November 04, 2022 09:02 am | Updated November 06, 2022 05:24 pm IST

The book is a re-casting of modern histories, told with a tenderness towards the person and the animal.

Boro Miyan is a most patient animal. And clever too. He will search out a gap in the [porch] netting and then swim across the river. But he follows etiquette.’ This is a villager talking about a tiger in Parimal Bhattacharya’s evocative book,  Field Notes from a Waterborne Land.

A similar multiplicity of looking at an animal — through fear, respect, disaffection — often informs many lives in India, and this must be recorded with the nuance it deserves. The book  At the Feet of Living Things succeeds in two chief ways: understanding that protagonists in wildlife conservation are also people, and gauging the many ways an individual and community can view an animal.

Edited by Aparajita Datta, Rohan Arthur and T.R. Shankar Raman, the book chronicles the successes (and crucially and courageously, the failures) of conservationists at the Nature Conservation Foundation.

Covering hornbills in Northeast India, coral reefs in Lakshadweep, snow leopards in the Himalayas, elephants and rainforests in Tamil Nadu, dugongs in the Andamans, bonnet macaques in Karnataka, this book does not claim to cover all species or landscapes within the country. What it does in great detail though is tell the story of what happens after an intervention or beyond the ‘happily ever after’ of social change. This is the more challenging script to write.

In a fine chapter penned by Teresa Alcoverro and Rohan Arthur, the authors describe an overabundance of green turtles that feed voraciously on seagrass beds in Lakshadweep. “Would we recognise the Garden [of Eden] if we ever got there? The pristine meadows of our imagination were a place of bounty — teeming with fish, filling our bellies, stabilising our beaches, capturing carbon to counter climate change... Perhaps the meadows of Eden resembled something closer to what we saw in Lakshadweep — a matrix of bedraggled patches in a state of constant recovery...” As long-term witnesses to fluid landscapes, and at a time of climate change, Alcoverro and Arthur have to unlearn their assumptions, and maintain seagrass beds, not just conserve turtles, rethinking their ideas of what an ideal landscape can (not should) look like in the modern time.

In another chapter by Aparajita Datta, the author details her eventual advocacy failure with the Lisu community in Namdapha tiger reserve, Arunachal Pradesh, after years of dialogue. Thus, the book is not just about conservation projects, but possesses that much rarer quality — the valuable project of self-enquiry.

As is usually true of these anthologies, some of the writing is better than the others. A special mention for Anindya Sinha’s intriguing chapter on bonnet macaques written partly from the perspective of the monkeys. Illustrator Sartaj Ghuman deserves to be named on the cover for his fantastic illustrations that uplift the book. His illustration of the macaques is from the macaque-eye level, while other paintings — a field full of elephants, and an encounter with a snow-leopard — intriguingly place the animal at the reader’s level; the human protagonists are on slopes or gradients below. It works almost cinematically, and you feel what the animal may be thinking. The book would have benefitted from locations and landscapes as subheadings in the chapters as many of the places are relatively unknown, and some chapters span many places within the same region. Maps would have similarly benefitted the book.

At the Feet forms a valuable addition to the social-change canon that is too often populated with self-aggrandising, one-tone narratives. It is a re-casting of modern histories, told with a tenderness towards the person and the animal both. As historian Mahesh Rangarajan writes in his foreword, 25 years seem like a blip in time, but is a lifetime in human time. We have had numerous non-fiction ethnographies of cricketers and political parties — this kind of morally-centred, open-minded enquiry into social change for nature is both overdue and welcome.

At the Feet of Living Things: Twenty-Five Years of Wildlife Research and Conservation in India; Edited by Aparajita Datta, Rohan Arthur and T.R. Shankar Raman, Harper Collins, ₹599.

The reviewer is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful — Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species .

The Hindu Sunday Magazine / Literary Review / wildlife / wildlife / nature / nature and wildlife / climate change / environmental issues

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