It Isn’t Easy Being Green

Huge, heavy and kaleidoscopic, the book is divided into three parts: “Thoughts from Elsewhere”, “Wildlife Chronicles” and “Wildfire”, of which the first is written by Thapar, who really needs no introduction. He takes us on a guided tour of India’s wildlife habitats: the western and eastern coastlines, the jewel-like islands in the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, the Eastern and Western Ghats and Aravalis and Vindhyas, the deserts — hot and cold, the great forests of central India, the Himalayan foothills and alpine forests, the Sunderbans and the Ganges basin. When you finish reading this section, you are likely to put down the book and say, “Wow!” Sadly, a lot of these beautiful areas, and their wildlife, are under assault or threat. They’re also bewilderingly diverse and unique in their own ways: the salt pans of the Rann of Kutch harbouring immense flocks of flamingoes and the pugnacious wild ass, the Odisha coast with its Olive Ridley turtle nesting sites, Chilika Lake, another haven for migratory waterfowl, the strange Sunderbans with its ferocious tigers, the lush Western Ghats where, even now, new species are turning up, the rarefied heights of the Himalayas stalked by snow leopards and the lush forests of the North-east with their elusive red pandas and golden langurs. It’s like a treasure trove crammed with jewels of every description — which we have opened and, alas, are greedily looting.

The second section, “Wildlife Chronicles” has accounts, observations and writings by hunters, naturalists, civil servants, emperors even, and travellers, who have encountered and often been overwhelmed by India’s wild creatures and places. The galaxy of contributors include Pliny the Elder, Akbar, Jehangir, George Schaller, Jim Corbett, ERC Davidar, M Krishnan and a host of other luminaries. Many of these accounts pertain to encounters with wildlife — sadly, most of them during hunting trips — some of which are hair-raising, and leave you in no doubt that nature really is red in tooth and claw. Others describe encounters between predator and prey — wild dogs ruthlessly chasing and bringing down deer, pythons squeezing and swallowing their victims, and of course, “sportsmen” hunting their quarry. In this section, contributions from Indians are few and far between and most of them are from British “sportsmen” and/or civil servants.

What strikes you is how different most of India appeared to have been then: quite like an immense wildlife garden or park where it was possible to encounter a fairly wide range of wildlife, if not just outside your front door or back garden, certainly within the radius of a few miles. What also strikes you is the apparent immensity of the wild landscapes that are described, almost African in scale. All of that have now shrunk and become fragmented as we spread our tentacles and set up our ramshackle, smoking townships everywhere. Again, a reminder of what we’ve lost and why we must cling on to what we are still left with.

This is reiterated stunningly in the third section, “Wildfire”, which is a collection of some of the most outstanding wildlife photographs, etchings and paintings ever put together in one place. Most of the photographs are in colour and appear to have been taken fairly recently, and what is heartening is that most of the photographers are Indian — so while we may not have written so much about wildlife, the photographers are out there deep in the jungles, with their cameras. A lot of these photographs are “action” pictures — always difficult to take. There are photographs of animals hunting, charging, courting and taking care of their young. It’s also well worth remembering that photographing wildlife in India is much more difficult that photographing wildlife in places like Africa, where you have stupendous wide-angle views of thousands of animals spread before you. But these photographs show us what we still have and nothing more needs to be said about why we must make sure that they do not, in the near future, become mere stark and sad reminders of what we’ve lost.

Ranjit Lal is an author, birdwatcher and environmentalist. He lives in Delhi