Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  NATURE’S SPOKESMAN

  M. Krishnan (1912–1996) was endowed with a wide range of interests and amazing prowess as a writer in both his native Tamil and English. Nature, temple art, folklore, ancient Tamil literature, dog-shows, cricket—almost anything inspired him to write and he wrote steadily for several decades. A pioneer in the field of black-and-white photography, Krishnan’s contribution to wildlife photography and writing on natural history in India has no parallel.

  Ramachandra Guha is a historian and columnist based in Bangalore. His books include Environmentalism: A Global History and A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. His next book, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, will appear in July 2007. His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages.

  M. Krishnan photographing the twelfth-century frescoes at Sittannavasal, Pudukottai District. (Photo: Gopal Gandhi)

  Nature’s Spokesman

  M. Krishnan and Indian Wildlife

  Edited by

  RAMACHANDRA GUHA

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  NATURE VENERATED

  1. THE LANDSCAPE OF LOVE

  2. FABULAR FAUNA

  3. ANCIENT DEPICTIONS OF HANUMAN

  4. THE SHAWK

  5. THE SOUTHERN LIONS

  6. ASOKA’S LIONS

  7. A BIRD EMBLEM FOR INDIA

  NATURE’S MARVELS.

  8. TIGER TALK

  9. WHEN ELEPHANTS DIE

  10. PYTHON AT HOME

  11. THE DISAPPEARING CHEETAH

  12. AN AFTERNOON IDYLL

  13. ONTI, OR A LONE CHAMPION

  14. FIVE ENCOUNTERS

  NATURE’S MINIATURES.

  15. A CITY’S BIRD LIFE

  16. RESCUING A FLEDGLING

  17. THE ANRIL

  18. A FLIGHT OF DANAIDS

  19. ARGEMONE MEXICANA

  20. LENIN THE LIZARD

  21. THAT GENTLEMAN, THE TOAD

  22. THE DINKY DESERT FOX

  23. INCESSANT RAIN

  NATURE’S WARS.

  24. MONKEY VERSUS MAN

  25. BASHING A BANDICOOT

  26. DEATH OF A SNAKE

  27. BOMMAKKA

  28. FREEBOOTERS OF THE AIR

  29. CAT FIGHT

  30. THE JELLICUT

  31. THE DYING GLADIATOR

  NATURE THEORIZED

  32. THE VENGEFUL COBRA

  33. SLEEPING DOGS

  34. THE AQUATIC SAMBAR

  35. SLOW - BREEDING RHINOS

  36. MIXED ISSUE

  37. THE AGGRESSION OF THE VEGETARIAN

  38. THE NORTH – SOUTH RULE

  39. THE ‘PINCH PERIOD’

  NATURE DOMESTICATED.

  40. MY DISTINGUISHED NEIGHBOUR

  41. AMRIT MAHAL

  42. VERSATILE NEEM

  43. JUNGLI PHAL

  44. WALCHAND

  45. THE PARIAH

  46. CHOCKI

  NATURE DESECRATED.

  47. CAPTIVE - BRED MUGGER

  48. HOUNDING THE SLOTH

  49. THE VANISHING BUSTARD

  50. A LAMENT FOR LOST WOOD

  51. GILDING THE LILY

  52. A WARNING TO AESTHETES

  53. ON SHIKAR ENGLISH

  54. A RED TEST FOR THE YOUNG

  55. NATURE STUDY

  NATURE PROTECTED.

  56. THE BISHNOI AND BLACKBUCK

  57. VEDANTHANGAL

  58. THE CHARM OF CHILKA

  59. PLANNING A PARK

  60. ANIMALS OF THE DWINDLING FOREST

  61. ECOLOGICAL PATRIOTISM

  NATURE TRANSCENDED.

  62. THE GENUS FERINGHEE

  63. A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

  64. A SUGGESTION TO GOVERNMENT

  65. TESTS IN FAR PLACES

  66. THE REVENGE

  67. THE TRUTH ABOUT AN OLD LADY

  68. VERSE FOR A LIVING

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to the family of M. Krishnan for their generous support to this project. His papers and clippings were made available to me in Chennai by his wife, Indumathi, and his daughter-in-law, Dr Meenakshi Harikrishnan. His son, M. Harikrishnan, provided fascinating insights into the character and beliefs of his father. From distant Cambridge (Mass.) his granddaughter, Dr Asha Harikrishnan, sent across a copy of the delightful ‘animal alphabet’ that Krishnan had made for her. A selection of those verses, with the illustrations that accompany them, serve as ‘section-breaks’ in this book.

  The family’s support was strengthened by the vital assistance provided by A. Madhavan, Krishnan’s kinsman and mine; and by Gopal Gandhi, Krishnan’s friend and mine. Both allowed me to raid their personal archives of Krishnan lore. I would also like to thank S. Seshadri, former regional director of the Oxford University Press, Chennai, without whose early encouragement this project would not have got off the ground.

  A

  Orycteropus after: Nocturnal burrowing mammal of Central and South Africa, order Tubulidentata. Long snout, extensile sticky tongue, diet of ants, termites. Also known as earth pig.

  —Collins Family Encyclopaedia

  THE AARDVARK

  Behind the kopjes of his land

  this curious, unfamiliar brute

  gambols, and frisks—and pants.

  His coat is much like rain-wet sand,

  he lives in burrows under-root

  and mainly feeds on ants.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Worlds of M. Krishnan

  I have before me a New Year’s card for 1994. It has been made by an eighty-one-year-old man for his ninety-one-year-old sister. He lives in steamy Madras, she in Mysore, the town on the Carnatic Plateau which (he remembers) ‘can be Arctic in December–January’. He is an artist, and so is she. To mark this, and the weather in Mysore, the card begins with his portrait of a bird in flight, its red beak and red legs and white-and-black wings etched against a blue sky. It is the White Stork, says the artist, helpfully providing its Latin and Tamil names too.

  And why the White Stork? ‘Can’t you see the connection,’ asks the artist of his sister. He reminds her of the address, offered some fourteen centuries previously, by the poet Saththi-muththappulavar to the bird as it passed Madurai en route to its wintergrounds in Kanyakumari. One column then prints the poem in Tamil, the letters and words flawlessly formed; the other column offers a translation in English, in a typed draft scored over with handwritten corrections. The poet had asked the stork ‘with coralred beak sharp-tapered like a split palmyra stalk’ that if it should halt, on its return journey northwards, at the tank of his home village, Saththimuththam, it should seek out his wife in her ‘wetwalled leaky’ hut, there listening ‘to the gecko’s whinnying voice for augury of my return’, and

  Tell her that you saw this abject being

  In Madurai, capital of the Pandya king,

  Grown thin with no clothes against the north wind’s bite,

  Hugging his torso with his arms,

  Clasping his body with up-bent legs,

  Barely existing

  Like the snake within its basket.

  Some family news follows, and then, at the end of the card, is a portrait in colour of the unhappy Saththi-muththap-pulavar. ‘The stork is quite accurate,’ comments the artist, but ‘I should not have attempted an impression of the poet—in my depiction, he looks more like a toad in a hole than a snake in a basket, though the foetal position must be correct.’

  This New Year’s card was sent by M. Krishnan to his sister Muthu. It is a period piece, in the precise sense of the term—‘an object or work whose main intere
st lies in its historical etc. associations’ (as defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary)—an object or work that could only be sent or received by one born before the First World War. The card continues a conversation conducted over decades between two old people of culture, learning, sensitivity, and style. It is also a handsome demonstration of the talents that made Krishnan the finest naturalist and nature writer in the land. In this private communication, as in his printed oeuvre, we find a distinctive combination of great skill, exceptional self-confidence, and obsessive perfectionism. We see at work the artist, scholar and writer, the man who would single-handedly annul the distinctions made by academics between nature and culture or literature and science. Even the showing-off—the pedantic precision of the stork’s Latin name, Ciconia ciconia ciconia—is in character.

  Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this card, however, is that Krishnan made it in the knowledge that it might never reach Mysore. For there was a postal strike on in December 1993, and, as he told Muthu, ‘Only the good god knows when you will get it or, with unskilled replacements for the regular postal workers, if you will get it at all.’ The card was produced out of affection for his sister, certainly, but also for the sheer joy of it. It was made by a man in love with his calling, a man with a supreme unconcern for what the world thought of him.

  II

  M. Krishnan was born in Tirunelveli on 30 June 1912, the youngest of the eight children of the Tamil writer and reformer A. Madhaviah (1872–1925). Madhaviah was employed in the Salt and Abkari Department of the Government of Madras. Posted in small towns, his work involved much riding on horseback, cross-country, in search of smugglers and drug pedlars. In his spare time he read, and wrote. His vast output includes the first realistic novel published in Tamil (Padmavathi Charithram, 1898), an English novel published in London (Thillai Govindan, 1916), as well as essays, short stories, poems, and skits. In about the year 1920 he took premature retirement, commuted his pension, and with the proceeds built a house in the Mylapore locality of Madras. Adjoining the new family home was a shed where he installed a press to print his magazine, Panchamritam. Madhaviah had resolved to devote the rest of his life to literature, but not much was left of it. He died at the age of fifty-five, in the Madras Senate House, immediately after making an impassioned speech on the need to introduce Tamil (or the equivalent mother tongue) as a compulsory subject for the BA degree.

  Madhaviah was a remarkable man, made more remarkable in the recollections of Krishnan. In a ‘verified factual record’ hecompiled in 1990, the adoration is unquestioned and uncharacteristically unqualified, with a gloss and glow put on imperfect memory by a devoted son. The father, in this telling, was always at odds with authority, always ahead of the social and political currents of the time. In a more personal vein, Krishnan remembers the early horse-rides with his father and the daily walks they took together before sunrise, to Marina Beach and back. He writes of how in the last four years of his life Madhaviah ate his meals with his last-born, and how at night his own cot was placed next to his.

  When his father died, the care and financial responsibility for the younger siblings was assumed by the second child, Lakshmi. Born in 1896, married in 1905, she had been cast away by her husband’s family. Madhaviah took Lakshmi back and educated her. At the time of his death she was teaching at the prestigious Queen Mary’s College, of which she was later to be principal. Krishnan was now studying at the Hindu High School; although not what we would term a ‘prize’ student, he read widely, and had developed an interest in art. Also in nature, for as he relates in an essay published in this volume (‘A City’s Bird Life’), Mylapore in the 1920s was something of a frontier settlement, stray houses with acres of shrub and pasture in between. The area was home to a teeming bird life and the odd jackal and blackbuck as well. The environment rubbed off: at the age of eleven this son of a scholarly Brahmin had as his pet a grown mongoose.

  In 1927 Krishnan joined the Presidency College, a since decayed institution then in its pomp. He appeared for the intermediate examination and, in 1931, for the BA, one of his subjects the Tamil for which his father had so vigorously fought. The subject he most enjoyed was botany, taught by Professor P.P. Fyson. Fyson was a fine and devoted field scientist who (judging from Krishnan’s references to him in later life) deeply impressed the young student. He accompanied the Fysons on trips to the Nilgiri and Kodaikanal Hills, learning science from the professor and discussing the techniques of watercolour painting with his wife.

  The friendship with the Fysons did not come in the way of Krishnan getting a third class in his BA. Job prospects were bleak, but an elder brother, M. Anantanarayanan, was in the Indian Civil Service,1 and he had a father-in-law more eminent still. This was R. Narayana Aiyar, one of the first Tamilians to get into the ICS. Narayana Aiyar took Krishnan to an even bigger man, a knight no less, Sir T. Vijiaraghavachari, who had among his many charges the Agricultural Research Institute in Pusa, a likely resting place for a young fellow with an indifferent academic record but a serious interest in plants. When Sir T.V. was told of Krishnan’s ‘achievement’ he advised him to do an MA and come back. Two years later the journey was repeated. In a letter written fifty-five years after this meeting the supplicant remembered the scene: ‘The knight in an easy chair; me, next to him, in a bentwood chair; Mr R.N. in a sofa farther away.’ ‘Another third class,’ burst out the knight in a storm of protest. ‘Now if you had only got a first class in either the BA or the MA, I could have done something for you.’ ‘If that were the case there would have been no need to come here at all,’ remarked Narayana Aiyar, and departed taking Krishnan with him.

  At the family’s behest Krishnan then spent two years obtaining a law degree. He graduated in 1936, but there is no record of any subsequent briefs or court appearances. In those days the lack of an income was no bar to matrimony. Thus on 26 March 1937 Krishnan married Indumati Hasabnis, from Bangalore, only fifteen, but in spirit and strength of will already a match for her husband.

  The first ‘verified factual record’ I have of any paid employment dates to 1937, when Krishnan published some drawings and caricatures in the Madras Mail. The next year he was publishing essays on book design in the low-circulation but high-prestige Indian Affairs and, more consequentially, nature notes in the Statesman and The Hindu. These early notes (a couple printed in this book) display the close observation and spare style that was to distinguish all his work. But as the aspirant novelist R.K. Narayan was finding out at about the same time, the concept of the freelancer was unknown to the moral and pecuniary universe of Tamil Brahminism. Thus in the early years of his marriage Krishnan irregularly held a ‘regular’ job—working initially with the Associated Printers, then with the Madras School of Art, and finally as the publicity officer of the local station of All India Radio.

  In 1942, at his family’s urging and with the help of whatever influence they could command, Krishnan was given employment by the Maharaja of Sandur, a small princely state in the northern part of present-day Karnataka. Employment was, it seems, a somewhat incidental consideration, the main reason for the move being that his wife’s doctor had advised them to relocate to a drier place. Krishnan was to spend eight years in the state—eight years under one paymaster but, true to form, in many jobs. In Sandur, Krishnan served successively as schoolteacher, judge, publicity officer and political secretary to the Maharaja. The work was dreary, but there was always the possibility of escape. For in his tours through Sandur the naturalist would come across the sambhar and the wild boar, jackals, jungle cats, porcupines and leopards. In this valley ringed by hills and forests, fields and shrub jungle within and the Tungabhadra flowing through them, the great ruined city of Hampi but a day’s bullock-cart journey away, Krishnan could nurture his love of nature and cultural history. He raised goats, occasionally grazing them himself; bred pigeons, running an experimental pigeon post with the state’s Boy Scouts; and walked in the wild and among the Hampi temples, returning home t
o read by lantern light the Tamil poets once patronized by the Vijayanagara kings. He also developed an abiding fondness for Mandalu-menasinakai, chillies fried in oil, a culinary gem of the interior Deccan.

  Krishnan was temperamentally well suited to the informal paternalism of the princely state. He could fit in here as he would never have ‘adjusted’ to the rule-bound impartiality of the administration of British India. Sandur was Krishnan’s finishing school or, to vary the metaphor slightly, the laboratory where he conducted the research for his unacknowledged doctoral degree. What he learnt there was communicated in the nature essays, cultural profiles, and short stories he published in the forties, under his own name in the Illustrated Weekly of India and under the nom de plume ‘Z’ in The Hindu. For years afterwards, as this anthology will reveal, he would embellish his articles with a fact or anecdote from his Sandur days. The state meant much to him, and he to it. Half a century after Krishnan left Sandur one of his students there recalled:

  … one particular lecture on protective coloration, where the science and nature study teacher, who was also a talented artist, drew a zebra and a monkey on a portable blackboard, which was moved farther and farther away from us, to demonstrate that, at a distance, the zebra with its broken pattern looked less prominent to the eye than the donkey in a block of single colour; though, at close quarters, it would be difficult to imagine how the vivid, black and white stripes of the zebra could ever look hazier than the dull, uniform brown of the donkey. My teacher was none other than M. Krishnan.2

  In 1949, when the state of Sandur disappeared along with 520 others into the Union of India, Krishnan returned to Madras, taking up residence in the tiled cottage his father had built for his press. He never took a job again, for the next forty-seven years making a precarious but always honest living as a writer and photographer. In 1950 he began a fortnightly ‘Country Notebook’ for the Statesman of Calcutta; his last column was printed the day he died. Alert and alive, at once scientific and speculative, peppered with allusions to literature and myth, opinionated, and acid in its wit, the column must rank as one of the remarkable achievements of English-language journalism in this country (or any other). While the Statesman was his mainstay, Krishnan also wrote for The Hindu, the Indian Express, the Illustrated Weekly of India, Shankar’s Weekly, et al., and on a staggering variety of subjects. Krishnan is known above all as a great pioneering naturalist, as he should be. But in his day he had also served notice as art critic, writer of fiction, poet, translator and literary historian. In January 1952 he even reported for the Statesman on the five days of the Madras Test of that year, the match in which Vinoo Mankad took twelve wickets as India beat England for the first time. These reports were said to be ‘From a Special Cricket Correspondent’, a seemingly curious description more true than the newspaper knew.