A Comprehensive Bibliography for the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, 1603-1996.

• Author: Zvelebil, Kamil V.

Comprehensive Bibliography for the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, 1603-1996. By PAUL HOCKINGs. Espaces tropicaux, no. 14, 1996. Dynamique des milieux et des societies dans les espaces tropicaux. Bordeaux: UNIVERSITE MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1996. Pp. xxv + 326. $50.

This remarkable "research instrument" is introduced by a foreword and preface in four languages (French, English, German, and Japanese; likewise its title) and contains 6,786 entries, references of documents published between 1603 and 1996 about one of the most intensively studied areas of Asia, the Nilgiri Mountains of south India.

The Nilgiri district of Tamilnadu is a relatively small area of 984 square miles. What is the reason for this immense interest in it? The reasons are many, but, stated as briefly as possible, one can say the following: the mountains--a massif and associated plateau whose high point is 8,646 feet above sea level--are (or were, for things are changing very fast) a true paradise for ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists, botanists, and zoologists on account of the fact that they can be stratified, vertically, into about ten ecotypes (moist deciduous forests, moist evergreen tropical and subtropical forests, dry deciduous forests, savanna woodlands, savanna grasslands, shrub savannas, temperate forests, so-called "sholas' temperate grasslands, close thorny thickets, and discontinuous thorny thickets). These ecological differentia have played a decisive role in the ethnic, anthropological, and linguistic patterns of the area. However, as far as the present ecology of the Nilgiris is concerned, I was told, as l ong ago as February 7, 1978, in a memorable conversation with the late Dr. S. Narasimban that the original ecological pattern of the Nilgiris had been for all intents and purposes annihilated, apart from a few remote and hardly accessible areas; specifically, the pattern of hunting-cum-food-gathering-cum-shifting cultivation is, as a distinct ecotype, now practically nonexistent. Biotic disturbances in the Nilgiris have been both extensive and intense, and so were ethnic, anthropological, and linguistic changes.

These sad facts give an additional, particular importance to the...