The Return of Nature: Decolonial Reinhabitation and Self-Indigenisation in Kodagu, India

Abstract

This essay contextualises the ecological and cultural practices of the Kodagu coffee plantations of Southern India within the post-/decolonial framework of bioregional reinhabitation. Given that reinhabitation is an essential domain in bioregional thought and practice that aims to restore and maintain the natural systems of an injured land, this essay explores the depiction of indigenous practices on Kodagu’s plantations in Kavery Nambisan’s The Scent of Pepper (2010). Analysing the complex interrelationships between the reinhabitory practices on the plantations and Kodagu’s environment, this essay argues that bioregional reinhabitation in Kodagu takes a decolonial approach to transform the non-native coffee into a bioregional crop in Kodagu and, in the process, foregrounds self-indigenisation as a prominent decolonial reinhabitory strategy in indigenous environments of crises.