Thirty cents is a modest measure by any reckoning — a fraction of an acre, barely enough to matter on a revenue map. Mine sits at the foothills of the Allikuzhi range, near a village called Shankarapura Kandriga in Andhra Pradesh, some forty kilometres from my weekend home in Dharmarajapuram. The land itself was never really the point. It was a foothold, nothing more, taken with a single intention: to walk into the hill forests that abound in "Jadi Booti" — herbs — and to study them in earnest. Not as a hobbyist collecting curiosities, but with something closer to a research discipline. A decade ago, I built a small hut there to serve as a base for exactly this purpose.
I mention the hut in the past tense deliberately. On my last visit, after an absence of nearly five years, I found it collapsed — undone not by any single dramatic event but by the accumulated, patient work of rain, wind, sun, and the particular breeze that runs off that hilltop. Nobody had done anything sinister. The land had simply gone on being land, indifferent to the plans I had made for it, while I went on being occupied elsewhere. There is a lesson in that indifference that I am still turning over, but it is not really the point of this piece.
The point is that the instinct behind the hut — that this hillside held something worth documenting — turns out to have been correct, and not merely in the way a fond hunch is occasionally validated. A formal ethnobotanical survey of these very forests, conducted by researchers from Presidency College, Chennai, and published in the International Journal of Ethnobiology & Ethnomedicine, recorded around sixty medicinally significant plant species across some three dozen families, gathered directly from the knowledge of local traditional healers in this belt — Shankarapura among the villages named. The Gudiyam caves nearby, a Paleolithic site first identified by the geologist Robert Bruce Foote, during the year 1863, sits at the edge of the same forest tract, a reminder that human beings have been extracting a living from this particular hillside for a very long time indeed — first as tool-users, later as herbalists, and now, apparently, as the occasional ethnobotanist with a clipboard.
What the survey documents, plant by plant, is a working pharmacy assembled entirely through trial, error, and oral transmission over generations: a root paste for eye irritation, a leaf decoction to bring down fever, a bark extract for tooth trouble, a stem paste for wounds, a snakeroot extract antidote for snake bite. None of it requires a laboratory. All of it requires someone who still remembers. And this is where the researchers' own findings turn quietly troubling — they note, almost in passing, that the healers who hold this knowledge, the Irula tribesmen, are ageing, and their children are not particularly interested in inheriting it. A pharmacy is being allowed to close for want of an apprentice.
I find myself sitting, unexpectedly, at the intersection of two kinds of neglect: my own small one — a hut left long enough that the weather reclaimed it — and a much larger, quieter one, in which an entire body of applied botanical knowledge is thinning out with each passing generation of healers who go unheard. An anchorage in the foothills of the Allikuzhi range will never substitute for what a proper research effort could do here. What it does offer is a reason, now overdue, to go back up that hill and pursue and try to restore the fading legacies.
I plan to trek from the plot itself, over the hills to the Paleolithic caves, and down the far side to Gudiyam village, where a further forty-four cents of agricultural land near the old TELC Zeigenbalg church marks the other end of a nine kilometre trek, across a range of hill forest. It strikes me only now, writing this, what a strange span of time that walk covers: from a collapsed hut built out of a decade-old intention, through a forest that has been quietly cataloguing its own medicine for longer than anyone has been writing it down, past caves that have outlasted every deed ever filed for land nearby, and down into a village whose church carries the name of a German missionary who arrived on this coast three centuries ago. Very little of that timeline was planned. Most of it was simply there, waiting, the way the herbs on that hillside were waiting long before anyone thought to ask a healer their name.
The rebuilding, if it happens, will happen later. For now, the walk itself is overdue enough.
