The wildlife photographer who has become a part of the forest

Sukumaran C. V.

“The shola forest and the meadows which have been gutted and destroyed by hunters at the hilltop of Nelliyampathy are the pang of my mind. Without having enough staff and funds, the forest department is quite hapless and helpless.The only one ‘weapon’ against wildfire in the hands of the forest department which fights the fire and the scorching summer is a banner which reads ‘Prevent Wildfire’. Without having enough staff strength and sophisticated methods, the department is playing a ‘fire play’ with the fire.  We have to conduct awareness programmes among the people who live in and around the forest. It seems that everything is ending in this reply—there is no fund. If there is no fund to protect the priceless and precious flora and fauna, what else we should protect and conserve? The underground water sources (uravukal) of the earth are drying up in the parching summer.  Earth is turning more and more parching and scorching. The answer to this ‘phenomenon’ is not trees but forests. We can plant trees, but we can’t plant or make forests. A small forest should grow in the minds of every individual. Only when it grows and spreads out from their minds; the land is covered with greenery. I have heard somebody saying that it rained as the result of their prayer. Never, friend; It won’t rain as a result of the prayer of the humans. It rains because of the prayer of other animals. The rain comes for them. What are the humans doing to the Earth?” (My own translation from Malayalam). This insightful writing comes from a person who sees forest and wildlife not through the typical anthropocentric view-point of the so called ‘educated’ society, and hence people like him are the really educated ones and this person is none other than the unique wildlife photographer N. A. Naseer. The passage is taken from his wonderful book written in Malayalam titled Kaadine Chennu Thodumpol.

N. A. Naseer is a wildlife photographer par excellence. What makes his photographs different from the usual wildlife photography is that he does not visit the forest only for photographing the wildlife. He is a part of the forest. His photographs show the serene bond between him and the animals. He has wandered through the forests for years together without camera in hand and has become a part of the forest as the animals, birds, reptiles, butterflies and insects are. Only after being a part of it, he started to photograph the forest and its children.

And his book shatters all our anthropocentric attitude and knowledge about forests and the wildlife. Usually the books on forest and wildlife are written from the perspective of the humans. But Naseer writes from the perspective of the forest and wildlife. He writes: “We should see forest as we look at a rainbow. We should touch the forest as if we touch a flower. We should glide through the forest as if we are in a dream. We should merge in and melt into the green of the forest. Then forest will take us with its thousand hands as if we are its children.” 

Naseer, who can rightly be called the Rachel Carson of Kerala, says in the book: “Everything should change and change is needed for everything. But the only thing that should not be changed is forest. I don’t know how we can call those who kill trees and mountains and marshes humans….”

We can see poetry in Naseer’s photography and Naseer’s prose is also poetic. He poignantly and poetically shows us that the Western Ghats and the forests are the precious sources of bio-diversity and they are the forces of nature which sustain us.

“The fact that the greatness of a small ant or a small worm is greater than that of the humans will be known to us only when we sit beside them. Daily, we prove that the only creature that sows destruction on Earth is the humans. While each small creature works hard to sustain Planet Earth, all the activities of the humans contribute to the destruction of the planet. We are travelling on the road of self destruction without recognizing the report of the WGEEP.”

In his long years of forest life, he has encountered almost all animals and reptiles, in the wild, face to face. But no animal (the carnivore or herbivore) or reptile has ever attacked him. He says that the wild animals can perfectly differentiate the humans who are their friends, who see them with reverence from those who come to kill them, who see them as something dangerous. 

“If the wild animals come just in front of us and if we reach very close to them, it is because of an intimate language, the language of heart, which is recognized by both the photographer and the photographed animals. We commit grave mistake when we consider it as adventure.”  

(The following are his photographs which show us this language of intimacy between him and the wild animals. When I informed him my intention to write an article in English on his wonderful book, he himself sent me the photographs to attach with the article. I have seen many ‘educated’ writers and activists, but I have never seen a man who is as humble as N. A. Naseer and hence I consider him as the really educated one. He is not ‘educated’ in the man-made universities to destroy Nature; he is educated in the school of Nature and by Nature. Hence he tries to protect and conserve Nature and Mother Earth as possible as he can.)  

This language of intimacy is the thing which makes Naseer the only wildlife photographer of his kind.

And the following insight makes his book the most important one of our times: “The roots of our indigenous trees have the power to sustain the coolness of the earth and collect water in them. It seems that those who pull out the roots don’t know that our small state which lies in a slanting position from the south to the west is sustained and protected by the power of the roots of the still remaining green patches….When the vapour that rises in the west from the Arabian Sea travels south on the wings of the winds, Western Ghats and its greenery are needed to block and cool it. Only then we will have drinking water through rains, only then there will be rivers, only then the atmospheric temperature will come down…But we are not interested in protecting the forest or the soil or the rivers. We are organizing seminars and meetings to wipe out the still remaining green patches in the name of development, and for the ‘farmers’ and the estate owners” 

Naseer shows us the pristine, pure, serene, beautiful and 

wonderful world of not only the big animals, but of the insects, butterflies, flowers, birds and even of the leaves and roots too. When he describes the different musics of the forest, the music you hear when it rains in the forest and the music you hear when it doesn't rain, we really experience the ecstasy. 

Let me conclude by translating a story with which he concludes the chapter on birds and their music titled Kaadu Paadunnu (Forest Sings): “Once, a Zen teacher (Zen Guru) entered into his class room and when the students were respectfully waiting to hear his words, a small bird started to sing sitting near the window. The class room fell into silence. After a while, the bird stopped singing and flew away. Then the Guru said: ‘Today's class is over’”. 

Hard choices - The Hindu

Hard choices - The Hindu

History and a right - The Hindu

History and a right - The Hindu

AAP, BJP & Varanasi - The Hindu

AAP, BJP & Varanasi - The Hindu

450 years of Shakespeare, the secular Bard of the World

                                          Sukumaran C. V.

Shakespeare approximates the remote and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but, if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed. This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life.—Samuel Johnson (in his Preface to Shakespeare).

April 23, 2014 marked the 450^th birthday of William Shakespeare, the greatest and marvelous creative genius the world has ever seen. We can even form a library with the books written on Shakespeare. There are many writers who are remembered forever only for their writings on the Bard. The most famous examples are A. C. Bradley, the author of Shakespearean Tragedy and Wilson Knight, the author of The Wheel of Fire. And almost all well-known English writers have written on Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats…the list is never ending. What makes Shakespeare the subject of so many books and why he is read more than any author in the world was or is read?

The reason is, as Samuel Johnson says in his Preface to Shakespeare, “…the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”

I was attracted to Shakespeare by Julius Caesar. Mark Antony’s brilliant speech by which he wins the sympathy of a hostile people and turns them against the conspirators enthralled me and thereafter, I spent months and years on Shakespeare and found that the most remarkable fact about Shakespeare is that his plays are astonishingly secular. Let me borrow a passage from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy:

“…although this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from another world, these ideas do not materially influence his representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy….while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or Christian. He looked at this secular world most intently and seriously; and he painted it with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essentials, without regard to anyone’s hopes, fears, or beliefs. His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary power.”

Read any of Shakespeare’s plays, you don’t feel that you are reading something written by another human being. Each play takes us into different aspects of human life. Again, in the words of Bradley: “We cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry IV and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and Shakespeare’s whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these reflections.”

When we read a literary work, we can garner the views of the writer, it may be religious or fanatic or progressive; but when we read Shakespeare we can only see Life and its evergreen emotions. There is no religious or theoretical dogma; there is no intolerance or fanaticism or racism that smothers life and its emotions. The powerful creative genius of Shakespeare celebrates secular life and its ecstasy and that is why even after 450 years, Shakespeare is still living and is loved.

Only an extraordinary creative genius can produce the following dialogue (of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) four hundred years ago when the prejudice against the Jews was predominant in Europe:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions;  fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

In the present day India, where caste and religion wreak havoc on the innocent, we have to learn the truth that the Dalits, the Adivasis, the OBCs, the caste Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians and everybody are ‘fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases and healed by the same means’. If we learn this precious truth, it will blur our caste and religious identities and we all will be humans. 

And who can forget the dilemma of human beings, of any age or of any locale, beautifully expressed through Hamlet, the character who ‘has been the subject of more discussion than any other in the whole literature of the world’, in the world-famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy of the first scene in the Act III of the play Hamlet?

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end 
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there is the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of? 

The English actor John Philip Kemble as Hamlet in 1802, in the grave-yard scene.

Party of the future? - The Hindu

Party of the future? - The Hindu

Hindutva vs caste - The Hindu

Hindutva vs caste - The Hindu

The battle begins - The Hindu

The battle begins - The Hindu

The non-stop march of bigotry and intolerance

Sukumaran C. V.

In 1811, Shelley was expelled from the Oxford University for publishing The Necessity of Atheism in which he wrote: “…all the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in god; this god is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and come in his name and announce him on earth. A god made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.”

Shelley was undermining the very structure of power and authority that oppresses people and denies them freedom of body and of spirit. And the authorities expelled him.

In 1798, Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in which he wrote: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…the church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.”

For publishing The Age of Reason, Thomas Williams was sentenced to one year’s hard labour and the British government confiscated all the copies of the book. The British authorities could not imprison Paine as he was already in prison in Paris for participating in the French Revolution.

In 1910, Gandhi published Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule in which he wrote that the western ‘civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ The British banned Hind Swaraj. While all other Indian leaders tried to ‘reform’ the poor Indians according to the Western standards, Gandhi approached them not to reform them, not to tell them their ways of living and their means of production are inferior to that of the West. He wanted to tell his people that the western civilization will be self-destroyed. The book was undermining the very basis of colonial rule and the colonial masters banned it.

The manifold destructive instincts and ways of the humans, especially of the English, inspired Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels in 1729. The world has yet to produce such a scathing and wonderful satire on the politics, colonization and military expeditions of the human race. In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels —A Voyage to Brobdingnag— Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives, to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Great Britain banned Gulliver’s Travels for its attack on the British ways of governance and subjugation.

When The Satanic Verses was published, a fatwa was issued on Salman Rushdie and the largest secular democracy in the world banned the book! In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese professor of literature who translated The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death. (It is ironic that a  ‘secular’ media house in Kerala that kept and keeps mum on the ban of The Satanic Verses is now yelling in full throat in defence of free speech!)

In the preface of the English translation of Lajja, Taslima Nasrin writes: “I detest fundamentalism and communalism. This was the reason I wrote Lajja soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodya on 6 December 1992. The book, which took me seven days to write, deals with the persecution of Hindus, a religious minority in Bangladesh, by the Muslims who are in the majority. Lajja was published in February 1993 in Bangladesh…banned by the government five months later….a fatwa was issued against me by a fundamentalist organization and a reward was offered for my death.”

Of course, those who are responsible for the demolition of the Babri Masjid would feel sympathy towards Taslima Nasrin and the Hindus of Bangladesh and anger against the Muslim fundamentalists. But let me quote the newspaper report Suranjan, the protagonist of Lajja, reads in the first chapter (Day One) of the novel:

“Needless to say, in Bangladesh too, the reaction to this event is bound to create frantic waves of religious hysteria. Temples will be smashed and leveled to the ground, Hindu homes will be burnt and their shops will be looted. Did the BJP, VHP and their associates, harbour the notion that their insane actions in Ayodhya would cause a reaction only in the geographical boundaries of India? In India the entire ordeal has already given birth to widespread communal riots. Five hundred people have died. Six hundred, may be even a thousand. The number of deaths increases by the hour. Did the devout Hindus, who were intending to look after the interests of their religion and their community, realize that there were almost twenty-five million Hindus living in Bangladesh too?”

                                              Taslima Nasrin

Now Penguin Books India, afraid of a fringe Hindu right wing group—Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, has agreed to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History and to pulp it! Having secured an easy victory over their bigoted fight against the expression of alternative views, the intolerant SBAS is now after On Hinduism, another book written by Wendy Doniger. I am really shocked to read that the SBAS ‘gave an ultimatum’ to the publisher (Aleph Book Company) to withdraw the book and pulp it by March 8, 2014! Are we living in a secular democracy or theocracy? By banning The Satanic Verses, our secular democracy genuflected in front of the theocratic elements and the secular fabric of the nation is being weakened by each day while the theocratic elements are strengthened by the omissions and commissions of the polity. 

What we are witnessing is quite dangerous for our pluralism and secularism. If the obscurantist and fanatic elements are not strictly curtailed, they will undermine the very foundation of our secular democracy which has already been emaciated.

If democracy has to be vibrant, there should be as many alternative histories and narratives as possible. If you want to destroy the alternative narratives that may be entirely different from your ‘authoritative’ narrative, you are killing democracy. I have not read An Alternative History, but now I strongly feel to read it. Let there be a thousand alternative histories and narratives of everything to shatter the centralization of power and knowledge.

As Howard Zinn says, ‘there is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.’ Let's search for the records left by the underprivileged and try to have alternative histories to understand the undersides of every age.

Curbing free speech - The Hindu

Curbing free speech - The Hindu

Theatre of the absurd

Sukumaran C. V.

A democratic discussion is going on on the topic of Progress. The delegates are the Development, the Politics, a Doctor, an Engineer, a Farmer, a Poor man, a Woman and a Tiger who represents the Environment.

Politics is presiding. In his inaugural address Politics said that he presides over the meeting because, of all the participants, he is the only one who stands to safeguard the interests of everybody. Then he called Development to speak.

Development: “Without developmental works, there will be no Progress. Environmentalists may argue that development is killing the planet. But they don’t see that the humans are able to eradicate poverty and live in prosperity only because there is development.” The poor man wanted to interfere, but he was not allowed by the president, and Development continued: “Now we want an airport in Aranmula. A feeder airstrip in Wayanad and the highway should be made four lane in Malappuram. People are agitating against land acquisition for these developmental projects that will change the face of the State.”

Doctor and Engineer: “Absolutely correct.”

            The paddy-fields at Cheekalloor in Wayanad where the feeder airport is proposed

Farmer: “Development wants to acquire acres of paddy fields and wet lands known as Aranmula puncha to construct an airport. For an airstrip or feeder airport in Wayanad, Development is trying to acquire 337 acres of biodiversity rich land. Of this, 169 acres are fertile paddy fields and to fill these fertile fields, many surrounding hillocks will be bulldozed. What a trail of destruction in the name of Progress!  However developed we have become or we may become, we have to take food to sustain life and the thing that helps us sustain life is paddy. If in the name of Progress you convert all our arable lands into roads and airports and rubber estates and concrete jungles what will we eat? If we bulldoze all hillocks and destroy all vegetation, how will we get fresh air and clean water? And for whom the airports are constru…” Development interfered and was allowed to speak.

Development: “Farmer is prejudiced against Progress. His argument is undemocratic.”

Doctor and Engineer: “Absolutely correct.”

Poor man: “I really don’t see how Farmer’s argument is undemocratic. He told the naked truth. Is speaking truth undemocratic? Do the farmers need airport? Do the poor need airport? Do the hillocks and plants and trees and rivers and the wildlife need airport?”

Woman: “As far as I am concerned, Progress means a peaceful atmosphere to live in without being harassed and molested. In the villages I feel safety and security while in the so called places of Progress and Development, I am being raped and harassed and molested and forced into prostitution. I am against converting the still remaining villages and forests into the concrete jungles in the name of Development or Progress. The Progress we have already had is more than enough. Let’s protect the still remaining villages, forests and the wildlife.”

Development: “I prefer the interests of the human beings to that of the forests and wildlife. My aim is to bring the fruits of Progress to each and every human being.”

Doctor and Engineer: “Absolutely correct.”

Poor man:  “Dear Mr. Development, in 1998, $6 billion was spent on basic education across the world; $9 billion on water and sanitation for everyone in the world; $12 billion on reproductive health for all women in the world; $400 billion on narcotic drugs in the world and $780 billion on military spending in the world. As the compiler of this list notes: ‘It would seem ironic that the world spends more on things to destroy each other (military) and to destroy ourselves (drugs, alcohol and cigarettes) than on anything else.’ Is this the Progress you refer to?”

Politics: “We are talking about Kerala and India. Take care not to go off the point.”

Poor man: “Sorry for the deviation. I didn’t know that India is not in the world. (The politician was happy to see that the Poor man noted and respected his presiding comment. He is not intelligent enough to note the satire.) But in the words of a well-known writer, ‘while 350 million people go hungry in India, former granaries in the country export tulips and dog food to Europe. While these same hundreds of millions starve, “their” government attempts to dump sixty million tons of grain into the ocean, because it cannot find export markets for that grain, and because it will not distribute food to those who cannot pay.’ Is this the Progress Development and Politics refer to?”

Development whispers something to Politics. Politics shakes his head in approval and says: “Time is over and if the representative of the Environment has anything to say without bias and prejudice, he is allowed a few minutes.”

Tiger: “Dear president Politics, I have been caught and caged and kept in a zoo ever since. My condition aptly expresses the hapless plight of the Environment which I represent. The ways of your democracy are really strange. The president says that he represents the interests of everybody and yet he supports Development blindfold! I know the president’s affiliation to a ‘progressive’ party that observed a hartal to protest the inclusion of forest patches into ecologically sensitive areas under the EPA, 1986. Development says that he prefers the interests of the human beings to that of the forests and wildlife. I would like to say that he prefers the interests of the greedy rich to that of the farmers, the poor, the women, the Environment and the wildlife. Many of the ‘absolutely correct’ people belong to the category of the greedy. The real name of Development is Business.”

Development whispers to Politics and he tries to stop Tiger, but his attempts are drowned in the roar and eloquence of Tiger: “The vast majority of the poor and the farmers need fresh air and clean water. To have both of these, pristine forest cover is needed and to preserve the forests, the wildlife is essential. The forest cover together with the wildlife is a prerequisite to provide a healthy atmosphere for the humans and other forms of life to survive. Development together with Politics has been destroying it long since. They have been destroying our habitats and killing us for centuries and they have been displacing the poor and the farmers, they have been annihilating the biodiversity of Mother Nature, they have been killing the planet our Mother for 30 pieces of silver….”

Again Development whispers to Politics and he shouts: “Guards.”

Guards of Democracy arrive with machine guns and are asked to take the animal away.

Development: (aside) “Brute, you are going to pay dearly for your guts and for revealing my real name.”

Farmer, Woman and Poor man: “It is undemocratic...”   

Politics: “The discussion is over. Let’s put the resolution for voting.”

Development, Doctor and Engineer voted for Progress. Farmer, Woman and Poor man voted against. Tiger was not allowed to vote. Politics used his casting vote in favour of Progress. (Thus the interest of the majority of the people and the Environment was crushed democratically). Development hands over a suitcase to Politics. Politics grins with happiness. Development scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it over to Politics and after perusing it, Politics calls the Head Guard and orders: “Open the cage and when the brute is out, shoot and kill it for trying to escape.”

Politics and Development and Doctor and Engineer go hand in hand to the air-conditioned car of Development with the escort of the Guards of Democracy. A gun shot is heard in the distance.

Woman, Farmer and Poor man: “Democracy has successfully dealt with the Environment , ours is the next turn.”

A view of the vast expanse of paddy land (Aranmula Puncha) that has been converted to set up a private airport company at Aranmula. Photo: Leju Kamal (The Hindu)

For sure, the new broom is here - The Hindu

For sure, the new broom is here - The Hindu

Woes of the displaced - The Hindu

Woes of the displaced - The Hindu