Sub-continental drift

A 'deep natural history' of the Indian subcontinent will reorient the way you see the land

More than 15 years ago a friend lent me his copy of the Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Written in 1996, it is a brilliantly crafted book on the evolution of life and reads like a whodunnit on a planetary scale. Its scope and the author’s intellect and felicity with language enthralled me. It resuscitated my interest in the sciences and natural history that had been dulled by years of science education in schools.
 
Last week, I felt a somewhat similar elation and excitement when I began reading Pranay Lal’s Indica. The book is, as the author puts it, “a deep natural history of the Indian subcontinent”. 
 
Lal’s penmanship may not entirely match Quammen’s but the book equals Song of the Dodo in scope. More than compensating for slightly less linguistic dexterity, Lal narrates the not-so-linear story of life on the planet in 468 pages anchored in the sub-continent. For an Indian reader (or, for that matter, a traveller to this part of the world) it opens up a great opportunity to see these lands anew, to go beyond the deep, rich material history that enthrals but often limits our sense of the subcontinent.
 
The reader is transported easily to Adilabad (now in Telangana) digging out the dinosaur bones of the biggest herbivore the region saw, the Barapasaurus. If I take a little liberty with the pundits of science, the big-footed lizard was so big that the chap next to it was only a third its size. You can go see it in Kolkata, all assembled up now.
 

Barapasaurus, the big-footed lizard found in Telangana

The reader is zipped to a village Katthghar near National Highway 80 in Jharkhand to learn how it came about that during wedding ceremonies brides from outside the village are play-cheated into cooking quartz gravel that looks like rice grains as a test of their culinary skills. It’s all geology, Lal teaches you.
 
You are then made to connect the dots between Madagascar and the Khasi hills in Meghalaya and the ponds of Tamil Nadu looking at the Pitcher Plant and Sundew to visualise how the world moved and took shape as we know it now — quite literally.
 
Next up, you could be standing on the shallow banks of rivers flattening out into the plains down from the Shivaliks in Uttarakhand to understand that young beast of a mountain range, the Himalayas, which just won’t stop growing up.
 
You could be swept into an inter-continental journey of immigrants 14-15 million years ago — apes, buffaloes and otters from Eurasia and Africa to the subcontinent.
 
Or you could be made to stand in one of Bengaluru’s fast-dwindling artificially crafted parks to understand what continental-scale mystery gave the city the best weather the year round — of course, till city planning (or the lack of it) began to undo it.

On one of these trips you could also get to learn why it’s dumb to use dinosaur as a pejorative term for the old-fashioned. That bit reminded me how Quammen’s book taught years ago that calling someone foolish a “Dodo” is ecologically stupid.
 

Rice-like volcanic gravel found in stream beds in Jharkhand

In short, Indica  is a breath-taking view of the world about which we only learnt a snippet or two but never got beyond the Darwin-as-taught-in-school phase. The millions of years Lal has to cover does not leave him enough space to be as light-hearted as a Judson can be in her narration but he does entertain on this crazy road trip over time-scales we mostly forget to imagine about in our mundane days.
 
Lal is not a palaeontologist or a geologist though the book derives almost entirely from these two fields of science. Perhaps, we can thank him for not pretending to be one in writing this book. He is a biochemist by training. Disclosure is due: I knew Lal as a colleague for a short period about a decade and a half ago when he would talk rather obsessively about mysterious fevers and infections in India.
 
But he says he has scanned the research and minds and hearts of many palaeontologists and geologists to write this book and his efforts are more than evident. The thick section of notes at the end of the book, explaining in greater nuance what he tries to simplify for lay readers in the main text, is further proof of his labour.
 
Some subject experts have pointed to a few errors of facts and theory in his book. He admits to three he is set to fix in the next edition and commits to correct any other that may be discovered after a microscopic reading. That’s good. Ask any science journalist what a nightmare it can be to convince scientists that a good read on science is not a peer-reviewed academic journal. India is replete with brilliant scientists who are restricted by the nature of India’s scientific institutions and sometimes too taken in by the weird scientist-worship in our society to write for those beyond their clique. If Lal’s book could convince some of our amazing ecologists, palaeontologists and geologists to outperform his effort, that would be fantastic for society at large. We need more such writing.
 
We need to read natural history written engagingly to appreciate and relish our lands and region (and not just the Galapagos Islands) in new and fascinating ways.
 
The book could easily be extended to multimedia projects rich with visuals that would reach a much larger and younger audience. Lal’s book could have done with some more of that. He or his editors could have also perhaps fine-tuned and nuanced the language to tease out yet more the ambiguity and uncertainty that imbue all sciences.
 
But do go buy it. It has exactly what one should read (and read to one’s children) to realise one doesn’t need human imagination to create magical stories. The planet has done it for us. Over millions of years.

Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent 

Author: Pranay Lal  

Publisher: Penguin/Allen Lane

Pages: 468

Price: Rs 999