This atlas's own consent protocol (see the legal note in the footer) is that oral history, photographs of people and ethnobotanical knowledge are published only with informed consent, with attribution or anonymity by the contributor's choice — and it explicitly states we do not use stock photography of tribal people. No genuinely consented, openly-licensed photography of Soliga, Irula, Kurumba or Malasar individuals was located during sourcing for this rebuild, so none is used here. That is a deliberate restraint, not an oversight — see the media credits.
Nine tribal settlements sit inside the reserve — seven in the core, two in the buffer. 136 villages lie in its zone of influence, 138 border forest area, 150 abut the boundary. Most conservation coverage of Sathyamangalam counts tigers and stops. This page does not — and the record it holds is incomplete precisely where it matters most: a landmark rights case, three-quarters of claims still unresolved, and a legal framework built to settle exactly this.
"Sholagars — an almost wild race (shola == forest) living on the hills." Nicholson, Manual of the Coimbatore District, 1887
That sentence is how the colonial state saw the people of this forest, and it is worth reading against what the Soliga actually possessed: a working knowledge of a landscape the administration had barely surveyed. The same manual records the taluk at 1,174 square miles with 184 inhabited villages, and notes that "sandalwood is spread over the whole tract." The people were an obstacle in that account. They are the reason much of the knowledge survives.
Roughly 40,000 people across Chamarajanagar (Karnataka) and Erode (Tamil Nadu). They speak Sholaga (Soliganudi), a Dravidian language closest to Kannada with strong Tamil influence. Historically shifting cultivators, now growing finger millet and living substantially on non-timber forest produce — honey above all, plus gooseberry, bamboo, lichen and wild turmeric. Belief blends animism with Hindu practice; Madeshwara, Rangaswamy and Karayya are central. In Karnataka's BRT hills the Soliga won a landmark court case establishing their right to remain inside a tiger reserve — the precedent that shadows every FRA argument here.
The largest tribal presence in this landscape and one of Tamil Nadu's largest Scheduled Tribes, recorded in the 1887 manual as "Irulars" alongside the Sholagars. Their own Dravidian language sits between Tamil and Kannada. Traditionally renowned as snake-catchers, honey-gatherers and expert trackers — skills the Forest Department itself now depends on: tribal youth staff the 54 anti-poaching camps.
Kurumbas are present across the wider Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve — Alu, Betta, Jenu and Mullu groups, the Jenu Kurumba named literally for honey. Cliff-honey harvesting, ethnobotanical knowledge and the Kurumba painting tradition are documented but thinly represented online. Malasars appear in the colonial record for this tract and are almost absent from contemporary coverage.
Why are indigenous people denied their rights in the name of tiger conservation?
No consented, openly-licensed photograph of Mallappa was located during sourcing, so the circle above carries a plain monogram rather than an unauthorised photograph — the same restraint applied throughout this page. See the consent protocol below.
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 was meant to settle historical injustice. Tamil Nadu's implementation record is among the country's weakest.
Residents of Mavanatham — Sivamurthy and Senthil among them — report forest degradation precisely because they can no longer manage vegetation or harvest the materials they need.
Organisations working on these questions in the landscape include Keystone Foundation (Kotagiri), ATREE and Kalpavriksh. This atlas assembles the documentary record — orders, judgments, claim statistics, gram sabha status — and presents the Forest Department's position alongside the community's. It does not campaign.
Consent protocol. Oral history, photographs of people and ethnobotanical knowledge are published only with informed consent, with attribution or anonymity by the contributor's choice, and with Tamil-language copies returned to the community. Nothing that could be used against a live FRA claim is published. We do not use stock photography of tribal people.
Life, Land and History are each backed by real database tables — taxon, place,
document/historical_passage/legal_instrument — with one detail page
generated per row. Checked against the live schema (22 tables in atlas.db) before writing this:
there is no equivalent table here. Nothing models the Soliga, Irula, Kurumba or Malasar as rows, and nothing
models Keystone Foundation, ATREE or Kalpavriksh either — every fact above is hand-written narrative text,
sourced the same way the rest of this atlas is, but not queryable, not exportable and not backed by a
per-community or per-organisation detail page the way a species or
a place is. This page is the whole of the People section right now, not
an index into a larger one.
One real, differently-shaped dataset does exist and is worth naming plainly rather than folding in here unannounced: the 576 species photographs across this atlas carry 48 named, individually-attributed contributors — real usernames with public profile links and open licences (mostly iNaturalist), e.g. parithi (170 photos), pjeganathan (65), down to single contributions from over thirty others. That is genuine, sourced "people" data in the sense of named individuals — but it is citizen-science photo attribution, not community or organisational representation, and mixing the two under this page's banner is an editorial call this atlas hasn't made. It isn't made here either: no contributor detail pages have been built from it. See the run report for the full count and the open question.
Orders, judgments and claim statistics for the Forest Rights Act implementation are catalogued alongside everything else this atlas cites — the 75% of claims still unresolved included.