by M Krishnan
Noble trees of these species are still to be found in the countryside, and even in towns, but, exotic and native, they are disappearing rapidly. Unless popular feeling and governmental authority step in, right now, to save them, there will be little left in a few years.
Unluckily, the feeling for trees that there was a generation ago is no longer there. I compute that within the past thirty years, more live wood has been cut down, root, bole and all, than was nurtured to maturity in the previous 200 years. At first that may seem a wild exaggeration, without any factual basis. How I wish that were true! The sad, the depressing thing is that my estimate is soundly based, and very near the truth.
Growing populations and the need for more and more firewood has been the main cause; the expansion of suburban and rural settlements and industries a lesser cause. Well-grown trees, thirty or forty feet high and proportionately thick, were not grazed down by goats; nor were they cut down with many regrets and sighs because of a rot in the wood that had killed them. You can see the sap dripping from the cut logs even while they are being carted to the yards, and from such stumps as have been spared, thin new shoots spring up in due course, though they can never again attain the stature of trees.
You have no idea of how quickly wood is cut and removed by our fuel-hungry citizens. No trace of a big tree felled in the morning remains by nightfall, not even a few leaves; swarms of men, women and children descend on the fallen tree, armed with saws, axes, billhooks, and even kitchen knives, and in no time at all it is gone. It is as efficient a disposal as the disposal of a carcass by vultures, except that no telltale bones are left behind.
Some seven or eight years ago, thousands of trees (among them many fruit trees) stood in the great grove known as ‘Navlakh Garden’, a mile or so from Ranipet—perhaps there were nine lakhs of trees here once, as the name suggests. Only a barren, parched expanse of flat land without cover of bush or herbage now remains; even the roots of the slaughtered trees have been extracted.
Limbless and beheaded boles are depressingly common along all our roadways. To whom do these trees belong, and why were they not protected? Such questions are futile. I presume that ultimately or immediately government exercises some control over our roadways and commons (‘poramboke’ lands). But, if I am correct in this, the blame for failing to save trees from the predatory axe is not assignable to any particular department, but to government as a whole. Where the administration has not yet realized the urgent need to protect roadside and villageside trees, such things will happen.
When the British Raj was there, we blamed the callous, foreign government for such damage to live wood. Let me quote a passage by Dewan Bahadur R. Raghunatha Rao, written about the year 1906—I concede its language is quaint, but its sentiment is strongly felt: ‘I am afraid this is not generally known to the European public what the feelings and opinions of the Hindus are regarding forests and trees. Their religion tells them that trees have souls like men; that cutting down a living tree is as bad as killing a living man; that their twigs even branches and leaves, when absolutely required, should be removed without harm to the trees; that only dried trees should be cut down for fuel. Any indiscriminate destruction of trees is very abhorrent to a true Hindu.’ Well, where is this allegedly Hindu regard for trees now? More trees have been cut down within the past ten years here than in the previous two decades.
Unfortunately, our Vanamahotsavas, which can be constructive and compensatory remedies, do little good because those in charge of this ritual insist on planting the wrong kinds of trees. Is it unreasonable that I, a citizen of India, should wish to see the trees of my native soil around me, when they can serve just as well as, or better than, queer, foreign importations? The prosopis that was imported to reclaim the desert in Rajasthan, and bind the shifting sands of Hagari, did its job all right—but why plant this ugly and useless bush all over Madras? Is it not because it needs no care once sown, and grows rampantly and spreads apace that it has found governmental patronage? Very soon it will develop into as smothering and troublesome a weed as the lantana, allowing nothing else to grow where it holds territory.
Why plant Giricidia sepium so very extensively at Vanamahotsavas? What claim has this exotic flowering tree to recognition as a species that stands pollarding well and supplies green manure, that a dozen indigenous trees do not have? I like the show of Mexican white plumerias along the Marina at Madras, but what happened to the no less ornamental, wholly native Calophyllum inophyllum that was there in my boyhood? It belonged so truly and traditionally to the coast.
I realize that the fuel problem is a formidable one. For a while, it looked as if the solar cooker might yet save our trees. But now it seems clear that only sustained governmental (or private) effort, and the plantation of hundreds of thousands of acres to supply quick fuel, can save the trees still left on our roadsides and commons. Meanwhile, such trees as there are must be protected efficiently, and soundly planned plantation work done, to provide tree growth to replace lost avenues and clumps. And in all such sylviculture, the indigenous species (which have suffered by exotic competition, apart from being cut down for fuel) should be preferred. It is true that some exotic trees grow quicker and need less care than many native species, but the latter should be preferred, if only to lend a more Indian look to the countryside.
1957
51
Gilding the Lily
The sportsman intent on the kill, the poacher seeking his meat from the furtively laid trap and gun, the wasteful and unnecessary spread of agriculture and transport routes into the outlying scrub and jungle, and the relentless pressure on our wild vegetation for fuel and building materials to meet the needs of our ever-growing population—all these have been potent influences in the depletion of our once wonderful flora and fauna. But, it has been said, these were not all: the apathy and cynical neglect of protective duty of a foreign government have also been responsible for this sad state of affairs.
Today we have been awakened to the pressing need to save what is left of our great national wealth of nature and for the past few years there has been a noticeable governmental and popular enthusiasm for wildlife. And with this enthusiasm, arising out of it, is another influence, seemingly constructive which could be as harmful as the gun and trap and callousness and greed of the past, because its power to deplete is so largely unsuspected.
No hint of cynicism or presumption of superior knowledge lurks behind this criticism, but only certain homely, well-founded misgivings about human nature. What should we do, what can we do, to preserve the flora and fauna of any area where there is still sufficient left to save? Why, nothing at all, beyond making quite sure that that area is freed from human interference and possibly, the consequences of past interferences. Leave well alone is the proven maxim of all wildlife conservation. It has been shown, time and again, that well-meant attempts to add to the natural richness of any place by the introduction of plant and animal species not native to it have ended in disaster. But it is not in human nature to leave well alone.
We want to do something about it, once we have taken on any responsibility, we want to gild the lily. While this is true of humanity everywhere especially is it true of us today, when so many in India are thinking in terms of national reconstruction. Of course this constructive zeal is heartening, and natural to a reborn nation. But we are a very ancient nation, too, and there are vital matters in which we need to be conservative rather than constructive.
Particularly we are given to the introduction of exotic plants in our desire to beautify the countryside and make up by plantation for the annihilation of jungle and woodland that we have been responsible for during the past fifty years. This is not the place for a survey of the foreign plants introduced by man and by accident into India, but it may be said that for several miles around our towns and cities it is difficult to find any sizable patch of scrub or jungle which does not feature exotics.
Our wastelands and open spaces teem with tropical A
merican herbs and weeds—the Mexican Poppy, Alternanthera echinata, and Croton sparsiflorus are only a few of these. Lantana, the ugly, assertive and ubiquitous Prosopis juliflora, and other shrubs from abroad dominate the scrub in large patches and even penetrate into the forests; and in parks and compounds and roadsides in Madras state, we find the tree growth featuring many exotics—Gliricidia sepium (neé maculata), Delonix regia (the gulmohur—and that in a country to which three of the loveliest of all red-flowered trees belong: Butea monosperma or the Flame of the Forest, the Asoka, and the Red Silk Cotton), Peltophorum roxburghii (in replacement of the entirely native and much more graceful Cassia fistula) and Kigelia pinnata among them. The Madras Marina is, perhaps, one of the most telling examples in the country of this systematic favouring of exotics: it is dominated by the Australian casuarina and Mexican and West Indian whiteflowered frangipanis!
No country in the world has a flora so rich in exotics as India.
Many of these have been intentionally introduced by wellmeaning people, and have completely altered the complexion of the countryside over wide tracts. And still we keep on propagating them. That these introduced plants are hardier than the native species and need less care (often no care at all) is not a consideration in any sort of national planning, however constructive.
All of us will readily appreciate the point that we cannot shift the fauna of a specific forest to an equally wide tract of open country and expect it to do well there. We realize that animals are highly dependent on their environment, on particular environments to which they have become accustomed and suited through the centuries, and that any radical change in those surroundings will prejudice their lives seriously. But still people suggest the planting up of a denuded area with plants not native to that soil, to provide cover for the fauna of the place, without realizing that this will lead to no less radical a change in the environment. Apparently the change must be sudden, complete and obvious, and not insidious, for people to take note of it.
When a thing can be stated in general terms, there is no need to cite examples, though such citation will lend the verisimilitude of fairness… . It is so profoundly true that the best way to preserve the indigenous flora and fauna of any tract is to leave it severely alone, confining our care to the exclusion of all alien and artificial influences, that the temptation to provide examples can be easily resisted here. But that is not to say that no suggestions have been made, in fact, that as part of our wildlife effort species of plants and animals not native to a tract should be introduced into it—some quite fantastic suggestions have been made. The majority of suggestions for the ‘improvement’ of our wildlife, however, do not concern the wildlife at all: they are suggestions for the provision of amenities to visitors at some of our sanctuaries and parks. No doubt we do need these amenities, no doubt they will serve to attract the foreign tourists to India, but first and foremost we must secure the effective preservation of the attractive force, i.e. what wildlife there is still.
Permit me one example—because it did happen, really, and because it is so very illustrative of the lengths to which some people can go in trying to improve upon imperfect Nature. My photographic assistant, who has often accompanied me on my field trips and who has seen most of our wild animals in their natural setting, was talking to me about a recent trip to Mysore. Krishnaraja Sagar was spectacular, and in its way, Bandipur was no less magnificent, especially in its herds of chital; how grand it would be if only the two could be combined. Given a limited woodland, in which chital and blackbuck and peafowl would have to stay (because they had nowhere else to go), and given the lighting up of the entire area twice a week with powerful, multicoloured beams that would play impartially upon the ebullient fountains and the prancing buck and deer—why that would be paradise, no less.
I felt too deeply shocked for words then, but will say this now. Personally, I do not believe in any sort of existence after death, but if there is a paradise let us wait till we are decently dead before we aspire to it.
1958
52
A Warning to Aesthetes
Some thirty years ago, an aesthetically minded gentleman in the Andamans had an inspiration. The islands offered few social pleasures then; remember, it was settled with desperate convicts and inhabited by aborigines described, by an encyclopaedia of those days, as ‘savages of a low Negrito type’. However, there was vegetative beauty enough, and gazing at opulent plantations and woods, it occurred to this gentleman that what was needed to transform the vista to a scene from fairyland was a herd of chital in the foreground.
Only those who have seen this most decorative of all deer in a forest glade can know the charm they can impart to a woodland setting: I have always felt mildly surprised that Hopkins wrote ‘Glory be to God for dappled things …’ without having seen chital. Anyway, this gentleman lost no time in gilding the lily—he imported a few chital into the islands from their native home.
Frequently it happens that impulsive importations have unexpected consequences, and these chital were no exception. Any competent naturalist could have predicted the result—chital are very hardy, very prolific, and large enough to resist the smaller predators (the Andamans contain no greater cats). I quote from a recent news item featuring the tour report of the inspector general of forests to the Government of India, after a visit to the islands:
‘The introduction of chital (spotted deer) from the mainland thirty years ago is regretted. In the absence of their natural enemies they have become as great a menace as rabbits in Australia. The report announces the arrival of two female panthers in the islands to check any further increase in the number of chital.’
Well, that sort of thing will happen. However, it is obvious to the critical reader that if all that is now sought to be done is to check further increase in the chital population, the comparison with rabbits in Australia is exaggerated. I have never been to Australia—for that matter, I have never been to the Andamans, but I understand the rabbit position there is really menacing.
It has happened, almost invariably, that wherever man tries to improve nature by importing exotic plants or animals, they have perished from inability to acclimatize themselves, or else they overrun the land. Take the lantana, for instance. Its conquest of India is surely the most rapid and complete in the history of our much-conquered country—and it was never actually introduced into India; it was brought to Ceylon, and just leapt across the ocean in the gizzards of migrating birds.
Why must men upset the balance of nature? The shooting down of animals ruthlessly, without thought of the survival of species or the way it upsets the well-tried equilibrium of God, is something that is even more reprehensible than thoughtless importations. It is going on all over India, but it is only the animals that perish, and so no one cares. When they flourish overmuch, as these chital in the Andamans do, it is then that we are moved to quick action.
I would like to point out the soundness of the action taken in this case. Panthers are the natural enemies of chital, all right. They have an appetite for chital flesh that is not easily satiated. Chital are not shy of human neighbourhood and enter plantations freely; in fact, that is why they are a nuisance in the islands. They can be shot down easily; the introduction of natural foes that will give them a chance of survival, in preference to massacre, is a laudable action.
But why ‘two female panthers’? Of course what follows is largely guesswork, but I think they are going cautiously. Apparently the instance of the importation of mongooses to check the rat menace in the sugar cane plantations of Jamaica is being remembered, besides rabbits and Australia. Those mongooses did their job well and suppressed the rats: then they turned their attentions to the poultry runs. Too many leopards in the Andamans can lead to highly unpleasant consequences, for panthers turn quite often to domestic stock when other hunting fails them, as I who have lost many milch goats to them, know well. I grant that the application of the analogy is hardly apt or direct, but perhaps the story of
King Log and King Stork has also been remembered!
1952
53
On Shikar English
The forest rest house was right on top of a hill, a little cottage with two wings. One wing was occupied by a high-ranking English officer retired from the Indian Army, and I occupied the other wing. At the foot of the hill, in the lantana and teak, lived a party of eleven chital, a very feminine bevy; some of these beauties came uphill to visit us each morning and evening, with that charming confidence that animals in a sanctuary often develop towards humanity.
The brigadier had done a lot of shooting in his time, and was now keenly interested in wildlife preservation—a gentleman of the old school, active in mind and body in spite of his years, and unrelaxed in his standards. He had come there with permission to shoot any wild dog he could find in the sanctuary, and though he found traces of his quarry he never caught up with it. I was there to photograph Gaur, and was having a run of singularly poor luck.
We were sitting in the back verandah after dinner, and in reply to a query I said I had seen nothing all day, except for the ‘tame’ chital hinds. Promptly he corrected me. Does, not hinds, he informed me; sambar hinds, but chital does.
