by M Krishnan
Government views in this regard have now swung the other way, and it is about the possible disastrous consequences of their enthusiastic and well-meant efforts to clothe the denuded land with green cover that I am writing this. It is best to begin my argument with some seemingly disconnected generalizations that have a vital bearing on the issues discussed here, and to repeat that I am concerned solely about the country’s natural vegetation.
Nowhere in the world have they succeeded in replanting a denuded forest with the mixed species of herbs, shrubs and trees it held originally, but, in places, denuded areas left to themselves and protected from human trespasses and activities have regained most of their pristine vegetation, at times within a generation. This has happened in our own country—for instance, in a depleted forest in Madhya Pradesh protected from human activities. I have no personal knowledge of this forest but am assured of the truth of its successful natural regeneration by reliable, knowledgeable people, among them H.S. Panwar, director of the Wildlife Institute of India.
I myself know a spiky, foothill scrub jungle that was severely denuded and then left alone by men, which regained its vegetation in a few years. It is now a remarkable haven for shrikes, doves, grey partridges and a host of other resident and migrant birds of the thorn scrub, and the other small animals of such tracts. Outside India, too, there are records of purely natural regeneration. Even the heat-sterilized lava of volcanic eruptions has acquired soil and vegetation and its own fauna in due season.
Where conditions are not propitious, the pristine vegetation may not come up but only a secondary growth. But even so it will consist of native plants and not of exotics. Ours is a hospitable country. Plants from distant lands flourish here with an exuberance they seldom achieve at home—lantana, water hyacinth, the wholly useless Croton bonplandianum and the pestilent mesquite. But it is true that where the soil has not been cleared and opened up, exotics are unable to dominate and suppress indigenous plants.
The desideratum prescribed by forestry experts for India is that a third of the total land area should consist of forests—more than half in the hills and less than a quarter in the plains. Statistics are available for the present proportion of forests to the land area of each state, and in most it is only a fraction of the prescribed ratio. But even if it satisfies the prescription, these figures are illusory and misleading because the ‘forests’ in them include plantations, artefacts, human settlements, and large tracts already heavily depleted by over-exploitation.
India is one of the richest countries in the world, if not the richest, in flowering plants, and the diversity of our flora is truly stupendous. It does not consist mainly of trees. Our richest plant families are mainly herbs and shrubs. Trees are more demanding of soil and climatic amenities than the smaller, less woody plants. Trees will, of course, come up where they grew and were cut down, but where the substratum is less congenial, it is the herbs and shrubs that form the vegetation, and these are no less valuable in binding the soil and in offering cover and fodder to the local fauna. In sandy, arid tracts (the Thar is an excellent example), it is the hardy herbs and shrubs that sustain life and, at high elevations in our oldest hill ranges (far older than the Himalaya), there are alpine meadows over a thin crust of earth formed over a million years on top of hard sheet rock. It is these herbs that held, and have held for centuries, this precious soil inviolate against wind and water erosion, powerful forces at that height.
Like most of our current ills, the devastation of our wild flora is correlated to our suffocating overpopulation. The inability, or unwillingness, of our government to safeguard the nation’s heritage of nature, directly under their aegis, from sustained depletion by the populace, and the extent to which this is due to our democratic Constitution and the dependence of successive governments in power on the vote-holding public, are no doubt relevant factors but are not considered in this note, which is intended as a constructive analysis and not as a post-mortem. However, I should mention an important aspect of this matter here.
Our sanctuaries constitute a minute part of our total land area, only about 2 per cent in a realistic assessment. But in them too protection is complaisant: cattle grazing and wood and produce collection are freely practised in them by the people around, often without licence. A decade ago, when this ineffectiveness of government protection came up at some wildlife conservation forums, a novel supplementary remedy was suggested—that not only the officials of a preserve but also its residental and peripheral tribals and others should be induced to take on protective responsibility. If there has been an authentic instance of the exercise of protective zeal by those previously engaged in depletive activities, I have not heard of it. However, the loss of our natural forests, scrublands and hilltop vegetation is due not only to depletion by people, by non-official, unlicensed humanity. Government and government-sanctioned projects and industries can be much more devastating, and everyone knows of the popular revolts against the permissiveness and projects of the government that threaten the traditional way of life of remote human settlements and their surroundings—the Chipko movement and the Narmada movement.
Some three decades ago, some forest departments initiated a scheme for planting trees outside the reserved forests, as a supplementary source of firewood and small timber for the people. This was called ‘farm forestry’, and such plantings were in denuded village commons and around agriculture, even in private holdings. This should not be confused with the many departmental plantations (mainly of exotics like cashew and eucalyptus) also made about this time in unremunerative denuded forests and scrublands, with a view to revenue.
This concept of forestry for the benefit of the people, rather than for revenue or supply of raw material to industries, has undergone many changes of name and specification which need not be detailed here. What distinguishes it from traditional forestry is its motive and today it has expanded into what is best known by the name ‘social forestry’, widely practised with foreign aid in most regions, though this, too, has undergone ramifications. The idea of social forestry of all kinds is that there should be popular involvement in its effort, and that it should benefit the people by supplying firewood, timber and other similar needs by silviculture outside the forests, at places even on the fringes.
Theoretically there is no reason why social forestry should not relieve and even eliminate the depletion of our natural forests by the people that is going on uncontrolled. But that is in theory. In most parts of our country, there are human settlements around the forests, at times even within them, and every day thousands of people (mainly women) go into the forests to lop wood, even allowing cut wood to dry in situ before transporting it in headloads, to sell at the nearest towns—so that this destruction might be camouflaged as the collection of deadwood by the forestside poor for cooking their modest meals! Hazaribagh in Bihar and Mundanthurai in Tamil Nadu are examples of specially protected forests (both are sanctuaries) from which firewood is supplied to the nearest towns every day. The compensatory social forestry supplies at present are only a small fraction of what is illegally removed. It is not merely that people find it easier to cut wood without having the bother of involvement in growing it. It has become an established way of life for them, and only unrelaxed vigilance and strict protection can alter it.
Till recently, nature conservation was concerned mainly with our flora and fauna and their settings, with our wildlife degradation. Now it is more concerned with air, water and soil pollution, with human health and safety. Of course, it is essential to protect ourselves from environmental hazards but, in our preoccupation with this, we seem to have lost sight altogether of something even more important, of which we had only glimmerings even in the past—the vital importance to our national identity (and that of future generations) of conserving India’s Indianness from ourselves.
With communication now instant even from distant countries, our growing association with very different countries, and with the consequent sustained
repercussions of alien values on our life, our cherished cultures, philosophy and religions no longer have the impregnable insularity and vivifying potency they had. All our accretions of culture and religious tenets, and our traditions and ways of life, are of our own creation and mutable, and to some extent artificial. Only the great heritage of nature that we have owes nothing to our contrivance, intellect or imagination, and is beyond our creative genius, though we still have the power to destroy it. Only that can ensure the stability and identity of our nation and national consciousness, and endow us with truly Indian moorings in life.
In recent weeks we have been hearing and reading almost every day of the only common commitment of diverse political potentates, the iron resolve of every one of them to safeguard the nation from all encroachments and destructive attempts from outside it, and also against all forms of subversion from within. More power to these patriots, but do they not know that a country can be lost as wholly as by conquests or betrayals, by sustained, relentless whittling down of its age-old entity by its people?
Afforestation is no way to conserve our wonderfully varied wildlife. The flora, fauna and terrain are so closely interlinked in so many ways that each tract has its own wildlife identity, different from that of others. Even in a preserve the vegetation of which has been depleted, its original cover cannot be restored by afforestation. Further, our wildlife is by no means confined to different kinds of forests. Arid, sandy grounds, wetlands, flat country with a low, hard-bitten cover, thorn scrub, high-elevation herbaceous meadows and rocky hilltops all hold their characteristic flora and animal life. Many beasts and birds (especially migrants like the white stork and animals given to ranging far) would be lost without open country of the kind nowadays clubbed together as ‘waste land’, and the planting up of such land with trees will have disastrous consequences on their lives.
Even social forestry is not the only way to provide an alternative to meet the denudation of the forests by the people. The only justification for the large-scale devastation of some of our finest forests by hydel projects is that they supply electricity, which together with gas and solar energy, can all serve to save firewood, if our rural humanity can be induced to utilize these sources of thermal energy—a truly valuable contribution of national importance that our scientists and social workers can make to our life. Cattle grazing must, of course, be strictly banned in all categories of wildlife preserves. This will also prevent the constant human trespasses now being made for collection of dung from the forest floor.
At times a profound truth is embodied in a jocular saying, and the classic definition of a virgin forest as a tract where the hand of man has never set foot is such a saying. Provided they are of adequate area, all manner of wildlife tracts in our country have the potential to recoup if left strictly alone, even if now heavily depleted.
If only 10 per cent of our total land area, representative of our much diversified wildlife, and each of adequate area, can be effectively saved from the hand of man setting foot on them, the future of our national integrity and character can be perpetuated to generations of Indians yet unborn, and provide them with an authentic Indian setting and identity and a vital interest in life that can compensate for most ills. Surely, with 90 per cent of the land at their disposal, our governments should be able to meet the people’s demands, but so far no government we have had has resisted the temptation to achieve popularity at the expense of the country’s entity.
1991
XYZ
THE XYZ?
The XYZ, it is quite clear,
must always be a mystery:
for being ex, YZ I fear
has long since ceased to be.
We only know that it is ex,
and when alive was Y and Z—
all of which only serves to vex
our sorely puzzled head.
Diligent digs have failed to yield
two unknown fossil bones, or three,
that now, at last, might have revealed
YZ’s identity.
Was it a bird? Was it a beast?
Or just a saurian of some kind?
We have no clue, and not the least
glimmerings in our mind.
The name ‘YZ’ does not belong
to namings of a modern nature—
it is a taxon of some long
forgotten nomenclature.
So let us drop this futile quest
for what we cannot ever get,
and concentrate upon the rest
of the long alphabet.
Nature Transcended
62
The Genus Feringhee
According to my trusty old dictionary the word ‘Feringhee’ is ‘a Hindu name for a European’, and is derived from the common European name, Frank.
I had always thought that ‘Feringhee’ was derived from the Tamil ‘parangi’ which also denotes a European—used adjectivally, ‘parangi’ specifies a kind of pumpkin, as well as a disease that came to us from the enlightened West. However, I am unable to trace ‘parangi’ far back in Tamil; it seems to be a word of comparatively recent import. Apparently my dog-eared dictionary is right, after all, and the Tamil ‘parangi’ is also a corruption of Frank.
And it is a word with a peculiar connotation. For example, no one would think of calling an American a Feringhee, or even an Indian who apes the European sedulously, particularly in his habits of dress and eating—for such an Indian we use the term ‘Dorai’ in Tamil, with a sneering intonation. Even to indicate a European in a purely racial and detached manner the term Feringhee is rarely used—perhaps I should say that it ‘was rarely used’, for it is essentially a word of the past, of the days of the rise of European powers in India.
In many shrines and pavilions belonging to the period of the Vijayanagar Empire and later, we find unmistakable depictions of Europeans, figures wearing trousers (usually of strongly ribbed corduroy) and a hat. These are never carved in heroic attitude or size, but are subsidiary figures. These are Feringhees, for as I understand the word it was invariably used in a somewhat derogatory sense, to deny the importance of a figure rapidly gaining stature, or already of heroic proportions, in those days—never in praise of the European in India.
In fact, a few of these carvings and effigies are positively spiteful. Tippu Sultan’s Tiger (now in a museum in England) is probably unrivalled as an effigy of hate—a clockwork tiger of metal, shown in the act of devouring a European soldier, the clockwork movements lending a gruesome verisimilitude to the depiction. This royal toy, incidentally, was made for the Sultan by a Feringhee!
However, few of the representations of the European in India are inspired by such hatred. The Feringhee in my picture* will appeal even to Europeans, for there is nothing that is not goodnatured in its delightful caricature. The face is cleverly carved from the fibrous outer covering of a peeled coconut shell, the fibres cunningly separated on the upper lip and chin to bristle into fierce moustachios and a beard; the sawed-off, unpeeled terminal part of the coconut forms a snug-fitting lid, which makes, by its natural conformation, a perfect tri-cornered hat, and even the pipe struck between the teeth is of the fibrous outer covering, neatly chiselled into shape. This is a contemporary depiction, but what it portrays is not the modern European, no longer so sure of the supremacy of Western culture and civilization after two world wars, but a full-blooded Feringhee, circa 1880, bursting with colonial zeal—the Feringhee, in short.
What will Indian history say, a century from today, of this colourful character? Our history then will be sufficiently removed from the present for objective appraisal, and I think it will rightly be much more a record of ourselves than of European domination in India. There will, of course, be a chapter or two in it about that domination, but I am afraid the Feringhee as an individual will be ignored, even forgotten. So, long before that history is written, I would like to pay my tribute to him.
I am thinking not of any one old-time European when I say that,
but of the genus Feringhee, perplexing as it was varied. And I am not thinking of distinct type specimens, highly differentiated from one another, of Hume, Ross, the Kiplings (father and son), Gamble, ‘Eha’, Dunbar Brander, Sanderson and Forsyth—I am also thinking of hundreds of Feringhees whose names even I do not know, but who are all, somehow, personified for me by this coconut-shell effigy. And I must add that I am not interested in their official lives or doings, if some of them had such a life. History, which takes note of achievements and calamities, and painstakingly of much less dramatic happenings spread out over years, can look to all that. What fascinates me about the Feringhee is himself.
What a remarkable character he was! As a rule he led an insular life. He did not mix with the people of the country, for whom he had a name, quite as distinctive and peculiar as the term ‘Feringhee’—he kept aloof from the ‘natives’. And I’m afraid he kept aloof from his own kind as well. The idea that Europeans in India formed a solid and mutually tolerant clique is a myth; they quarrelled as bitterly among themselves as other men did, and some even found refuge from their brethren in the company of the ‘natives’—they went native, to use a phrase that belonged to that era.
Many may differ from me over this, but I think the Feringhee (by and large) completely missed the culture of the country—except to the extent to which he unwisely indulged in curries and pilau. He never did get to know or appreciate the highly evolved music and dance of India, and though occasionally his comprehension of Indian art (with a heavily historical bias) was better, he rarely got much beyond folklore in literature. I know there were Europeans in India who claimed considerable scholarship in Indian languages—without going into the depth or reality of their scholarship, or their mastery of their own, native English (which, frankly, I think was wretched), I may safely say these men were exceptional, and that anyway they were not sufficiently true to type to be called ‘Feringhees’.
