 "Pradip Krishen")
Chill winter rain is thundering on the roof over Latitude, Anita Lal's fashionable restaurant perched three steep storeys up in Khan Market, and we are straining to hear Pradip Krishen, whose voice is as low key as his persona. He's talking about his unsuccessful attempts to photograph the Babool in the forest for his sumptuous new book Jungle Trees of Central India: A Field Guide for Tree Spotters, another, if long-awaited, virtuoso performance after Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide published in 2006.
"After a while, I began to wonder why I could not find a Babool in the forest. The Indian Babool is called Acacia Nilotica Subspecies Indica, so there is a strong suspicion that it may have come from Africa. But I never found it in the forest though all the literature affirmed that it is a forest tree.
"Then, it struck me. The Babool is a tree that has lost its habitat. That's because the Babool is like an advertisement that says 'this is good farming land'. So, wherever the Babool grows, people want to occupy that land. That's when I realised why it was missing, and other trees with a similar ecology - that require good, loamy soil and grow quite close to the surface - are in the same situation."
Slowly, we begin to understand the depth of the research that has gone into this second magnum opus that involved a field of study larger than the size of France. For all his rigorous auto-didacticism, Krishen wears his achievements lightly. He has evolved as a respected environmentalist, almost a lifetime away from his much-documented persona as an edgy film-maker (Massey Sahib, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Electric Moon) and one-time husband of celeb writer Arundhati Roy. At 64, he looks rail thin despite the bulk of a slate blue cable-knit sweater, retains an air of distracted enthusiasm and is as restless as a toddler, constantly fidgeting in his chair .
He's sketching the area of his research on the paper place mat the better to explain why he would love to have his book translated into Hindi to reach every forest guard. "See, this shares forest ecology with a fairly large area here, spilling down into the Deccan but avoiding places like Bastar, which are wetter, and then into Bihar and Jharkhand here, and into eastern Rajasthan. So in theory, the forest departments of Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, Andhra and Chhattisgarh could be persuaded to subsidise the Hindi book. In most cases it would cover 95 to 100 per cent of their trees - and many of them have trees that they don't even know of… ."
The server interrupts this demo to place a plate of Pasta Carbonara, covered with a goodly sprinkling of bacon and tomato, in front of Krishen. We've chosen, respectively, Chicken Schnitzel, thin slices of crumb-fried chicken, a variation of the Austrian original with tenderised lamb, served with creamy mashed potato, and a pea soup and salad.
Given that Krishen's area of research covers some six tiger reserves, was the forest service helpful? "There was no opposition but very little help," he replies matter-of-factly. "I mean, there were some individuals who went out of their way to help and I have acknowledged them in the book. But there were areas I could not go and the department would not give me permission. They should have been saying, 'Tell us where you want to go'."
Why is there so much disinterest in conservation in the forest services? It's the way they've evolved from colonial times, he replies. "Around the 1850s, the railways were developing and there was a sudden, huge demand for sleepers. Private contractors were asked to supply hardwoods - teak, sal - and there are heart-rending descriptions of what happened before regulation started.
"Then the government said we are going to impose regulations from next year. This is like saying, abhi jaa ke jo marzi le lo aap [take what you want while you can]. Look what happened in the Bori Reserve Forest that is now part of the Satpura Tiger Reserve. Contractors went with bags of rupees and told adivasis to cut everything before the regulations came into force. Then, they let it lie in the forest to take when they wanted. There was wholesale destruction. And then, some of the railway companies failed and could not honour their deals with the contractors, so all the wood was burnt, it was not even used. It was just terrible."
When it came to starting reserve forests, he continues, it was decided to keep people under check and not allow felling on a whim. "So the history of the forest department is the history of it becoming the biggest landlord in the country, and doing so at the expense of the adivasi. It appropriated not just timber but what is called MFP or minor forest produce."
He is explaining with quiet emphasis how adivasis are being marginalised and then, charmingly, checks himself: "Sorry, I forgot what your question was." We had asked what he thought was wrong with the way Forest Service cadres were trained. "They are trained in ways that keep destruction, people and cattle out, and then they can do what they like."
Project Tiger did help preserve pristine tiger habitat but with the forest rights Act of 2006, it is not clear what will happen. "The tiger people are saying the legislation favours the adivasis. But the people who support tribals say you have to give reserve land to them for reasons of equity. In any case, I don't think the model of having inviolate wilderness areas is possible any longer."
Krishen is one of those rare Lunch with BS guests who manage not to neglect their meal, though he must, perforce, do most of the talking, which allows us to savour the delicately braised schnitzel and creamy soup. Did he have a favourite tree? He did: not a pretty-pretty species but a tough survivor called Dhau in the Delhi region and Dhok in Rajasthan.
"It is beautiful in new leaf, and in old leaf, it gets this manganese colour. Then, it goes bare for about four months so when you walk through these forests, there are these wonderful trees with not a leaf on them. Also, the soil doesn't encourage much to grow underneath, so it is a ghostly kind of tree, but an interesting one."
The Dhau is a natural monoculture, a specialist in surviving and germinating in rocky places. "Basically, they send underground runners, so you have another tree coming up a little distance away, which means you could, theoretically, have a forest of several acres. And if the leaf is nibbled when young you get a growing shoot called a meristem that grows into side-shoots. So you can get an old Dhau that is only so high [he indicates about five feet] but spreads over the rocks like a mat."
The talk meanders to Delhi's allegedly expanding green cover. "The facts are unclear because this is done with satellite imagery that counts anything with a certain amount of greenery." Nurseries? That and "these silly little forestation schemes of the forest department where they take tennis-court sized plots of village land, grow trees at this much distance and say we have planted 5,000 trees. Take the southern Ridge. It is full of the Vilayati Keekar, which has no ecological value and prospers at the expense of native species."
Main courses over, we eye the desserts. Krishen, with patently no need to watch calories, chooses a sinful confection laced with Bailey's Irish Cream. Only one of us follows suit. We're chatting about his current work as director of the extraordinary 70-hectare Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park near the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, which he was instrumental in setting up seven years ago. Was he planning another book on trees in another part of India? He shudders and says no, too much to learn at his age. Not that that's stopping him develop a "new passion": desert rocks. "What happens to them when they are coated by iron sediment? It is called a desert varnish but nobody knows where it comes from - it could be a meteorite. If I do another book, it may be about this region."
The roof is starting to leak as we get to the coffee and chat about Oxford, where he went to read history but spent his days attending courses in English literature and cultural anthropology. "History at Oxford was so Eurocentric that I didn't like it." What he did like was the fact that he was in the thick of the counterculture - flower power, drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll, religion, Beatles (who had just released Let it Be shortly after their break-up). "I turned around 180 degrees as a result," he says, a supreme understatement of a subsequent chequered career that dismayed his family with its staunch tradition of public service. Watching him walk gleefully towards Bahri Sons to buy a copy of Wendy Doniger's recently banned book before it is pulped, it is easy to imagine him taking another turn - even as much as 360 degrees.
