Marginlands: A Journey Into India's Vanishing Landscapes - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arati Kumar-Rao is a National Geographic Explorer, an independent environmental photographer, a writer, and an artist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Emergence, BBC, and in leading Indian publications. Arati was named in BBC's 100 Influential and Inspiring women from around the world in 2023. When not on assignment, she splits her time between a biodiversity hotspot--the Western Ghats--and Bangalore in India.

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Bangalore July 2007

Outside, the rain hammered down, relentless in its intensity. I huddled under the covers, in the grip of a fever that refused to let up.

At 2:30 that afternoon, with a thermometer read-out of 104°F, I logged into a call to China, cued up my presentation and passed the next hour in a febrile stupor. Shivering and exhausted, I dragged myself out of my den and up a flight of stairs, swallowed a paracetamol and crashed into oblivion.

When I woke up, it was night, and my temperature had kicked up another notch – to 105°F.

Several days of blood tests and hospital visits later, I learned that I had paratyphoid. I am allergic to antibiotics; my recovery was going to be slow and precarious. I took leave from the multinational corporation where I worked as a market researcher, studying technology consumption behaviour in the Asia-Pacific region and its implications for marketing strategy.

Days passed in a delirium. The monsoon kept up a tympanic backbeat to my misery, crashing against the windowpanes. My mother installed herself as resident caregiver, disciplinarian and guardian angel; she fed me nutritious meals and maintained vigil to ensure I did nothing in the way of work. Huddled under blankets, I drifted in and out of fever dreams.

My childhood in eighties’ Bombay was a mix of many worlds. My father worked for a company that housed its employees in a gated colony – a wooded, hilly township accessible by a kilometre-long road that led away from the metropolis. My second-floor bedroom window was curtained by the boughs of trees on which sang orioles and ioras, barbets and bee-eaters, bulbuls and parakeets.

I was seven when a spotted owlet hopped onto our balcony late one evening, and I remember my pre-teen self feeling an unprecedented exhilaration. I spent my teenage evenings walking through brush and cycling on paths that rose and fell at steep inclines; I devoured books in the shade of a mango tree; friends plucked gooseberries that I carried in the swell of my skirt to someone’s porch, where we sucked on them with lips that puckered against the tartness – a life that was a part of, and yet apart from, the press of humanity that is Bombay.

My father, an engineer by training, worked for a thermal power company. Though a trained nutritionist, my mother taught English, science and geography at a local school. Papa did not believe in owning a car, and we lived in a city where public transport – Bombay’s BEST buses and suburban trains – satisfied all of our travel needs. He role-modelled cycling to the closest highway and then using a bus to reach the nearest train station that took him to the other end of town for work. Every day, Mamma walked to and back from school, a mile from where we lived. Thus, my sister and I grew up walking, cycling, riding buses and trains all over our island megacity.

Even though my father’s scope of work did not involve renewable energy sources, he was convinced about their efficacy as far back as the early eighties – long before climate change and clean, green energy became catchphrases. When I was eight, he built a solar cooker for our home – a wooden box painted black on the outside and lined with aluminium foil on the inside, with four reflective flaps that directed sunlight into the cavity. We cooked rice in it, and sometimes lentils – a tad unsatisfactorily, according to Mamma. It fell upon my sister and me to take turns running up to the terrace to orient the cooker towards the sun every few hours.

My family’s reading tastes were eclectic: my father introduced us to literature as diverse as Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Mahatma Gandhi, Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry. Mamma, who comes from a family of academics, insisted on instilling communication skills in us. Good writing – including handwriting – and public speaking were important parts of my school life. On Sundays Papa would take us birdwatching. My sister and I would wake up at 4:30 a.m., as would some of the neighbourhood kids. Papa took us all in tow, the party walking a kilometre to the main road to catch one BEST bus, then another, until we reached Sanjay Gandhi National Park by daybreak. Here we would trek several kilometres through thick forests and across streams, binoculars around our necks, eager eyes straining to find birds and any other wildlife that might have been dwelling in those parts.

Those were exhilarating times. I devoured Salim Ali’s Book of Indian Birds,2 memorizing bird calls, what they ate, how long they lived, poring over the illustrations, planning ‘expeditions’ through the neighbouring woods with my sister for company.

In those days, a Wendell Berry poem that my father read to us seeped deep into my teenage mind. ‘Reverdure’3 began with an ode to curiosity ...

You never know

What you are going to learn

... and went on to alternate between turning inwards and peeking outwards at the land, expounding an ethic that was gentle and harmonious, enduring and renewing – one that would serve as a lodestar for me decades later.

No leaf falls there that is lost;

all that falls rises, opens,

sings; what was, is.

We lived in a small apartment, 1,100 square feet – two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a tiny room in the back that my parents, both voracious readers, had converted into a library. It was my refuge when guests came over; I would tune out the sound of conversations and tune into the world of words.

But one conversation refused to be shut out. My grand-uncle, a senior economist with the World Bank, visited us every other year from the United States. While my mother and my grand- aunt went into their private huddle to bring each other up to date on family news, I sat hunched behind a pale blue cotton curtain, my antennae tuned to the male voices in the living room – voices that started out low and cordial but tensed and grew in volume and vigour within minutes.

In the eighties, massive hydropower dams were still being built all over the world under the auspices of the World Bank. My father, who marched with protesters carrying ‘Save The Western

Ghats’ banners, and with activists who advocated for protecting Kerala’s Silent Valley (he would later join the Narmada Bachao Andolan too), was dead set against large dams, believing them to carry an enormous ecological and social cost.

Long before world opinion began to look askance at those ‘temples of modern India’, my father had understood the price we would pay for every such interruption of a living, flowing, inhabited river. My grand-uncle took the opposite tack, pushing the merits of big hydro. As the evening wore on, their exchanges intensified and their faces reddened with the vehemence of their contrasting positions, until they ran out of breath as well as arguments and agreed to disagree.

My father, back then, was in a minority of one in his opposition to unplanned, unbridled development. It made a mark on me – his courage to stand for his convictions. My grand- uncle and other relatives, who came home and got caught up in these debates, were highly educated, erudite men, some of them tenured professors in American universities. How was it that none of them could see what my father recognized so early on?

That led me to wonder how, since arguments were clearly ineffective, one could fruitfully communicate fundamental ecological issues to the public; tell stories that married hydrology, ecology, social science and lucid communication; and reach past rhetoric to open minds to the unfamiliar and the inconvenient.

Those preoccupations stayed with me through my years in India as a...