FORESTS THAT BUILD EMPIRES: NILAMBUR TEAK AND RAILWAY EXPANSION

Nilambur is a small town situated in the foothills of the Western Ghats in the Malappuram district of Kerala. If you travel to Nilambur today, its thick forests, the Shornur-Nilambur railway that passes through these forests, the Connolly plot, and the adjacent teak museum, one of its kind, are major tourist attractions. To reach the heart of the Connolly plot, one has to cross the hanging bridge running across the Chaliyar River. The teak plantation in Nilambur, now named Connolly Plot after the British collector of Malabar under the Madras Presidency, Henry Valentine Conolly, is one of the oldest teak plantations in the world.

The Nilambur forests were a vibrant ecosystem with a rich flora inhabited by several indigenous tribal communities in different parts of the forest. Teak, due to its durability, was in high demand, especially in shipbuilding. Fully grown teak trees produce hard, resilient timber that resists the attack of ants and other pests and can withstand long-term exposure to saltwater and humid, insect-prone tropical climates. Most of Nilambur's forests were privately owned, and timber trade was a highly profitable business. Local merchants cut and sold teak for local use and for sale in the Indian Ocean markets at Cochin and Bombay. Timber trade along the Malabar coast was organized by merchants that the British classified as jungle merchants and coast merchants. The jungle merchants, mostly Mappilas, employed several contractors to conduct different phases of timber procurement, like selecting trees fit for cutting, the cutting itself, which was conducted on a special day in a ceremonial manner, and the transportation of the cut logs. The last phase of the timber trade was performed by the coast merchants who bought the logs from the timber depots and stored and distributed them to the shipwrights.

One of the first industries established in Bombay under the British was that of ship building. The rise of Napoleon Bonaparte led the British government to construct warships in the early 19th century to maintain political hegemony over its colonies. Teak timber was one of the main demands of the British government officials for shipbuilding and military purposes due to its durability. After the annexation of Malabar following the treaty of Srirangapatnam, the earliest attempt to acquire teak from the Nilambur forest was through the formation of a timber syndicate in 1796 in which a merchant named Machinochie was the prime mover. Machinochie had asked the Bombay government for assistance for his venture, which they eventually provided. He suffered difficulties from the very beginning and was never entirely successful. In 1799 he suggested classifying forests into two major categories, forest and jungle, with the obvious intention of marking out areas that would be economically profitable and treating them as state property.

To procure a regular supply from Malabar, the English East India Company entered into contracts with prominent timber merchants on the coast. As demand for teak increased with the expansion of warship construction, these contracts multiplied rapidly. There was anxiety in the British officials regarding the depletion of the teak reserves due to its high demand.

In August 1800, the Court of Directors authorized the Bombay government to assume the right of forest administration on behalf of the EIC, enabling it to establish a monopoly over Malabar forests. Captain Watson was appointed the first conservator of forests in British India, and under him an inquiry led to a proclamation that royalty rights were vested in teak by former rulers who auctioned the right to felling to private owners, and that right would now belong to the EIC, and all unauthorized felling by private individuals was prohibited.

E.P. Stebbing, in his work Forests of India, observed that the Raja of Travancore was considerably more successful at preserving teak reserves in comparison to Malabar because Travancore forests were state-controlled. Private timber trade was effectively annihilated, and a government monopoly was established under Watson. In 1823, however, due to growing discontent among forest proprietors and timber merchants, the conservatorship was abolished on the recommendation of Governor Thomas Munroe on the grounds that it violated principles of laissez-faire. As a consequence, private trade in teak increased once more and led to further depletion of teak available in Malabar.

The British argued that a forest department to oversee the utilization of resources was necessary because the ‘magnificent forests of India and Burma are worked by private enterprise in a reckless and wasteful manner and were likely to become exhausted if supervision was not exercised’. V. M. Ravi Kumar, in his article on colonial forest policy in South India, argues that the British initially exploited all accessible forest resources for shipbuilding, railway, and military purposes, and when sustainability became a problem, they branded forest utilization by natives as the main reason for resource depletion. This discourse facilitated the control of the colonial state over most of the forest in South India by establishing a rhetoric of preservation as a means of saving the environment.

Gregory Barton, in his foundational study, argues similarly that modern environmentalism itself was born inside the British Empire in the forests of colonies and that forests under colonial rule were not conserved as ends in themselves but as growing capital, resources to be managed, classified, and made productive for the state.

In 1840, H.V. Connolly brought to the notice of the government the fact that most of the mature timber in Nilambur had already been felled and removed for naval purposes. He calculated the annual demand of teak from Nilambur by the Bombay dockyard at the rate of one ship a year, amounting to 2230 cubic meters of teak, for which at least 2000 teak trees were needed, and it would take about 60 years to grow a teak tree to full maturity. Connolly recommended that at least 670.5 square kilometers of forest land be set aside for plantation. The proposals were approved by the government. The western side of the Nilambur forests were selected for the plantation investigation. The next few decades from the 1840s witnessed numerous land deeds and contracts by the British with the local landlords for obtaining land on lease for teak plantations. Teak plantations were formed by clear felling forests and planting the area with teak. Between 1843 and 1855, teak plantations were raised over an area of 1500 acres.

The biggest challenge with materializing the ambition for a teak plantation was that teak seeds were notoriously resistant to germination. Despite decades of attempts in nurseries across the subcontinent, nobody had succeeded in growing teak from seed at any scale. Several European botanists and foresters had tried, but it was Connolly's assistant, Chathu Menon, who proposed burning hay over the seeds to singe their tough coating, mimicking the natural role of forest fires in teak regeneration, and when that proved insufficient, experimenting with boiling the seeds to achieve germination. The technique was successful, and from 1843 to 1860, Menon managed the nilambur plantations, overseeing the planting of more than a million teak plants across 1200 acres. For the first time anywhere in the world, teak was being grown systematically from seed, under state supervision for industrial use. The plantation was named after the collector that commissioned it. But Chathu Menon is buried within it. This described precisely how empire forestry worked by extracting knowledge, labor, and land from natives and inscribing the names of the British administrators.

The railway subbranch that runs between Shoranur and Nilambur through the thick forests of the region is a distinct beauty of Nilambur. This branch from the Shoranur junction ends at Nilambur; it is connected to the main railway network only by Shoranur. It was in 1921 that the railway board instructed John Izat, engineer-in-chief, to draw up a scheme that would connect Shoranur to Nilambur. A notable feature of the construction was that sidings were built at all important stations along the line, parallel lines constructed to facilitate the loading and unloading of goods wagon even while there was traffic on the main line. The increased demand for teak in global markets had made its transportation from the hinterland to principal ports essential. After the development of Cochin Harbor, large-scale seaborne trade centered around Cochin, and it soon assumed the status of a major port on the west coast. With the opening of a broad-gauge line between Shornur in Palakkad and Cochin Harbour, the possibility of direct timber transport from Nilambur to major ports attracted colonial authorities.

In Nilambur the railway was introduced primarily for strategic and commercial reasons. It was remarkably instrumental in draining wealth out of Nilambur. Although it is important to note that the railway was built at a time when Mappila peasant insurgencies were on the rise. It was also crucial in easy movement into various parts of Eranad Taluk, the center of the rebellion to suppress it. When it comes to Nilambur, the teak and the trains are remaining evidence of the machinery that ran imperialism through material extraction and appropriation.

REFERENCES

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