The pregnant tree

Photographer Gayatri Ganju has been visiting the forests and villages of the Nilgiri mountains for eight years, listening to stories told by the Kurumba people. Those stories inspired her powerful photo series The Pregnant Tree.

The forests here are known as shola – characterized by patches of stunted trees amid alpine grassland. Although these habitats are under threat from human activity, Ganju became aware that some groves were thriving with animal and plant life more than others. 

She believes this is thanks to the stories told about them. 

Ganju, who lives in the city of Bengaluru, says: “There’s a lot of invasive species, deforestation, human interference… whereas in the sacred groves, they say a human hasn’t set foot there for hundreds of years.”

But the tradition of oral storytelling is not as strong in these communities as it once was. And if stories protect the forest, what happens when the stories themselves are endangered?

“Life is changing in these communities,” says Ganju, “nobody is sitting around telling stories in the evening anymore. So these stories are being forgotten.”

And although everyday life is closely tied to the life and health of the forests, that’s not the only thing on people’s minds here. Many people here rely for work on plantations that contribute to deforestation. And the loss of forest leads to ever more encounters with dangerous wild animals such as elephants and leopards. 

Members of the Kurumba community are in the process of collecting and documenting the stories in their own language. Ganju joined them as they did this, and worked with local people to bring images and ideas from the stories to life in photographs. 

In particular she was inspired by a story about how the forest was born, in which a pirikki bird rescues the first seeds from a fire, and in the process earns its distinctive black and white coloring.

Although the resulting work represents her ‘version’, Ganju felt a weight of responsibility to show the world who the Kurumba are. 

“They see no end to the forest,” she says. “Something that was constantly told to me was: the forest will exist as long as we are here, and we will be here as long as the forest exists.”