A naturalist's discovery of India

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.

- RANJONA BANERJI

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.