When we were looking at photographs to pick for the cover of this issue, I recalled those unforgettable and oft-quoted lines from A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of a love poem from the Kuruntogai:
“But in love our hearts are as red earth and pouring rain:
mingled beyond parting.”
The reference is to the love between two people, but the poet could well have been speaking of another phenomenon—the love of the Tamil people for their land. Uniquely, Tamil literature is classified along five ecological categories just as land is classified according to its features. These are the ainthinai, or five lands: mullai (forest), kurinji (mountain), marutham (field), neithal (seaside), and paalai (scrub or desert). In Tamil literature, the moods associated with these five land types are evoked stylistically to suggest a feeling or emotional compulsion, a situation or personality, and every specific bird, flower, grass, rock, pond, or raindrop summons up a specific meaning. To quote Ramanujan again: “In the Tamil poems, culture is enclosed in nature, nature is reworked in culture, so that we cannot tell the difference.”
When did Tamil Nadu lose this synapse in its cultural memory?
In our Cover Story this fortnight, we wanted to focus on the killing of Jagabar Ali in January this year by the mining mafia, a powerful group that runs amok in Tamil Nadu. But when our senior writer Ilangovan Rajasekaran began to investigate Ali’s murder, he found that he could trace at least 13 similar road kills in the districts of Madurai, Pudukottai, Tirunelveli, Erode, and Krishnagiri—the hotspots of the mining business. These are the ones he could uncover with some certainty—there are probably many more that have gone unnoticed, filed away as road accidents.
Why were these people killed? Because they opposed illegal mines or the illegal expansion of legal mines or the extraction of much more stone than mandated by law.
With the demand from the construction industry growing each year, stone quarrying—which produces construction material such as M-sand—has mushroomed into a multi-crore business, one that refuses to be hemmed in by environmental laws, or any laws. It birthed and now sustains an unhealthy troika of vested interests: quarry, government, police. Together, they nurture the industry, their clout so formidable that even the judiciary, when it takes an interest, is unable to halt its advance.
Ali found this out the hard way. He put together a dossier of evidence and sent it to all the officials, including tahsildar, district collector, and police superintendent. The dossier was shared with the very quarry owner he had named. This happened in December 2024. A month later, Ali was dead. The police called it an accidental death and closed the case. It was the protests of activists that forced the Tamil Nadu government to bring in the CB-CID as well as investigate illegal quarrying.
The extent of environmental damage that illegal quarrying can wreak may be gauged by the fact that quarries licensed to extract 6 lakh cubic metres of stone a year mine up to 63 lakh cubic metres. The earth is gouged out, hills are flattened, pits go so deep that nearby wells dry up, small species are wiped out. Nobody seems to care. All governments, regardless of the party in power, have their hands in the till.
In his book Wild Fictions, reviewed in this issue on page 99, Amitav Ghosh writes: “It is the elevation of humans above all other species, indeed above the Earth itself, that is largely responsible for our current planetary crisis.” This anthropocentrism is lethal, but the culture of impunity it engenders is deadlier still. Thus, today, greedy governments seem to have joined mining mafias in the rapacious extraction of mineral wealth for private profit, and together they are gutting both the land and the body politic.
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