Reforesting Arunachala Hill in Tiruvannamalai

Tiruvannamalai, in northern Tamil Nadu, announces itself as a temple town, the shiny green board welcoming visitors to the city is hard to miss. Tourists, and monks clad in orange, are equally numerous here. The footpaths are fragrant with heaps of roses and marigolds waiting to be sold to devotees.

Arunachala Hill, at the centre of this city, appears a thick, mossy green. The hill is visible from everywhere, standing firm and still in stark contrast to the bustling city. The temple town surrounding this hill is home to the famous Annamalaiyar Temple, frequented by devotees of Shiva; the hill is considered a form of Shiva and all its stones lingams. For this reason, people aren’t allowed to roam the hill freely. “You cannot step on Shiva, madam,” the city librarian notes. Dedicated paths allow devotees to walk around the hill for Girivalam — a 14-km circumambulation ritual conducted every full moon. On the tenth day of Karthikai, one of the biggest festivals in the city, only a few devotees are permitted to climb the hill to light a cauldron full of gallons of ghee. This deepam burns so bright it is visible from faraway villages, a reminder that the hill was once called “fire mountain”, emblematic of one of the five elements of the Shaivite tradition — fire.

Arunachala’s trysts with fire are well known. Speak to town residents, and they will confirm this. An auto-driver I befriend says, “Fire was frequent on the hill until some twenty years ago. The entire hill would be up in flames”. Old photos of the hill show a landscape plagued by fire, almost entirely barren and naked. In contrast, when I first look at the hill on a sunny afternoon, I see an 814-m-high landscape with green forest cover. Less than 200 m from me, common langurs rest quietly on trees lining the slope. “It doesn’t have that many fires anymore,” the driver continues. I am convinced that some magic happened here.

This story is about the magical transformation of this land.

Lemongrass landmine

Arunachala Hill has had long and frequent problems with wildfires. Not all ecosystems get destroyed by wildfires. A fire-adapted ecosystem may rely on fire to fertilise and nourish the soil and dispose of dried grass — and recovers once fires abate. However, in Arunachala, with every fire, the native dry, deciduous flora would burn without getting a chance to shoot up into trees. The only fire-adapted species to survive these fires was lemongrass, a flammable grass that had dominated and colonised the hill’s vegetation.

Lemongrass (Cymbopogon martini) was grown on the hill until the 1970s to make roofing material when a significant population around the hill lived in huts. It has a high oil content and can grow almost 2 m in height under the right conditions. Once harvested, its stubble was burned to encourage fresh growth the following year and kill any plants in lemongrass-dominant areas that could prevent it from growing. These burned slopes held very little water and eroded quickly with rainfall, depleting groundwater levels. By every harvest, the hill would turn into a landscape full of tall lemongrass that grew unfettered and burned quickly when ignited.

And flames erupted often, multiple times a year: from lightning strikes, festival celebrations, even minor accidents. Sometimes, people started fires on the mountain to cure stomach aches, as their belief system dictated. Other fires were started during drunken brawls. The reasons did not matter, a spark was enough. The hill would burn for hours, sometimes days, with only the lemongrass surviving the attack enough to return in the next season, resulting in a monoculture of lemongrass growing wild and becoming the only species surviving and thriving through fires.

The shift to brick housing in the 1970s led to a decreased demand for lemongrass, so it stopped being harvested. Numerous attempts were made to forest the hill and bring a more diverse, less flammable flora to its soil, both by the Tamil Nadu Forest Department and independent bodies like the Annamalai Reforestation Society (ARS), the Arunachala Greening Society (AGS) (both organisations consisted of villagers from Tiruvannamalai and naturalists from further away). Saplings were planted on the hillslope, and the Forest Department attempted aerial seed dispersion, leading to the growth of some Malabar kino (Pterocarpus marsupium) which survives on the hill even today. But replanting an entire hill prone to wildfires is a complex process, as illustrated by John Button, an Australian permaculturist who was invited to help reforest this hill. He writes that his first few attempts at planting saplings on the slopes in 1989 were “abject failures. What the fires did not claim, the goats certainly did”. He then changed tactics and started growing saplings away from the hill, replanting them once they had grown enough. Button writes of raising almost 250-300 types of plants in a distant nursery — hardy varieties that could withstand fires, plus plants that could be useful to local populations. Eighty of these plant varieties were planted on the hill and protected from fire by inspired local villagers, who, according to Button, “knew the plants would be more value to them than rocks and grass.”

In the following decade (1990s), ARS, the Forest Department, and other locals carried on reforestation with steady success. Button writes of pilgrims starting to complain that “the trees were spoiling the sunset view from the mountain”. By 2000, there was enough hope for the hill’s transformation. But as lemongrass continued to grow unfettered and burn easily when set aflame by goat herders, illegal loggers, and the odd lightning strike, it became clear that a more holistic approach would be needed.

Firefighting on the hill

In 2003, environmentalist Govinda joined the reforestation efforts and planted a lot of saplings on the hill. “I saw the entire batch vanish in flames,” he says. The fire lasted over 24 hours. It became clear to him that they would not be able to fully reforest the hill without fighting the fires simultaneously — the reforestation efforts needed to include firefighting efforts. The fires had to be prevented from starting, halted if they started, and stopped from spreading if they couldn’t be put out immediately.

Wildfires cannot be watered away, especially if they are on an 814-m-high hill that experiences dry weather and has no river in sight. They are also notoriously tough to put out if the ecosystem has a fire-promoting, flammable species. In Tiruvannamalai, volunteer efforts were redirected towards blocking lemongrass growth on the hill by clearing bushes and laying out fire lines to stop the spread of fire. Locals familiar with the hill’s landscape actively took up firefighting. Masilamani was one such key local, and he tells me he has fought off many fires, even one that lasted over 21 hours. He heads contracted firefighting and replanting on the hill under The Forest Way.

Once the fire lines were laid and the forest department restricted casual walking on the hill, wildfires markedly decreased. In 2008, a group of volunteers established a trust called The Forest Way which began contracting locals from nearby villages toward firefighting. R. Vijaya, a nurse who joined The Forest Way in 2007, and oversees the fire watch on the hill, confirms the success of the efforts — there was only one fire on the hill in the first half of 2022, and it was put out in under an hour. The 25 kilometres of fire line paths are 4.5-6 m wide, and though they are not mapped, Vijaya knows the routes by heart (she’s one of the people who helped lay them). Sarkaparai, for instance, begins at the slippery slope, Nilli topu ends at a pile of amla trees, and Tawalaparai is the one by the frog rock.

Committed community efforts

Vijaya is among the many active participants who have witnessed the transformation of Arunachala Hill. The Forest Way, led by Govinda, V. Arun, and Akila Balu, has planted almost three lakh saplings on the hill through plantation drives that involve going up to its highest points to uproot lemongrass and mulch it, dig up pits, and pad saplings into the pits by hand. The saplings include over 160 varieties of plants, their seeds sourced from nearby forests. While there is no exact estimate of how many plants survive on the hill, one can see a canopy developing, and a tree census is underway. The city’s schools run drives where children disperse seed pods in the children’s park on the hillslope. Everyone seems to be contributing to creating magic.

With permission, one can walk up the hill and see plants like round-leaved grewia (Grewia orbiculate), kathber (Ziziphus xylopyrus), and Malabar kino. You may notice half-eaten leaves on many bushes. They are being snacked on by spotted deer, Arunachala’s new resident “pests” that have migrated here following the reappearance of flora. The conservationists call them pests affectionately as they eat saplings and sometimes don’t let plants grow, but they are an integral part of a flourishing new ecosystem. Porcupines, wild pigs, mongoose, civets, and jungle cats have all been documented on the hill by The Forest Way.

“There’s no need for planting anymore; the hill will regenerate (flora) by itself,” V. Arun tells me. This is an excellent sign of rewilding success, but perhaps the most significant indicator is the emergence of streams on the hill every monsoon; one summer, these streams even brought an otter to the hill. The streams are a sign that the groundwater on the hill is balanced.

I accompany students from Marudam Farm School (built and run by The Forest Way in Tiruvannamalai) on their weekly trip up the hill. I sit by a stream as they swim in it. Their only assignment is to have a good time, which they do as they play in the stream, and eat berries they know the scientific names for (I don’t!). They ask me the names of fungi and enquire with their patient guide, Pacchu, the names of the butterflies we spot and the crab in the stream. He occasionally stops to take photos of the blue tiger butterflies we see, and a rock agama sighting becomes the highlight of the day. This is a part of their weekly visit to the hill to understand its ecology, the ecosystem, the fire lines etc. “Trying to be on the side of life,” Govinda calls it.