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BOOKS
Little
Green Man
The
many worlds of M. Krishnan, India's pioneer wildlife chronicler
By
Mahesh Rangarajan
NATURE"S
SPOKESMAN
Ed By Ram Guha
OXFORD
Price: Rs. 595
Pages: 291 |
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The
passage of M. Krishnan from the scene in May 1996 did more than rob India's
wildlife and natural landscapes of their most acute observer and most
copious chronicler. It also brought the curtain down on one of the 20th
century's most remarkable naturalists, who for the most part worked outside
the umbrella of official institutions, whether of government or of formal
academia.
Unlike his
contemporaries, Krishnan, who was born a year before the outbreak of World
War I in 1914, never took up the gun. In the 1930s, at a time when wildlife
photography was in its infancy, he took to the pen and subsequently to
the camera. For a record 46 years he continued the column "Country
Notebook" in The Statesman, writing not only of the spectacular animals
of the peninsular forest he knew so well but also of trees, plants and
a host of smaller creatures of jungle and backyard, hill and plain. Even
in an age when cable television beams vivid images of wild landscapes,
his pen portraits stand out as period pieces.
That Ramachandra
Guha should choose to pick the best of the writer's work from across the
decades and introduce the enigmatic but fascinating Krishnan to the reader
is also a stroke of luck. Unlike most edited collections, this one comes
with a sparkling, champagne-like essay on the author and we learn there
were not one but many worlds of Krishnan. There was the botany student
walking the hills of Kodaikanal, who never saw trees and plants as merely
a backdrop to fauna but as a key link in the web of life. Then came the
law graduate who perhaps never entered a courtroom; and the adviser to
the ruler of Sandur, a little Maratha-ruled state on the Deccan plateau.
He finally emerged and became a scholar of the Indian countryside in its
natural aspect. It was a measure of Krishnan's greatness that he wrote
as Jim Corbett did of the tiger-but did not neglect the little things
so many have missed.
The essays
bring to life characters in a way that Gerald Durrell would have envied:
we meet Lenin the lizard and Bomakka the water buffalo. Already in the
1950s, long before it became the fashion, the writer was bemoaning the
loss of the diversity of domestic varieties of cattle like the Amrit Mahal
breed. Perhaps his own lineage, not being descended from nobility or landed
gentry who went out into the woods with a gun, gave him a wide view few
could match. No one else would pen article upon article on the flowering
tree species that grace the sidewalk or on the behaviour of the common
toad.
He was right
in arguing that few Indians, including the most avowedly patriotic members
of the middle classes, know even a little about the nature of the land.
More ominously, conservation was and is all too often equated with protecting
forests or large game animals. Yet India has a host of landscapes of intrinsic
worth that need protection for reasons both scientific and cultural. Krishnan's
shortlist included "arid, sandy grounds, wetlands, flat country with
a low, hard-bitten cover, thorn scrub, high elevation herbaceous meadows
and rocky hill tops".
What is
remarkable is that in the early 1950s itself he was sounding the alarm
about the disappearance of the wildlife of the scrub jungle and open plains.
Krishnan it was who favoured a park near the Tungabhadra dam site where
the rare cheetah could find a new home. That he was not heeded and the
species vanished is evidence enough that the far-seeing is often ignored
by contemporaries. Krishnan's work serves as warning at the dawn of a
new century. It is also remarkable testimony to what a difference a man
can make if only he has the gift of observing and writing about the wild.
A fine collection that the reader can turn to not once but over and again.
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The
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INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in 
