Ever heard of rainwater harvesting in India’s Rajasthan Thar deserts or flooding in the highlands of Ladakh? In Marginlands: Indian Landscapes on the Brink, shortlisted for the Tata Lit Live! Award and the Attagalatta Prize 2023, Arati Kumar-Rao, an ardent environmentalist, describes with passion the diverse topographies she has traversed for over a decade, the ancient wisdom of their inhabitants, the slow degradation that has occurred in the past decades, and the pressing need to preserve the ecosystem.
‘Marginlands: Indian Landscapes On The Brink,’ Arati Kumar-Rao, Picador India, 2023.
Brimming with stories of the people and their persistence to earn their livelihoods from their lands, the book takes you through the various terrain Arati traversed in her years of travel, capturing landscapes, meeting people, listening to their struggles and victories, and gaining the ability to perceive the bigger picture. Using black-and-white sketches along with photographs, she brilliantly illustrates the environment and its people.
Though the saga of the precious yet vulnerable landscapes comes across as a poignant plea, Marginlands is not a sad tale. Rather, it is a bold narration interspersed with laments on the intrusion of undesirable elements on the lands and the marginalised lives inhabiting them, among other things. Warning about the dangers of a rampant ‘development’ driven by corporations with government facilitation that has ruined livelihoods, the book urges us to “listen to the environment” as opposed to disconnecting ourselves from it. Written in a unique storytelling style combining journalistic elements of reporting, the narration engages the reader deeply, reminding them of the fragility of our environment and igniting a sense of urgency to protect it. Arati writes, “Almost every account in this book is an example of misguided decisions, warnings wilfully ignored, evidence disregarded, inevitably paving the way for impending or currently unravelling disasters that may never make the news.”
A National Geographic Explorer who’s on the BBC’s list of 100 inspiring and influential women 2023, a photographer, and an author, Arati, in her prologue, shares an account of her childhood influences and a corporate career before quitting and diving headfirst “into the uncertain world of environment storytelling.”. Recalling her early years when her parents encouraged reading Salim Ali’s books, bird-watching at national parks, and making nature trips, Arati mentions how her father, despite being an engineer by profession, was “dead set against large dams” and had “marched with protestors” against their construction. When “the frenetic pace of corporate life” was taking its toll on her, she remembered a line that she read in a book: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom,” as she lay tossing on her sickbed. She gave up her stressful corporate job, but then had no idea where or how to start as an environmentalist. Like everyone else, she “logged on to Facebook and Twitter to connect with journalists, editors, wildlife biologists, hydrologists and environmental activists” before choosing to finally get on the ground. She dipped into her savings time and again to travel, research, and photograph entire landscapes — this culminated in the book.
The book comprises five sections: the Thar deserts, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin, India’s western coast, the Ladakh ecosystem, and finally the urban ecosystem of cities. Exploring the Thar desert in the first section, she describes the histories, daily lives, and wisdom of its inhabitants. A local shepherd, Chhattar Singh, magically pulls out wet sand from underneath the dunes on a hot summer afternoon with the sun overhead.
The ancient wisdom goes thus: “Chhattar Singh can go hours without speaking a single word. But when he is in the mood, as he is now, he will impart the wisdom of the ages, gratis. Sand particles, he explains, do not coalesce like clay. When clay hardens, it cracks, allowing the moisture to escape. Sand particles, on the other hand, stay separate and do not harden, or fissure. Hence, the moisture that has seeped into the dune, does not escape. The heart of the dune, a few feet deep, is a water-storing miracle.”
Unraveling the current state of the land, she mentions that “open cast mining and deep hole blasts” have depleted groundwater, destroying traditional crops, and devastating the locals’ lives. Projects the government introduced to transform the land into an agriculturally productive area failed miserably; the first part ends with a moving picture showing the locals staring at the sky, missing rain and lamenting their lost livelihoods.
In the second part of the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin, Arati unravels how the Farakka barrage and dams changed the course of the river, displacing communities and plunging their lives and livelihoods into darkness and despair. Engaging readers with her creative nonfiction writing style, she provokes a lot of sympathy for the thousands who live under constant threats of losing their houses.
“A few kilometers upstream from Inamul-bhai’s home, the river runs right below Arati Mandal’s house. It is her fourth home — a weak, floppy bamboo-and-khod construct with little in it except some pots, kettle, a bundle of clothes. Arati knows the future because she has lived in it many times in the past. She will wake with a start one night, possibly disturbed by the fearful bellow of her tethered calf. She will rush out of her home, clutching her pitifully few possessions. Her neighbor Arun Mandal will hoist a child on his shoulders; his wife will grab the television. After finding some makeshift shelter, they will watch, despairing, as their world disappears into the river in slow motion. And they will move on. But where will they go?”
In the third part, where the author scans the western coastline from Mumbai to Thiruvananthapuram, she attributes the current flood woes of Mumbai to the land reclamation from the Arabian Sea. Sand mining and constructing seawalls along the Kerala coast have led to coastal erosion, with the entire fishing community living in constant fear of their homes being eaten up by the sea. “‘There was a loud sound in the middle of the night,’ says Bindu. ‘We rushed out and saw the house to our right falling into the sea.’” Where once a kitchen, hall, bedroom, and staircase existed, only rubble stands. A freshwater well disappeared too.
In the fourth part, the author points out that the once pure, high-altitude Ladakh with minimal carbon footprint is unbelievably no longer so. As the Magsaysay award winner, engineer and educator Sonam Wangchuk tells her, “Ladakh had no living memories of flood.” Arati meditates on the climate change that has not spared the highlands as well. “Then came the unprecedented flood in 2006 that devastated the Phyang valley. It was followed by the destructive flood of 2010, then another in 2012, again in 2015, and most recently in 2018. Clearly something had shifted — a region that hadn’t seen floods in over seven decades was wrecked five times in the space of a dozen years.”
In the final part, the author brings us back to the cities, urging the readers to wean themselves away from phones and headphones and listen to the ecosystem around them. One needs to listen to the surrounding noise to even be aware of the noise pollution. Dominated by technology and urbanisation, the fast-paced world is of alarming concern because we are out of touch with the land and the natural actions that have shaped our relationships with it. A disheartening issue that is more so in the case of youngsters flocking to cities, disconnecting themselves from their geographical roots, is that the lands are neglected and, as a result, go barren.
Marginlands invokes the necessity to fight for our sustainable future, as the fate of our environment is intricately woven with our own.
Shobha Sriram, a freelance writer, is a former Copeland Fellow with Amherst College, US.
