Of land, legislation and litigation: Forest leases, agrarian reform, legal ambiguity and landscape anomaly in the Nilgiris, 1969-2007
This paper provides a history and sociology of how and why the Janmam Act, an apparently well-intended scheme of agrarian reform in Gudalur, South India, has had unintended social, legal and ecological consequences.The Act sought to abolish a largely forested janmam Cutters (Zamindari) estate and reform its tenures.Some of its provisions pertaining