. Upon settling in India, Tibetan refugees started rebuilding famous Tibetan monasteries across the country, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the south west. These monasteries produced various blessing pills of their own, which started to circulate among the Himalayan Buddhists. They have become so popular since the late 1990s that they have replaced the mani rilbu made by the Tawang Monastery. Eventually, by 2010, the Tawang Monastery decided to stop making mani rilbu due to lack of demand. Thus, Tawang blessing pills, among the most prominent locally-produced Tibetan “power objects ’ in the region, disappeared. Today, Rinchin Norbu mourns the disappearance of the Tawang mani rilbu tradition. But his 37-year old son Leki Wangchu, who is an ardent supporter of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, says he has always preferred blessing pills produced by Tibetan monasteries in mainland India over Tawang’s mani rilbu. “The pills from Dharamsala [Himachal Pradesh] are produced by doctors and monks trained in Sowa Rigpa [Tibetan medicine]. Most people these days choose these national jinden [pills] made by Sowa Rigpa experts rather than local mani rilbu. The mani rilbu produced in Tawang Monastery was only a local tradition brought over from Tibet by some monk in the nineteenth century,” Leki tells me emphasizing the ‘Indianness’ of the mani rilbu from Dharamsala in contrast to the obscure Tibetan origin of Tawang mani rilbu. Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government as an “Indian system of medicine” back in 2010. The popularity of the practice is rising across India following its government recognition. Anthropologist Steven Kloos has captured in rich ethnographic details the tussle between the Himalayan Tibetan Buddhists and the exiled Tibetan community in India over the ownership of Sowa Rigpa. He wrote in the journal Medical Anthropology Today , “While Tibetan medicine had been known and practiced for centuries in the Tibetan-influenced Indian Himalayan regions, it was only with the arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in 1959 and their subsequent institutionalization of Tibetan medicine there that this health tradition developed into a ‘medical system’ with sufficient standards, popularity, and political clout to be recognized by the Indian state.” While Leki Wangchu attributes the decline of Tawang mani rilbu to the rising popularity of standardized Sowa Rigpa medicine, the disappearance of various local, spatialized care practices is also triggered by the rise of right-wing nationalism in the region. In the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), the ruling party in India and its affiliated cultural organization that champion Hindu majoritarian religious and cultural nationalism, have made a strong ideological inroads in Arunachal Pradesh. As their vision of ‘greater India’ gains acceptance in this borderland, there is an increasing tendency among the locals to assert “Indian” identity through various means, including through purchase of commodities made in India or consumption of cultural products associated with the Indian mainland. Sowa Rigpa's increasing popularity rests to a considerable extent on its supposed “Indianness” following its recognition by the Indian government. For old-timers like Rinchin Norbu, however, the locally made mani rilbu was much more than just a medicine. It was a care practice deeply rooted in the relations humans and local deities share in this landscape and their local understandings of disease etiology. People here believe in a range of deities and spirits connected to mountains, rivers, and other geographical features of the landscape, such as yulha (land deity), tsen, and nyen (deities of the mountain). Some of these deities are like human beings with worldly emotions such as anger and jealousy. “If you contaminate the dwellings of yulha or tsen, or offend them by visiting their places in ungodly hours, they may catch you and cause illnesses such as skin disease and nerve pain,” Rinchin Norbu tells me, “If you eat mani rilbu the spirit will leave you.” Not only did mani rilbu help the local people navigate the anxieties of unpredictable encounters with local deities and spirits, but it was a traditional way of co-production of care in a specific landscape. “The production of Tawang mani rilbu itself was a localized collaborative process between monks, nuns, and lay people, as well as Avalokiteshvara, the divinity that blessed these pills,” writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an acclaimed writer and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh explained to me. In contrast, Rinchin Norbu says, the blessing pills brought over from outside are “just medicines” with no relations to the landscape. “They aren’t as effective as the Tawang mani rilbu we used to make simply because these pills [and their makers] don’t know the local deities causing illnesses in our bodies.” The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has triggered new spiritual practices intended to reify a sense of homogeneous “Indianness.” They often emerge at the expense of long-standing local traditions that relate to place, community, and tradition. The replacement of Tawang mani rilbu by blessing pills made by Sowa Rigpa practitioners from the Indian mainland is just one of many such examples.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Courtesy of Mihir Joshi. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reportage Arunachal Pradesh Tibet Hindutva Hindu Nationalism Tawang Monastery Indigeneity Buddhism Asylum Himalayas Himalayan Tribes BJP Steven Kloos Blessing Pills Medicine Health Chinese Occupation of Tibet Space Indigeneous Spaces Spatial Relations Respatialization Labor Northeast India Sister States Planting Barley Fermentation BIKASH K. BHATTACHARYA is an independent journalist and researcher with bylines in YES! Magazine , LGBTQ Nation, BuzzFeed, Earth Island Journal, Mongabay, The Third Pole, and The Diplomat among others. He has reported from northeast India, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste. 7 Jun 2024 Reportage Arunachal Pradesh 7th Jun 2024 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: