Reading the Land

Arati Kumar-Rao's Marginlands is a timely chronicle of India's changing landscapes and climate

- Latha Anantharaman

MARGINLANDS: Indian Landscapes on the Brink by Arati Kumar-Rao PICADOR INDIA

You might say that this is the right time to read a book like Arati Kumar-Rao’s Marginlands, as our forest regulations are being diluted, our hillsides are collapsing under the weight of rain and greed, and our coasts are crumbling into the sea. But the misguided policies arising from the misreading of landscapes began centuries ago. And as long as an official sees a mountain and calculates how many cubic metres of granite can be mined from it, or looks at a riverbed and plans to build a runway there, those misguided policies will live on.

In each chapter of her book, Kumar-Rao maps expansively, and probes intensively, a precisely balanced and highly fragile ecosystem and the people who have lived with it. Then she narrates the history of policies and developments that are killing it. She writes of the secret stores of water, and prosperity, in the Thar Desert, which looks empty to those with no eyes to see. It has no forests, no wildlife of the type that fits on a logo, and the government labels it a wasteland. So it mines the landscape, installs windmills, and lays roads that block a delicate network of aquifers and wells, till the desert actually becomes a wasteland. Along the western coast of the subcontinent, stone seawalls, groynes and concrete breakwaters disturb the natural flows and accretions of sand and have alarmingly speeded up erosion instead of mitigating it.