forests

I have contradictory notions about the human relationship to the natural world – we are part of nature aren’t we? We are mammals and there is not much difference between us and the rest of them. We have bodies, instincts, we feel hunger and pain and so on. So then why talk of this relationship with nature, as though we were separate from it?

At the same time, after growing up and living largely in urban spaces which exclude most of the natural world, there are all these fears and revulsions (sometimes) and I feel out of place and unsafe in a completely natural environment. Yes, it is unfamiliar and strange, but no more than any other place I’ve never been to, I think of my first visit to Europe, landing in Amsterdam, which was also unfamiliar, strange and a bit scary. But it was a pleasant case of the heebie-jeebies and I overcame it quite fast. Why is not so easy with forests?

Maybe this fear is to do with acknowledging our own bodies, the sheer messy naturalness of it. In the urban ‘civilized’ world, we are constantly getting away from it, smells are masked with perfumes, the skin polished and painted and the hair refined and arranged. We come closer to our bodies as we age, when we fall sick, when we bear children. Some of us make friends with our bodies – we run or do yoga, but this is a limited friendship. Mostly we live in our minds and our bodies are the pretty vehicles. At least we aim at pretty.

Sumana Roy talks of the depictions of forests in literature as being permissive of returning to our primitive selves, in her book ‘How I became a Tree’. She speaks of the ‘… effect the forest has on people of the city – an alchemy that cleanses them of conditioning and culture and offers belated employment to their latent primordiality – the jungli in the jungle, the beast of the forest.’ Is this what frightens us – that we will become ‘wild’ and lose our hard won sophistication and poise?

The forest shows me the brittleness of this polish, this veneer. And once exposed, I fear my skin may be too thin to withstand the metaphoric thorns. And yet, with a small effort I can overcome and be exhilarated, even after a three hour walk, exhilarated after stretching my body, breathing in the clear sharp air, resting my eyes on the incredible complexity around.

I’ve been reading the opening chapter of Sadhana by Tagore, where he talks about Man’s relationship with the Universe. He talks about the urban attitude to nature, which ‘… seems to take a pride in thinking that it is subduing nature; as if we are living in a hostile world where we have to wrest everything we want from an unwilling and alien arrangement of things.’ We build walls and barricade ourselves from the dangers of nature, consciously removing and distancing ourselves from the natural world. He believed that the quintessentially Indian way of thinking about nature was one of harmony and co-existence.

“The earth, water and light, fruits and flowers, to her were not merely physical phenomena to be turned to use and then left aside. India intuitively felt that the essential fact of this world has a vital meaning for us; we have to be fully alive to it and establish a conscious relation with it, not merely impelled by scientific curiosity or greed of material advantage, but realizing it in the spirit of sympathy, with a large feeling of joy and peace.”

I’ve encountered this spirit of sympathy when I’ve travelled and worked with traditional artisans, especially in the more remote parts of our country. It is there in the way artisans collect wood and wax from the forest, the way they make their own tools, molding them through use over decades, till they become true extensions of the body, their use of material – careful and frugal. Even the rhythm of work is in tune with the surrounding land. Food comes from plants nearby, sometimes growing wild. Animals are part of the family.

In village homes the meal is planned around the brinjal that has just matured or the gourd that is weighing the creeper down. Festivals revolve around seasons and harvests. The land is very much part of life. Water bodies – canals and ponds are intertwined to everyday life, children playing with clay in the dry riverbed in the summer, and fishing in the full waters in colder weather. The rains bring their own excitement with the green becoming greener, the soundscape changing and more crawlies everywhere.

I do realize I’m romanticizing this relationship; this close connection with nature has some terrifying repercussions. When I read of floods or unusually high temperatures, I’m happy to be in my comfortable 8^th floor apartment in a suburb. I’m also aware of the cause of these extremes in climate and there is no way of ducking responsibility. It’s not really either or, it is about becoming aware and searching within for the reasons for our collective myopia, for this ‘lets have one last drink before the world collapses’ syndrome. Collective positive action is required, but also individual soul searching.

My mother is a very good gardener, but is also wary of anything beyond her own garden. She does not see the connection between her small patch and the larger natural world. This attitude is obvious in many urban spaces, where everything has to be tidy and pretty in a man-made way. All the ‘ugliness’ of nature needs to be weeded out. We want to create gardens of Eden without the snakes. And caterpillars. And spiders. We want to sit on a park bench and enjoy the sunset in a carefully edited and curated space with no connection to any actual land. As an urban Indian I have lost sympathy with the natural world, I don’t coexist. I can blame my education, colonialism, my parents and so on. The question is, how can I reclaim the connection to my own land? All it needs is a little nudge, a deep breath and a plunge.

The Rainforest Retreat in Coorg shows us one way to do it. I recently travelled here with my students. Sujata and Anurag Goel came to this land almost 30 years ago and have been working to find this balance between taking care of the land and the land taking care of them. They have set up circular systems for living, farming and conserving their land so that everyone survives and thrives. You can read more about their work here: http://rainforestours.com/

Another place that I visited almost 15 years ago, is the Timbaktu Collective in Chennakothapalli, Andhra Pradesh. The story of how this collective was set up and the arid land around revived into lush green hills still amazes me. When Bablu Ganguly and Mary Vattamattam went there in 1990, it was a drought prone barren land that was unfit for anything. Kalpavalli is only one of the many programs they initiated https://www.timbaktu.org/our-programmes/kalpavalli/ to revitalize the land through managing water and reviving ancient watersheds. What strikes me is the courage and determination to undertake such a massive task.

There are many more examples of people who have made an impact on their surroundings in small and big ways and I admire them immensely. Perhaps one day before its too late I will be able to emulate them in some small way.

Notes:

There are so many ways in which people interact with the wild – as farmers, naturalists, artists, writers, conservationists, poets, biologists and many more. Each have their special symbiotic relationships which ground and scaffold them.

Artists have been working with the biological world for some decades now, trying to understand the human-nature relationship. They’ve moved from being visual recorders of landscapes to actually working with the land. You can see some work here https://magazine.artland.com/top-10-land-art-and-earthwork-pioneers/

There is an interesting interview with the artist Mel Chin on his sculptural work called Revival Field where he plants the Datura to absorb pollutants in a landfill. https://art21.org/read/mel-chin-revival-field/