We at Keystone have lost a valuable bridge, friend, and guide who has been with us for over twenty years. Janaki Amma was a Kurumba woman leader and traditional healer with indomitable spirit, capable of leading her community through thick and thin. She was a director of Aadhimalai AAPCL, a midwife who helped birth countless babies throughout The Nilgiris, and the oldest women reporter for the Nilgiri Seemai Suddhi newsletter. She would travel by foot to neighboring villages from her interior village of Vellaricombai, memorizing details of each story that she would later relay to her fellow reporters to be written down in the newsletter. She had immense traditional ecological knowledge, and fulfilled multiple roles as a healer, a midwife, and a traditional medicine practitioner.
Janaki Amma has been an invaluable community mobilizer and facilitator for the Alu Kurumba community, and her impact at Keystone has been immeasurable. She has worked with everyone from public health workers to ecologists, and during COVID-19 was an active facilitator for service delivery to her region. As of late, Janaki Amma advocated heavily for civic and social issues in her region, such as forest rights, infrastructure, and road access. In addition to this, she was working to map Kurumba ancestral domains and sacred groves. In 2017, Janaki Amma received the Paul K. Feyerabend award for her work in promoting traditional systems of governance and cultural identity within the Kurumba community. Last year, Janaki Amma was one of 1350 tribal members from PVTG communities invited to Rashtrapati Bhawan to meet President Droupadi Murmu. Janaki Amma has left behind a massive legacy, with a loss difficult to fill. It is a void that we all feel today. Her memory will live on for generations to come.
Header photo credit: Ramya Reddy
