Chronicle of crises foretold

A book on the drought in Marathwada offers a compelling preview of the human and environmental costs of poor policy-making, caste inequalities and globalisation

A humble forewarning to the reader who is prone to judging a book by its first few pages — please don’t. Plod past the Introduction. This book has the power to make a reader not only better informed about the drought in Marathwada and the web of causes and effects that cause human suffering in that region, but also make the reader more compassionate towards the sufferings of fellow humans and perhaps more mindful of his own privileges. Moreover, this book has the potential to be a significant text for the much vilified and utterly important Indian movement against climate change.

Why the forewarning then? In the Introduction to this must-read book, a veritable Diwali of numbers bursts forth, a fireworks display of statistics. Like a string of red firecrackers, a good statistic is apt to dazzle. Light many in rapid succession, and they will leave the eyes dazed, the ears benumbed. That happens in the Introduction to this book. A haze of big words also follows — for instance, I had to Google “anthropogenic” and “evapotranspiration”. By the first chapter, however, and in all the ones that follow, the author hits her stride superbly, making this book absolutely indispensable for policymakers, NGO workers, government workers and aspirants to civil service, as well as the conscientious citizen.

This book could not have been written by a newbie. Iyer is a senior journalist. She is a Mumbai-based reporter. This is her first book, and what a book. You can tell that it comes from years of immersive research. Landscapes of Loss is the product of the author’s multiple visits over a decade to a drought-blighted part of Maharashtra, namely Marathwada. The book looks at the drought and its effects in a 360-degree sweep. To the reader who thinks a drought is a mere matter of failed rains, the book offers a richly detailed explanation of its layers. As Iyer puts it succinctly: “[P]resent day challenges in Marath­wada’s rural economy are an assimilation of decades’ worth of history of inequity, climate change, scratchy policymaking, caste realities and a new globalized world order that failed to take everyone along.” That’s a lot of inter-related causes. Each cause is elaborated upon in this book, comprehensively and lucidly so.

Iyer contextualises the drought in Marathwada as part of a worldwide phenomenon. Even against this background, we are told, Marathwada is especially dry. Iyer writes, “In the summer of 2014, when the state government declared 23,802 villages drought-hit, every single one of Marathwada’s 8,100-odd villages was among them.”

Anecdotes and case studies follow one after the other, glittering amid clarifying context and lucid analysis — that is, the author artfully controls the “camera angles”, artfully going “wide angle” into perspective on the reasons behind a particular aspect of life in Marathwada. For instance, after a series of anecdotes about individuals, this remarkably insightful piece of “wide-angle” perspective follows: “By 2050, the world population will balloon to 10 billion. As the world’s hunger grows, so will groundwater extraction, and tremendous water insecurity. Since the 1990s, this is precisely what Marathwada has already witnessed, agriculture developing on the strength of groundwater extraction, now unsustainably so, with apparently no safeguards to prevent a catastrophe.” Insights like this one establish Marathwada as an early sign of a frightening global future, and set up the book as a predictor for what could happen around the world.

Landscapes of loss: The story of an Indian drought

Author: Kavitha Iyer

Publisher: HarperCollins

Price: Rs 599; Pages: 248

The author also zooms in on the human face of this condition; masterfully so. The author has an eye for the telling anecdote, the cinematic case study, the ringing quote. Iyer deploys all these to imbue her text with narrative. Sample this passage: “Tradition holds that the (post-cremation ritual) be performed near a river, a dip in its water announcing the end of the mourning period… But on this day, the Dhondges find that the river is not even a stream.” What a symbolically and emotionally charged image, told in a restrained, even tone. The author makes the reader feel no pity, which is essentially condescending, but elevates the reader to the pure feeling of compassion, of fellow feeling.

Other anecdotes and case studies take us into the anguished hearts of Marathwada’s people, who are brave but after all, only human. We are given moving dispatches from the families of people whose despair led them to take their lives, and are shown the living hell which surrounds the living — women having to do backbreaking labour in sugarcane fields while pregnant, women whom a complex web of factors forced into uterus removal, entire families who migrate hundreds of kilometres away for work, men who anaesthetise despair with drink or drug, children whose futures have shrivelled soundlessly. We are shown, vividly, the “unfolding mental health crisis” faced by “a stoic workforce with slowly eroding mental health that continues to take pride in enduring silently. Until they no longer can.”

Landscapes of Loss also calls out a succession of state governments for their stupidity, apathy or straight-up neglect of Marathwada. Official incompetence and lack of adequate application of mind is, of course, food for outrage. But the author’s tone is never shrill, but measured and quiet. This is critical to avoid the twin traps of poverty porn and depressing despair, which she sidesteps admi­rably; this is a book written with hope. And towards the end of the book, we are given a tour of the green shoots — literally and figuratively speaking — that are springing up in parts of Marathwada, whether in the form of self-help movements comprising women, or people-led rainwater harvesting initiatives that have worked spectacularly.

This is a book about drought, but more so, a book about people. Their humanity shines through in the book. As, of course, does that of the author, who worked on this vital subject. The book deserves a wide readership. Moreover, its intersecting themes of human endeavour in the teeth of hostile natural conditions, and human actions rebounding upon themselves, are truly epic, and will lend themselves well to visual storytelling, whether in documentary or feature film form.