Call of the wild

More than anything, TR Shankar Raman ties ecological loss to the everyday

Paraphrasing the American ecologist Aldo Leopold, the author sees ecology both as evocative of the wonders of nature and as enabling the means for a community “to see the marks of death”. This may, at first glance, seem morbid but Shankar Raman, with his ludic and sometimes lyrical prose, tears us away from an Animal Planet or Bear Grylls’ view of the wild. Ecology is a science of relationships of the tree and the garden gecko as much as the rain forest. He invites the reader to let the senses enjoy and learn from nature and its “eternal dance of life death and renewal” and partake of it, not tear its web asunder.

Given his three-decade engagements, first as naturalist, then as ecological scholar and then, for two decades-plus, as pioneer in re-growing rain forests in abandoned coffee estates in Valparai, Tamil Nadu, his is a journey across landscapes where life takes many shapes and forms. All through, whether in gibbon and clouded leopard country in the north east or discussing the metropolitan leopards around Mumbai, he never lets go of one thread. That life hangs together or not at all.

Given there are 77 pieces written across the years, though polished and honed as a wordsmith should, the tone and timbre vary. This book is best read in bits, depending on the mood and title that grab you: It is just right for a good but not long read. To my mind, the young Shankar Raman or the one reflecting on his early days come out the best. There is a Gerald Durrell-like fascination for nature in the shadow of bustling human life. It is not large, familiar animals or birds but often little-known places, and fascinating cameos of nature in the everyday that bring the pages of this book alive.

It was as a high school lad and then an undergraduate in the then city of Madras that Mr Raman cut his teeth as a naturalist. The ode to six seasons in the city is deeply evocative, with fruit bats and owls coming alive as never before in prose pictures. There is a touching ode to his mentor, the late R K G Menon, or “Cutlet”, who took youngsters to the Guindy park to cut transects, study pug marks and learn to read the lives of creatures that lived in this little forest in the city. In his 50s, “Cutlet” Menon had carried out studies of antelope behaviour; five years later in 1982, estimates of wild ungulates used transect methods. 

As a scientist, the author is part of a small band of men and women off the beaten track. He recounts how rare pygmy hogs are being captive-bred and put back into grasslands in Assam and how Naga village councils protect endangered Amur falcons. Local volunteers watch over hornbill nest in Namdapha in Arunachal Pradesh lest the young end up in a cooking pot. There is a love for nature but of one seized of the new vocabulary of science. Any glimmers of hope in a wider mood of darkness? There is a sense of foreboding in many essays, of a juggernaut of breakaway growth that brings great benefits but at immeasurable cost. 

More than anything, he ties ecological loss to the everyday. The essay “The butchery of banyans” recounts the majestic trees that for centuries gave shade and shelter to people and animals on roads in southern India. An order is passed, and along the Chamarajnagar road to Gundalpet and Asanur those trees are cut down in a matter of days. Markers of cultural as much as natural history vanish with little thought to ways to minimise or prevent such havoc. Trees come alive and there is even an essay on a straggler in a logged woodland who “stands alone to mark the forest that once was”.

The larger question is more than mere aesthetics or scientific curiosity. The neglect of the environment extracts great costs to human health and this is but to be expected given that we too are reliant on the cycles of life that sustain air, the waters and the soils. Beyond polluted air or vanishing lakes, or depleting ground water, there is a crisis of ethics and a blinkered outlook. Looking at nature afresh calls for a rethinking here and now of how Indians value the land and all that lives in it. He celebrates the heart of India, the Kanha Park, where streams originate in the deep forest. The land is inestimably more than the sum of its parts. It is not the  sal  tree or the deer or tiger or bumble bee but all of them together that need reprieve as much for our sake as their own.

There are many forces small and large searing the wild heart of India, and the cause would be better served by a smaller less catholic a selection than this one.  The book, then, is a plea and one that blends intellect and emotive appeal for, “a land ethic and place in the community, open to all who care to participate, who will feel moved to act and make space for other species in their lives and in their hearts”.
 

The reviewer teaches History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University

The Wild Heart of India 

TR Shankar Raman 

Oxford University Press

476 pages, Rs 795.