© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 57
A. Si, The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega, Ethnobiology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24681-9_3
Chapter 3
Plants in Solega Language and Culture
3.1 Introduction
The location of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills at the confl uence of two important
mountain ranges of south India and the existence of numerous habitat types within
these Hills have conspired to bestow upon the forest home of the Solega an abun-
dance of plant life. Solega po:ḍu ‘hamlets’ are scattered all over the B. R. Hills , and
people are well acquainted with habitats that biologists would call ‘lowland scrub’,
‘moist deciduous’, ‘dry deciduous’, ‘evergreen’ and so on. Unsurprisingly, the
Solega language has its own words for such categories—although indigenous con-
ceptualisations do not always match those of the biologist—and these and other
landscape terms are described in more detail in Chap. 5. The Solega botanical lexi-
con consequently includes the names of lowland, drought-tolerant, thorny plants
such as Opuntia sp. and Ziziphus spp. as well as large, montane, evergreen trees
such as Canarium strictum and Aphanamixis polystachya. Knowledge of plant
name s and uses is not evenly distributed across the population, and people living in
highland hamlets are, naturally, more at ease with identifying and naming highland
plants.
To say that the Solega regard the forests of the B. R. Hills as their home would
be an understatement. To older Solega, living in the forest is the natural state of
affairs, and most would consider it an ordeal to face the heat, dust, noise and crowds
of treeless lowland towns and villages for extended periods of time. The words of
the late Heddini Basavegowda eloquently summarise the idealised Solega exis-
tence: “Aḍaviliye baddu, aḍaviliye sa:yadu” ‘(We were meant to) grow up in the
wild, (we were meant to) die in the wild.’ Congruous with this strong attachment to
the forest are a number of other beliefs often expressed by older people: the ability
of traditional forest foods to keep illnesses at bay, the superiority of natural reme-
dies over the pills and injections dispensed by city-trained medical practitioners,
and the need to regularly burn patches of forest not only for agriculture, but also to
promote regrowth.