In 2018, Goethe Institut and Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB), Mumbai launched an interdisciplinary project, titled State of Nature, to spark creative and scholarly exchanges on the ongoing climate crisis. Led by artist and environmentalist Ravi Agarwal and poet and writer Ranjit Hoskote, the idea was to bring together experts and practitioners from different fields to curate interventions that reflected on humanity’s shifting relationship with nature. Over the next several years, art and poetry via philosophy and activism informed these meetings, which have been recently recorded in a single volume, Practices of Hope: A Reader for the Future, edited by Agarwal, Hoskote and Amruta Nemivant.
The ambition behind this endeavour was commendable—to open “new discourses in the framework of the Anthropocene,” as Björn Ketels, the current director of Goethe Institut and MMB, puts it in his opening note. However, the outcome isn’t entirely tonally cohesive. While the volume opens with a strong polemic by Agarwal (“Why should one include the poor and disenfranchised in the species of mankind being responsible for climate damage?”), it largely veers towards one of two directions.
The first of these errs on the side of overt optimism, at times at risk of sounding glib, even as the writers make valid and valuable observations about the waning ties of interconnectedness between living and non-living forms on earth. Ranjit Hoskote’s piece, Resources of Hope, Against All Hope, despite its richly layered erudition, sounds like a manifesto that puts too much faith in hopefulness and ethical action over ground reality.
The second type of writing, in contrast, remains stodgily academic, riddled with obtuse jargon that leaches all urgency out of a problem that is, ironically, in dire need of a more humanised approach. Two long theoretical ruminations, Gardens and Fire: A Reflection on the Relation of Nature and Culture in Western Cultural History by Bernd Scherer, and Nature: A Fabrication by Michael Marder, exemplify this style, in that both are mired in abstraction and language that withholds access to rather than clarifies meaning, and is replete with ideas that lack affective appeal, let alone translate into any actionable outcome.
In between these two extremes are the exceptions—a moving intellectual autobiography by Nancy Adajania, revisiting the making of her documentary Khichri Ek Khoj, about the Korku tribe living in the Melghat region of Maharashtra, made 25 years ago; a lecture by David Quammen about transforming himself into one of the finest science writers of our time from being a novelist; an essay by the anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh, revisiting his experience of living among the Sahariyas, bonded labourers and forest dwellers of Shahabad in Baran district of Rajasthan, among other things; poems by Forrest Gander; and some thought-provoking artwork by Rajashree Goody, Prabhakar Pachpute, Rohini Devasher, Gigi Scaria, Ranbir Kaleka, and others.
Too many cooks
Despite its valuable contributions, Practices of Hope exemplifies the proverb about the danger of having too many cooks stirring the pot. Where the multiplicity of voices could have enriched the thrust of the volume, the reader instead is confronted with roadblocks, in the form of texts that remain unyielding, abstruse, divorced from the human reality of climate catastrophes. Especially in the context of the recent environmental tragedies that have befallen the subcontinent, these exercises in verbosity feel hollow, showing up as empty rhetoric rather than actual provocations for action.
Thus, the flash floods in Nepal, which have unleashed untold suffering and loss of lives, loom before the reader of Practices of Hope as an immediate reminder of the sheer scale of destruction that is already in motion. Belaboured ruminations through a Eurocentric lens, with dense allusions to the classical and mythical past, only end up accentuating our disconnect from the horrors of the present and the injustices of the past.
There are peculiar elisions as well. In her essay, poet and writer Ruth Padel points out, approvingly, that India created the “world’s first state forest conservation programme,” which “three Scottish doctors helped” set up. The rest of the piece rightly bemoans the post-colonial state’s systematic exploitation of its forests and their inhabitants but remains silent about the nefarious role played by imperialist policies on the destruction of the land.
In a similar vein, Rahul Ranjan’s piece, Litany of Loss: Grief and Disasters in the Himalayas, turns into a project of copiously documenting the evils of the past and present ills rather than offering a framework, affective or otherwise, that gestures towards mitigation.
The pieces that truly stand out are the ones that compel the reader to look at the world with fresh eyes. Helen Davis, for example, dwells on the etymology of a distinctly 21st-century compound word, “plastiglomerate”, in a short essay. The coinage refers to plastic that has fused with organic matter, found mostly in oceans, leading to the formation of a “new kind of hybrid materiality”. It is through encounters like these one-of-its-kind realities of the Anthropocene Age that the reader experiences a sense of wonder, not because Chandravarkar exhorts us to feel a certain way in his lengthy discourse, The State of Nature and the State of Practice. In his words, “We must learn to recognize that the weed in the pavement crack and shrub in our backyard are as worthy of wonder as the primal forest.”
Haunted by the spectres of devastating earthquakes, melting glaciers and forest fires, it is much too late for humanity to revel in the wonder of the humble weed that hides inside a crack. Rather, recovering a sense of wonder in the Anthropocene Age requires of us the clarity to confront the terrors that besiege our lives. Instead of only seeking solace in nature at its most benign, benevolent and beautiful, we need to keep the memory of its wrathful face alive, to remain alert and take decisive actions that can protect the planet’s present and the future.
In Adajania’s bracing account of her youthful adventures in Melghat as well as Singh’s fieldwork, we find a generous willingness to engage with the Other, the less palatable aspects of the human-natural nexus, especially the complexities it brings in its wake. The same is true for some of the image-based work in the volume. Although not too extensively represented, glimpses of Ranbir Kaleka’s House of Opaque Water, a multi-channel video installation, signals the precarity of identity politics and existence in the islands of Sundarbans in Bengal. Prabhakar Pachpute’s sculptural work, resembling quaint natural forms, is made of organic and inorganic materials. And departing from the earthly realm, Rohini Devasher’s Glasshouse Deep trains our gaze on the cosmos, invoking deep time and an idea of universal life, whose presence and persistence can only be felt inside the most attentive human heart.
As Gander urges us in his powerful poem, Twice Alive III, Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais, “…still the lived sensation fits/ into the living sensorium, can’t/ you hear?—Don’t be so/ rational—the world inhale? —hear”. Unfortunately, the deep clarity of felt utterances remains few and far between in Practices of Hope, overwhelmed by the noise that emanates from its wordier and more inert offerings.