Marginlands: A Journey Into India's Vanishing Landscapes - Hardcover

Kumar-Rao, Arati

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571315985 ISBN 13: 9781571315984

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2025

Synopsis

As a child growing up in Mumbai, Arati Kumar-Rao’s parents instilled in her an abiding love for the natural world and a passion for storytelling. Years later, adrift in a corporate job and concerned by the unbridled development of her country, she asked herself, 'When will you stop doing what you can do and start doing what you really want to do?'

Animated by an instinctive sense that our fate is bound to that of the earth and the more-than-human world, Kumar-Rao sets out on a journey across India, listening along the way to stories the land and its people share with her. In the Thar Desert, often reduced to the value of extractable commodities, she learns about ancient methods of harvesting rainwater from shepherds with deep ancestral memories. In the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers at the Bay of Bengal, she walks ancient shorelines and mangrove forests with a marine biologist, exploring tidepools and learning of the extent to which this astonishingly diverse ecology is increasingly endangered by commercial trawlers and overfishing. And on India’s northernmost plateau, surrounded by the Himalaya and home to snow leopards, ibex, and numerous endangered species of eagles and owls, she finds glaciers disappearing at an alarming rate and meets with inhabitants who play little role in creating climate change but now bear the brunt of it.

Richly illustrated with the author’s photographs and drawings, Marginlands is a vibrant and compelling account of the changes reshaping India today. Engaging and urgent, infused with wonder and profound empathy, this is a work of love and hope, inspiring readers across the world to preserve and protect the world around us.

'Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India’s marginalised landscapes and inhabitants, written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force.' – Robert Macfarlane

About this title

About the Author

Arati Kumar-Rao is a National Geographic Explorer, an independent environmental photographer, a writer, and an artist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Emergence, BBC, and in leading Indian publications. Arati was named in BBC’s 100 Influential and Inspiring women from around the world in 2023. When not on assignment, she splits her time between a biodiversity hotspot―the Western Ghats―and Bangalore in India.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bangalore July 2007

Outside, the rain hammered down, relentless in its intensity. I huddled under the covers, in the grip of a fever that refused to let up.

At 2:30 that afternoon, with a thermometer read-out of 104°F, I logged into a call to China, cued up my presentation and passed the next hour in a febrile stupor. Shivering and exhausted, I dragged myself out of my den and up a flight of stairs, swallowed a paracetamol and crashed into oblivion.

When I woke up, it was night, and my temperature had kicked up another notch – to 105°F.

Several days of blood tests and hospital visits later, I learned that I had paratyphoid. I am allergic to antibiotics; my recovery was going to be slow and precarious. I took leave from the multinational corporation where I worked as a market researcher, studying technology consumption behaviour in the Asia-Pacific region and its implications for marketing strategy.

Days passed in a delirium. The monsoon kept up a tympanic backbeat to my misery, crashing against the windowpanes. My mother installed herself as resident caregiver, disciplinarian and guardian angel; she fed me nutritious meals and maintained vigil to ensure I did nothing in the way of work. Huddled under blankets, I drifted in and out of fever dreams.

My childhood in eighties’ Bombay was a mix of many worlds. My father worked for a company that housed its employees in a gated colony – a wooded, hilly township accessible by a kilometre-long road that led away from the metropolis. My second-floor bedroom window was curtained by the boughs of trees on which sang orioles and ioras, barbets and bee-eaters, bulbuls and parakeets.

I was seven when a spotted owlet hopped onto our balcony late one evening, and I remember my pre-teen self feeling an unprecedented exhilaration. I spent my teenage evenings walking through brush and cycling on paths that rose and fell at steep inclines; I devoured books in the shade of a mango tree; friends plucked gooseberries that I carried in the swell of my skirt to someone’s porch, where we sucked on them with lips that puckered against the tartness – a life that was a part of, and yet apart from, the press of humanity that is Bombay.

My father, an engineer by training, worked for a thermal power company. Though a trained nutritionist, my mother taught English, science and geography at a local school. Papa did not believe in owning a car, and we lived in a city where public transport – Bombay’s BEST buses and suburban trains – satisfied all of our travel needs. He role-modelled cycling to the closest highway and then using a bus to reach the nearest train station that took him to the other end of town for work. Every day, Mamma walked to and back from school, a mile from where we lived. Thus, my sister and I grew up walking, cycling, riding buses and trains all over our island megacity.

Even though my father’s scope of work did not involve renewable energy sources, he was convinced about their efficacy as far back as the early eighties – long before climate change and clean, green energy became catchphrases. When I was eight, he built a solar cooker for our home – a wooden box painted black on the outside and lined with aluminium foil on the inside, with four reflective flaps that directed sunlight into the cavity. We cooked rice in it, and sometimes lentils – a tad unsatisfactorily, according to Mamma. It fell upon my sister and me to take turns running up to the terrace to orient the cooker towards the sun every few hours.

My family’s reading tastes were eclectic: my father introduced us to literature as diverse as Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Mahatma Gandhi, Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry. Mamma, who comes from a family of academics, insisted on instilling communication skills in us. Good writing – including handwriting – and public speaking were important parts of my school life. On Sundays Papa would take us birdwatching. My sister and I would wake up at 4:30 a.m., as would some of the neighbourhood kids. Papa took us all in tow, the party walking a kilometre to the main road to catch one BEST bus, then another, until we reached Sanjay Gandhi National Park by daybreak. Here we would trek several kilometres through thick forests and across streams, binoculars around our necks, eager eyes straining to find birds and any other wildlife that might have been dwelling in those parts.

Those were exhilarating times. I devoured Salim Ali’s Book of Indian Birds,2 memorizing bird calls, what they ate, how long they lived, poring over the illustrations, planning ‘expeditions’ through the neighbouring woods with my sister for company.

In those days, a Wendell Berry poem that my father read to us seeped deep into my teenage mind. ‘Reverdure’3 began with an ode to curiosity ...

You never know

What you are going to learn

... and went on to alternate between turning inwards and peeking outwards at the land, expounding an ethic that was gentle and harmonious, enduring and renewing – one that would serve as a lodestar for me decades later.

No leaf falls there that is lost;

all that falls rises, opens,

sings; what was, is.

We lived in a small apartment, 1,100 square feet – two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a tiny room in the back that my parents, both voracious readers, had converted into a library. It was my refuge when guests came over; I would tune out the sound of conversations and tune into the world of words.

But one conversation refused to be shut out. My grand-uncle, a senior economist with the World Bank, visited us every other year from the United States. While my mother and my grand- aunt went into their private huddle to bring each other up to date on family news, I sat hunched behind a pale blue cotton curtain, my antennae tuned to the male voices in the living room – voices that started out low and cordial but tensed and grew in volume and vigour within minutes.

In the eighties, massive hydropower dams were still being built all over the world under the auspices of the World Bank. My father, who marched with protesters carrying ‘Save The Western

Ghats’ banners, and with activists who advocated for protecting Kerala’s Silent Valley (he would later join the Narmada Bachao Andolan too), was dead set against large dams, believing them to carry an enormous ecological and social cost.

Long before world opinion began to look askance at those ‘temples of modern India’, my father had understood the price we would pay for every such interruption of a living, flowing, inhabited river. My grand-uncle took the opposite tack, pushing the merits of big hydro. As the evening wore on, their exchanges intensified and their faces reddened with the vehemence of their contrasting positions, until they ran out of breath as well as arguments and agreed to disagree.

My father, back then, was in a minority of one in his opposition to unplanned, unbridled development. It made a mark on me – his courage to stand for his convictions. My grand- uncle and other relatives, who came home and got caught up in these debates, were highly educated, erudite men, some of them tenured professors in American universities. How was it that none of them could see what my father recognized so early on?

That led me to wonder how, since arguments were clearly ineffective, one could fruitfully communicate fundamental ecological issues to the public; tell stories that married hydrology, ecology, social science and lucid communication; and reach past rhetoric to open minds to the unfamiliar and the inconvenient.

Those preoccupations stayed with me through my years in India as a master’s student of physics, and later as a graduate student of design and business administration in Phoenix, Arizona, and remained a constant as I went to work, rushing from one meeting to the next in the conference rooms of a multinational corporation, first in the US and then in Bangalore.

That July night, as I lay on sheets drenched with the sweat of my agitations, all those lived experiences washed over me with renewed energy. It was as if that enforced pause from the frenetic pace of corporate life was exactly what I needed for clarity. Tossing about on my sickbed, I asked myself over and over: ‘When will you stop doing what you can do and start doing what you really want to do?’

A line I had read and absorbed at some point came back to me, as if in answer to my question: ‘And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’

In time, I recovered. Soon after my convalescence, on a decisive day in September 2007, I composed one of the hardest emails I have ever written to one of the best bosses I’ve ever had. I told her I wanted to quit my well-paying corporate job and venture into the uncertain world of environmental storytelling. ‘I want to read, research, shoot and write about the fate of our landscapes,’ I wrote.

Having cut the cord that bound me to my day job and decided to become a storyteller, I realized I had no idea how to go about it. I knew no one in Bangalore – editors, writers, or anyone who may have been interested in the kind of work I envisaged doing. I cold-called magazines, wrote emails to strangers, submitted story pitches and even fully composed stories, not knowing if I’d ever hear back.

I even got published in a few travel magazines – it wasn’t what I had set out to do, and the few articles that did get published didn’t fetch much income either. To make ends meet, I consulted with a market research firm and freelanced for my previous corporate employer. I bought a full-frame digital SLR camera and some cutting-edge lenses, blowing through what was left of my savings. Travelling and exploring geographies, I spent far more than I was making. I logged on to Facebook and Twitter to connect with journalists, editors, wildlife biologists, hydrologists and environmental activists. Many were generous with their time, guiding and teaching me, pointing me to resources, correcting misconceptions, taking me along on field trips.

Five years after my exit from corporate life – five years of learning, watching, doing – I realized that if I wanted to pursue my passion in earnest, I would need to give it my all; there could be no half measures. So I stopped consulting, giving up my safety net in order to fully commit to storytelling.

It was in 2012 that Twitter led me to Prem Panicker, managing editor of Yahoo! India at the time. At a meeting in a coffee shop with a different acquaintance I knew from social media, I had learnt about an ancient method of rainwater harvesting in the deep Thar. I wanted to pursue that story, I told Prem. He said that Yahoo would give me space to tell my story, even if they could not pay for travel.

But I was determined. Dipping into my savings, I booked tickets and set off for Rajasthan, flying from Bangalore to Jodhpur, where I met with Pradip Krishen, who was restoring desert ecosystems around Mehrangarh Fort. Together, with his team of naturalists – Harsha and Payal – we drove into the deep Thar beyond Jaisalmer, to explore. A few days later, I broke away from the team and went off to pursue the story I’d come for. All I had with me was the name and number of a shepherd-farmer in Ramgarh, a border-outpost town an hour or two northwest of the golden city of Jaisalmer. I got to the Jaisalmer bus stop and, weighted down by my backpack and camera bag, clambered onto a crowded bus which dropped me off a few hours later at a crossroads tea stall.

There was no sign of Chhattar Singh, the shepherd-farmer, and no response to my calls. I settled down at the tea stall and ordered my second cup. He materialized presently. A slight man of about fifty years with a head full of hair, dressed in a white kurta-pyjama, climbed out of an autorickshaw. ‘Namaskaar,’ he said with hands folded and a smile that revealed bright white teeth. Hauling my bags into the three-wheeler, we climbed in and went a short distance to the small stone house where I was to stay. There were two bare rooms – one locked, one open. Chhattar Singh motioned for me to take the open room. There was no bed; only a dhurrie on the floor, a fan, and a single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling.

I stepped out onto the porch to find two plastic chairs and a plastic table on which rested a plastic can of water. We sat down, and I began to ask him about the area. He interrupted me before I could make much headway. ‘How much time do you have?’

I had only booked a one-way ticket, I told him, as I had no idea how long I would need in the desert. He smiled. Somehow I had offered the right answer; Chhattar Singh would not be hurried.

Over the next few days I walked the desert with Chhattar Singh in the blazing heat of summer. I saw what he showed me, listened to his stories, took notes as he explained how villagers in the area prepared the desert floor to harvest rainwater. And I learned a lesson that would set the tone for how I would tell my own stories: to really understand a landscape, you have to invest time, live in it, become one with it. ‘You can’t tell this story,’ Chhattar Singh had said to me on the porch on my first day in his village, ‘if you don’t see for yourself how the desert changes with the seasons and how my people adapt to it.’

I called Prem and told him I would need an entire year for this one story alone. At first there was silence, as Prem was likely considering his options. But I knew the man was committed to The Story, among the last of his tribe. Whatever it takes to tell it in the best possible way has always been his mantra. ‘Do what you have to do,’ he said.

Starting in 2013, I returned to Ramgarh almost every month, observing the desert, living amidst its people, walking with shepherds as they tended their flocks, watching the landscape change, drinking endless cups of chai and engaging in bantal, the word the locals use for aimless conversations.

But ‘aimless’ can be relative. A reporter on assignment engages in transactional conversations, armed with a list of questions she wants answered; there is no time or inclination for digressions. But digressions can lead you down interesting avenues, as I discovered when a casual sentence heard over a fourth cup of chai spawned an idea for a story – it would have scarcely occurred to me in one hurried, agenda-driven visit.

I paid for those trips to the desert out of my own pocket, decimating my savings further. But in return, the time spent there instilled in me a deep respect for the landscape that far outweighed the costs. There was no substitute for giving time, paying attention and closely observing the land and the intricately interconnected relationships that played out on it. No substitute either for ‘seeing’ with all your senses. Had I not experienced the desert through the seasons, had I been content with one stint in the desert – or two – I would not have begun to fathom the land’s rhythm which informs every aspect of lives lived against all odds.

Around this time, I came across a map of India’s northeast with tiny black bars all over it – each bar a dam. The government planned to dam all the tributaries of the mighty Brahmaputra

river, some of them several times over. What this would do to the fragile ecology of the Eastern Himalaya was beyond imagining – I felt I had to document that large river basin in its current state, and follow its fate over the years as the government’s plans fructified.

Thus, in 2014, I turned my focus to the Ganga–Brahmaputra– Meghna basin, the most populated river basin in the world, where large hydropower dams and barrages had already played havoc with lives and landscapes.

I couldn’t have sent Yahoo a vaguer pitch: ‘I want to go to the basin, walk around and tell stories.’ What stories exactly? ‘I wouldn’t know until I get there.’ How long a trip and how many stories? ‘I can’t say.’ Stories of the land take as long as they take; they can hardly adhere to a schedule or abide by an editor’s clock. Yet, miraculously, my editor at Yahoo flashed the green light, and I set off in pursuit.

Following a thread I had picked up in Upper Assam, I went to Arunachal Pradesh, climbing back down to Lower Assam to pursue a related thread. It led me across the border into Bangladesh, where I found several other pieces of string. Thus was born ‘River Diaries’, a project that allowed me to criss-cross the Ganga–Brahmaputra–Meghna basin, telling stories as I went. This lasted for six months, until the Yahoo management changed, corporate priorities took over, and the funding dried up.

By then, however, I was fully vested in telling these stories and telling them my way. So I secured loans, applied for grants, and kept travelling, documenting landscapes, connecting dots. Sometimes I would not publish for months if I felt I didn’t understand enough or I had not seen seasonal change that was central to the story.

Rainer Maria Rilke likens the life of an artist to that of a tree, and his words are true of storytelling about landscapes too: ‘In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing.’4 That need to absorb myself in landscapes deepened further with time and was reaffirmed when I came upon a wise professor’s urgings. Environmental stories, Rob Nixon writes in ‘Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor’, are about ‘slow violence’5 – a kind of destruction that unleashes itself incrementally, over seasons, often over generations. Unspectacular and sometimes imperceptible, it can be spatially dispersed: a disruption in one place can affect landscapes and lives several hundreds of miles away. Those who live in these landscapes – and the ecosystems themselves – die by a thousand cuts.

In my work, I was seeing several examples first-hand. The fifty- year-old barrage at Farakka, the head of the Ganga delta in West Bengal, that is wreaking havoc to this day is a veritable instance of ‘slow violence’ – and it is hardly the only one.

Almost every account in this book, therefore, is an example of misguided decisions, warnings wilfully ignored, evidence disregarded, inevitably paving the way for impending or currently unravelling disasters that may never make the news.

This book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of India’s landscapes – far from it. It is rather a record of my early attempts at gathering string from all over, of returning to places to pick up old threads and find new ones, of knotting them together to weave a fabric that might, eventually, come together in a tapestry that celebrates a more gentle, just and equitable land ethic. For it is my belief that the ancient practice of listening to the land and doing right by it can yet be reclaimed.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571315985
• ISBN 13: 9781571315984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Kumar-Rao Arati
• Number of pages: 280