Subject(s): Landscape -- Environmental politics -- Nilgiris -- Histories of rights in nature : history within modernity, scientific history v/s subaltern memory, evolutionary histories and many Europes, contested space in delimited region, claiming and negotiating rights -- Narrative on toda and its problems : Idealizing historical landscapes, Nilgiri hills in regional history, refugee and entrepreneurial burgher -- Negotiating law : Competing for conquered territories, asserting legal rights, protecting subjects rights against absolute rule, early attempts to protect toda rights, preferring cultivation to pastoralism - case of Ketti -- Perceptions of land and people : Empirical science fixing people to time and place, ethnology in administration of Nilgiris, ethnicizing subjects, ontesting land rights, towards a public Nilgiri historiography -- Local politics and regional confrontations : Hotel in hills encroaching on sacred lands, colliding norms for rights in land- conflicts in 1830, sovereign government sets rules 1843 regulations -- Towards an environmental history of law : Four key arguments, private interests in conflict with sovereign claims, contested process of making law, spaces of negotiation through multiple layers of authority, rewriting regions in regional history, towards an environmental history of law