Aali Dadhich :

I have always wondered about how the idea of land as a resource-static, permanent, something to be mapped and owned-maps onto forests-dry, wet, grass, woods, clearings, rivers, stone, sand. Ten minutes into the road cutting through the jungle in Chhattisgarh, this dissonance became abundantly clear. The semi-tropical and dry deciduous forests did not resemble a mere parcel of land. Nor did the people living in and around them treat the forests as such. It was my first time in a place where land and livelihood were the least alienated.

The FRA, I realized, isn’t just about land rights. While it is often gauged that way, the 2006 victory has meant embracing forests and their distinctive production of life. As Beni Puri and Alok Shukla spoke about the historical need for the Act and the processes through which it is filed, I saw how this law is not granting rights but making legible, legal, and official the existing ones. What the FRA recognizes is not property, but relationship-the continuous life between jan, jangal, zameen.

In Gatabharri, I watched a gram sabha map its forest through what they called nazari naksha, followed by buzurgon ka kathan-the narration of elders that delineated traditional nistar boundaries. It was verified by neighboring gram sabhas after short negotiations, marked by village devi-devtas who served as seema chinh-symbols of both belief and boundary. This mapping wasn’t about lines on paper; it was memory cartography. The land itself carried stories-of grazing lands, bada jungle, chhota jungle-different spaces, different times, and different permissions for use. It felt like a living archive, a form of direct democracy written into the soil.

Khudurpani revealed what it means when such memory becomes official. Their gram sabha had secured the Community Forest Resource Right title. Monthly meetings, shramdaan collection, fire watchers, rotational vann khands, and biodiversity records-all done by the people. The sachiv proudly said no one fears the Forest Rangers anymore. Once, when they caught them illegally transporting sand from within their CFRR area, they locked them inside a room. That small act seemed like the FRA coming alive-authority turning on its head. The very people long criminalized for being “encroachers” now protecting what had always been theirs.

In other places, the distance between people and forest was heavier. Basanti didi spoke of regions where adivasis have been so long invisibilized that they have little recollection of when the forests were actually theirs. “It’s not that they don’t know the forest,” she said, “but that their identity took shape with the insecurity of being outsiders in their traditional homes.” The violence of the State lies here-in erasure, in forgetting.

In Udanti, the violence looked different. After it was declared a tiger reserve in 2009, the forest department cleared forest land in the name of conservation and introduced a large deer population to sustain relocated tigers from Bandhavgarh. Meanwhile, elephants migrated there from a nearby degraded forest. The federation leader pointed to this chaos: “Haathi yahan khush nahi hai. Ek tareeke se voh ek mariz hai yahan.” The image stuck-the elephant as a patient, a creature sick from displacement. The federation of nine gram sabhas had been formed precisely to resist this-to ensure gathan of gram sabhas and continuation of traditional forest practices even across core and buffer zones.

Here, it became clear that the forest department’s neat separation between “wild” and “civilized” collapses. Civilization here is derived from wilderness. The colonial and state regimes had both drawn hard lines-protected, reserved, buffer-turning the forest into a bureaucratic object. But in these villages, the forest is not an object. It’s an extension of community. The FRA, in recognizing this, is not just undoing historical injustice-it’s rewriting the logic of how nature and people are thought about.

As Alok Shukla said, the logic behind the FRA only completed when the CFRR was added-acknowledging nistar practices and empowering gram sabhas to manage, protect, and conserve their forests. It is this provision that allowed communities like Khudurpani to transform their rights into daily practice, to turn conservation into collective action. In doing so, they were also rectifying arbitrary lines-compartments, revenue boundaries, buffer zones-replacing them with living, rotating boundaries of use and care.

It was strange to realize that the FRA is itself a form of statemaking, but a kind that arises from below. The State barely appeared in the villages we visited. It was the people-mapping forests with GPS, verifying boundaries, securing NOCs-who were carrying the weight of legality. Through these acts, the very history of traditional forest dwelling was being recorded in the State’s documents for the first time. Legal existence was being produced not through birth certificates or Aadhaar, but through forest maps and community testimony.

Everywhere, the same tension returned: between the bureaucratic idea of the forest and the lived one. The former divides, compartmentalizes, and disciplines. The latter is messy, continuous, sacred. The FRA sits uneasily between the two. It tries to translate one into the other-to make the forest “legible” without killing its soul.

Towards the end of the trip, Beni Puri spoke about animal cruelty in the secular world-how crores of sick and depressed animals are killed in the name of food, while the ritual killing by adivasis is called unethical. How ironic that the adivasis, who make their living with the forest, are called cruel, while the world that mass-produces death calls itself civilized. That inversion said everything. The happiness of animals, the balance of the forest, the rights of people-all folded into one continuous life.

It is mind-boggling how ecologically destructive the forest management practices of India have been, despite claiming a scientifically informed outlook. It is equally mind-boggling how consistently the adivasi communities have managed to manage and protect the forests despite being treated as outsiders in them. The FRA, in this sense, is less a law and more a long overdue recognition-an official nod to what has always been true.

To recognize the STs and OTFDs as rightful owners of the forests, to grant legality to centuries of unethically criminalized lives, to let the forests be what they already are-this is the quiet triumph of the FRA. And maybe also its contradiction: that justice has to pass through paperwork to prove what has always been lived.

Driving back, the dissonance of that first thought returned. Land isn’t static. Forests aren’t resources. They are layered and lived-dry, wet, grassy, stony, sacred. The FRA, for all its bureaucracy, gestures toward this truth: that the forest cannot be owned; it can only be remembered, practiced, and protected. And that civilization, here, is not a conquest over wilderness, but an inheritance from it.

लेख का हिंदी सारांश –

यह निबंध जंगल, भूमि और लोगों के संबंध को समझने की कोशिश करता है। छत्तीसगढ़ के जंगलों में यह स्पष्ट होता है कि जंगल कोई “संपत्ति” नहीं बल्कि जीवन का हिस्सा हैं – जहाँ ज़मीन, लोग और प्रकृति एक साथ जुड़े हैं। वन अधिकार अधिनियम (FRA) केवल ज़मीन के अधिकार नहीं देता, बल्कि उस पारंपरिक संबंध को मान्यता देता है जो लोगों और जंगल के बीच सदियों से मौजूद है।

ग्राम सभाएँ अपने जंगलों का नक्शा बुज़ुर्गों की यादों, सीमाओं और देवी-देवताओं के प्रतीकों से बनाती हैं। यह “स्मृति आधारित नक्शानवीसी” है, जिसमें जंगल की कहानियाँ, उपयोग और सीमाएँ जीवित रहती हैं। कुछ गाँवों, जैसे खुदुरपानी, ने सामुदायिक वन अधिकार प्राप्त कर लिया है और अब स्वयं अपने जंगलों का प्रबंधन करते हैं – रक्षक नियुक्त करते हैं, संसाधन बाँटते हैं, और वन विभाग की दखल के बिना निर्णय लेते हैं।

दूसरी ओर, कुछ क्षेत्रों में आदिवासी अपनी ही भूमि से अलग-थलग हो चुके हैं; राज्य की नीतियों और अभयारण्यों के नाम पर विस्थापन ने जंगलों और समुदायों दोनों को बीमार कर दिया है। वन विभाग की “जंगली” और “सभ्य” की सीमाएँ यहाँ टूटती हैं, क्योंकि असली सभ्यता उसी जंगल से उपजी है।

एफ.आर.ए. इन परंपरागत अधिकारों को वैधानिक रूप देने की कोशिश है। यह नीचे से ऊपर तक बनने वाला ढांचा है, जहाँ लोग खुद अपने अधिकारों का दस्तावेज़ तैयार करते हैं। यह कानून केवल न्याय नहीं देता, बल्कि प्रकृति और समाज के रिश्ते की नई परिभाषा गढ़ता है।

अंततः निबंध यह दर्शाता है कि जंगल कोई स्थिर संसाधन नहीं, बल्कि जीवित स्मृति हैं, जिन्हें न तो स्वामित्व में लिया जा सकता है, न बाँटा जा सकता है; केवल याद रखा, जिया और संरक्षित किया जा सकता है। सभ्यता यहाँ जंगल पर विजय नहीं, बल्कि उसकी विरासत है।