Field Reflections from MM Hills: Notes on Research, Routine, and Resilience
M Ushashree
Conservation Researcher and Writer.
Pursuing Master’s in Environmental Science (Conservation Studies) at ATREE, Bengaluru.
Between late January and early March, I conducted fieldwork for my Master’s thesis titled “Understanding Women’s Roles in Decision-Making Within Indigenous Farming Practices Among the Soliga Community in MM Hills, Karnataka.” The Soligas are a forest-dwelling Adivasi group known for securing legal recognition to live within the core area of a tiger reserve — a rare and powerful precedent in India’s conservation history. This right, granted through the Forest Rights Act, affirms their community’s ancestral claims and enables continued access to forest produce, cultural sites, and farming land despite stringent wildlife protection laws.
Coming from a background in physics, my pivot to conservation research often felt disorienting — but not aimless. Standing in MM Hills, trying to understand the intersections of gender, land, and traditional ecological knowledge, was not something I ever imagined, but it felt necessary. The early days of fieldwork were marked by isolation. Based out of a field station deep in the forest, with limited network and no familiar social rhythms, I was pushed into a slower, more intentional routine — cooking every meal, budgeting carefully, and learning to sit with the silence, which sometimes felt more oppressive than peaceful. Gradually, I began to read this stillness not as emptiness, but as an opening, as an opportunity to learn and adapt.
My daily rhythm became one of early mornings, village visits, conversations, note-taking, and long walks. Meals were basic, often iterations of tomato rice, cooked with an unpredictable gas setup. The real work, however, happened in the hours spent talking with Soliga women — often with the help of community liaisons and translators — and listening to what was said, and what wasn’t.
I had gone in expecting interviews about agriculture. What I encountered was far more layered: stories of women managing kitchen gardens, negotiating forest access, storing seeds for uncertain seasons, and subtly influencing which crops to grow. These weren’t decisions that always happened in formal spaces — often they unfolded in kitchens, in shared meals, or in routines of water collection. What stood out wasn’t just their role in agriculture, but the emotional weight of that labor. One woman spoke of how she continued cultivating the same ragi plot even after her husband migrated for seasonal work — not just out of need, but because, in her words, “this soil knows me.” It was in such moments that I understood what I had earlier described clumsily as “pure love and compassion.” What I witnessed was a relationship of care — not just with their crops, but with land, with each other, and with knowledge systems handed down across generations.
By mid-February, the strangeness had settled into familiarity. I began tracking the subtle shifts: how body language changed when women talked about their own plots versus their husbands’; how decisions about what to plant were often made jointly but only one name was on the land deed. I began noticing that some of the strongest opinions on farming came from women considered too old to work in the fields — their experience carried authority, even if it wasn’t formally acknowledged. My field notes began capturing not just content, but context: the interruptions by children, the pauses when men passed by, the way voices dropped when land titles came up.
In total, I conducted close to seventy interviews and five Focus Group Discussions across several podus (Soliga settlements). These interactions built a composite picture of how gender, knowledge, and land intersect — not only in terms of formal decisions, but in the subtler negotiations that shape farming life. Importantly, I realized that referring to these farming practices as “indigenous” needed precision: it wasn’t about any generic traditional method. The practices I studied were specific to the Soliga tribe — rooted in their lived history of shifting cultivation, kitchen gardening, and knowledge-sharing rituals tied to the forest ecology of MM Hills.
There were days when interviews led to nowhere — a mismatch of language, fatigue, or distrust. But even those moments told me something: about the precarity of being researched, about the invisible labor of translation, and about how long-term presence matters. This wasn’t extractive work; it was relationship-building. Often, the most meaningful insights emerged not from my questions, but from side comments during seed-sorting, or stories shared while peeling tamarind.
When the fieldwork ended, I returned not with definitive answers, but with sharpened questions. For instance: How do women navigate decision-making when land ownership is almost entirely male-dominated? What happens to widowed women’s farming roles in the absence of formal land rights? How might policies support kitchen gardens as sites of autonomy and resilience rather than simply subsistence? These questions continue to sit with me — unresolved, but clearer.
If this research taught me anything, it’s that grounded fieldwork is not just about data, but about presence — being quiet enough to listen, patient enough to wait, and humble enough to not always conclude. The forest, once unfamiliar, became not just a backdrop, but part of the story. A quiet collaborator. A space that held both challenge and clarity.