Latest Publications
Are Plants Conscious? Vegetal ‘Being’ in the Caraka Saṁhitā
This study discusses notions of plant consciousness within the classical Ayurveda text, the Caraka Saṁhitā (CS) and its ideas on vegetal ‘being’. Drawing extensively from Cakrapāṇidatta’s commentarial gloss on the CS, the Āyurvedadīpikā, it begins by pointing to two frequently conflicting conceptualizations and positions ascribed to plants within the text: (a) plants as material agents of therapy and (b) plants as sentient and conscious ‘beings’.
Coastal Tamil urn burial sites and Harappan links: Wrought in iron?
The writeup explores the implications of the recent early AMS dates of coastal Iron Age urn burial sites of Tamil Nadu.
Urbanisation and Social Change in Rural India
A major social transformation is reshaping rural India. New processes of urbanization are marked by steep declines in agricultural jobs, the restructuring of local economies, changing livelihoods, and the emergence of new forms of permanent circular labor migration. Our research suggests that this transformation has important social ramifications for household dynamics and class structures, with implications for conventional urban theory and potential relevance for urbanizing experiences of other parts of the Global South.
Population Dynamics of a Lion-Tailed Macaque (Macaca silenus) Population in a Rainforest Fragment in the Southern Western Ghats of India
Demographic analysis is often used for the effective management of wildlife, especially for species facing human‐caused disturbances to their habitat, such as habitat fragmentation.
Anthropogenic histories, affective geographies: The macaques of urban India
Multispecies ethnographies have begun to understand the sentient lives of nonhuman beings within increasingly human-dominated, ecological contexts of the Anthropocene, especially in India, where the close physical and emotional proximity of humans and macaques over centuries have led to intense interspecies behavioural exchanges and to slow, but irreversible, processes of synurbisation, wherein individual macaques have begun to adapt to urban ecologies.
Politicising problem wildlife: Insights from the ‘vermin’ campaign for the wild pig in Kerala, southern India
Management strategies for nuisance wildlife species are typically contentious policy decisions that reveal much about socio-political tensions in a region as they do about the depredating behaviour of wildlife. We examined human-wild pig conflict in the state of Kerala, southern India, to understand the circumstances behind the state government repeatedly petitioning the federal government for a vermin status for wild pigs.