A naturalist's discovery of India

Alter does quite a remarkable exploration in book. He demonstrates the massive entwined entanglement between history of India, of its people, customs, rituals, geography and geology with environment

The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage

Author: Stephen Alter

Publisher: Aleph

Price: Rs 999   

Pages: 361

This exploration of India’s wild heritage by author, academic and naturalist Stephen Alter is not a journey through the country’s few remaining wild areas. It is not a chronicling of India’s animals, birds, fish and plants. It is not about ecology, environment, conservation or conflict. Rather, it is all of those things and much more.

In the last few pages of the book, reproduced on the back cover, Alter writes, “Wildness can be a state of mind. Over the past two years I have travelled thousands of kilometres to see hoolock gibbons in their natural habitat, snow leopards traversing remote, precipitous slopes, and Malabar trogons perched amidst a disorienting profusion of tropical foliage. Undisturbed, unsettled places have a raw and lonely beauty that evokes a sense of sanctity and leaves us entranced. Every naturalist is a pilgrim in search of ecological truths. To experience a wild environment and observe the species it sustains gives me a greater reverence for the mysteries of life, wherever or whatever they may be.”

The focus of  The Cobra’s Gaze lies in the last two lines. Because Alter does quite a remarkable exploration in this book. He demonstrates the massive entwined entanglement between the history of India, of its people, customs, rituals, geography and geology with the environment that nurtures it and in return gets nurtured.

We start, for instance, in Bhimbetka, as good a place to begin as any. Discovered in 1957, the rock shelters of Bhimbetka show evidence of continuous human occupation for 100,000 years. The famous rock paintings are dated from 10,000 years ago. Human, animal, mineral and vegetation are all here, from early depictions of hunting to prayers to gods, a paean to early human imagination.

Alter writes of the “spiritual significance of species other than our own” that he feels here. Through the scrub jungle of Madhya Pradesh, the traces of our ancient past mingle with the teeming wildlife, our yesterday and today in one place.

His own journey towards becoming a naturalist is presented in the first chapter, the books he read, the journeys of people he followed and the observations he made of humans and animals living together – the chipmunks in gardens and the lizards in our homes being two examples we are so used to that we do not think of them as wild. Or a photo of a cow and a peacock on an Indian street. And a description of the festival of Naga Panchami.

Early on, at Agumbe, he comes across a sacred grove, of the kind that will appear again and again across India, not just in the Western Ghats. The story of the fascination with snakes and the significance of snakes in ancient Hindu texts are both demonstrated in his telling of the story of the battle between the Great Naga Kaliya and the Great God Krishna on the banks of the Yamuna. We follow the cult and the myth and the worship of the serpent through Vrindavan and the Yamuna. As historian D D Kosambi has written, the fact that Krishna did not kill Kaliya underlines how Naga worship survived; the cobra’s gaze undimmed.

Snakes play an important role in the telling, but they are not the dominant species. Tigers, lions, leopards, frogs, macaques, langurs, nilgai, peacocks, hornbills, muggers, bees, tendu, ber, sal, banyan, peepul, kadamb, amaltas… you name it and it’s likely there in one of the sites visited.

We move from the Western Ghats to the Deccan to the Himalayas to the Satpura ranges. The diversity of landscape and foliage is mesmerising. The range of the story extends from the Mahabharata to Khasi tradition, to the many people who contributed to the naming and collecting of Indian flora and fauna. You suddenly, unexpectedly, find yourself up against the Great Hedge of India, in the Chambal, when British colonialists punished salt smuggling – thanks to a tax they had unfairly imposed on salt – with thorny vegetation.

Or you may be immersed in the story of the girl, named Goongi – that Jim Corbett heard about and of whom other records were kept – brought up by a bear. Or perhaps somewhat more disquietingly, she was one of many women that the people of the area claimed bears kidnapped and mated with.

Or Girnar, the last mountain that had its wings clipped in the days when mountains flew about in an unsettling manner, and there in the Gir forest, an encounter with two lionesses while on foot.

Or the hanging question of whether the cheetah was ever indigenous to India or merely an export from Africa.

Alter makes it clear that he is not an expert on conservation and nor is he a wildlife scientist. But the very scope of his experience and the depth of his study make him something of both.

His feeling and empathy for his surroundings and his curiosity about the connections that envelop us make  The Cobra’s Gaze a fascinating read, an exploration into the wonder of the wild, of life and of imagination. This ability to hold both reality and dream in one thought is a delight.

The only grouse about this book is that the print is a little too small and sadly, the older one gets, the bigger a problem this becomes!
 

In that context, it’s best, perhaps, to immerse oneself in the folk songs of the Baiga and Gond communities, translated by Verrier Elwin and Shamrao Hivale: “Look at me with the strong eyes of youth/ In the cold days the trees are flowering/ The wind blows among the hills/ Bending the treetops/ Take my hand, come with me/ For you have conquered me/ With the strong eyes of youth.”

The reviewer is an independent journalist who writes on the media, politics and social issues