Saving the tiger and wildlife will take more than a few Shernis

My TOI Plus column:

The man-animal conflict in India is a complex, burgeoning problem, and one that is left unaddressed both by our national forest policy and by our mainstream politics

 

Vidya Balan plays an ethical Indian forest service officer in Sherni (2021)

Amit Masurkar's new film Sherni has some things in common with his award-winning 2017 film Newton -- the central Indian jungle setting, the town-bred government official working against the odds in an unfamiliar setting, and unlikely collaborations among people striving towards something larger than themselves. The plot in one sentence: When a tigress named T2 starts to attack villagers in the vicinity of a Protected Forest area, an idealistic new forest officer named Vidya Vincent (Vidya Balan) struggles to prevent more human deaths, while also keeping her thoughtless, corrupt bosses from letting a self-appointed hunting hero kill the tigress.

Where Newton tackled the state of Indian democracy with pitch-dark humour and a sometimes-manic edge, Sherni approaches the tragic impasse of environmental conservation with enthusiastic sincerity, tempered by something akin to haplessness.

Perhaps that is inevitable, given that the man-animal conflict in India is a complex, burgeoning problem, and one whose roots are left unaddressed both by our national forest policy and by our mainstream politics.

To try and summarise a complicated history: India spent the first 25 years after Independence wooing parties of tiger-hunting foreign tourists, getting them to pay for the privilege of what sahibs and maharajas had always done. A 1964 New York Times article reported 15 government-approved jungle camps (up from only three in 1954) that organised these expensive shikar holidays, complete with “clean, tasty Western-style food” and liquor. “It is estimated that 3,000 tigers roam the forests, and they are multiplying fast enough to support the present shooting rate of about 300 a year,” the NYT declared.

That proved catastrophically untrue, and in 1972, the government did an about-turn. According to a 2017 article by the Kumaon-based butterfly expert Peter Smetacek, a group of hunters and naturalists had petitioned for a three-year break from tiger hunting to let populations recover, but in response Indira Gandhi's government promulgated the Wildlife Protection Act, under which hunting of any species was banned permanently.

Smetacek, like some others, has questioned the wisdom of this wholesale outlawing of hunting. For one, it made it illegal for farmers to protect their hard-earned crops from incursions by wild boar, monkeys, porcupines, nilgai, bears or birds without permission from a forest officer, pitting locals against the animal world they had cohabited with, while leaving them at the mercy of a corrupt state.

Also, if hunting was strictly regulated instead of being banned, allowing permit-based hunting of animals whose populations were growing too large, we would actually have records of animal populations besides the tiger -- and in fact be able to track and respond better to their declining numbers. That suggestion, outlandish and violent as it may sound to those who of us brought up in a sanitised modernity alienated from the ways of the wild, may be just the starting point we need to rethink the simplistic, often counterproductive legal regimes that have failed in practice to protect our forests.

Few Indian films before Sherni have engaged with this difficult terrain. In Anay Tarnekar's brilliant 2016 short The Kill, a poor adivasi man's deep, reverential knowledge of the jungle and the tiger goes from being a useless, non-monetisable asset to the only thing he can sell – but at a terrible cost.

In 1994, Sai Paranjpye made the sweet, well-intentioned, Chipko-inspired feature Papeeha, where her daughter Winnie Paranjpye played an anthropologist representing the tribal perspective on living in and off and with the forest, cast alongside a forest officer hero (Milind Gunaji) and a series of corrupt forest officer villains who run clandestine logging businesses.

A year earlier, in 1993, Pradip Krishen had made a film called Electric Moon (scripted by his then-partner Arundhati Roy), which takes a more sideways, ironic look at the situation. The film's central protagonists are a family of fading Indian royals who run a wildlife resort catering to foreign tourists, selling tiger hunting as an Orientalist fantasy, while responding to the new Hindi-speaking forest officer (Naseeruddin Shah) with snobbish class outrage. The humour is spot-on, as is the context: many Indian princely families who had once pursued hunting, often in forests that were part of their own territories, did indeed make this transition to being conservationists. It was a mixed metamorphosis that allowed them to retain their privileged relationship to the wild -- sometimes speaking legitimately from a place of knowledge, and sometimes just bending the rules for themselves.

The other film Sherni made me think of is Bhuvan Shome, Mrinal Sen's 1969 New Wave classic. Sen's film isn't intended as a realist comment on anything, certainly not on Indian wildlife policy. Yet, at its centre, is a man on a hunting expedition, who ends up not killing a single duck – and handing over the single one he brings down to a young girl he has become fond of.

Utpal Dutt sets out to hunt birds in Mrinal Sen's New Wave classic, Bhuvan Shome (1969)

Further, Sen's marvellous lightness of touch achieves much more than what that narrative outline suggests. Utpal Dutt, acting the grand hunter with his sola topi and rifle, is actually a tragicomic figure. The anglicised Bengali bureaucrat out of his depth in the Gujarati rural desert landscape represents not just bureaucratic mechanisation and urban dessication, but also a State totally disconnected from ordinary people's lives.

The low-level chai-paani bribes that Bhuvan Shome so sternly polices, and Mrinal Sen treats with comic indulgence, are still not the primary enemy. Nor is the biggest enemy the still-surviving big game hunter, who is given a little too much play in Sherni, perhaps understandably because a film needs a villain.

The problem is that out-of-touch State. Under cover of 'development', that State now cuts secret deals to give away our rivers and mines and forests to big men. It postures as a protector, but its grand diktats only cut off the deep, pre-modern, symbiotic relationships on which our forests managed to thrive for generations -- leaving both people and nature vulnerable to the worst kind of short-sighted profit motive. We cannot conserve our wildlife – or any heritage, actually – if we continue to treat those who live beside it as errant, trespassing children, rather than as dignified, proud, well-paid stakeholders.

Humans and animals have lived together before. We could do so again. But the task needs both intellect and courage.

Published in TOI Plus, Sun 27 Jun, 2021

Book Review: What would human history look like if told through our relationships with animals?

Simon Barnes’s ‘The History of the World in 100 Animals’ is a unique way of looking back – and around.

If you have the slightest curiosity about the millions of species with which we share the planet, Simon Barnes’s delightful new book will satisfy and whet it in equal measure. Picking out a hundred from these millions (a selection that ranges from gorillas to earthworms), Barnes provides a crisp, evocative history of each creature – and even better, of humanity’s relationship to it: real and symbolic.

Lions, for instance, have been part of human life from the dawn of our species, he writes, drawing evocatively on a pair of footprints from Tanzania’s Laetoli Gorge, possibly made by some adult hominid parent escorting a child to safety some 3.6 million years ago.

If the lion is our most ancient enemy, it is also humanity’s most admired symbol of masculine courage. Courageous warriors and kings have long been compared to lions, but have also spent a lot of time killing them. Lion-hunting became a mark of human courage, of our conquest of nature – and as we devised better and better weapons, while also just wiping out their natural habitat, lions began to disappear from more and more parts of the world. “The retreat of lions is the story of the advance of humanity,” writes Barnes, and it doesn’t seem an exaggeration.

If lions exemplify our changing relationship with the wildest part of nature – ie, fear, conquest and now increasingly expiation, then the house cat might be seen as the embodiment of its opposite – the domestication of the natural world. Barnes makes the commonsensical argument that as human societies became settled and agricultural, cats kept rodents from the stores of grain – but having once been a cat owner, he also brings in the ineffable pleasure humans derive from scratching a cat between the ears and having it purr in contentment. Cats were useful, yes, but they were also company. “Thus human civilisation advanced to the sound of the purring cat.”

Occasionally Eurocentric

Some of Barnes’s choices of species are more particular, connected to a specific discovery or episode in human history. For example, an early chapter is devoted to the existence of four different kinds of mockingbirds in the Galapagos Islands, apparently crucial in nudging Charles Darwin towards the world-changing argument about evolution that he eventually published in On the Origin of Species (1859). Another dips into the incredible and tragic history of the American bison, succinctly explaining both how that single species helped sustain Native American civilisation and how its near-total extermination was crucial to the founding of the settler-colonial economy that formed modern USA. Yet another takes on the Oriental rat flea, responsible for several world-historical outbreaks of bubonic plague.

But this is among many instances where Barnes comes across as rather obviously Eurocentric. The Justinian Plague of the sixth century AD, named for the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, and the heavily mythologised Black Death of medieval Europe get vastly greater attention from him than the much more recent Third Plague Pandemic, which he merely describes as having “killed 12 million people in India and China” between the 1850s and 1960. This seems particularly strange for a book published in the midst of Covid-19. 

Even a cursory reading of Wikipedia reveals the Third Plague Pandemic to be a world-historical outbreak in more ways than one – starting in a poor mining community in Yunnan in the 1850s, reaching cities like Canton and Hong Kong in the late 19th century, and travelling from those port cities via the trade routes to India, where British colonial regulations to control the plague – widely seen as repressive and culturally intrusive – became the focus of nationalist agitation and violence.

Barnes’s chapter on cattle, while it does a fine job of pointing out how deeply many human cultures identify beef-eating as the embodiment of plenty, wraps up the Hindu exception in a single sentence about McDonald’s not serving beefburgers in India. His chapter on the pig feels like a cursory dip rather than the immersive essay owed to an animal so painstakingly forbidden and deeply abhorred by several world religions. But for Barnes, even the Revolt of 1857 having been triggered by the use of pig and beef fat on cartridges elicits only wry British understatement: “The strength of feeling about pork is startling”. He mentions the pig toilet in India, but only Goa, not the North-East.

Perhaps it’s only to be expected. The gaps in Barnes’s exposure can sometimes unwittingly reduce vast swathes of humanity into insignificance in his version of “the World”, but he does vastly better than most Western authors might. He plays to his strengths – and as a well-read, well-travelled ex-journalist (he was Chief Sports Writer at The Times until 2014), those are many.

The author of fourteen books, Barnes has a great eye and ear for detail, and his understanding of the natural world draws on the best of English literature, from John Donne on the elephant (“The only harmless great thing”) to Coleridge on the albatross, from Kipling on cats to Orwell on pigs. And his book does range far and wide, his choices unaffected by the size of the animal, the extent of its terrain, or the length of time it influenced the course of human history.

Myths and reality

Sometimes a category is supremely general, as in the chapter on cattle. Sometimes it is necessarily specific: he has individual chapters on the house fly, the tstese fly and the fruit fly, as well as on the pigeon/dove, the (extinct) passenger pigeon and the pink pigeon. Either way, Barnes is always good for peeling away the pervasive myths with which humans like to surround the animal species.

He tells us, for instance, that the insatiable flesh-eating piranha is a myth – more remarkably, a myth invented by Amazonian locals in 1913 for the benefit of the then-American President Theodore Roosevelt, who had arrived there on a hunting expedition. The locals apparently filled a netted-off stretch of river with piranhas left unfed for weeks, creating a stressed, hungry, overcrowded population of piranhas that then obligingly devoured a cow lowered into the water, to Roosevelt’s everlasting awe.

A lifelong hunter, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was also responsible for a reverse sort of mythmaking – the fantasy figure of the cuddly, cute, quasi-human bear. In 1902, he refused to shoot a black bear already cornered by dogs and beaten with clubs. The incident became a Washington Post cartoon, with Roosevelt portrayed as a “hunter of mercy”, writes Barnes, and a subsequently smaller and cuter version of the bear then became enshrined in the children’s toy we call a teddy bear.

But what brings the book alive is not Barnes’s ability to cheerily condense reams of information, note the inevitable ironies of our mythical versions of most animals, patiently address persistent factual misconceptions, or sound the alarm, yet again, about the need for humans to recognise how we’re endangering other species and thus potentially destroying the planet. It is the enchantment he clearly experiences in the presence of the natural world, not just in flesh and blood (as when instinctively standing stock-still when confronted by a lion he had woken up by mistake in the African jungle), but also in the mind. 

In the midst of a chapter on the nightingale, for instance, we suddenly hear about him hearing the wind whistle through two hollow bones on a breezy day in Zambia and feeling like he had invented music “or at least recapitulated that moment in human history, quite by chance.” There is clearly much about our relationship to animals that we need to fix pronto – but magic always works better than mourning.

Published in Scroll, 20 Feb 2021. 

Filming the forest and why our relationship with it is complicated

My Mirror column:

The jungle still sustains millions in India. What does indie cinema make of the conflict that takes place when modernity vies for their minds and hearts?

Radhika Apte and Girish Kulkarni in the fine short film The Kill (2016), dir. Anay Tarnekar

I have spent the last week in a village near Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. Living with a local Gond family in a rural homestay that abuts the forest, I've had some occasion to contemplate not just the differences between city and village, but between village and jungle. The human move from hunting and gathering to cultivation, ie, from the nomadic life to the settled, agricultural one, is usually seen as an advancement for the species, and urban life is perceived as a step up from the rural. In this view of the world, the index of human development is the extent of our conquest of nature.

The idea that human beings could live in sync with the natural world, could choose to depend on the wilderness, seems either romantic or revolutionary. Of course, you might say that the key word here is 'choose' -- when humans are forced to live at nature's mercy, it can often mean fear and suffering.

That sense of mystery and majesty is what still makes the forest such a powerful place. For thousands who live on the forest's edge, or in tiny parcels of land carved out of the wilderness through the labour of generations, the jungle can simultaneously be worthy of worship – and something they are trying to separate themselves from. Being 'jungli' has never been respectable in the eyes of mainstream society, but most such communities' lives are still tied to the forest, not just economically but culturally as well.

Given how strong the jungle's hold is over large numbers of Indians, IT has featured rather minimally in our cinema. Pradip Krishen's under-watched Electric Moon (1992), written in collaboration with Krishen's then-partner Arundhati Roy, took a swipe at the entire Indian wildlife set-up. Set in a fictitious Indian national park, it featured a family of Anglicised ex-royals who successfully sell foreign tourists a package of Oriental tradition and ferocious wildlife, both half-fiction. 

A still from Pradip Krishen's acerbic comedy Electric Moon (1992), set in a wildlife resort

 
The next Indian indie I can recall that was set in a wildlife reserve is Ashvin Kumar's stilted 2009 feature The Forest. Despite its grave flaws, I mention it here because it unconsciously mirrors modern urban civilisation's deeply-conflicted relationship with the jungle. An urban couple (Nandana Dev Sen and Ankur Vikal) arrive in a jungle for some quality time, only to encounter the wife's belligerent ex-boyfriend (Javed Jaffery, playing a cop) -- and a vengeful, man-eating leopard. Kumar's direction hinges on portraying the jungle as a place of menace: Spiders preying on insects, haunted temples, a weird saadhvi, and a leopard that really has it in for humans. But this jungli B-grade horror movie comes with a 'Save the Leopard' postscript: The leopard in question turned maneater when injured by a poacher.

I didn't mind Kumar's idea of the jungle as bringing out the city men's masculine competitiveness, testing their testosterone, as it were. “We can go out tonight, if you want, hunting-shunting, yaar,” proposes Jaffery to his ex-rival Vikal. “Centuries of instinct right here, in your balls.” More interesting is Vikal's opening voiceover, suggesting something supernatural about the forest: “I have come to believe we were summoned. That we answered some primeval call. And that nothing that happened that night was either chance or coincidence.”

Kumar's film doesn't deliver on that promise of enchantment. But entering the jungle can often suspend one's sense of modern-day reality, a feeling most clearly embodied in animals whose raw physical presence can still reduce human beings to our most elemental fears. Anay Tarnekar's taut short fiction, The Kill (2016) captures it spectacularly.

Currently available on a streaming platform for curated arthouse and classic cinema, The Kill casts the adept Marathi actor Girish Kulkarni as a poor adivasi man called Gopal who spends his nights gambling away his wife's meagre earnings -- and his days following a tiger. Tarnekar successfully captures not just the feel of the jungle and the great beast's leisurely, loping gait, but the grave, hushed awe with which Gopal treats him. And yet there is also an intimacy there. “Balasaheb,” scoffs his wife (Radhika Apte), referring to her husband's name for the tiger. “What is he, your uncle?” But a statue of a tiger finds place in the family shrine.

The film does not mention it, but the tiger (and sometimes also the leopard) has long been revered as a deity by communities that share a landscape with it. The people of the Sunderbans, the mangrove-covered islands that are home to the largest population of tigers in South Asia, believe in a greedy, man-eating deity called Dokkhin Rai, who is half-Brahmin sage, half tiger-demon. In the North East, the Garos wear a necklace of tiger claws for protection, while the Mishmis see the tiger as their brother. In the forests of western India (where Tarnekar's film is set), the tiger is worshipped by many adivasi communities under the name Waghoba or Waghjai or Wagheshwar, with many beliefs and rituals believed to protect both humans and their livestock. In the Gond home from which I write this column, the domestic shrine has no tiger god – but the man of the house, an ex-forest guard, keeps the tiger as a totem on his motorbike.

But as modernity beckons, it often asks people to sacrifice their old gods. Tarnekar's film ends in tragedy. The death of one's gods is a kind of death, too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Mar 2021.

Acrobats of the Upper Canopy

Don’t be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque

is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western

Ghats.

Slug: Narr

Don’t be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque

is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western

Ghats.

Slug: Narr

Reporting and researching this piece was a joy, though it also made me tragically aware of how we're ruining the earth for other creatures. It's my first piece for the nature and environment website Roundglass Sustain (please click link for all the superb pictures). 

Don't be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western Ghats.

It was April 2014, and I was in the Western Ghats to meet an endangered primate. We drove on, the way the man had pointed, our gazes fixed on the tangled canopy. There! A group of monkeys with black faces, black bodies, and light facial hair. But Erinjery chuckled. This wasn’t the monkey we wanted. The Nilgiri langur we’d met has glossy black fur and a striking mane, similar enough to be confused with the monkey we were looking for. But what distinguishes our chosen primate is its shorter, tufted tail.

Fewer than 4,000 lion-tailed macaques — locally known as simhavaala or singavaal kurangu, literally ‘lion-tailed monkey’ — exist in the wild. They are, Erinjery informs me, divided into approximately 47 subpopulations across at least seven locations in the Western Ghats. These wet evergreen forests are also home to an impressive array of endemic plant and animal life, including over a dozen mammals found nowhere else in the world. The lion-tailed macaque, fondly abbreviated to LTM, is one of those: so perfectly adapted to these forests that conservationists are convinced it can function as an umbrella species. Protect it and you protect the whole forest ecosystem.

And it needs protection. The Ghats run about 1,600 km from north to south, but according to the research of wildlife biologist Dr. Ajith Kumar, forests now cover only about 25 percent of the slopes. The British began felling as early as the late 19th century to create cardamom, coffee and tea plantations. Agriculture, dams and human settlement have only speeded up the depletion. Since about 2004, though, Nelliyampathy’s macaques have benefited from an unusual land use shift: at least three plantations have been reclaimed by the state forest department and begun a slow return to wilderness. By Erinjery’s estimate, Nelliyampathy in 2014 had some 200 lion-tailed macaques living in 14 groups, making it one of the best places to see LTMs in a somewhat natural environment. But LTMs in the wild are shy. As soon as they spied us, they would move deeper into the jungle.

******

Usually found climbing and leaping through trees some 60 to 100 feet tall, the LTM leads its arboreal life with a lithe grace that belies the astounding height of its acrobatics. Its style is poise, not display. It barely ever descends to the ground even for water, managing on fruit sap and dew.

Unlike the Nilgiri langur, whose whooping ‘hoo hoo hoo’ calls are among the most frequent sounds of the jungle, it rarely makes much noise, devoting most of its energy to the search for food. The only thing you might hear as it travels through the upper canopy is a gentle ‘coo’, helping keep the group together.

When Erinjery and I finally found the LTMs, a silent feast was in progress. A group of about 40 was scattered across a clump of jackfruit trees on either side of the road. A large oblong fruit, fibrous yellow inside and ribbed green outside, the jackfruit originated in these forests. So it makes sense that it is one of the favourite foods of the LTMs, the oldest of the Western Ghat macaques. But the jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, weighing up to 36 kilos, while LTMs are among the world’s smaller macaques, reaching a head-body length of only 16 to 24 inches and an adult weight between 2 and 10 kilos. It’s quite a sight to watch: an LTM balancing itself between two branches, using its forelimbs like arms to immobilize a jackfruit larger than itself, then tearing into it with sharp front teeth. I even saw a sub-adult carry one away to eat in peace, climbing with its back limbs while holding the fruit with the front two and its teeth.

Like other primates, LTMs have forward-facing eyes and excellent vision, as well as opposable thumbs dexterous enough to manipulate fruits. Other than jackfruit, they eat figs, spiny green wild durian, elephant apples, and mangoes, supplementing this frugivorous diet with insects: caterpillars, spiders, cicadas and mantises picked off leaves. A juvenile LTM is likely to spend more time foraging for invertebrates than a grown one. Like human children, they need more protein.

Also like human babies, LTMs take time to grow up. The more common bonnet macaque, often found in close proximity to the LTM, has a similar lifespan, of about 20 years. But while a bonnet macaque starts reproducing at age 3 and gives birth every year thereafter, an LTM female is, on average, 6.6 years old when she first gives birth — the oldest among all macaques. And she will have only two or three infants in her lifetime.

LTMs usually live in groups of about 20, with a single dominant male. Where do the other males go? The answer is a fascinating one. While adult females remain in the group they were born into, an adult male LTM must migrate when it turns five or six, and enter another group to mate. An anti-incest rule!

******

Nelliyampathy’s 736 sq. km. of fragmented forest has begun to redevelop the connectivity needed for LTM males to migrate. But a full third of the world’s LTMs now live in privately-owned forest patches crisscrossed by plantations and human settlements. For every LTM in Nelliyampathy, there is at least one living in Valparai, 130 km away. There, I watched in disbelief as two male LTMs ambled across a busy road to investigate a heap of trashed plastic plates for leftover rice and dal. Returning to our jeep, I found another macaque peering out of it cartoonishly, as if to say, “What guys? No food?”

But the state of LTMs in Valparai was no joke.

Like Nelliyampathy, Valparai began as a colonial plantation area. Today, though surrounded by the protected forests of Anamalai Tiger Reserve, Valparai is a much larger urban settlement. Also, unlike the shady half-jungles of coffee and cardamom that play host to LTMs in Nelliyampathy, Valparai is dominated by tea estates, whose greater tree-clearance amplifies the habitat fragmentation that is the biggest long-term threat to these macaques.

Two of the largest Valparai groups, comprising 160-odd LTMs, are living a strange new life: isolated from other groups, hemmed in by human habitation, spending 30-40 percent of their time on the ground instead of the four percent normal for the species, and consuming new foods.

In Valparai, it is tragically common to see LTMs by the roadside, making an easy breakfast off local cultivars like the guava. When a car stops, a daring male can get a still easier snack. I saw three different monkeys show up for their fix of fried, salty processed food.

Ananda Kumar, a scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in Valparai, suspects that growing construction and tourist traffic has increased human-animal interaction, changing LTM behaviour and causing conflict and roadkill. To help, Kumar and his team had built fire-proof canvas bridges to link the tree canopies on opposite sides of the busiest roads, and hired two staffers to track these two groups daily. Between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., they held up placards telling drivers to ‘Go Slow’ and tried to persuade day trippers — many from a rising tribe of amateur photographers — not to feed the monkeys.

These are emergency measures. Long-term conservation needs plantation owners to work with the NCF. Restoring forest fragments and planting connecting tree corridors across a nude expanse of tea bushes would help create a self-sustaining habitat, in which migrating males from one LTM group can find a mate in another.

The growing number of LTMs in Valparai can appear a good thing, especially since hunting remains a threat elsewhere. But the larger group has 120 individuals, more than six times the size of an average group in the wild. Both groups have become multi-male, and Mysore-based primatologist Mewa Singh says the biological effects of the inbreeding “will only show themselves in several generations.” And given radically altered diets and exposure to human diseases, a ballooning population could suddenly crash.

What I’d learned about the lion-tailed macaque in the wild was that they were almost entirely arboreal, uni-male societies, dependent on the fruits of the rainforest and its connected canopies. In Valparai, all of this had changed. But unlike bonnet macaques and rhesus macaques, known to commonly snatch food and act aggressively with humans, the LTM’s forced engagement with the human world has not yet changed their essential temperament. As one of the placard-holding NCF trackers said, “Sometimes they come and touch us gently on the shoulder. They’re soft-type animals. If you don’t disturb them, they don’t disturb you.”

I can only wonder how much further we intend to push them.

Published in Roundglass Sustain, July 2019.

Delhi can't afford to lose a single tree

The very character of the city might change forever. 

A grand old peepal in Netaji Nagar, Delhi. July 2018. (Photo credit: Trisha Gupta)

In the first week of July, soon after Delhi received its first official monsoon rain for 2018, I went for a night walk in Sanjay Van. The air was heavy with moisture, and the light of the full moon came filtered through a sky even hazier than Delhi's usual. The oppressive humidity mattered little as we made our way into the undergrowth, listening for nilgai, watching in horrified fascination as a spider on its giant cobweb gift-wrapped its supper before our eyes. What made the walk such an incredible experience was the feeling that we were within blinking distance of the lights of Vasant Kunj and JNU, and yet very much in the wild. If we had any doubts, as we clambered up onto the 11th century wall of Lalkot, two packs of jackals in the distance began an impromptu howling match.

Sanjay Van forms the core of the South-Central Ridge, a 626-hectare tract that's one of Delhi's remaining chunks of urban forest. That classification can seem confusing, because the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) which controls the area, seems to conflate the cultivated greenery of parks and gardens with forests: over the years, the authorities have even planted several non-native species that are merely ornamental, like succulents, cacti or champa trees. They have cleared spaces around the rocky outcrops, as if to encourage picnics; built a gigantic look-out tower, a machaan for viewing wildlife – and then laid out a lawn around it.

It struck me later that this apparent inability to distinguish between jungle and garden might have a deeper implication. It might, in fact, have a slightly sinister connection to the claim, last made in the State of Forests Report of 2017, that Delhi's forest cover is increasing. “Despite several infrastructural projects and large scale construction taking place in Delhi, the Forest and Tree Cover of Delhi has been increasing on a sustained basis from 22 Sq. Km. (1.48%) in 1993 to 299.77 Sq. Km. (20.22%) in 2015,” the Delhi government's Forest Department states.

But the government pats itself on the back, adding that “The Hon’ble Prime Minister has also complemented Delhi on its rising green cover over the years,” even though the same report makes clear that Delhi has lost about 0.2 sq km of very dense forest and 0.9 sq km of moderately dense forest since 2015. The stated “increase” is an eyewash, a sleight of hand achieved by changing the mode of calculation of forest cover in 1999, such that scrubland, plantations and orchards now count alongside legally notified forest areas as part of forest cover.

***

This is the sort of institutionalised skullduggery in keeping with the horror that the Central government authorised more recently: cutting down thousands of trees in the heart of South Delhi. A Rs 32,835 crore plan for the redevelopment of seven Delhi neighbourhoods -- all some form of “government colony” -- approved by the Centre in July 2016, turned out to have been granted permission to fell over 16,000 full-grown trees.

Each of these neighbourhoods, from Sarojini Nagar to Srinivaspuri, have been traditionally characterised by two-storeyed housing surrounded by generous open spaces and shade-giving trees, even if plot sizes, invariably, are calibrated to match the occupants’ status in government. Going by the 3-D images on the corrugated high walls currently surrounding these areas, this profoundly familiar urban form will soon be a thing of the past.

In Sarojini Nagar, Nauroji Nagar and Netaji Nagar, for instance, a total housing stock of 8,087 government-owned flats will be replaced by 15,510 flats. To finance the cost of construction, the NBCC gets to build and auction 8,00,000 square metres of commercial real estate in these prime central locations. As environmental activists, academics and policy-makers have pointed out, this redevelopment will not just 'densify' these localities, but put a great deal of pressure on civic infrastructure intended for far smaller populations.

It would also alter the character of large parts of Delhi. The citizens’ movement that came into the public eye three weeks earlier as 'Delhi Trees SOS' has brought people together not just to hold placards but to hug trees in Sarojini Nagar. Some have put together skits and musical performances about the role of trees in the city's life and as a bulwark in our losing battle against air pollution. Others have initiated a 'tree census' that they hope might place the state’s claims under scrutiny.

It is true that these -- that we -- protesting South Delhi citizens have a disproportionate voice in the national media and social media, because they are English-speaking and upper-class, and have the privilege of airing their objections to the press because so many of them -- us -- are journalists. Of course we should ideally be fighting to protect trees from thoughtless developers all across the country, not just in what we consider our backyards. (The Goa government, for instance, recently approached the National Green Tribunal for permission to cut 55,000 trees for the construction of a second airport in North Goa: activists allege the real number of threatened trees is 90,000.)

None of this, however, excuses apathy or mockery of the protests currently underway in Delhi. As Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil wrote in their now-classic book Ecology And Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature In Contemporary India, there are structural reasons why bureaucratic regulators and their political masters are bound to fail our forests: “with no rewards for honest performance as custodians, and no punishment for misappropriation of the resource base, the regulators stand only to gain from profligacy – except, occasionally, when a major misdemeanour comes to light and they are exposed to adverse publicity.” Adverse publicity in Delhi has shown results: a Delhi Court bench stayed tree-cutting until July 26, and on July 7, the Delhi government revoked its tree-felling permissions to NBCC.

In Netaji Nagar last Sunday evening, I joined a friend and eight strangers in an ongoing tree census. At the end of a muggy hour and half, having gazed up into and measured the girths of a glorious neem, two shahtoots, two amaltases, a pilkhan, a possible tumri and a massive peepal, I emerged from my chosen census gali to find an even grander peepal standing sentinel over the remarkably peaceful chauraha. The local presswali, who had ironed clothes under it for fifty years, said it was planted by a “panditji” (who also happened to be a Class Four government employee). Stuffed with pictures of Hindu gods, it continues to be worshipped by locals. But it was also hung with green chadars from an adjacent Sufi shrine. That's just one of the 2276 trees we might yet save from the NBCC. It's enough to make anyone a tree-hugger.

Trisha Gupta is an independent writer and critic. She writes a weekly column on Indian cinema for the Mumbai Mirror, and other pieces on films, books, art, photography and the city for other publications. She blogs at Chhotahazri.

Published on the website Brown Paper Bag, 13 July 2018.

The Art of the State - II

My Mirror column:

Schools, guns and graffiti in two films about the Indian state: When the Woods Bloom and Newton.

(This is the second of a two-part column. The previous column is here.)

I return this week to my discussion of Amit Masurkar's Newton and D. Bijukumar's Kaadu Pookkunna Neram (When the Woods Bloom, WTWB): very different films that deploy strikingly similar motifs to depict a similar subject. In both, an incident of anonymous violence is followed by the uniformed might of the Indian state descending on a Maoist-controlled adivasi area -- centred, in both cases, on a school. 

In the Malayalam film, the policemen have arrived to stay. "Two rooms will be enough for us," pronounces a senior cop, being magnanimous. "There are only four rooms in the school," replies the teacher. "But even if you wanted to take over the whole building, we could not stop you." The fact that the police sit at the top of this ecosystem becomes even clearer when a sleeping cop wakes up and starts hitting two curious children who have sneaked past him to touch some guns. When the teacher objects, he retorts rudely: "You're here to teach children. Don't try to teach cops!" The teacher keeps quiet, but later stops the cops from using the schoolchildren as free labour. Some of the loveliest scenes in Dr. Biju's film involve the tribal children singing.

The songs they sing are clear and sweet, a world away from the raucous film music that the policemen bring with them. "We are the masters of the forest," run the lyrics of one, its dulcet tones belying the sharp irony of the words as they ring out in a forest that no longer seems theirs. In Masurkar's film, where black humour replaces lyrical melancholy, two tribal children are forced to sing songs to entertain the cops. In both WTWB and Newton, local anger can only be expressed in graffiti -- scrawled on the walls of the sole pucca structure for miles around: the school.

But the sentiment of those messages, let alone the irony of their location, does not seem to be reaching the state, which remains intent on widespread repression — which can only produce greater public anger. Early in WTWB, a truckload of cops is unleashed on a village to search for a single 'terrorist'. In the end, when the protagonist (Indrajith) returns to the police post, he is greeted with surprise - and told that that six Adivasis have been jailed for a month on the non-bailable charge of killing him. Newton, where the police have come only for a day, with the ostensibly benign purpose of holding an election, also underlines the casual terror they wield.

In one silently sarcastic sequence, the cops barge into huts, extracting tribute as they rough up people to make them exercise their 'voluntary' right. Poor adivasi India, it seems, is where the state only shows up to replenish its stocks of fresh-brewed liquor and freshly-killed chicken. Newton takes a lighter approach than Biju's film to deliver the same depressing message - the police do not merely implement the law: they are the law. At least while they have the weapons.

This, too, is a motif both films share. WTWB puts the gun in the hands of a woman and a Maoist, letting us see how contingent power is when she taunts the now-unarmed cop: "You're afraid too,without a gun, isn't it?" Newton's climax, too, depends on a gun changing hands - though here we are under no illusion that it will eventually return to those who are licensed to use it. In this utterly skewed world, if you think you can challenge a police officer, you must either be powerful — or a fool. Which is why the long-serving Loknath ji, having observed Newton Kumar's refusal to kowtow to Aatma Singh, sidles up to him to ask after his political connections.

The chatty, diabetic Loknath ji is the excellent Raghuvir Yadav, who began his cinematic career in Pradip Krishen's Massey Sahib as a lower functionary of the colonial state, and now embodies to perfection this lower functionary of the postcolonial state. Both as the youthful Massey and as the middle-aged Loknath ji, Yadav offers up an everyman character whom we laugh at, but also with. And in so laughing, we also laugh at ourselves.

Loknath ji also offers a humorous indictment of the status language and literature have in today's India. An MA in Hindi sahitya who now advises people to focus on English, which he is teaching himself by watching American slasher comedies on his phone, he combines a deadpan cynicism about our times with a hope that he might still catch up.

But in his desire to write a "jombie story" about a police team that enters a jungle in a Maoist area (and never coming out), Loknath ji also gives us a momentary reprieve from realism, a pleasurable dip into the sensational that reminded me of Lalmohan Babu in Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories. Fiction makes other appearances in the film: as indulgence, as entertainment, as a trap. We hear a policeman reading a novel aloud to his mates, a potentially erotic romance about one Ramju. Less innocuously, in the pre-climactic scene, it is by telling the story of the day aloud that Newton realizes that that is what it is: a story he has been sold.

I have not yet watched Dr. Biju's other films, but I was fascinated to learn that none of the characters in his last five films have names. Masurkar and screenwriter Mayank Tewari are clearly equally cognizant of the significance of naming. Their protagonist has already shed the weight of his caste surname. His new first name rids him of the femininity of 'Nutan', while putting him on par with a famous Englishman - and making us instantly think of gravity. At some fundamental level, naming lies at the core of fiction. The fact that Newton can name himself anew is testament to the power of imagination.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 19 Nov 2017.

Back to the Jungle

Watching the new Jungle Book movie in Hindi made me think again about its Indianness.

Last week I did something I have never done before (or at least not voluntarily): I watched a Hollywood film dubbed in Hindi. I'd already seen Jon Favreau's new Jungle Book (and written about it in this column). But the Hindi version had a special tug. There seemed a homecoming double bill experience to be had, what with the refurbishing of Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj's 'Jangal jangal baat chali hai' song, and the added miracle of Bagheera and Baloo becoming conjoined with Om Puri and Irffan Khan. 

And despite everything I knew about the Hollywood production, my subconscious mind clung to a notion that a Hindi-speaking Mowgli would be coming home - to the Seeonee (Seoni) hills, where the wolves and the tigers still roam the banks of the river Waingunga (Wainganga), in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Because Kipling's original Jungle Books were set in the grand old central Indian forests of Satpura, later immortalised by the Hindi poet Bhavani Prasad Mishra as "Satpuda ke ghaney jangal. Neend mein doobey huye se, Oonghte anmaney jangal". 

Although of course Mowgli would be 'returning' to a language he never spoke. Kipling's dialogue did not lack for dramatic resonance, but it was the full-bellied English of its time. Here is Mowgli, speaking to his wolf-sibling to plan his revenge against the absent Shere Khan: "So long as he is away do thou or one of the four brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out of the village." 

Yet this was most definitely a text located in an Indian world - Kipling may or may not have acquired it from life, but he conveys a sharp sense of the terrain and the vegetation. The flaming dhak tree, the lush creepers and the steep ravines animate a very particular kind of jungle -- that very word, of course, was acquired by English from the Sanskrit/Hindi word for wilderness. When Kipling describes the Cold Lairs, the lost city where the Monkey-People take Mowgli prisoner, you can practically see the ruins of a Mughal-Rajput palace: all red sandstone reservoirs and milky-white fretwork. Calling the king of the jungle Shere Khan is a stroke of genius, as is having the wolves mock him as Lungri, the lame. 

Jon Favreau's English dialogue, of course, is nothing like Kipling's. And as it turns out, the Hindi version follows closely on the chatty contemporaneity favoured by Favreau. There are a few instances when the ease of the English is belied by a Hindi term that has too much grandeur about it - the Water Truce becomes Sandhi Kaal, the Peace Rock becomes Shanti Shila. The Sanskrit-heavy words achieve heft effortlessly, but they're also slightly impenetrable, I imagine, to many thousands of the Indian children who watched the film this month. Sometimes a translated term is weighed down by clunkiness and connotations the original didn't have - "insani pilla" entirely strips away the clean, unforgettable beauty of "man-cub". 

But on the whole, screenwriter Mayur Puri has done an admirable job, creating not just appropriately translated dialogue, but sometimes whole new characters on the strength of accent and vocabulary. Many of the ordinary jungle folk speak in Bambaiya street-lingo: the rhinos, the comically big-eared rodents, the porcupine. The porcupine is scurrying through the dry forest ticking off stone after stone as "apun ka patthar" when he realizes that the water level in the river has dipped enough that "Shanti Shila dikh rehli hai". 

Bagheera speaks a more proper Khadi Boli, allowing for an occasional thaw into the familial: "Main kanoon jaanta hoon, chhote," he deadpans to the deer at the water's edge, who seem skittish and ready to scatter as the panther comes to drink. There is a slight metallic tang to Om Puri's voice, which I thought worked very well for Bagheera's snappish, no-nonsense air. And he pulls off some most ambitious Hindi wordplay: "Shere Khan ki dhamki koi geedad-bhabhki nahi thhi (Shere Khan's threat was no jackal's bluster)". 

The hypnotic rock snake Kaa has Priyanka Chopra at her sultriest, but the dialogue doesn't give her enough of a persona. "Vishwas karo mera" can't match Disney's "Trusssst in me". The one sentence of Chopra's dialogue that worked for me is "Mehfooz rakhoongi tumhe", with the "mehfooz" emerging as a slow hiss. Perhaps if Kaa kept to this Lucknawi nazaakat register, we might have had a real character. 

Which Baloo gets. Mayur Puri's dialogue turns the happy-go-lucky bear into an amicable, lazy-ass Punjabi, who calls Mowgli "puttar" and "yaara" and is only too happy to let the man-cub lagaao his "jugaad" (one instance where the Hindi is much meaningful than the English "tricks") while he ambles alongside. 

The only thing about Baloo that moves quickly is his tongue, and the Hindi version does wonderfully well with his crackerjack conversational style, such as when Baloo adapts a 1963 melancholy classic song to inform Mowgli that he owes him a favour - "Jo waada nahi kiya woh nibhaana padega..." - or explains the stinging bees with innuendo-laden ease as "Kudiyan dank maarti hain". 

Perhaps the most significant Hindi rewording is that of Kipling's "Red Flower" ["...Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name."] into the rather more dramatic "Rakt Phool", literally 'blood flower'. And unlike in the original Kipling tale, where he is trampled by a herd of buffaloes, in Favreau's film it is the Rakt Phool by which Shere Khan meets his death: burnt to a cinder, bhasm, like some evil Hindu demon.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1st May 2016.

The Strength of the Pack

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

A sparkling new adaptation of The Jungle Book is a chance to take a fresh look at Kipling.

The latest version of The Jungle Book hit Indian screens on April 8, a week ahead of the US. The fact that we get first dibs on the film, however, is about the only concession to 'Indian-ness' here. (I'm not counting the fact that the only actor on screen is a 12-year-old Indian-origin New Yorker called Neel Sethi.) 

Perhaps my brain has been permanently warped by The Jungle Book I grew up on (a lovely hardback with Disney images), but it seems to me a bit absurd to expect Indian-ness from something originally written by a white man in 1895, filmed in English as early as 1942 (by Alexander Korda), and successfully Disney-fied in 1967. 

What we think of when we think of The Jungle Book is Mowgli, a thin brown boy making the forest his own, accompanied by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. But Kipling's Jungle Book was actually several tales, first published serially in newspapers, and only some featured Mowgli. And even those didn't necessarily follow from each other: they had to be stitched into a single narrative. 

In some ways, it was the films that did this work. Korda spent most of his dramatic energy on Mowgli's ambivalent relationship to human society - in Kipling's memorable phrase, the "man-village". It was Walt Disney who created The Jungle Book most of the world now knows: the tale of Mowgli's battle with Shere Khan the tiger, encounters with the Bandar-log and Kaa the snake providing adventurous sidelights. 

Jon Favreau's version, in glorious live action 3D, remains largely faithful to the 1967 Disney film, though it darkens the tone and ups the pace considerably. It is Shere Khan who bookends this version, snarling and sneering to terrifying effect in the voice of Idris Elba, and asking the question that is at some level, at the moral centre of the Jungle Book: "How many lives is a man-cub worth?" Favreau gives the angry, embittered man-eater of the previous film a sharper identity as a tyrant, a power-hungry creature who wraps his unlawful activities in a cloak of hypocrisy and violence: "You did not respond to reason, so now you will know fear." 

On the other hand— not driving Mowgli out of the jungle but trapping him into self-doubt—is Kaa the snake: "Don't you know what you are?" 

And what is Mowgli - this creature who cannot ever be a wolf, no matter how much he tries, but who is too free, too wild to inhabit the world of men?
The idea of a feral child has long fascinated us. Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, were raised by a she-wolf, and famous cases of wolf-men have been the subject of films by European auteurs like Truffaut and Herzog. 

The appeal of Kipling's tale is that it reverses the perspective to that of the jungle: so not wolf-child, but man-cub. Instead of a return to human society, Kipling imagines what it would be like to be taught the ways of the wilderness. And what has made his text persuasive for generations of children is the richness of his conviction that the wilderness has ways. The Law of the Jungle seems, if anything, more clear, more just, and infinitely more navigable than the changeable codes of human societies. The idea of a Water Truce that would allow all animals to access the river in dry season, or the resounding call to togetherness in "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack": these explain why The Jungle Book's evocation of loyalty, honesty and codes of honour were a huge influence on Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. 

Sure, Kipling was a British imperialist in whose eyes there was no possible equivalence between brown people and white ones. But our response to that doesn't have to be a bar on reading him. It's much more profitable to read him critically but carefully, to read him and marvel at his ear for language, and his eye for the Indian world he grew up in. For one thing, he could often be funny. Here he is talking about small boys in Indian villages being sent out to graze the herds: "The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses." And here he is making a snarky comparison between human dispute settlement and the jungle version: "One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward." 

If we are to insist on mapping the Jungle Book onto Kipling's real-life surroundings, then the "man-village" would have to be the British, and the jungle representative of Indians. But then we would need to account for the fact that Kipling's man-village, although armed with the ultimate weapon ("the red flower", i.e. fire), is prone to fear and exaggeration. It is the jungle folk who are heroes - not just because they live simply and keep their word, but because they are able to take a man-cub in.

Regardless of whether it challenges or confirms colonial stereotypes, much of the power of the Jungle Book lies in Mowgli's learning how he can belong to the jungle, yet not fear the things that come naturally to him as a man. What Mowgli offers, eventually, is a model of accepting the different parts of oneself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 April 2016.

Secular Deities, Enchanted Plants: the art of Mrinalini Mukherjee

My essay on the late sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, published in the newly launched website The Wire.



In one of AS Byatt’s Matisse Stories (1995), a self-declared “artistic family” is stunned to discover that their silent, reliable, long-time housekeeper Mrs. Brown has been making more with their cast-off clothes than the patchwork tea-cosies they grudgingly display. The person most in shock is Robin, serious artist and irritable man of the house, whose repetitive paintings of single objects – ‘problems of colour’, he calls them – are summarily rejected by a fashionable London gallerist. In favour of Mrs. Brown’s dazzling cavern of creatures, knitted and stitched from scraps of wool and cloth.

Mrinalini Mukherjee was no Mrs. Brown. She was the only daughter of the artists Benode Bihari and Leela Mukherjee, and trained in fine arts at Baroda’s MS University. Today, her work is part of the public collections at Bharat Bhavan and Lalit Kala Akademi, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Tate Modern in London–and international interest is only getting stronger. But as the artist Nilima Sheikh, Mukherjee’s close friend and contemporary, points out, “For a very long time, the sculpture world, especially in Delhi and Baroda, didn’t accept her as a sculptor, because ‘woh toh kucch craft mein kar rahi hai‘. But she kept improvising, and pushing the boundaries. Her work became much more relevant [than theirs].”

Peter Nagy, curator of the Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art that opened on 27 January 2015, a week before her unexpected death, goes further. “She got her final revenge,” he chuckles. “Because all those men chiselling away at their chunks of marble in Garhi studio, who pooh-poohed her – very few have gone anywhere, really. In terms of scale, her work just kicks sand in their faces.”

Female, not feminine

Walking into ‘Transfigurations’, as the show at the NGMA is titled, there can be not the slightest doubt that one is in the presence of a brilliantly assured artist. The largest pieces here are the hemp-fibre sculptures that were Mukherjee’s signature for a quarter century, from the early 70s to the mid-90s. The painstaking knotted construction and fluid organic forms may have been responsible for that early, wounding dismissal of this work as ‘craft’, but what leaps out at you is Mukherjee’s ability to turn her malleable, ‘female’ material into stable, imposing, often monumental forms. Frequently, these also display a powerful sense of the sexual.

Close to the entrance, for instance, we are met by ‘Pushp’ (1993) and ‘Adi Pushp’ (1991), which despite their names, belie any idea of the floral as we usually think of it: pretty, summery, sweet-smelling. ‘Adi Pushp’, ‘the first flower’, in particular, is a marvellous evocation of organic growth, the tubular black forms at its centre unfurling into impressive red and brown ‘petals’. Nature in Mukherjee’s conception is no mild, tameable thing. Yet what also emerges from many of her figures is a harmonious continuum between plant, animal and human form; sometimes with the addition of a superhuman element.

The arresting reds and purples of ‘Aranyani’ (1996) combine the sense of some forest flower writ large with that of a female sexual form, and an enthroned regal figure. The three free-standing figures that make up ‘Vruksha Nata’ (1991-92) appear plant-like at first, with their layered stems and fronds in light brown and lime green. But as one looks at them again, their inescapably humanoid qualities come to the fore: a sad, drooping head, a bent back, what seems like the start of a slow, painful hobble towards the other.

The forest is never far away, and Mukherjee’s forms of divinity are often particular to it. ‘Vanshree’ (1994), woven of yellow and mauve, has what seems undeniably like a face. Her eyes are sunken in, or perhaps hooded, with age, or sleep. Her lips protrude, sulkily. An umbrella above her, she sits grandly upon a golden throne, and may or may not grant you an audience. ‘Van Raja’ (1991-94) is even grander. Placed in a woven alcove arched like a temple is a standing figure, very definitely male, but also animal. Is this a tiger turned god, his golden body made erect, to be worshipped amidst his unruly jungle of green?

Crafting Art

For Mrinalini Mukherjee, refusing the hierarchy of high art and low art came naturally. Seeing craft and art as parallel to each other was part of her artistic legacy, both from her parents, and from her mentor at Baroda, Prof. KG Subramanyan. Subramanyan himself had studied at Shantiniketan, and been Benode Behari Mukherjee’s student. “So there was a sort of lineage going on,” says Sheikh. Shaped by Tagore’s rejection of the colonial aesthetic, Shantiniketan’s teachers and practitioners had long taken interest in Indian art forms and indigenous materials. While primarily a painter, Subramanyan took craft seriously enough to have left his teaching job and joined the All India Handloom Board as a Deputy Director for a couple of years in the 1960s. Later, in 1975-76, he was also elected a member of the World Crafts Council.

But how did Mukherjee arrive at her unusual material? In the late 1960s, says Sheikh, during MS University’s annual Fine Arts Fair, the campus was thrown open to the public. Students would often make “gateways, sculptural forms, design units… to make things more festive.” One of the materials used for these was hemp fibre, and even as an undergraduate, Mukherjee was drawn to the possibilities of the material. So she chose mural design as the option for her MA, and asked Subramanyan whether she could specialise only in hemp in the final year.
Subramanyan himself had worked a little in hemp, but Mukherjee’s conception of the material was very much her own. For one, she was remarkably invested in scale. As early as 1972, she was commissioned to produce a 30-foot fibre sculpture for the DCM pavilion at the Asia 72 trade fair. She then did a 45 X 4 foot one for the Ashoka Hotel, and a 14 X 70 foot mural for the Gandhi Memorial Institute at Mauritius. (The Mauritius work still exists, it has recently been photographed by an art enthusiast, hung on the wall on either side of what appears to be an auditorium stage—sadly somewhat robbed of its original grandeur by large black speakers.)
Her second crucial departure was to make her sculptures freestanding, or at least viewable in the round. Mural design, which she trained in, involves working on walls or ceilings: think Italian frescoes, or the Ajanta caves. But after early works, like the Mauritius one, and another on display here, Water Fall (1975), Mukherjee seems to have consciously abandoned murals.

A couple of other works at NGMA do lean against a wall, like Sitting Deity (1981), whose trunk-like form and playfully disc-shaped ‘stomach’ gesture to the elephant-headed, pot-bellied Ganesh. On the whole, though, there is a clear progression being marked from hemp netting as a ‘decorative’ element—something to enhance the look of an already existing structure, like a doorway or wall—to independent forms with a definite structure, shape, bulk. Mukherjee’s work gave hemp heft, metaphorically and literally.

Material matters

But it wasn’t quite enough. In the 1990s, Mukherjee slowly stopped working with hemp. We don’t quite know why. She had been working in a single material since the beginning of her career. Also, from the mid-70s, she had been aided in the laborious knotting and twisting by a woman she had trained, known as Budhiya. By the 90s, Budhiya was too old to assist her, and the work seemed tedious to do alone. There is something interesting here, about the collective labour demanded by craft.

Whatever the reasons, a chance workshop at the Sanskriti Kendra in Anandgram, followed by an invitation to the renowned European Ceramic Work Centre in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, enabled her to explore ceramics. Almost immediately, she began making larger works than most ceramic artists do. A decade or so later, in the early 2000s, she moved into bronze, perhaps the most traditional material for sculptors. “She chose bronze for its longevity, its stature, its seriousness,” says Nagy, who showed her bronzes at a solo show at Nature Morte in 2013, and had earlier curated her ceramics at Lokayata Gallery in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village.
Looking at the bronzes, one feels, first and foremost, a sense of loss at the disappearance of the deep reds, forest greens and coal blacks that had made her hemp work so vivid. The ceramics, happily, are a mix of unglazed flesh tones and glazed vermilions and purples. All her work is striking, but to me the hemp sculptures remain the most memorable. I would even say she went from a complex mediation of organic forms (in hemp fibre) to a more simple translation of them (in ceramic and bronze).

Natural, sexual, human

But it is nature that brings her work together. The lovely arrangement of ceramics called ‘Lotus Pond’, Nos. I to VIII, gives us overlapping lotus leaves on the water surface, tubular stems turning into chutes and spongy thalamus-like forms. Several of the glazed ceramics are cabbage-like, with veined leaves. Others are flowers opening slowly to the sun, upturned half-globes erupting into life—and yet preserving a sense of hidden orifices.

That keen eye for the voluptuous complexities of nature also extends to the cast bronzes. Most of these are purely vegetal in inspiration, the pleasure of them arising from making us see naturally-occurring textures and shapes anew: the stippled interior of a calyx, the gleaming smoothness of an outer stem, the single palm frond slowly detaching itself from a trunk. Here, too, you see a scalar progression, from the smaller Natural History series (2003-2004) to the bronzed plant limbs of Palm Scapes (exhibited in 2013), massive pieces whose precise sense of balance once led Peter Nagy to describe them as “only slightly perturbed by gravity”.
Speaking at the inauguration of the NGMA retrospective, with her friend Mrinalini in hospital, Nilima Sheikh spoke of the child ‘Dillu’ growing up between Shantiniketan and Dehradun (she studied at Welham School, where her mother Leela taught art). Both were places where people went to be with nature, where artists lived with flowers. “Flowers were planted and grown in gardens, worn, sung in praise of, painted, worked into shorthand in textile and rangolis.” But that childhood love of plants and flowers was transformed, in the artist’s hands, into something anthropomorphic and awe-inspiring.

Talking about art

Mukherjee rarely spoke of her artistic process, and even less of what her art ‘meant’. “No, she would never explain the themes,” laughs Pankaj Guru, her assistant on the bronzes for the last sixteen years. “She would just come to the studio and say, I want to do this. She dreamed those works.”

“She used to resist interpretations of her work at first, even the gender politics in it,” agrees Sheikh. “Later she came to accept various interpretations, and was helped by it, I’m sure.” But on the whole, Sheikh suggests, Mukherjee prized spontaneity. Like her mother, who sculpted in wood and later in bronze, (and unlike her more famous father), she was averse to theorising. “Her intellect, her judgement, her connoisseurship was unparallelled. But she didn’t intellectualise.” In a world in which visual art seems increasingly dependent on the words through which it is mediated, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s art manages to make you ask the question: are words the only way to think?

The Mrinalini Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, continues until May 31, 2015.