In Defence of Our Lands: Women’s Resistance to Mining
Defending one’s land is a collective confrontation of power and injustice, visible through images that reinforce this imagination. Yet what remains invisible is the war that is waged every day by women, in particular by farmers, because women are the first living guardians of the land, which is the source of life, memory and resistance. The UN has declared 2026 as the International Year of Women Farmers to recognise and amplify rural women's role in food, biodiversity stewardship and community survival. However, recognition alone cannot fix decades of land grabs, corporate control, devastation of forests and militarisation of rural spaces.
In Tijmali (known in government records as Sijimali), one of the hills in the long, winding Gandhamardan mountain range in Odisha on the Eastern Ghats of India, frontline women leaders of the organisation Ma Maati Mali Surakhya Mancha (MMMSM), in the districts of Rayagada and Kalahandi, are spearheading the movement against mining practices, for self-determination and autonomy over their ancestral territories—its lands, animals, forests, streams, mountains, burial grounds, and sacred groves and caves. Formed about three years ago, MMMSM has been protesting against violations of environment laws and people’s human rights. A primary issue being raised by the organisation is the forgery of people’s signatures in Gram Sabha resolutions, which have been fraudulently shown as held. This is a gross violation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 (amended in 2023), because in order for forests and land to be used for mining, the state needs to get consent from a minimum of fifty per cent members of a Gram Sabha. Since the people of Tijmali have made it clear that they shall not consent to any such process, the forgeries and fraudulent resolutions were scripted for land concession approvals.
On the Tijmali hilltop, two villages are inhabited by the Kandha Adivasi community, while forty-five villages around its foothills across a radius of about 30 kilometres in the Rayagada and Kalahandi districts are inhabited by both Kandha and Paraja Adivasi peoples. The Tijmali land and ecosystem are also co-habited by Dalit and other non-Adivasi communities who depend completely on the forests, mountains and rich fertile farmlands, double-cropped by virtue of the nearly hundred perennial hill streams that irrigate the lowlands through the year. Every year, thousands of Adivasi and non-Adivasi forest dwellers, farmers, traders, agricultural workers, children, elders and disaris (shamans) gather at the hilltop on Tijmali to celebrate the starting and ending of their agricultural season and offer prayers to their deity, Tij Raja (King of Tijmali). Thus, in April of every year, the Chait Parab is held to pray for abundant rains, crops and food for all life forms. In December, during the Toki Mara Parab, the deity is thanked and offered the newly harvested crops. Only after this Parab, do the animals and humans consume the new crops.
For both Adivasi and non-Adivasi communities, Tijmali is not just a mountain with bauxite reserves, but the abode of their reigning deity, Tij Raja. And this is the paradox at the centre of which lies the conflict between the people of Tijmali and the Vedanta-Odisha lobby. For the latter, Tijmali is simply a “mound of minerals to be extracted and sold for profit.”
The conflict began in February 2023, once Vedanta was allotted the Tijmali bauxite reserve over an area of 1549 hectares, 708 of which is forest, for a mining lease period of thirty years. Those who called Tijmali their ancestral homeland never consented to it being handed over to Vedanta. Thus began an arduous journey of organising villagers, educating about environment laws and agitating against the mining that will have devastating impacts on their homes, lands, forests, perennial streams and the sacred abode of their supreme deity.
For the women, their identity, spirituality and survival are inseparable from the rich tapestry of Tijmali’s biodiversity. And each act of survival by the Adivasi women reminds us of how they carry deep intergenerational knowledge about their land rooted in memory and resistance, as well as the central role they play in sustaining the relationships between the human world and other life forms that co-share spaces in the living world. They are the frontline stewards and defenders of these ancient lands and of an Adivasi worldview that does not treat anything as a commodity that is extracted for profit, but as an equal life form to be respected, protected and nurtured.
To learn more about Indigenous communities’ harvest festivals, engage with Sakhi Subramaniam Chowla’s curated albums from the Madai Mela of Netanar and Diyaari Puja in the Bastar region.
To learn more about artists reflecting on Indigenous communities’ resistance against land grabbing and resource extraction, read Radhika Saraf’s two-part interview with Mekh Limbu on his work Chotlung: traversing spirits, redemptive songs (2025), Ishtayaq Rasool’s essay on Fileona Dkhar’s Ancestral Echoes (2022), Nikita Jain’s documentation of Adivasi resistance in Bastar, Jigisha Bhattacharya’s observations on Shishir Jha’s Dharti Latar Re Horo (2022) and Najrin Islam’s conversation with Shishir Jha about the same film.
To learn more about artists exploring the relationship of Indigenous communities to land, watch Bhumika Sarawati’s discussion with Subhash Thebe Limbu as he speaks about Adivasi Futurism, Riddhi Dastidar’s review of The Land Sings Back (2025) and Mallika Visvanathan’s curated album from Kunga Tashi Lepcha’s Children of the Snowy Peak (2019–ongoing).
Thanks to Earth Journalism Network for field support.
All images are by and courtesy of Sankaraa and Narendra Mohanty.
Click on the image to view the album
