Buses Take the Right of Way
By Isabel Tadmiri ‘21, Keystone Foundation Fellow 2022-2024
On the streets of Kotagiri, buses take the right of way. Green, blue, or pink mighty metal, they barrel down the roads. No matter if they’re hairpin or straight, narrow or wide, paved or unpaved: the roads are the bus’s roads. Buses go along, with thankfully and incredibly accurate metal-muscle-memory. A bus comes by, trees sweep their branches aside, and cars pull over to make extra space (that you didn’t even know existed on such a narrow road). Their loud honks are loud, so I usually manage not to skim my shoulder on these big buses when I walk down the street to and from work, even though they are so close to me.
Western or wealthy imaginaries often villianize South Asian public transportation spaces. I don’t mean to swing so far and weirdly glamorize the bus; of course it is crowded and tiring and not as fast as being in a car. But public transportation is a comfort space for many, me included. I often feel safest when surrounded by a lot of people. As my co-fellow Anokha said to me last night, in Ramchand (our main town circle) ‘there’s so many people -- so there’s always someone ready to come to bat for you’. And this remains my truth on the bus. On a bus in the Nilgiris, there is always someone willing to help, to hold your bags, to make you hold their bags, to tell you when to get off or to shut the window because you’ll catch a cold.
In my early days in Kotagiri, the bus was not only our weekend activity, but also our weekly Tamil quiz—if I really really wanted to go buy salad greens, I had to find the குன்னூர் bus. Find உதகை for momos, கோவை for leaving the hills, கொதகிரி for home. Once we graduated from those quizzes, the bus became our music plug. A time to get hip on Tamil tunes if headphones weren’t on, a time to reflect out the window with headphones in. It’s a space I crave here in Kotagiri: public space to be alone yet with people. But most notably for me, taking the bus is a time to feel myself moving. For most of my life, I have equated my choice to move, walk, ride with a sense of my own agency. And that is why I love public transportation. To ride the bus can be to make a choice that is autonomous. I have control over getting what I need and want, and thus deserve—an idea I’ve learned from fair trade workspaces—whether it’s arugula or momos or getting home safely.
Technically, public buses of course make you depend on others (i.e. the government) and of course they may be used as a vessel for realizing power plays and exclusionary politics (i.e. remote village route access and service frequency) that can be even violent (main mode of safety provision from increasing wildlife threats). But in Kotagiri, I get the privilege of riding public transportation and feeling autonomy. I live in town and I can flag down a bus and get on. On a Saturday I can make a choice—‘குன்னூர் or உதகை bus?’—that is not moderated by anyone else. And unlike what I have experienced in my hometown, public transportation in the Nilgiris does not seem to be a space of increasing surveillance and policing. It is a very normal and also a very beautiful thing to have a space to go, to move, without surveillance. For women, this is especially important.
Autonomous movement and the independence that results from it is a hugely gendered experience here in the hills. Most women do not have their own modes of transportation, and so are dependent on men and/or public transportation to provide them with access to movement.
A silly meme by me, for any TN bus riders to please enjoy :)
Now, some buses are free for women. Since 2021, local and state governments have been releasing schemes that expand free buses for all women. According to their own report, the scheme has “particularly helped women users by contributing to higher disposable income, enabling higher work participation, reducing dependence on family members for their mobility and fostering new opportunities for social networks and learning…” (TN State Planning Commission, 2022). YAY PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION!!
A public resource of buses does not mean that it serves every ‘need’ for women’s choice to movement. When I realized that the Kotagiri women’s hours at the gyms were always going to be in the middle of my work day, I felt how starkly so many types of literal movement are negotiated by others (and not self) for women. I’ve seen so many women my age accrue the amazing and daunting responsibilities for the care and health of a house and all the people in it. Going for cold coffee after work or even making income, then, becomes much harder when time and energy is limited.
Income opportunity, recreational opportunity, that pure-feeling-of-joy-when-I’m-on-a-bus in-these-hills and I-get-to-know-that-I-am-a-self-with-the-bus-wind-on-my-face and the lightness-of-choice-and-being opportunity are all more imaginable for those who can move more. The money, the stigma, the free time to just hop on a bus for oneself is classed and gendered. Even with buses, and some of them free, women are just not able to access movement in the same way as men, and that is just part of the social fabric knit into the hills. Social access to movement is affected by the time of day—when the sun goes down, animals come out—but buses stop. A gendered access to movement restricts the use of community space outside of the home for most women after hours, without men or enough disposable income (which you need transportation to have anyway) to use autos or cabs. It’s a catch-22 that can leave many women stuck in situations in which they cannot express their autonomy through movement of their bodies.
Apis dorsata honey and parchment arabica coffee, drying in the forest sun.
In this context of a strongly gendered access to mobility, the Last Forest/Aadhimalai cooperative model exists as what I consider a movement-access conscious and thus a gender-just climate resilience strategy. Aadhimalai (‘first mountain’) is a group of 2500+ Indigenous owner-shareholders who produce and/or gather wild and forest-cultivated produce in the Nilgiris. That’s honey, beeswax, pepper, coffee, nellikai, shikakai, nutmeg, among some. Aadhimalai is a part of the Keystone 'ecosystem', but all of Aadhimalai’s production centres are decentralized away from our Kotagiri campus. They are instead within in villages that are nestled into hills which are hours away from Kotagiri even by car. We could see it as true centralization, actually, if we flip our 'center' and do not regard a village as ‘remote’ just because it is far from where we stay.
The model acknowledges that movement out of the village is not easy, or necessarily desired. It does not insinuate that Indigenous women must leave their villages and go hours by bus to find an income option. Very real jobs of family and forest caretaking already exist. Instead of demonizing the ‘remote-ness’ of a village or village-centralized responsibilities, instead of moralizing movement out of a village to ’modernize’, the Aadhimalai model allows for self-determination and income at the same time as tradition and connection. It’s a rejection of antiquated concepts of modernity and development. It's resilience, maintenance, survival of important “old” alongside important “new.”
These production centres are fully made up of Indigenous women workers, who also self-manage and direct the centres themselves. The women organize the centres into procurement points for produce and also as a workspace for value addition (i.e. beeswax into soaps and balms, nellikai into candies). As much of the product development as possible remains within the hands of the women in the production centres, which maximizes income hour opportunity but also utilizes their specific expertise.
My job with Last Forest sits within this model to create access for Nilgiri producer cooperatives to markets with wealth or purchasing power. I try to create an argument—whether at honey tastings with kids, music festivals, or investment meetings—for a material investment in the right to choose the movement that is desired, the right to a harmonious livelihood, and the right and the backing to continue crucial forest caretaking work.
A Jacaranda tree blooming, on the way to Banagudi production centre. I can’t imagine what it would be like to travel hours out of a village for work, and by bus—although many people that I work with do, and don’t have a choice.
This past September, I received the honor of doing this work as a part of Germany’s annual Faire Woche (‘Fair Week’), a nationwide series of events engaging the fair trade scene of Germany, funded by their government's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Last Forest was one of three groups invited from around the world (!) to join Faire Woche alongside La FEM (Fundación Entre Mujeres), a group of feminist coffee farmers of northern Nicaragua and Heiveld, a cooperative of rooibos tea farmers in Suid Bokkeveld, South Africa.
According to the theme of climate change, I spoke to German stakeholders in six cities across Germany and also Salzburg, Austria on all things Last Forest. Specifically, I addressed how Last Forest's cooperative and business model, within our embrace of 'fair trade', can be a tool of resilience and justice amidst intense climate changes in the Nilgiris. From members of the German parliament to 10th standard students, I had conversations on South-North cooperation, gender-just climate resilience in trade chains, neocolonial honey politics, and more. I realized on this trip that the commitment to material investment in a community can come as a consumer, or a dealer… but really just anyone who is willing to put as much of their expectation of certain luxuries and profit on the line, in exchange for care for themselves and others. There was a frank readiness for commitment to lean into this that I actually found in the fair trade community in Germany.
This readiness is more than needed. This season, due to climate changes in the hills, all crop yields for Aadhimalai have been drastically low. No honey, no shikakai, drastically less coffee, pepper. How do we move forward then? Centuries-old livelihoods, colonial violence, and the Earth itself responding to it. My work with Last Forest has made me wonder if it all really could be possible, redistribution for climate resilience. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, anyway. So we need to figure out wealth redistribution, resource redistribution, matter redistribution. Can we shift and tend our forests’ mass back towards an equilibrium that works for us? That works for the forests? What will it take for the shifts, the movement, to truly remain autonomous for communities and forests?
Suganthi (Head of Supplies, Last Forest) and I were hosted for two weeks by Forum Fairer Handel, Fairtrade Deutschland, Weltladen Dachverband, and El Puente. Every month I look back and realize more gratitude I have towards these groups for all I learned on this trip.
LEFT to RIGHT: Hamburg ‘Open Mouth’ Food Festival opening day; A panel on markets and messaging with Berlin’s Good Food Collective and i+m NATURKOSMETIK at Refugio Café; Educational honey tastings to introduce German audiences to non-mellifera honey.
Shansi has pushed me to move in ways like I could never have imagined. Shansi has not been a ‘travel fellowship’ for me. I did not come to India just because I wanted to move around, away from the US. It has been a lot of hard work, challenge, personal questioning, and sometimes if I look at it plainly, a job. But this fellowship has gracefully, peculiarly, consensually, and irreversibly enabled me to move. To move across the world, to move away from ameri-centering, to move slowly. As I look out the window on the bus and write this, I am plainly struck by the ways Shansi has gifted me the absolute luxury of enabling my sheer movement. The movement that I get during Shansi is a luxury. But now I am suddenly asking myself — how do I decentralize? Or centralize? Where will all of the movement and momentum of Shansi take me next?