Specially Written for Vikalp Sangam
A life of forest protection, women’s leadership and intergenerational ecological knowledge
On 15 September 2026, Dengajhari lost one of its most steadfast forest guardians. Sashi Pradhan, lovingly known as Sashi Mausi, passed away, leaving behind a community, generations of women she inspired, and a forest whose history cannot be separated from her life and work.
For decades, she stood alongside the women of Dengajhari to protect their forests, restore the landscape and strengthen the community’s relationship with its commons. Her contribution went far beyond preventing tree felling. She helped shape a form of community forest governance in which forests, water, agriculture, livelihoods, memory and collective responsibility were understood not as separate concerns, but as deeply interconnected parts of a living landscape.
When the forest began to disappear
The hills around Dengajhari were once severely degraded by timber extraction and extensive felling. As the forest receded, its consequences entered everyday life. Four streams originating in the hills weakened or dried up; agriculture suffered from water scarcity; and the village experienced the wider social and economic costs of ecological decline.
The community began organising collectively to protect what remained of the forest. Over time, women came to play a strong and increasingly visible role in this effort, bringing their own collective strength, vigilance and knowledge of the landscape. Sashi Mausi emerged as one of the leading voices of this mobilisation, helping women come together to defend the forest as a shared community resource.
Through the Maa Maninaga Jangala Surakshya Samiti, the women developed Thenga Pali, a traditional system of rotational forest patrolling through which community members shared responsibility for safeguarding the forest and responding to threats. They monitored the forest, intervened against illegal felling and enforced the community’s collective rules for its protection. What began as an effort to defend a threatened forest gradually evolved into a sustained system of community-led forest governance.
The landscape began to recover. Water sources returned, agricultural conditions improved and the forest regenerated across a large area.
But the significance of this transformation cannot be measured by the physical extent of forest restored alone.The restoration was ecological and social at the same time. As the forest returned, so did confidence in collective action.
Before the Law, Community Forest Governance Was Already a Practice
Dengajhari’s experience offers an important lens through which to understand the Forest Rights Act, 2006. The community had been protecting and governing its forest long before Community Forest Resource rights became part of the law and governance. The law did not create the relationship between people and forest; it provided a framework through which historical relationships and community institutions could be recognised.
Dengajhari later received legal recognition of its Community Rights and Community Forest Resource rights under the FRA. Sashi Mausi’s long years of forest protection formed an important part of that journey.
Rights had to be sustained by knowledge, participation and intergenerational continuity. She understood that the forest needed people who would carry its memory collectively into the future.
Keeping the forest’s memory alive
This understanding shaped her later work. The Jungle Kutir, established by the women of Dengajhari, became a space where the community’s ecological memory could be shared with children and young people.
Sashi Mausi narrated the history of the forest-its degradation, the struggle to protect it, and its gradual regeneration. Through stories, songs and everyday observation, she helped children recognise trees, medicinal plants, forest foods, mushrooms and other signs of the living landscape. For her, teaching children was not separate from conservation. It was conservation.
She was deeply aware that migration, changing livelihoods and changing aspirations could weaken young people’s relationship with the forest. Her response was not to blame the younger generation, but to teach them. She wanted them to know the landscape well enough to value it and, eventually, take responsibility for it. She became a keeper of ecological memory.
Forest, livelihood and women’s leadership
For Sashi Mausi, protecting the forest was never about trees alone. It was about safeguarding the web of life that sustained the village. Food, fuel, medicinal plants, leaves, seeds, mushrooms and other forest produce were woven into household economies and, especially, women’s everyday lives. For her, the health of the forest was inseparable from livelihood security, dignity and the community’s ability to sustain itself.
Even after the forest began to regenerate, she did not consider the struggle complete. She continued to walk into the forest, remain engaged with community protection efforts and encourage younger people to take responsibility. For her, regeneration was not the end of the story; it brought a new responsibility-to ensure that the forest would remain healthy, the institutions that protected it would remain active, and the next generation would understand what had been built through collective effort.
The experience of Dengajhari also travelled beyond the village. What began as a determined effort to protect a threatened forest became part of a wider movement for community forest protection across the Ranpur region of Nayagarh. Neighbouring villages drew from Dengajhari’s experience of collective vigilance, locally evolved rules and community-led governance. Sashi Mausi was part of a larger process through which a local struggle grew into a wider demonstration of what communities can achieve when they organise around their commons.
Her contribution, therefore, was larger than the forest she helped protect. She helped affirm that forest conservation can become a source of livelihood security, women’s leadership and stronger local institutions.
A legacy written into the landscape
Sashi Mausi’s leadership was never defined by a position or an office. It was earned over time-through presence, persistence, memory and trust. She belonged to a generation that had witnessed the forest at its most vulnerable and then seen it slowly return. She carried that history within her: the loss of water, the years of struggle, the collective resolve of the women, and the gradual renewal of the hills. She also understood that much of what made this transformation possible could disappear if its history was not passed on.
That is why her legacy extends beyond the physical landscape. It lives in the confidence of women who discovered the strength of collective action; in the community institutions built around the forest; in the younger generation that learnt to recognise and value the life around them; and in the memory of what Dengajhari achieved together.
Her passing leaves a silence in the village. But the landscape she helped shape continues to carry her presence. The regenerated forest, the returning streams, the Jungle Kutir, the stories shared with children, and the community practices built over decades are all part of that inheritance.
Perhaps that is the most enduring way to remember Sashi Mausi: not simply as someone who protected a forest, but as someone who helped a community imagine its relationship with the forest differently-and then live that relationship collectively.
On 15 September, Dengajhari lost one of its steadfast guardians. But what she helped build does not end with her. It continues in the forest, in the community, and in every generation that chooses to care for both.
