Secondsaturn's Blog

I prefer to travel by air if I have to reach Kolkata by daylight. I love it when the plane swishes down, circles a bit and then touches the tarmac. This is because never ever have I seen a city which is so ornamental in its natural beauty. As the aircraft begins its descent one knows that Kolkata is around when one spots a long, never ending river lying about casually like a cast away cellotape amidst a thick dark green rug. But as we swirl down closer to the ground we find what seemed as lifeless as a thrown away litter emerges into a clear river with the reflection of the sky in it. This is the Hooghly river of West Bengal as it meanders through through the deltaic zone of the Sundarbans into the Bay of Bengal. The closer to the ground we get, one finds the stunningly ornamental beauty of its jade green trees, the paddy fields of light emerald, flowers that are like gems set amidst green plants that have turned gold as the sun shines after a bout of dark rain, the generous smattering of rain clouds half grey and half indigo against a sky that is blue sapphire in the orange light of the setting sun. I have seen nature in many places, lush, lustrous, luxuriant but never have I seen nature as it is found in Kolkata, rich, ostentatious, and conceited in that extreme richness.

The Bengal villages are green but they are not rich, the open paddy fields, the occasional banyan and peepal trees bear a sense of necessity for the rural community. Kolkata is not like that; it is regal, elegant, idle and supercilious. The canals and nallahs are like molten green and gold, its gulmohar like zircon, its champak flow out in open petals like ivory plates, the palm trees shine like gold plated green richly textured silk. Nowhere is nature so supremely beautiful and so self consciously arrogant in that beauty. There is nothing pristine, nothing simple, and nothing rural in Kolkata’s natural bounty; the sheer ostentation, the bedecked luster makes Kolkata take a manicured, haughty look.

I have always suspected the theory of Kolkata being a set of unknown villages of Sutanati, Gobindopur and Kolikata those the British used when they never had access to anything better. I always get a feeling just by watching the colours and foliage of trees and fragrant flowers of the city, the mirror like surface of its dark and deep water bodies, the glory of its sunlight and the dripping gravity of its cloud covers that Kolkata can only be an imperial city, bedecked and bejeweled. The British did not alight on a malaria infested unpeopled muddy shores of a few hapless villages off the Hooghly; their imperial eye must have immediately recognized this largely unpopulated riverine stretch as one that was fit to hold a City of Palaces and to become the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire on which the sun never set.

As I got into the car that drove me through Rajarhat, I saw these palatial buildings of the Peerless and Axis Bank, Technopolis and so on. Lights glistened, fast cars swished past and the recently launched signboards of Uninor with their neons and blue light shining through yet a glorious twilight as the sun was lazily sinking into its rest behind the gold lined indigo clouds heaped on the radiant sky. Suddenly many things seemed to fall in place at once for me. I observed that the Kolkata was naturally suited to affluence and abundance; orchestra played through the saxophone, musicals of the Shehnaai, toony lights that fall like the beads of gold, plush interiors, glossy shop fronts and men and women in expensive attire moving about in evenings wearing fragrance and decked in fine filigreed jewellery gelled aesthetically into the opulence of its nature. I never realized that Kolkata was naturally aligned to all things fine, heavy and expensive and exclusive. The drab houses, the sallow shops, the fungus laden walls, the sweating and gasping women wrapped in body hugging saris and men with terry cot printed shirts running after overcrowded public buses such anomalies. Wealth and its display fit aesthetically into Kolkata’s surroundings, not pallor and poverty.

Delhi is green and wooded but there is certain simplicity in its woods and shrubs and hence sprawling single storeyed white washed bunglows with lumpy pasters, or the uneven floored DDA mass housing without elevators and private homes with wide open courtyards in the centre spelling of jasmine and champak are so much in line with its character. This is why in Delhi where rain leaves the fragrance of wet soil, ostentation looks gawky. Delhi, unlike Kolkata can be home to power but never to wealth. On the other hand Mumbai, a city by the sea, a port town that congregates people from all over the world is so naturally cosmopoliton. It houses unstoppable pursuit of wealth and accommodates the rich and the poor alike. Its rains leave the smell of dried fish and merchandise. When it rains in Kolkata the air is fragrant with wet lush green leaves of trees and the sweet smell of flowers in bloom from the crevices of unkempt buildings, some even crumbling out of public memory. It is a lie that Kolkata accommodates the poor; the prices are low because incomes are lower; Kolkata is a city which has no place for the poor in its scheme of things. Only beggars who thrive on charity do well in the city.

The rich in Kolkata are not the earning rich; they are a spending rich. This is why; the city has little respect for anyone who earns an income like the Gujarati, Sindhi or Marwari businessmen. The rich of Kolkata are the idle rich; either as socialites, or as wheelers and dealers of social and political contacts. Hence high value brands, gourmet restaurants, colonial clubs, nature resorts and culture tourism and exclusive housing do so well in the city for all of these are spending avenues and not productive activities. The rich does not invest in factories, or in schools, and far less in services; these belong to the ‘up country” communities who are scorned as ‘meros”.

Since the rich native to the city do a not engage in productive activities, the society in Kolkata has no sense of interdependence and mutuality. There is no recognition of the poor by the rich and the reverse. The poor show their contempt when workers don’t work in the factories, shopkeepers are rude to their customers, taxi drivers refuse elderly passengers; eve teasing, passing of lewd remarks, defiant body language of servants show that the poor are keen to resent the rich. The rich also take it out on the poor by paying ridiculously low wages, by never creating work opportunities them and leaving them to languish in conditions not fit for any kind of decency. Kolkata is a great city inside the premises of a club or a drawing room, outside in the streets it is a rude city where each one waits eagerly to talk down at the other, impatiently jostling past the other and very suspicious of the world outside their homes. It is a city where the neighbour is the enemy who befriends you only for the latest gossip, in which you have to chase service providers rather than the other way round.

Kolkatans hate to work for a living, and so the shopkeepers shout at customers, parlour hands look the other way round when you go for a haircut and should you be visiting a doctor’s chamber, you are treated as being no better than a stalker. No wonder factories rapidly evaporated, investments left the state and Bengal, India’s richest state came to rank below some of the poorest African countries. Beggars do very well in the city, because the rich that does not want to own the poor find it easier to deal with them by throwing in a deterring charity.

Kolkata would have been a happy city were it to remain as the city of the idle rich. There would be the high spenders in the palaces and the poor would be happy to be patronized as the palanquin bearers. But the Partition did all the wrong things; the huge Hindu population of the Bangals came in all from the walks by the Padma, used to plain living, conservative ways and austere demeanours. They tried to bend and twist Kolkata into the same drabness that they had in their little cottages by the rivers and ponds laced with palm and areca nut trees. Kolkata never liked the bangals and as the bangalization of the city took place, its great natural beauty made for the aesthetics of palaces were replaced by dull, morbid, hopeless dwellings of lamenting and despairing souls. The bangals made Kolkata into a great anomaly by their cynical austerity, their brooding pessimism, their bitterness at having to work for a living. Kolkata never being a city for work did not open out enough opportunities for people to work and earn. The bangals tried their level best to fight the high culture of the rich by writing sorrowful poetry and lewd novels, and for sometime they became the corporate types but again found themselves pretty alienated in that ostentatious world.

The bangals were saved with the onset of the Cold war when they took the socialist side to fight the obscene flaunt of wealth by Kolkata’s rich. They wrote competitive examinations and qualified in professional courses and made a living for themselves that depended on merit and not on some rich Marwari’s whims. The bangal conservatism also moved against women and Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Taara made a martyr out of a modern woman who was acting like the man of her father’s family. Women in Kolkata still consider working for their own living to be a downgrade in their status!!! The bangals came from the uprooted soils of a Partitioned land; growing up never to trust the neighbour, never to talk to strangers. The sense of public space broke up and a mass of alienated and isolated individuals came to occupy the territory of Kolkata.
But Kolkata innately remained a city that loved and housed only the rich. This is why the Banga band, Bengal’s own format of the rock music, despite being the first in India really never took off. Bengal’s popular music is drawn out, melodious, swaying and swinging, rising and floating as if one is aboard on an autumn cloud. Hence when the CPI(M) shed its egalitarian pretence and invited the Tatas, Jindals and the Salims of world for glossy malls, posh housing colonies, wide roads and fast cars, Kolkatans felt as if the essence of the city was returned to them.

The CPI(M) was never really egalitarian; it was a comfort for those bangals who came into the alien high culture of Kolkata and found no space in it. Then through the consolidation of a thirty year long rule of the party, slowly the CPI(M) secured the lower middle class to give them the confidence to imagine that Kolkata now certainly belonged to them. Dreams of opulence started again, fantasies of bright lights, polished floorings and stilletoed women emerged once more as possibilities. The CPI(M) fed into that dream by adhering to an image of development that meant gloss, privilege and social exclusion. This is why when Trinamool returns with the discourse of the lower middle class it appears as a regression to so many Bengalis. Trinamool is a return, a sink back into the sentimentalities of the lower middle class, one that had thrived on its envy of the rich. Trinamool is puncturing this aspiration of Kolkata in which every girl hopes to enter the glamour world and every young man wants to own a flat in a gated self contained apartment complex with gym and swimming pool. This is why Mamata seems to be such an undo button, whose dilapidated home, whose undecorated face, whose simplicity and street arrogance is such a misfit in a city where natural assets aesthetically can only be matched by everything glamorous.

When Zuchamo Yanthan, a young Professor from IGNOU invited me to chair a session at a Seminar in St Joseph College in Nagaland, I agreed immediately. I had never been to Nagaland and accepting the invitation would mean that I could visit the state. The North-east is a bit queer for us, associated with armed militancy, fierce tribes, and hostile anti-Indian people. If one has ever thought of visiting the area it has usually begun and ended with a few game sanctuaries in Assam and a government guided tour of Arunachal Pradesh. Nagaland, the land of the cruel head hunting warring tribes, seemed as dangerous as the Jarawas of Andamans from the plains of the river valleys of mainland India. So, the pull of adventure rather than knowledge or interest in the topic of the seminar made me agree readily to Zuchamo’s invitation.

The seminar was supposed to be in climate change and how it affected Nagaland adversely. Climate Change seems to be the new currency and academia irrespective of which discipline they hail from seem to jump into the bandwagon, identifying affairs of the climate as the track that leads the fastest to recognition, money and fame. Anyway, that hardly mattered because I had a distinct purpose or visiting Nagaland, to know its people, from whosoever I could meet in the college and intelligentsia. There was a new development among the Naga youth, an increased attraction towards South Korea, in the form of their movies, their music and their fashion trends. Arerang, a Korean channel was very popular in Nagaland and because of it the young persons in the state were learning the Korean language and even later I found was tracing their ethnic descent to Korea !! Such developments interested me and I decided to at least test waters as to why, Nagaland, an integral part of the Indian Territory should show such proclivity towards Korea, leaving the universally popular Bollywood untouched and ignored.
Our flight from Kolkata to Dimapur was rough and Dr Dolly, Zuchamo’s colleague had a bad attack of vertigo. But I decided not to let her travel sickness occupy my mind as I quickly reached for my camera to capture the breathtaking beauty of lush green fields bordered by indigo mountains and lunging rain clouds against a deep blue sky all along the horizon. Zuchamo was very excited to be in Nagaland, savouring every bit of the nature, pointing out to us the sheer beauty of his homeland. He asked me to take as many pictures as I could of the scenic beauty of the airport telling me that there were many more surprises for me in the high mountains of Jakhama, the venue of St Joseph’s College, our host. I realized that he was very fond of his home, a true patriot. Later as I got to know more people I was convinced that the mountains and its flora and fauna were as crucial to the Naga existence as their families were and together with the climate and clan formed the proud individualistic culture of the people.
Father Abraham with who Zuchamo co-coordinated the Seminar had arranged for lunch at his Dimapur home. Father Abraham’s home is also a museum with arts and artifacts collected from all over Nagaland that cover many tribes. This, in itself is a major achievement because the Naga people consist of many tribes who are so fiercely independent even of one another that only a mutual distance and non interaction can ensure peace among the Nagas. Artefacts, ornaments, weapons and other mementoes are essential to a Naga identity and separation from them means the giving up a part of oneself to a stranger. This is why, despite outstanding works of creation, Nagas rarely ever sell their crafts to the market, because even non living things here are infused with soul and bear symbolic meaning for life. Hence, Father Abraham has done a commendable job in convincing the Naga people to give up parts of their living in the form of the collection in his museum. The women of his family served us ethnic food and as we tried to adjust to the sharp taste of Naga food, I thought that Father Abraham was trying to introduce us to the Naga culture without us becoming aware of the same. I rapidly clicked some photographs of the museum as Dolly felt even more sick at the sight of the severed heads of animals, birds and humans, the last being only wooden carvings and burnt earth impressions. I wondered why the Nagas continue to hold their militant tradition and why posit them forth as the most defining feature of their identity.

With a brief introduction to the Naga culture at Father Abraham’s residence at Dimpaur we started our long winding roads over the mountains towards Kohima where we were to rest at night. Evening shadows lengthened over dark and deep woods, the bundle of clouds across the sky stretched out as a splash of mauve over the purple mountains as we moved into the sunset. Zuchamo admired the sunset, asking me to take photos of the grandeur of the closing day like the grand closing of some mega event while he looked around for a tea stall to have his evening quota of the beverage. I was stunned by the variety of plant species, exotic for me and native to the geography, plants with strange colours and strange foliage and I am sure that no botanist upon earth can fully list out of the sheer diversity of flora found on each square metre of the north eastern Himalayas. Dolly was feeling unwell due to her vertigo and said that she regretted coming to Nagaland and wished that she remembered her school geography that the north eastern states were also mountainous and hilly.

The road to Kohima is also the highway to Manipur from Assam and the rest of Indian plains. A recent blockade had just been lifted and the trucks carrying provisions to Manipur had started to roll out again and together with the military patrols they made quite a crowd on the streets. We were thus late in reaching Kohima and Father Abraham kept calling on Zuchamo’s cellphone quite a number of times. I later realized that no one stays out too late in the evenings in Nagaland just as a matter of habit from the curfew days in the 1980’s. Twenty years and a whole generation have passed since the curfew nights but Naga society has not got back its mental assurance to take on nights with ease. Dolly fretted at this because shops closed by afternoon leaving visitors hungry for shopping. Fast food is absent in Kohima and the cafes that are at all there are basically music cafes that also serve tea.
Hotel Jafpu was a comfortable place that served Indian food. Jafpu is a mountain near Kohima from which the hotel derived its name. The people were very obliging and since the sponsors of the Seminar were paying every bit of our expenses, we too were very relaxed. The students of St Joseph’s College were very obliging and as we worried that they were getting late in reaching their homes, they insisted that they would leave for the day only when we have settled down fully in our rooms. There was another reason for this attentiveness; outsiders are not safe in Kohima unless accompanied by a local person; Naga militants on the one hand and the Indian army on the other pose equal threat to personal safety.

My hopes of taking photographs of sunrise were dashed because the rain that started in the night continued in the morning and mist covered every bit of the atmosphere. After a hearty English breakfast, we trudged towards the bus that St Joseph runs way up to the college campus at Jakhama encountering on the way vendors selling snails, frogs and other crusty animal flesh. Zuchamo quickly opened his umbrella to shield Dolly’s vision from these creatures in the fear that she might throw up again. The city was waking up as streets filled with smartly dressed bright looking young women. The young men were smart too but appeared more self conscious than self certain. After the militancy the women started taking up more upon themselves as the young men lived forever in the fear of being picked up by the military and tortured to death on suspicions of being a militant. The proud head hunting Naga man has been so humiliated by the military that either he has taken to more insurgency or withdrawn completely from India and life. There was a small traffic jam on the road on the Kohima side and as soon as some army convoys came from the opposite side the students started commenting on how India was ripping apart the everyday life in the town.

A young lecturer of the college sat next to me eagerly pointing out to me various things those were worth seeing and interestingly these were not the usual sight seeing points that the tourist is meant to see. On the way I saw jhum cultivation, piles of logwood from trees that were cut while forests were cleared for jhum, Naga homes that were built from such wood, women wearing the Angami costumes, and the numerous boys and girls’ hostels, or morungs. She excitedly pointed out to a place where the annual hornbill festival is held. The hornbill festival is a seven day congregation of all the tribes of the Nagas that include not only those that inhabit Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal but also people from Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The Nagas are a distinct set of people, each tribe with its distinct culture and language that is understood only within its own tribe. The hornbill festival must therefore be an important one to congregate peoples who are so distinct from one another. The hornbill festival showcases the diverse cultures of each tribe, organizes sports and competitions and becomes a venue for both unity and assertion of uniqueness of cultures in that diversity. In everyway, the hornbill festival is a genuine Naga nationalism or Naga globalism depending on the way Nagas see themselves as people. The students told me that skies were golden blue and the air clear and light in that early winter of the festival time but to me rains in the mountains was the most salubrious for my mind and body.

My young guide was called Medonou and when I asked her name she said that she was from the Angami tribe. She said that Jakhama and Kohima belonged to the Angami tribe while the Lotha, Zuchamo’s tribe, occupied the area of Wokha. It seems that each tribe has a distinctly marked territory that others are not supposed to trespass. If they do, then warfare ensues in the starkest possible cruelty of chopping off of the enemies’ heads and then bringing back that severed head as a trophy. This practice is known as headhunting. Women’s heads are very valuable because it means that the warrior has been able to breakthrough the cordon of men and reach for the women in the inner chambers, a sure sign of bravery. Today head hunting is legally banned in India though the last head hunting was as late as 1972 in the Mon district of the Konyan tribes whose territories run into Myanmar. Since Naga tribes were attached to land and practiced shifting cultivation, it was important for them to have territories clearly marked out and violation of the land mass associated with the tribes territory assumed terrifying jealousy. Hence the tribes clearly kept out of one another’s way and this is also why they do not care to understand the others’ languages. Naga disunity is a way to peace and calls for Naga unity is not only an anomaly in the Naga culture but would upset the fragile balance of power that each tribe maintains vis-à-vis the other people in the Nagas. When Nagas converse among themselves, they speak a language called Nagamese, a mixture of Bengali, Assamese, Bhojpuri, Oriya and Hindi. This is an Indo-Aryan language while the Naga languages belong to the Sino Tibetan family.

Medonou means many things all at once. It means the self willed and the autonomous, the spontaneous, self referential, self respected and self guided. It also means the self confident, self reliant and independent minded and the free spirited. I realized that this was the beauty of the Sino Tibetan family of languages; many ideas are communicated cryptically through a single word. This is also the bane of such languages because it can communicate far less than the Indo-Aryan languages and since the latter dominates the world’s discourses, it becomes difficult for those who speak in the Sino Tibetan languages to convey their feelings. Medonou said that she felt difficult in writing down her papers because of a poor command in writing. I felt that this was perhaps why the Nagas despite being a superior civilization continued to be trashed because they could not communicate well. The dress codes, the ornaments, weapons, the tattooes and the fine body language of the Nagas seemed to tell me that these people communicate more through gestures, posturings, signs, symbols and icons rather than through words. The Naga art is more like a language, closely associated with a particular tribes’ affairs. Hence, in the world of language, Nagas have never done well for themselves.

I asked Medonou about the Korean cinema and she said that the television channel, Arerang was very popular. The young people want to learn the Korean language. She also said that like everyone else in the world, the Nagas too loved watching movies but had no option. The Nagas do not like Bollywood films, no matter how much the context of Nagaland is similar to that of India’s. They do not identify with India at all; they do not resemble the Indians, nor have neither their kind of families, nor their ways of society and have different stories of their cosmos. In all of these they are close to the Koreans. Medonou said that the Nagas believe that they descended from the same ancestors as the Koreans. I found this to be strange because the weapons, costumes, artifacts and jewellery and the internecine feud among the tribes made me connect the Nagas to the Mongols rather than to the island people of Korea and indeed so because later Father Abraham said that in the origin myths Mongolia, Manchuria and Seszwan were the areas through which the Nagas have lived and passed in the time of migration before they reached the Himalayas. Korea, then is an invented ancestor for the Nagas, made available through the Arerang television channel as the larger civilization to which the Nagas would want to belong and move on.

All through the bus ride Medonou and I talked of her research on the Naga family structure and how it is changing. She said that after the militancy and curfew in Nagaland, the persons from her locality watch a lot of Star Plus soaps. This was interesting because while they did not go to Bollywood movies because they could not identify with them, they watched a lot of soap drama. The soap, said Medonou was so much of a self-contained world that one need not really be a part of the culture as characters fought among themselves like skettles in a game world. This was a unique observation that she made and I think that this could be the reason why television can out do cinema in its mass base. As the bus climbed higher and higher into the mountains, Medonou praised the clean and cool air of Jakhama and told me about its magnificent water which leaves hair after shampoo silken smooth. She did not hesitate to mention that this was her tribe’s land, the very best in all Nagaland, the territory of her tribe, the Angamis.

The Nagas may have been head hunters who believe in non communication for peace but they are excellent hosts. The Seminar started off with the Governor Mr Nikhil Kumar who was also the Police Commissioner of Delhi flagging it off. He seemed to be genuinely interested in the subject and spoke earnestly though naively about the climate change. The governor, like most of us believes in simple technical solutions and imagines those solutions to be final without consequences of further climate change. Mr Probir Bose made an excellent presentation in which he showed that climate change manifests in rising oceans, melting snow caps, breaking of ice shelves, dry rivers, parched lands, famines, epidemics, pestilence and finally death of all things living on the earth and all this will take less than a century to happen. The governor was very pleased with the presentation and made it sure that a CD copy of the same reached him.

The rest of the papers revolved around three themes, what caused climate change, whether it can be mitigated and what would be the consequences if the process was allowed to g on unabated. It was universally agreed that manufacturing, mining, agriculture and transportation, in short, the anthropogenic factors caused the catastrophe. As far as the third theme was concerned as to what would happen if we do not halt the process of climate change, the presenters predicted social conflict, famines, epidemics, pestilence and death to which one of the boys from the audience asked whether those who were poor so far and did not contribute to the climate pollution will now hold back without tasting what development feels like. This presented a lot of criticism from his colleagues during the coffee break who all felt that development as is defined today through the single story of high consumerism should be shunned and the Nagas, as people close to nature should show the world what development should really be like. This sounded so much like that of the adivasis of Chhotanagpur that I felt that the tribals of India should unite en masse against global capital and the policy makers and make alternative development a reality. As for the second theme was concerned, presenters clearly showed that large scale production, specialized retailing, and long distance transportation of goods were culprits of climate change and the way forward is to shorten the loops of production and consumption. Dolly was suggesting that we plant crops that with reduced carbon emissions and those which can also serve as biofuels. Mhonlumo opposed her thesis and said that such technical solutions were not to be taken as grand solutions and that things were far complex than planting jethroba as substitutes for fossil fuels. Dolly took this badly and she argued with Mhonlumo and became rude. Zuchamo felt very embarrassed and I asked him to brush the matter aside but he continued to be seriously affected by it. It was not until much later that I understood why.

The debates in the Seminar centred on jhum cultivation. Jhum is practiced by tribals also in the Chhotanagpur area and it seems to be a pre-settled agriculture practice. Jhum is integral to the tribal culture and the rituals, songs, stories, festivals are usually centred around the jhum. It is the jhum that has come under the flak from environmentalists who often accuse it of felling trees and emitting carbon by burning of the residue after slashing them. But jhum has many points in its favour; firstly very old trees become net emitters of carbon dioxide and secondary forests have more potential to sequester carbons, the felled trees are used for making houses to live in that are more climate favourable than those made of steel and cement. Some interjectors asked from the floor that building roads felled more trees and there was no use blaming the jhum; he was supported by the rest in the audience indicating clearly that the Nagas are fonder of preserving their climate than the conventional mode of development through fast cars and posh hotels. No wonder then that the Nagas are not keen to develop tourism; the Nagas are not too fond of strangers and they are fonder of preserving the climate than in commerce.

As I boarded the bus back to Kohima rains started again. In the rain, the green forests looked lush, water falls were gushing out of nowhere, shabby and shoddy wooden huts lined with pots of coloured flowers looked style statements and the road winded down through small villages with strange names welcoming us with wooden gates to reach Kohima in an hour. Zuchamo was determined to show us around Kohima and he called up his cousin Mhatang who drove down all the way leaving a party in his home given in honour of his younger brother who just joined the Nagaland police. We met Mhatang’s parents and they all spoke Nagamese at home because the mother and the daughter-in-law were women from the Aos and Rengma tribes respectively. In the headhunting days these tribes were sworn enemies but now they inter-marry. But despite this the women do not learn their in-law’s language as a measure of distance, though the children are taught the language of their father’s family. The women among the Nagas are liberated but that’s only in appearance because beneath a people who are as conservative as the Nagas, patriarchy is strong. Culture is very good for mitigating climate change but it brings with it conservatism that goes against the women. Some more reflection must go into this gender aspect too.

Mhatang drove us all the way to new Kohima, a posh state of art town that looks straight out of New Zealand. But when I had asked the young students what part of the town I should see all of them said that it should be Barabasti, the largest village in Asia, now a continuous part of Kohima. There is a clear case of divide of how the administrators perceive Kohima as a sprawling stretch of posh bunglows and wide roads and what the people value, a village with a huge population. The people of Kohima value demography and Father John explained that the name of Kohima is actually Kahama, a term in Naga language which means census. It seems that there was a head count of all Naga people in Kahama and the conclusion was that they were too many to count. Kahama also suggests the infinite size of the Naga population. I sensed that Kahama, being located in the Angami land may imply that the Angamis were the most powerful tribes among the Nagas; Father John and Zuchamo said that it was indeed true.

The following night Zuchamo took us to his brothers’ place for dinner. The brother is a bureaucrat in the Nagaland Bee Mission and is very committed to his work. He served us most excellent wine and his wife cooked some amazing Naga dishes. The Naga diet consists of lentil, vegetables and meat and fish dishes. The Nagas only eat rice, the stick variety of rice found in Philippines. Since the Nagaland has hardly any oil or salt, they cook food without oil or salt. The overwhelming use of fish is because fish is the source of oil and meat which is mainly pork acts as a source of oil. The Nagas use chillies, turmeric and bamboo shoot juice to cook their food and along with some salt to taste these days, they either use garlic or ginger, never the two together. The herbs are nameless and with amazing aroma. There is no standard recipe for the herbs and it varies from individual to individual and who is the smart one to recognize the most aromatic ones. Medonou said that there is no shared knowledge of herbs and it is up to the individual to recognize them. The desert in a Naga platter is invariably fresh fruit and for those who are better off, freshly baked cakes.

As we reached the hotel I went out to buy a notebook and a pen for myself. Zuchamo accompanied me to the shop because of the problem of people walking around the town. The shop was a small and dull one and the stocks were limited. I looked through the notebooks to select one out of them and mush to my surprise they all had themes of climate change imprinted on the covers and climate change quizzes on the back flap ! The community in Nagaland is more knowledgeable than the expert on climate change and I made it a point to mention this discovery in the valedictory session of the seminar.

I was slowly getting to understand the Nagas as a race fiercely independent and individualistic. The Naga children’s names are stories of their parents’ biographies that the children are required to fulfill. The children must look after parents as their prime duty and this perhaps also explain the large size of families that the Nagas have, the better off they are the more number of children they have. My conversations with the intelligentsia and my casual reading of the newspapers revealed that there was nothing as insulting to the Nagas as the claim of its territory by India as the latter’s inalienable part. It seems that the Nagas have never called themselves as the Nagas, this is a name that the others have given them. Some feel that Nagas means the naked people, a preposterous claim because the Nagas are far more heavily clothed than most adivasis. A more probable explanation is that the area was the kingdom of the Snake king where Arjuna met Ulupi, the snake princess, as he went there to gather superior arms. The Nagas invest heavily in weapons, display them, hold them close to their bodies and use them as their tribal identities. It is not surprising that the people who are so conscious of their boundaries with others should have a bit excess in weapons. But somewhere even the Mahabharata associated weapons with the land of the Snakes. Since the Naga myths have no historical date, it is difficult to assign a date to the Nagas whether they are indeed as ancient as the Aryans themselves. In any case, given the Naga pride over their territories and territoriality, one can easily see what impact the presence of the Indian Army has on the Nagas; every day the Nagas must eagerly wanting to hunt the heads of the uniformed men. The streets are agog with stories of the misbehaviour of the military and every scrap of opinion in the newspaper warns the Nagas never to integrate with India.

The Nagas are a whole civilization unto themselves, part of the fearless Mongols in the line of none other than Chengiz Khan and India would do better to become a host to this civilization rather than to homogenize it as Indic. India does not realize that its strength does not lie in presenting a common Indic face to the world but as a territory that hosts different nations and even different civilizations that may not all fall in the same time zone. As conversations rolled inside the Yanthan household among the Lothas and the few of us from India, one realized that the Naga intellectuals are shy to say out aloud that the Nagas never were and never are going to be a part of India. As the Lotha family were articulating more and more of how they are a distinct civilization totally different from India, sharing no history and far less of a future, Father John analyzed the properties of the honey from the combs of the stingless bees as being excellent shampoo. The Nagas are obsessed with hair, shampoos and dyes and this makes them very concerned with the quality of water and alert to its contamination.

At the dinner we also talked of Arerang channel once again and the seniors fell from the sky when they heard that the youth imagine that they are from Korea !! The only time the Nagas were at all close to the sea were during their stint in south east Asia, otherwise the Nagas are mountain people, integrated and intertwined with its valleys and peaks, gorges and plateaus as the clouds in monsoon. Then what of Korea, we all wondered. Someone among us, Ajay, I think asked Father Abraham how old Christianity was in Nagaland and he set my mind to thinking that if the Nagas are so hung on their culture and its signs and symbols, how was it that they embraced Christianity that contained none of their everyday lives and was an implant from above. I realized that the idea of the Nagas being too close to their customs was straight jacketing them. The Nagas have been and still are a global people. They have migrated thousands of miles and in their minds they still do. Every young Naga wants to go abroad, ambitious young women want to join the UN and a basic motive behind autonomy and nationhood for Nagaland is its opportunity to send its representative in the UN council, at least the newspapers were full of such desires. The Naga spirituality was divided into two spaces; one the earth that was inhabited by spirits and the other was the larger world of forces that helped them to transcend the contingent of spirits. The Nagas worshipped that sublime and transcendental entity. Christianity helped them find this global sublime and now Korea too has played that role. Unfortunately, India with its military has become the swarm of bad spirits.

Zuchamo and his cousin talked to us of the corrupt politicians who are buying up land around Kohima. I wondered if every Naga owned land and the common land of the territory belonged to the tribe and was important for them then how it was possible for private individuals to buy up land. I guessed that around the Kohima area where the Angamis graduated from jhum to settled cultivation, private ownership of land had become possible and which created opportunities for corruption. I became even less uncertain over asking the Nagas to give up jhum cultivation. I remembered how Medonou was telling me that she hated farming. It seems that as the nature of families change with women refusing to do the cultivation, Nagas, especially the Angamis, the most progressive among them is taking to settled terrace cultivation, which has its disadvantages in infusing economic and social inequalities in the communities.

We all felt sad to leave the wonderland of the Blue Mountains and the swirling rain clouds on them, the orchids and strange deep forests swinging in the incessant rains and cool breeze. We packed our bags and cameras and prayed that the journey back to the plains would be better for Dolly’s vertigo. Zuchamo was busy saying his goodbyes to his people and we were all silently catching al that we could of the landscape. I observed that in some places the vegetation was so thick that it became impenetrable for sunlight as a result of which grass cannot grow on the soil, just like in the Amazon rain forests. No wonder that the soil is loose except when it is held by roots of trees and rivers especially during the rains are muddy, again like the Amazon. Only the jhum fallows have grass that hold the soil and water streams that pop up around these areas have clear water!. Jhum thus has a purpose integral to the climate of the area. The only flip side of jhum is that its cycle cannot be reduced below ten years, something that tends to get shorter as population increases. Therefore, for better or for worse, if the Nagas want to centre their lives on jhum then they will have to contain their population growth.

Rains lightened and then ceased as we reached the hotter plains of Dimapur. On the way we had some tea and took some snaps of the mountains and its foliage both from near and far. Dolly bore the journey better and Zuchamo awarded her a degree in management of regurgitation related disasters !

Madhuleena, Madhusree and my mutual friend was visiting us after 20 years. She was with us in JNU but way laid by matrimony and child rearing she had neither the motive nor the opportunity to meet up with her friends. After two decades of housewifery she decided that she was fatigued by domesticity and deserved a break from her long and unbroken service to her family. On the occasion of her visit to our home at Dayalbagh we decided to travel to the hills. We hired an Indica from the familiar Himachal Taxi Service and planned that with a brief stopover at Chandigarh we would travel to Dharamshala. The break journey at Chandigarh would also give us the opportunity to connect with old JNUites, Pampa and Sarabjit. Himachal Taxi was sufficiently threatened into providing us with a new car with a strong air conditioning and a polite and obedient driver. Everything seemed to be in place except that Georgie was so sad to be left behind with her attendants Nitin and Vinod, who she does not quite trust to take care of her. We had to leave her behind with a heavy heart and a prayer that she stays happy and sound for the 96 hours that we were leaving her.

Chandigarh was hot and dry but Pampa made excellent arrangements for us at the University Guest House of the Panjab University where she is a faculty in the Department of Political Science teaching development and policy. She drove us around to pubs serving Bloody Mary, showed us around the campus, planned our route to Dharamshala, entertained us with the latest gossips and saw us off the following morning as we steeled ourselves for a steep climb to the hills. Madhusree insisted that she sits in the front seat braving the beating sun through the front glass because that way she can keep her vertigo at bay.

As we started the climb on to the hills, I realized that the Dhauladhar range could be a very different proposition from the Shivaliks or the Himalayas. The last mentioned mountains start suddenly from the plains and one gets a feeling of being in a plane that has taken off the ground into flight. But the Dhauladhar is slow to rise, undulating and interrupted but when it does rise it is steep and straight. It is not for everyone to manage these slopes but fortunately for us the driver was from the Kangra Valley and he seemed to be somewhat in command of these mountains. Madhuleena was intrigued by the smooth stones strewn along the mountain walls. She seems to have picked up some geology from her husband who teaches at Kalyani University. She felt that the mountain must have been the path of glaciers. I was more likely to believe that the Beas had shifted its course on its way down from the snows or that landslides and earthquakes must have changed the course of rivers, but Madhuleena was confident that the stones were remnants of glacier shifts. It turned out that she was right and the civilization in the Kangra Valley existed even before the Indus Valley Civilization. Kangra, then is the place where the Indian civilization originated !!

I was wondering about Kangra being the original Indian civilization when I realized how closely it resembled the culture of Tibet. It is a small wonder that Dalai Lama found it as his apt home away from home. From food to crafts, from custom to law, from folklore to legends, and indeed in case of deities, Kangra civilization seems to have mingled indeterminately into the Tibetan one. Tibet, despite its Buddhist practices is a Goddess worshipping place. Here the Goddess has forty hands, ten storeys of heads, with four head on each story. Shiva carries Kali’s garland of severed human heads in his trident and wears the peacock feather on his helmet. On his arms he has snakes and holds lotuses in his hands. He is macho and moustached and looks very much like the Kushana kings who made Kangra their centre point as they held together the largest Empire in India after Asoka. I also learnt that Kunal, a common name among Bengali men is actually a female name for a stone worshipped as Goddess Durga and is called Kunal Pathri. !!!!

I read in Michael Wood’s book Story of India that the Kushana period, often obscured in history was actually the forerunner of the Mughals when India was woven as a plural, multi religious empire integrated with the Silk Route. Kanishka struck coins in gold to be at par with the Roman Empire and thus increased India’s presence in the global map. Kangra was central to that imperial unity. I was excited to see the Kangra art museum because the Kangra school seemed to have led the style of wood carvings of Kashmir and Saharanpur, the metal working from Ladakh to Arunanchal, and originated paper mache, lac, water colour paintings, jewellery styles and appliqué work that stretch from Central Asia to south India !!!. If India is today a land of unity in diversity then Kangra surely is the melting pot of that grand assimilation. Kangra paintings and records show that this hill region was the hub of industrial activity with skilled workers in metal. From Todar Mal’s account of Kangra during Akbar’s time, the place was famous for medicine and surgery, eye treatment, processed food, basmati rice and metal working especially the ashtadhaatu. It appears to us that Kangra was the hub of manufacturing activity and its influence seemed to have stretched as far as Mathura, one of the most important towns of the Kushana period. Kangra civilization command area thus included the present day Kashmir, Ladakh, Punjab, Western UP, the whole of Himachal, Uttaranchal, North east and even parts of Central India.
Michael Wood says that the historical Kanishka was the mythical Kansa, a tyrant who was assassinated by Krishna, the dark skinned hero of the Yadavas. The decapitation of Kanishka’s statues seems to bear testimony to the fact that the Buddhist Emperor of non violence and peace faced local rebellions and Hinduism had asserted local autonomy in the face of Buddhist Imperial integration. Kangra may have been fiercely autonomous too. Mythologies and legends have that Kangra people fought Rama on the side of Ravana and in the Mahabharata, they fought on the side of the Kauravas. No wonder Kangra’s pride of place being the Baijnath Temple, where Ravana visited as a common man to sing the Shiva stuti. Baijnath, or Baidyanath, the Lord of Medicine, is also an incarnation of Lord Shiva.

I was intrigued because it seemed to tie up with my own family history from my mother’s side in which her ancestors came down as medicine monks from Kamrup monastery being Buddhists at the same time Goddess worshipping, having knowledge of medicine and curating idols of ashtadhaatu. Kamakhya, is a peethasthan, in which the uterus of the dead Sati was supposed to have fallen – indeed, the entire Kangra Valley is strewn with such peethasthan, like the Jwala Mukhi and Naina Devi, the latter being now in Anandpur Sahib, Punjab. Buddhism, after the defeat of Kanishka may well have made peace with the local religions and hence with the local people and accepted into its practice several Goddess cults; or the location of Buddhism among the more primitive people of India could well have been a reason for the closeness of this religion with various animistic cults of such people.

We stayed in Dharamshala, in a village called Lambagraon in the home of the Katoch, the unbroken line of kings of Kangra. This house is now the hotel Clouds End Villa, a rugged place surrounded by undisturbed forests with sighing trees and wild lilacs. The Katoch clan claims their descent from Eastern Rajasthan, as the third dynasty who emanated from the earth in sharp contrast to the other two dynasties who emerged from the Sun and the Moon respectively. The Katoch insist that they are from the Earth which is also a way of saying that they are the sons of the soil. The soil has been a hero in Kangra, once when defending themselves against Rama, then fighting the Pandavas and then decapitating Kanishka. Historians feel that the dark colour of Rama and Krishna are because of their non-Aryan descent but when in Kangra one feels that in comparison to the hill people’s yellowish hue, the plainsmen appear dark. These heroes could well have been people of the plains who the bhumi putras led by the Katochs have fought valiantly.

Tikam Singh, the attendant told us about a short cut which led us directly to McLeod Ganj, the home of the Tibetan refugees. As we were waiting for Madhusree to fetch the camera, I suddenly saw a white little animal rushing towards me. I instinctly extended my arms towards it because it appeared so much like Georgie to me that for a second I forgot that she was not with me in this hill station. When the animal drew forward I realized that it was a baby ram, a boy with little horns and it came right into my arms and snuggled against me. I hugged it and then let it go and it sped over the boundary wall and started nibbling at the tender shoots. The “Mother” of the ram was close by who looked on indulgently saying that he loved playing with everyone. Then suddenly a thought crossed me and I have actually been meaning to ask this to animal rearers for a long time. I asked her how do people feel when they rear animals and then they are slaughtered? She told me that it was sad and very sad and no wonder killing of animals was labeled as sacrifice. To slaughter an animal after raising it like a child was no less painful that killing one’s own child but it had to be done. The little white ram called Bakru was being raised for sacrifice!! I collapsed as I heard it, my blood pressure started falling and when Madhusree returned with the camera, and she found me sweating profusely. I turned away from her and started trudging along the path Tikam Singh showed us to the abode of Dalai Lama concealing my tears by taking photo of the mountains incessantly. I could not tear my mind away from Bakru.

My mind was full of the wonderful closeness of Bakru to his mother, how they are company to each other in the loneliness of the hills, how they must have assured each other when thunder struck and rains lashed their path, both trembling with fear, I imagined how Bakru would grow wary when mother was late in coming home and how he would be overjoyed at seeing her return to him. Bakru was everyone’s favourite in the village, pampered and mollycoddled. But when the “D Day” would come for Bakru’s sacrifice, I wondered how he would be surprised to see his people weeping and petting him goodbye, and he being dragged onto an unfamiliar place, unfamiliar things happening to him and because he has always been loved he would try to snuggle against his killer too, loving him in the last moment and perhaps too surprised to even respond to the pain in the last moment of his life. Then that wonderful white fur of his, long and straight, combed and cared for would lie wet in blood and the lifeless head severed with eyes still looking around for his loved ones. Tears welled up again and to hide them from everyone I started thinking about animal sacrifice. Yes, indeed it was sacrifice, it was the sacrifice of those who humans grow to love most purely, their pets.

I wondered what made some resort to animal sacrifice. In my infancy we were told that this was a way to provide meat as a diet for the common man. I don’t think this picture fits. Animal sacrifice is genuinely a sacrifice and it is definitely the giving up of your favourites for the sake of the community and indeed in many places animal sacrifice co-existed with human sacrifice. The motif reminds me of a story that I heard long ago in which there dwelled in a forest a ferocious lion that ravaged the animals. The animals got together and decided to appeal to the lion that they would voluntarily offer one of their ilks as a kill for the lion so that he does not destroy them indiscriminately. I felt that animal sacrifice was something like that in which one voluntarily offered a kill to the Goddess so that she does not kill randomly and help the human community live on. This can happen in a community which is surrounded by death, disease, hunger, natural calamities, wars, fights, murder and mayhem. Death is feared and so is worshipped and imagined as the Mother Goddess so that in Death one can be nurtured and reborn. The worship of the female deity is related to societies constantly threatened by Death, because the only way to make death bearable is to imagine it as the Eternal Mother who kills only to absorb in her lap and promises rebirth and rejuvenation. Mother Goddess is therefore the killer force, no wonder everywhere she demands blood and kill.

The act of killing as a part of worship is to overcome the fear of death by witnessing the death act and becoming the killer. Any cult that upholds death whether in the form of terrorists or nations demanding capital punishment is a set of people scared by uncertainty of life and paranoid because of the certainty of death. Animal sacrifice belongs to a community turned irrational because of their failure to bring about any form of certainty in life. If the people of the Kangra Valley still believe in the fact that the Goddess demands blood of its children then the objective conditions of life for these people does not seem to have changed since time immemorial. I wonder why these people feel the uncertainty of life as acutely even today as they felt it so many years ago. Is it because that medical care is still inaccessible for them? Is it still so far to the hospital today so that to be almost absent? Has education that makes Himachal Pradesh the most literate state in India after Kerala and Manipur not created sensibilities against this practice? Sometimes I feel that development is powerless to change the lives of people at large and the practice of animal sacrifice shows just that.

As my mind revolts against animal sacrifice with a strong feeling that it should be banned, it suddenly strikes me that most religious reforms and conflicts have taken place around the issue of animal sacrifice. Jainism and Buddhism contested the killing of animals, Vaishanvism fought Shaivism on the issue of vegetarianism; Shaiviites opposed Mother Goddess cults also around animal slaughter; Hindus oppose Muslims because of their animal sacrifice and so on. Indians are far kinder to animals than to human beings and hence while untouchability has largely remained uncontested, animal sacrifice has been at the core of social conflicts. The Goddess wallahs have hit back and the series of the peetha sthans like the temple of Jwala Mukhi and Naina Devi, or the various versions of Durga like the stone shrine of Kunal Pathri or of Shikari Devi, who distinctly looked like Kali shows that there was a community of rural folk who time and again asserted themselves politically against their kings who followed a milder version of the similar Goddess cult and of course the Buddhist Empire of Kanishka or the Vaishnavite merchants from the plains.

I was very sad throughout the steep climb to Mc Leod Ganj and hence I reached the place with much huffing and puffing and irritation. Dalai Lama was away in the United States. The place seemed far less like a mini Tibet but more like an exotic resort attracting tourists. There were yoga, tai chi and massage of every kind everywhere with momos, thukpas and Tibetan food joints strewn all along. I was happy to observe that in many places there was Tibetan vegetarian food because now I see a pampered and petted animal in every piece of non vegetarian food that I bite into. There were stickers, posters and T shirts demanding that Tibet be free. There were also posters and T shirts with Che Guevara’s face demanding autonomy and freedom. Interestingly there was no Gandhi, nor Nehru, nor any Indian leader, strange because Indian Freedom Struggle is the largest mass movement in the modern world. Tibetans were in majority, speaking only in their language, writing in their own script. They have refused to learn any Hindi and usually converse with the tourists and the local people with the help of translators. Tibetans avoid eye contact with the locals, and stay strictly among their community, pretending to see nothing, hear nothing and having neither the need nor the desire to speak anything. Yet the posters that announce HIV awareness classes seem to tell us of a different kind of interaction. Tibetans live a life of isolation, as strangers in a strange land, as if being on a platform of a train that has been pulled into a siding waiting for the relief engine to come and carry passengers to their destination. They are all waiting to go back home, beyond the snow streaked Dhauladhar Mountains where the locals easily go and come each year on religious festivals of the Goddesses but it was unsurpassable for the Tibetans because of the political boundaries.

McLeod Ganj is the only place where Indians appeared to be better people. The Tibetans overcharge for artifacts, cheat in food, talk rudely and show a peculiar sense of superiority that makes them appear more as colonizers than refugees. They seem to be doing us a favour by being our refugees and not the other way around. Dalai Lama claims religious and moral superiority but unfortunately no political autonomy because such a people as the Tibetans who live by petty businesses and American aid show scant self respect as they cheat customers, monopolize retail space and make things difficult for Indians and the locals to survive, cannot evolve into an autonomous political force. Tibetans are thus glorified alms receivers and not a people who seek self autonomy before they seek it from the others. Free Tibet seemed to me to be a pipe dream, as fragile as the clumsy water pipes of the total sanitation project of Himachal Pradesh.

We visited the Kangra Fort that was built in the time of Harshavardhana albeit rebulit and renovated several times after that, to possibly ward off attacks by the Sakas and the Huns. The Fort is unique in the sense of it being partly in the Roman style and in part rather Nordic !!! One can understand the Roman influence but it is difficult to make sense of the Nordic stylistic incursion, until and unless one allows for the possibility of Nordic architects and workmen who came into the lands of Bharat as the Huns marauded the Kangra Valley in utter defiance of the Romans and their trading routes in which Kangra was an important centre.

Dharamshala and Mc Leod Ganj were hot. Fans were seen in the markets and in some cases even air conditioners. People seemed to be wary of the climate change but did not quite know how to handle it. The present Katoch king whose home is the hotel we were staying in came to see us and gave us copies of a painstaking compiled time line of the ancient Kangra Valley civilization that started before the Indus Valley and the Egyptian Pyramids and experienced several bends in its course as the world moved on from the Roman to the Ottoman Empire and India went through the eras of the Mauryas, Kushanas, Guptas, Harsha, Turks and the Mughals. The Kangra Valley was decimated by the British colonies and continues to be dominated by the mainstream Indians who visit the place more to see the beautiful sceneries, eat Tibetan food and shop goodies in the curiosity cubby holes ignorant of the fact that Kangra is the womb of the unbroken Indian civilization as we see in the present primitive and primordial.
We returned to Chandigarh to find that a lot many more turbaned Sikhs were visible in its roads and alleys than what one could see in the 1980’s and the 1990’s and even the first decade of 2000’s. Haryana seemed to have lost to Punjab as far as Chandigarh was concerned. Madhuleena braved the heat to enter the maze in the rock garden. Nekchand is always amazing for his perseverance and among the millions of tiles, rocks, broken sanitary ware and discarded bangles lay intricate motifs of humans and animals that stood in perfect line and company and made an eerie picture. The numerosity of the figures and their being in formations creates shudder in the spine and while one wonders at the artistic techniques, one cannot but overlook the discomforting aesthetics.

The rest of the evening was spent in part with Sarabjit when she and I talked our hearts out discussing some interesting healing techniques that she learnt from a Holy Order.

Madhusree and I went for a short trip to Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary. Ever since Georgie, our Lhasa terrier has come into our lives it is no longer possible for us to be out of home beyond one night. We leave Georgie behind with our trusted people but their magic lasts only for twenty four hours after which she becomes distressed. So Madhusree’s and my footloose and fancy free life has been severely restricted to about 200 kms around Delhi, most of which we have exhausted. Bharatpur was one of those rarest of rare destinations that we had not covered in our twenty years of stay in Delhi.
Frankly speaking, Bharatpur never quite excited me because I could never get myself interested in birds; I did like it when the Serberian cranes flew into Kolkata Zoo and later in my life in my Hauz Khas home I would notice some exotic birds perched on my clothes line, which the landlord would tell were from all over the world headed for Bharatpur. But Bharatpur continued to remain outside my pale of interests because tigers and rhino and not the avian species constituted “wild life” for me. It was only because of the very short duration of our parole from Georgie’s bondage that we actually took a trip along the Golden Triangle to reach Bharatpur early this December.
Madhusree had booked a hotel called Birder’s Inn, a quiet place whose entrance resembled a bird’s nest. She has this huge knack for finding exciting places through the Internet. The hotel was small and quaint and we were the only Indians staying there; the rest of the guests were all whites and naturalists!! Outlook Weekends From Delhi said that there was no need to take a guide because the rickshaw puller would double up as the guide but nothing could be a greater blunder than this. The forest department guides have powerful telescopes through which one can see the smallest of the birds in its minutest of details. I never had an idea that apparently similar looking birds could be so different in the hues of its plume, shape of the tail, colour of claws, eyes and beak. I learnt that the first step in bird watching is to be able to identify the call and then associate the species with its habitat and learn about its perching habits and recognize its flight; after this locating a bird becomes fairly simple.
We were told that Bharatpur is only a quarter of what it used to be, especially because there is no water left in the park. Of the total area of 29 square km, 11 square km are supposed to be water bodies. Today Bharatpur is reduced to only a quarter of its former strength because of the lack of water. The water bodies today stand dry with sambar deer and antelopes grazing merrily with their herds and caracass of boats lie strewn untidily around these depressions; water seems to have left the sanctuary. We watched larks, robins, swallows, shrikes, kingfishers, woodpeckers, hoopoes, owl, eagles, babblers, barbets, starlings, crows, sparrows, mynas, flycatchers, peacocks, pheasants, ducks, cranes, vultures, drangoes, pigeons and night jars but this is only the tip of the iceberg. We were told that the exotic species almost abandoned this park though the naturalists were hopeful that the season of the migratory birds was not quite over and there was hope in the spring to come. The forest officers, rangers and students seemed to feel that the lack of water was due to the lack of rains – what they missed out was that the intense industrial activity around Bharatpur depleted the water tables mercilessly to dry up lakes and destroy one of world’s most bio-diverse natural habitat forever. Indians favour industries so much that they seem to miss out on the fact that environmentally insensitive development can ruin more livelihoods than what it helps to create.
What was supposed to be a tame and a benign forest full of birds, turned out to be a veritable epic drama of insects, plants, mammals, human beings and birds; in fact climate change seemed to actually form relatively a smaller part in the story. I realized that plants fought with one another for space as varieties of bush babool that destroyed other vegetation, species of grass tried to deterritorialize its contenders; eucalyptus eroded resources for mango trees and lantana bushes ate up peepals. Parrots were possessive of their territories and chased away the Egyptian vultures and dusky eagle owl and made them into reluctant visitors in the park today. Crows have a bad habit of cartelization and monopolization and they harrassed the kites and reptors out. In the marshy habitats, swallows fought with turtles for homes and cats were forever on the prowl to feed on infant chicks of the water hen. Porcupines harass pythons and loss of pythons is bad for the mongoose; mongoose dig holes that the dusky owls use and the loss of mongoose population have created havoc for the dusky owls. Cats however were the most commonly visible mammal in the sanctuary forever on the prowl to prey on infant birds and chicks. In our hotel too cats abound jumping on tables to drink milk from the milk pots after we finished our evening tea.
For a long time thanks to the forest management policies of the government villagers were denied access to the forest, and no cattle grazed in the park. As a string coincidence the brahmani cranes disappeared and the naturalists discovered that such cranes fed on the leeches on the bodies of cattle and if there were to be none of them, such birds also could not feed and breed. Vaccination brought down animal death rates and municipal corporations disallowed open disposal of carcasses, the vultures, jackals and hyenas had less food to feast on and were decimated.
Certain species of grass and shrubs that spread very fast and quickly bring about a forest cover. But these species like the eucalyptus, babool shrub and many other kind of grass also draw out enormous quantities of water. Over 200 species of birds have lost habitat due to the depletion of water tables due to the shrubbery planted by none other than the forestry department. The forest department is encouraging wild boar to root out these water guzzling shrubs but as these shrubs go, the certain species of insects they host also die. This upsets the food chain of small fish, tadpoles, frogs, and eventually birds.
We were happy that Sohran was our guide not only because his amiable nature and good command over the species of birds but also because he gave drew for us a wholistic picture of birds’ habitat, breeding habits, nesting patterns and told us many things about the deer, boars, cattles and cats in the forest. I realized that the bird that perched atop dead trees fought about 10,000 species of insects, 360 species of grass, 300 species of plants, 30 species of mammals and about 400 of its own kind to alight in Bharatpur as its winter residence. This is ecology, dynamic, dramatic and constantly unfolding; the stories of strategy, judgment, choice and decision making in the world of the flora and fauna is no less exciting than in any business venture. It is sad that the subject is taught so badly in schools.
Sohran introduced us to a few enthusiastic young naturalists; one among them was researching on pythons. Madhusree was very excited at this because she remembered Satyajit Ray’s story Khagam, where a man was made into a rock python, the species that the young naturalist was pursuing. Sohran told us stories of sadhus and holymen who could change in various forms of cats, tigers and snakes from their human selves and thus delude the people, Madhusree felt that the episode of the man turning into the snake Balkishen was a part of this local myth. Sohran was a Scheduled Caste, an exceptionally bright young man and his being so close to this myth struck me. There were many myths among the Dalits that spoke of magical powers of some human beings and these were basically the way that the downtrodden fantasized to resist the guiles of the upper caste.
I have traveled quite a bit as a tourist but I have enjoyed it the most when I have been a nature tourist. Everyone seems to get into sync with the nature tourist seeking her experience in the forest, helping her with clues on where to find a natural species she is looking for and introducing her to fellow nature lovers. The hotel owners, waiters, guide, co-travellers become a community which is on a pilgrimage with a sense of mutual sharing. The owner of our hotel was Tirath Singh, a Gujjar. He was a man of riches and now he wanted to enter the world of sophistication. He is of a certain kind, a kind that is sensitive and respectful of educated people and no wonder that his hotel were full of serious naturalists. The locals were a little contemptuous of Tirath’s closeness to the higher echelons of society and spoke of him in defamatory parlance. Sohran was especially very critical of the Gujjars, saying that they were a bit “cracked” clearly he did not quite like those that dominated his ilk through centuries.
The rickshawpullers were overwhelmingly Sikhs from Sindh and ours was one too. Never before these rickshawpullers had I seen poor Sikhs. Hakim Singh was cut up about the Congress government and I realized that he, like all Sikhs had a personal grudge against the Congress. He was all for BJP despite its communal politics. Sohran and he argued their heads off with Sohran supporting a nationalist, centrist, inclusive and accommodative party, and Hakim wanting an ethnic, partisan and a communal outfit. The caste war and the ethnic competition clearly had distinct political preferences and nothing was more evident than in the Sohran-Hakim argument.
Madhusree sat down with Sohran in the hotel lawns to note down the names of the birds she had taken photos of while I cleared out our rooms and got Tirath Singh to prepare the bills. We bid our goodbyes with tips to the waiters, mobile number to Hakim Singh so that he and I could get the gurudwaras to prepare for a showdown with the perfidy and betrayal of a government apparently for the aam admi and took Sohran’s card to help friends and relatives locate him in case they went to Bharatpur for he had one of the best telescopes among the guides. Madan got the vehicle ready, and since Fatehpur Sikri was only 21 kms away we decided to zip down the Golden Triangle expressway to pay our respects to Akbar, the Great.

5th December 2009