World Environment Day: Arati Kumar-Rao wants you to listen to the land
Writer and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao talks about her book Marginlands, India's marginalised landscapes, environmental storytelling and the need to reconnect with nature
There is an interesting anecdote from Arati Kumar-Rao’s new book, Marginlands: Indian Landscapes On The Brink, which best describes the beauty of India’s vast natural landscapes and the urgency to rescue them from the precipice of destruction.
In one anecdote, the writer and environmental photographer talks about desert dwellers and shepherds in Rajasthan’s Thar region. Drawing a parallel between the Inuit people of the Arctic region and inhabitants of the Thar, she writes: “It is said that the Inuit people of the Arctic region have forty names for snow—which makes sense, since they are surrounded by snow all year and have an intimate acquaintance with all its variations. The people of the Thar get only forty cloudy days in a year, and yet they have as many names for clouds.”
Many more such intimate stories from Indian landscapes—all the way from Ladakh to the Sundarbans and more regions in the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin—form the backbone of the book, which drives home the point that we are forgetting the ancient practice of listening to the land.
Kumar-Rao is one of the most active voices in the environmental storytelling space in India. Down the years, she has chronicled the changing landscapes and climate, and their effect on livelihoods and biodiversity, in South Asia. In Marginlands, which consists of reporting and storytelling spanning a decade, she goes deeper to understand these marginalised landscapes through the people who live there.
“People think that those who speak about the environment are anti-development. It’s not like that at all. It’s just a question of right development and how you carry it out,” Kumar-Rao says during a video call from Seattle, US.
In evidence of how local the book is, Kumar-Rao has also included a glossary of local words, some of which we might lose eventually. For, she writes, the value of such “landscape lexicon” is declining with every generation.
There is sound scientific backing for why we need to talk—and be concerned—about these vulnerable landscapes. The World Meteorological Organization has forecast that 2023-27 will be the warmest five-year period ever recorded. In October 2021, the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (Ceew), a Delhi-based think tank, came out with a unique district-level climate vulnerability assessment. The study found that five out of six zones in India, i.e., South, North, North-East, West and Central, have a low adaptive capacity to extreme hydro-met (hydrological and meteorological) disasters.
While lack of infrastructure planning and building against nature has cost these landscapes heavily, Kumar-Rao believes we still have a wonderful opportunity to turn things around and restore Indian landscapes. “We are on the brink, we could go this way or that. These next few years are going to be telling almost, to see which way we go, and I really hope we go the way of restoration.”
In an interview, Kumar-Rao talks about the challenges of environmental storytelling, how the American novelist and environmental activist Wendell Berry and film-maker Satyajit Ray have influenced her work and why we need to connect again with the natural world. Edited excerpts:
How did you arrive at this style of storytelling?
It was in 2012, when (journalist) Prem Panicker and I, we had gone down to Kerala to explore the boat-building that goes on in Beypore. We were on our way back—we had driven there—and as we were driving, we were passing all these landscapes from Kerala to Bangalore (Bengaluru). I turned to him and said: “You know, I don’t think I want to do storytelling like this.” I do want to take it slow. I want to be able to move at a human pace of life, only because I felt like there were so many stories that we were missing. So, beginning of 2013, I decided to only tell stories, slowly, that is, where I can really spend time in landscapes. That’s how it began, with my trips to the Thar desert. The reason I wanted to tell it slowly is because I realised that things change, and especially in landscapes. In a place like India, you have different seasons and different things happen in different seasons. People adapt to those changes.
I realised that even spending 10 years in landscapes is nothing. So this is just scratching the surface. This book is getting to maybe just the first bit of how these landscapes play. Hopefully, the rest of my life I will be doing this.
Are you exploring any other new formats of storytelling as well?
I am toying with a bunch of things. I am going to be embarking on a transect next. I am going to be walking across India, from the eastern-most point to the western-most point. That’s a different kind of slow: where I am not going to be revisiting landscapes but I am going to be moving through them slowly.
I want to concentrate on sound because that, I feel, is one of those underrated layers of information in storytelling. Maybe in sum, at the end of it, when I put everything together, it’s all going to layer upon each other. But there’s no definitive answer that I have found (as to) which is a comprehensive way of telling these stories.
You spent weeks and months at some of these locations. A lot of the chapters are immersive and deeply personal. Was it challenging to not intervene in certain situations when you were seeing things happening around you?
That’s kind of this mindset that we go into stories with, right? That we are witnesses, we let it play out, and so on. There were one or two instances when it was really hard not to be humanitarian. And I did not let myself not be humanitarian in those cases, as long as it didn’t affect or influence the story. All said and done, however immersive these stories might be or may come across as, I still can remove myself from them. I have that privilege. I was acutely aware of my privilege and the fact that I could come back to a home with a roof and food on the table and all kinds of things that come with the trappings of city life.
Every time I would go back and come back, it would take me a while to decompress and be okay with certain things. My life itself seems so far removed from what I was reporting about. And that was painful all the time. It was hard but nothing compared to how those people have to live. My hardship was nothing.
What were the logistical challenges when you were reporting from these locations?
I hate to romanticise any of this but the wonderful thing about India is that people adopt you. I travel alone. Very often people insisted that I stay with them. They just looked after me really well.
I think the biggest challenge was finding funds to do all of this because I was constantly dipping into my own pocket. There was a brief period—and I think I mentioned this in the prologue—of six months where I was funded, which was great.... If you didn’t dip into your own reserves, how would you tell these stories? I wasn’t willing to give that part up. I tried to find a way: I took personal loans, quite a few of them.
What were the influences on your storytelling?
Oh, (there are) many... It started when I was a teenager. My father used to read to me from Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry’s writings, philosophy as well as poetry are a huge influence. Every time I read his stuff, I discover something else.
Early on, the writing of Barry Lopez was a huge influence. In general, storytellers like Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore. I love that kind of storytelling. So even a lot of my photography, and my sensibilities when it comes to the visual arts, come from that kind of storytelling. When I used to work in Bengal, it was something that I just felt spoke to me.
(Journalist) Paul Salopek—in just his way, his manner of storytelling and his crafting of the story— is just brilliant. And Prem, in his editing and how he looks at the story, how he dissects a story, how he has guided me through stories. I think they are my mentors. One I met in 2012, the other I came to know of in 2013. That one decade was pretty formative in my career. Without their influence, I don’t think any of this would have been possible.
You reiterate in the book that the deep knowledge of the land is declining with every generation. A prime reason being that the value of such knowledge is being undermined. What needs to be done to preserve such knowledge?
That’s such a big question and I wish I could answer it because if we could, maybe there would be ways forward. I really think, again, it comes down to listening, it comes down to heeding. It comes down to actually going back a few steps and going back to realising what really matters.
I hope the people who read the book can glean that the bedrock of GDP is the environment... The environment is everything—the land beneath our feet. Unless we begin to listen again, to the wisdom of the land, to put it in a very broad sense, we will lose it—and that listening is key.
Even for the children. I know so many—my own daughter included—who went to a school or an education system where nothing she learnt was local. Nothing was what she saw or heard around her. That is an echo I am hearing even from tribal leaders, Adivasi leaders: that our kids go to school and they learn things that have got nothing to do with their lives. We need to teach and get back to people who know the land and can teach survival in those landscapes, rather than some general education that prepares kids for almost nothing at all.
I met kids in Bihar, for example. Their parents came up to me and said aapne bola bachon ko padhao toh humne padhaya. Aur ab dekho usko job nahi mil raha. (you told us to educate our children, so we did, and now they can’t find jobs). Because they have not been taught anything that makes any difference or can get them any job which is meaningful. That’s partly because we are not teaching them anything that is useful for their milieu. They are forced to migrate and when they migrate, they lose so many different aspects of their own identity.
So, I think that is the only way: allowing youth to reclaim their local knowledge and be able to use it. I met people in Ladakh who are trying to teach locals to make it meaningful to stay where they are and do things right by their land. Unless that happens on a very large scale, we are going to completely miss the boat and our kids are going to pay the price because they are the ones that are going to be bereft.
The World Meteorological Organization said recently it is near certain that 2023-27 will be the warmest five-year period ever recorded. What kind of impact will it have on landscapes and how do you see them changing?
I am not that technical. So I would not hazard what exact changes might be coming. But I know that we have altered the resilience of landscapes, which earlier were pretty resilient in and of themselves, by basically building against nature. We have shot ourselves in the foot.
In Rajasthan, for example, there have been drought years when the traditional rainwater that has been harvested has helped people. Those who depended upon the government’s canals came to get the water from these people who traditionally harvested rain. These people are just doing the basics, taking care of their traditional water sources, and it has helped them. That’s the resilience I was talking about.
It’s a question of how we protect the resilience of the land. If we do that right, five years of El Niño are not going to make much of a difference. But if we don’t, it is going to hurt us. And I am afraid that the people who suffer will not be the people who take these wrong decisions.
You have used a lovely quote from the American jurist William O. Douglas at the beginning of one of the chapters. “I’ve often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.” How does one widen the scope of urban planning in today’s time?
By listening to people like (author and ecologist) Harini Nagendra and others who are working in these spaces, and speaking abundant sense.... Engineers are specialised in what they do. Geologists are specialised in what they do. Botanists are specialised in what they do—and they don’t talk to each other. We need to break these silos. (We need to listen to) the non-specialists, who look at the big picture and the connections... People like Wendell Berry and (Japanese farmer and philosopher) Masanobu Fukuoka—people who have looked at it from a different lens.
Just allowing for more species to thrive than just the human. I truly believe that urban landscaping and tourism are two industries which can hugely benefit from thinking ecologically.
What was your research process? How do you manage your notes and decide what to include or leave out?
I didn’t keep as good notes as I should have. So when I teach a class, I always tell everybody to keep really good notes. I must say that in the areas that I kept really good notes, I was able to do a far better job than in places that I did not keep good notes.
The good thing is that because I was going back to places, I had chances to correct my mistakes and see things more clearly.
Also, the fact that I take photographs and make sound recordings, helped. Those are also information layers.
One of the things that changed over these years, as I went back to the landscapes, is that I sought out the women, because otherwise, only the men were speaking up. I found that I was only getting a part of the story. As I went back to these landscapes, I specifically asked to speak to women. That helped a lot because then I started seeing things from a very different lens.
All the photographs in the book are in black and white. Is there a reason for that?
At some point, we decided to do the book fully in black and white. However, I would say that Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray’s 1955 movie) influenced me a lot. I tend to shoot a lot in black and white. Colour kind of jars me a little bit. Even my drawings are largely black and white.... I guess I am just like a little bit of a monochromatic person.
The message that comes across is that the fate of Indian landscapes is uncertain. Were there any stories and examples of hope that could lead to a positive change in the future?
Meeting people like Chhattar Singh in the desert and Sonam Wangchuk, for example, in Ladakh. There are many such people whom I did not write about that are working in different landscapes and doing excellent work in the agricultural space and forestry, etc.
As soon as jargon or greenwash or things like tree-planting drives being the panacea for everything takes over, I think that’s when we would be lost. But we are not there yet. We are very much in the realm of people restoring landscapes. I just hope that we don’t go the other way. We are actually quite on the brink. That’s why I use those words in the book quite a few times.
In an earlier interview with ‘Lounge’, primatologist Jane Goodall said we should let the young generation explore the natural world more closely. “Get them out in nature. Let them explore. Let them watch with amazement. They will learn to understand and love it, and what you love, you want to save.” What are your thoughts on this?
Fantastic. And I know that for generations youngsters have loved nature—but then they grow up. And no matter what they love in elementary school, they seem to forget.
I think we need to build small communities where we don’t lose sight of what’s important. So (we need to think of) neighbourhoods, which are centred around or are in restored landscapes, rather than the youngsters thinking (that) going to a forest on a weekend or during holidays is nature.
Restoring neighbourhoods and changing their lifestyles to include these kinds of connections to the environment, to the land, is really important. So yes, the curiosity and wonder are always there in children, and even in some adults. But how we sustain that wonder and make it part of their everyday lives is important.
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First Published:3 Jun 2023, 10:35 AM IST
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