Afrah Jahan

LA4003-1

Wet evergreen forest | Agasthyamalai range | Southern western ghats | Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary |

With a history going back millions of years – even before the cleaving of the Gondwanaland - the Myristica swamps are believed to have once traversed the entire stretch of the Konkan coast, creating a network along the watercourses of the primeval forests of the Western ghats. 

Now highly fragmented, these systems are endemic to the Southern western ghats and are the last remnants of a fast disappearing and endangered family of evergreen trees belonging to the Myristicaceae family - one of the most primitive families of flowering plants, that have evolved to withstand the perennial waterlogged conditions of the area. 

The journey takes one in search of this archaic system, now reduced to linear formations fringing slow running water courses, in the deep shade of evergreen hills of the Wet evergreen forest of Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary and asks one to pause by one such swamp which has survived the test of time and acknowledge the myriad forms of complex lives and systems it sustains.