Arati Kumar-Rao whisks her audience away from the relatively colder climes of Bengaluru to Jaisalmer district in the heart of the scorching Thar desert. “It has been almost two years since there has been any rain,” she explains at a talk titled Marginlands: An Exploration of Indian Landscapes, which was part of the fourth edition of the recently-concluded Green Literature Festival (GLF).

“This is what it looks like, the dunes we are on,” says the Bengaluru-based writer and photographer, displaying photographs of this arid area.

Arati Kumar-Rao
| Photo Credit:
SUDHAKARA JAIN

But the pastoralists who call the desert their home also know the secrets it harbours, including where to find water, even during prolonged droughts. Rao talks about sitting on top of a dune with her friend, Chhattar Singh, a shepherd farmer from that area, watching him unearth water from the belly of a dune.

“It hasn’t rained here for 22 months. How is this dune wet?” she asks before sharing what Singh has told her: there are places in the dunes in the Thar desert where they hold water in their bellies.

It is why the desert is dotted with self-replenishing, pitcher-shaped hand-dug wells or beris, a system suited for, “the youngest and most populated desert of the world.” The Thar, clearly, thrums with life, from pastoralists like Singh, who spend their lives walking their ungulates through the undulating landscape, to many plants and animals like the small but deadly saw-scaled vipers, hunting for food as the sun goes down and the hardworking scarab beetles, moving large balls of dung several times their own body weight to secret chambers deep in the dunes. “If you look around in the desert, it’s hardly deserted,” says Rao. “Our metaphors are so wrong; there are signs of life everywhere.”

‘Life is now proving to be a struggle for many of these people. They have to deal with extreme climate events, laws and policies that are not always friendly to them,’ says Rao.
| Photo Credit:
hadynyah

A drought of ideas

Over hundreds of years, people living in and off this harsh desert landscape have learnt how to not just survive but also thrive here, creating adequate water systems in a land that gets only 4 inches of rain annually, even managing to farm here. But life is now proving to be a struggle for many of these people. They have to deal with extreme climate events, laws and policies that are not always friendly to them, government interventions, or the rapid urbanisation taking over their commons, becoming scapegoats in the ongoing tussle between rapid development and conservation.

“For the Indian government, the Thar is a wasteland…something that has to be better utilised,” says Rao. To “improve” this wasteland, water is piped from the Sutlej down to the Thar. “By the time it reaches, there is hardly any water and what does is putrid…stinking,” says Rao, pointing out that this district, which did not even know what a mosquito was, is now the district with the highest incidence of malaria in Rajasthan.

Harvested rain water

The people who live here refuse to drink this water, using it for cleaning or for their livestock instead, preferring instead to drink rainwater harvested from their wells. “The women just walk a few meters down to their local beris, and that is the time of socialising for them because that’s the only time they get out of the house,” says Rao, who calls herself government-agnostic. She believes that no government in history has been fair to the desert landscape and its people, their interventions often ironically converting perfectly healthy deserts into the wastelands they perceive them to be. This, in turn, forces people who’ve traditionally lived off this land into congested cities since they can no longer sustain themselves on these vastly altered landscapes.

“We live in the age of a mass forgetting of local geographies….do not know how to treat the land anywhere,” she says, pivoting the discussion back to Bengaluru, which oscillates between spells of flooding and water shortage precisely because we have forgotten the city’s topography. “Chhattar Singh says that before a drought caused by a shortage of rainfall comes the drought of ideas. And that is what we’re living through today.”

Symbiotic relationship

The view that the deeply symbiotic relationship between local communities and the landscapes they inhabit means that they should be included in the larger conservation narrative was repeatedly reiterated in this edition of the GLF.

Take, for instance, the opening session titled The Nilgiris in Focus: A Conservationist’s Nightmare, which had conservationists Vasanth Bosco and Dr. Tarsh Thekaekara in conversation with writer Monisha Raman, discuss, among other things, the role played by communities in preserving and restoring ecosystems. Or how many sustainable solutions already exist within communities, as entrepreneur Nagaraja Prakasam states in a session titled India’s Green Transition: Opportunities for Investors and Ventures, where he shared the stage with other entrepreneurs Rajan Mehta, Vishal Pandya and Benedict Paramanand (also the founder of GLF).

Prakasam, the author of Back to Bharat: In Search of a Sustainable Future, believes that while climate change and inequality are big problems, his extensive travels across the country have shown him that solutions are within reach. In his opinion, many existing systems practised by various communities in the country already provide answers to some of these problems, whether it is the regenerative nature of Jhum cultivation or the opportunities and health benefits of traditional backyard poultry farming. “India has solutions. You just have to go find it, promote it, and fund it, of course,” reiterates Paramanand.

(From left) Nina Chandavarkar, Ravi Chellam, Dr. Alister Scott, and Seema Mundoli.
| Photo Credit:
MURALI KUMAR K

The power of language

The close relationship between humans and nature in India was also emphasised by wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Ravi Chellam at an afternoon session titled Rewilding: The Only Hope. “India is a shining example of how coexistence is possible,” says Chellam, who shared the stage with Dr. Alister Scott, the co-director of the Global Rewilding Alliance, Nina Chandavarkar, the founder of Okios Landscape Architects and Seema Mundoli, writer and faculty at Azim Premji University, on this occasion.

“Over the decades, while giving talks outside the country, I found people being amazed that we’ve done such a good job of retaining our wildlife populations,” says Chellam, who believes that the usage of the term “rewilding” could have enormous, potentially harmful implications for how conservation is practised in a country like India. “The official policy paradigm is, there is wildlife, and there are people, and if there are people where wildlife is, they need to be moved out,” he says, pointing out that this is especially true of tiger reserves in India.

Referring to the earlier Nilgiris discussion, where one of the points discussed was how invasive plants are running rampant in the absence of local people who were once integral to the ecosystem in many protected areas, Chellam says that this is a good example of what happens when we blindly adopt “the western model” of conservation in our country. “When you start with the view that people and wildlife are not compatible, the official conservation policy is throwing the people out,” says Chellam, who believes that using the term “rewilding” will only strengthen this argument. “In this era of climate change, what are we talking about? Why do people with the least carbon footprint have to continue paying the cost for conservation as currently mandated by official policy?”

Colonial history

Scott, in his official role as the co-director of the Global Rewilding Alliance, which, according to him, has “223 organisations operating in over 125 countries influencing the rewilding of about 2.5 million sq km of land and about 5 million sq km of ocean,” agrees that a conservation narrative that advocates the removal of people is not the way to go. “Out of those 223 organisations, I would say that exactly zero advocate removing people from landscapes to help nature recover. There is absolutely zero tolerance for that kind of policy among our members,” he says.

In his opinion, this policy stems from “an ugly history, especially in the United States and many countries with a colonial history,” which had a tradition of removing people from the landscapes they inhabited. He brings up the example of Yellowstone, once home to many Native Americans, which was declared a national park in 1872, leading to the expulsion of many tribes from that landscape. “The concept of wilderness was created to create this false idea that an untouched landscape with no humans in it was the only legitimately wild landscape,” he says. “But as we know, throughout history, indigenous peoples have worked with the land and nature in incredibly sustainable ways.”