OL Nation: The Nilgiris, Todas and sustainable environmental action

It was a privilege to be invited by the Old Lawrencians Association (OLA) to participate and moderate in a discussion on the environment of the Nilgiris. SEE THE VIDEO ...

Save shola forests to combat climate change

It is necessary to protect the native forest ecosystem of the Western Ghats so that they can continue to be the water tower of the peninsula. Planting forests at random along the banks of rivers - as being advocated today in the Rally for Rivers - could be counterproductive. MORE ...

The native shola-grassland ecosystem of the Nilgiris, where wattle has also been planted.

In a drought hit country, sacred groves are crucial for climate resilience

Facing the yin and yang of drought and flood years, sacred groves in the country can provide climate resilience. MORE ...

Even during the peak of summer in 2017, this stream inside a sacred grove in Kerala had water flowing in it.

Saving the sholas: To overcome drought, Nilgiris' forest communities return to traditional wisdom

The drought caused by the failure of the southwest and northeast monsoon of 2016 has led to introspection and action in the Nilgiris to conserve the native shola-grassland ecosystem. MORE ...

Toda elder Poofsed in Artawl Mund.

Regenerating sholas and grasslands

In 1981, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had started an innovative programme. They called it Socially Useful Productive Work (SUPW). We called it Some Useful Periods Wasted. In our adolescent irreverence, we did not quite enjoy the labour involved in digging the soil of the Nilgiris upper plateau to plant saplings of eucalyptus. But then there was the desire to contribute to the larger purpose of afforestation of the hills that had hosted us for our school life.

This week, I was back at the Lawrence School, Lovedale, to watch students plant grassland species from the native shola-grassland ecosystem of the Nilgiris in a patch near the main water stream that supplies the institution. The students worked with gusto.

The students of Lawrence School, Lovedale plant native grassland species.

Having lived through a dry 2016, they were aware that the shola-grassland ecosystem provided the lifeline of water. Within the limited understanding of teenagers facing multiple pressures, they were aware of the linkages. In the Whatsapp group that links my classmates, there were jokes asking whether it was Shola aur Shabnam, caricaturing the name of a 1992 Bollywood movie starring Govinda and Divya Bharati.

It is not as if we did not live through weather-related highs and lows during our period in school. In 1979, the Nilgiris faced the brunt of a cyclonic storm. Strong winds whistled through the valleys and it rained heavily for days. There were landslides in different parts of the hills. Many of the highway culverts that were rebuilt after the storm had the ‘For 1979’ painted on them for years. The bund that impounded the water of the Lovedale Lake breached, turning the lake back to what it was originally – a wetland. There was also a dry period, when water in taps had run dry.

Even though we trekked extensively in our campus and in other parts of the hills, we mistook the eucalyptus, wattle and pine stands to be the original forests of the Nilgiris. So much so, that when the then headmaster announced a project to extend the girls school building, one alumnus protested the deforestation that would cause. In fact, the extension project would have removed a few eucalyptus trees – a native species from Australia.

The Nilgiris had not yet felt the resource pinch. Living in a period of low population and a rich natural resource base, nobody told us that what the eyes saw was not reality. We did not know of the process that was already underway for converting grasslands into softwood plantations and shola forests into tea plantations.

This was an institutionalised process that had begun in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Tamil Nadu Government in its push for promoting industrialisation had started the process of systematically planting pulpwood trees on grasslands, which were deemed to be wasted lands. Eucalyptus and wattle were grown, harvested and sold to rayon and paper mills in the plains. The branches from these trees were also good as firewood for the local population.

The second prong of the institutional attack on the environment was when shola forests were converted to a tea corporation, to employ the Tamil tea workers repatriated from Sri Lanka after the accord signed between Lal Bahadur Shastri and J.R. Bhandaranayake in 1966.The State’s actions signalled a go-ahead for everybody else.

We did not know in our school days was that the Nilgiris was home to the unique shola-grassland ecosystem in the upper plateau, which constitutes 1,800 sq.km out of the total 2,400 sq.km of the district. This ecosystem is found only in the higher reaches of the southern Western Ghats and works in combination with each other. There are grasslands on the hills and the evergreen shola forests in the valleys and groins of the hills.

A typical shola-grassland ecosystem of the Nilgiris.

The sholas and grasslands are climax vegetation types, i.e. they have reached the logical conclusion of their evolutionary process. It is believed that it is because of the ground frost in the upper plateau of the Nilgiris no native tree species grow on the grasslands. Trees grow only in the protected valleys. 

While the grasslands let the rainwater and the moisture in the fog run off, in the valleys the sholas hold on to this water in black, peaty soil formed from centuries of decaying leaf litter. Like a sponge, the peat bogs release water all through the year in the Nilgiris.

If the water reservoirs in the Lawrence School at Lovedale have water for the local needs, it is because of water flowing in the stream that feeds it all through the year. The stream, in turn gets its water from the shola patch upstream. It is estimated that there are around 1,100 streams in the Nilgiris, originally starting from the shola-grassland ecosystem of the upper plateau. In turn, they join to form four rivers – Bhavani, Moyar, Kabini and Chaliyar. While the first three join the Kaveri, Chaliyar flows west from the Nilambur forests to meet the Arabian Sea near Kozhikode.

Rivers, after all, are drainage channels. They carry the water that fall in their catchments into the sea. More rain, more flow; it is as simple as that. It is the ecological health of the forests in the catchment that determines whether a river will be perennial (flow throughout the year) or seasonal (flow only when it rains).

Thus the stream originating from the shola forest patch in Lovedale has an importance beyond meeting the local needs – it helps provide (in its minor way) the Kaveri its perennial water flow. In addition to fighting with Karnataka for not releasing enough water in the Kaveri during dry years, Tamil Nadu can strengthen the flow in the catchments originating within its boundaries. The shola-grassland ecosystem holds the key for this. 

The sholas and grasslands also regulate the temperature regime of upper plateau along with its water flow. Shola patches are a few degrees cooler than the adjoining patches. It is not so under eucalyptus, wattle and pine stands. Even though located within the tropical latitudes, the upper plateau of the Nilgiris provides a temperate climate. It is a sky island protecting a unique plant and animal life.

If the temperate climate changes into tropical, the Nilgiris will lose its sky island status. Some of the flora and fauna in the upper plateau have their closest relatives in the Himalayas. For instance, the Nilgiri Tahr is a cousin of the Himalayan Tahr. The Nilgiri Rhododendron also shares a similar relationship with the Himalayan Rhododendron.

The Nilgiri Rhododendron is a cousin of the Himalayan Rhododendron.

The high altitude of the plateau is only partially responsible for the temperate climate profile. If it was the only factor, the Nilgiris would have continued to be cool all through the year. Instead, it is warmer during most of the years and bitingly cold during the winter months. These extremes could be an indication for climate change in the hills. The impacts of the global-scale climate change are aggravated by the destruction of the sholas and grasslands.

A combination of changing land use patterns and the changing climate are changing the man-animal interface on the plateau. We did not have monkeys and gaurs in school during our time in school.

The idea of regenerating the shola and grassland in a small patch within the school campus originated from a batch of alumni who completed their course in 1981. The group provides core funding and guidance for the project. Headmistress Sangita Chima, a few teachers and students enthusiastically support the work. During their free hours, the students work in the field planting the grasses.

Unlike us, these students are leaving school with an understanding of what the shola-grassland ecosystem is, and how it contributes to conservation of the Nilgiris environment and from there adjoining parts of peninsular India. They would opt for different careers in their lives. But somewhere this understanding will form a foundation layer on which they will build other domains of knowledge and expertise.

In 1981, we were right and the eminences at the CBSE were wrong. The time we spent planting eucalyptus saplings were, after all, some useful periods wasted.

A story about stories

A scientist reprimanded me once for asking for a story. “I do scientific research and am not in the business of telling stories,” he said, before ending the phone conversation.

Perhaps the use of the word “story” irritated him. A journalist uses the word so often that it becomes a creature in itself in newsrooms. Life is a story, and so is death, accident, tsunami, fashion show and the infidelities of a celebrity.

A scene from the movie In the Valley of Elah

However, I am sure journalism borrowed and used the word only because the concept of storytelling has been with humanity ever since civilization and culture started. I can imagine the editors of the newspapers of early days asking their reporters “do you have a story to tell our readers today?” But much before newspapers started there are records of cavemen telling stories about the wild animals they saw. Cave etchings testify to these storytelling sessions around the fire.

Growing up in a boarding school, we often reenacted the cave situation. Starting a fire inside the dorms would have got us expelled, so we exchanged stories while warming our hands over an electric stove to ward off the cold of the nights in the Nilgiris. There were new, fresh stories when we returned from holidays. Seven weeks of separation from friends was enough to generate creativity. Some amongst us told tall ones; the others were wannabes. Like the cavemen, we also recorded our succinct messages on the walls for posterity. A cryptic “PGP was here” scratched on the wall marked the tiger’s territory in our teenage social forest.

From time immemorial stories served the same purpose as our sessions around the electric stove. They brought people together. When domesticated agriculture started, communities sat together during that part of the day when they could not do any farm work and told stories.

In most societies storytelling evolved into an art. In Kerala, the Chakyar koothu tradition has evolved into a sophisticated performing art form. Not much unlike the present-day standup comedians, the Chakyars narrate mythological stories, interspersed with modern-day parallels.

Much of country music does the same. A guitar is not a difficult instrument to carry. It can give both rhythm and tone to music. The narrative, however, is not mythological. In a country of mixed histories that would not have been possible. The country songs instead dip into stories of yore, and talk about miners and railroad engineers.

Epics in all cultures tell the stories of the struggle of good against evil. They instill good values in societies.

It is because of the timelessness of stories in the epics that references are continuously made to them even in the present day. The movie In the Valley of Elah tells the simple story of a father wanting to find how his son died. The story of post-traumatic disorders suffered by young American soldiers returning from Iraq is weaved with the David-Goliath story of the Old Testament through a story-telling session between an old man and a young boy. The old man’s struggle for truth against a stonewalling army establishment is compared to David standing his ground and fighting Goliath.

It is said that the forced migration of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of wrath has parallels to the migration of Israelites from Egypt in the Book of Exodus. If Steinbeck linked to the past in this book, the story of Kino when he finds the magnificent stone in The pearl continues to find parallels to the plight of many poor countries when they find oil or minerals on their land.

Ernest Hemingway told simple love stories blended into the background of historical events. In A farewell to arms, Lieutenant Frederic Henry made love to Catherine Barkley, got her pregnant, crossed national borders as she was approaching labor and lost her in childbirth while the First World War raged in the background. In For whom the bell tolls Robert Jordan participates in the Spanish Civil War.

Memorable stories keep coming back to us. Even without being Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, we face the “to be or not to be” question almost every day of our lives. Have we not faced the situation like the salt tax inspector in Premchand’s Namak ka daroga where our principles are initially assaulted and then see us through difficult situations?

There are some story tellers who have the ability of explaining complex scientific theories through simple stories. Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist, spoke about the theory of punctuated equilibrium of evolution through comparisons with the price and size of Hershey chocolate bars.

In the mid-1980s, when my father bought our first television set, life was simple. We had one channel – Doordarshan. We watched unending saga of Buniyad and Hum log, the activism of Rajani, and the class conflicts of Nukkad.

Twenty-five years later, we have more than a hundred channels. But even today, while surfing channels mindlessly, at times I come across one frame in a movie which holds my attention. The director succeeds to hold me with the story in that frame. I stay on to watch the whole movie.

“To state is to kill, to suggest create” is an old adage in literature. Good story tellers suggest. They persuade us to experience the situation through our senses.

Hemingway compares this with the dignified movement of an iceberg. In Death in the afternoon he writes: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

Stories are the foundations on which human civilizations and cultures are built. They link the past with the present. They blur the boundaries of truth and fiction, like the itihasa-puranas of India. They put gods and men shoulder to shoulder in the same frame, and create a class of demi-gods such as Achilles and Hanuman.

Many a time in restaurants, I have seen someone telling a story to a group at a table. The table would have been far and the language spoken unintelligible to me. But seeing the body language of the raconteur and his audience, I have become a party to the story.

For young adults, the ability to tell a story well is a sure way to attract members of the opposite sex. In my days I tried. I never got a response. Today, I read my university-going son’s stories on his social media networks. And considering the number of responses he gets, I know he has succeeded in an area in which I failed. Unfortunately some genes skip a generation before expressing their traits.

An Indian river-log

The Narmada is the most beautiful river I have seen in India. No, not at the rail bridge at Hoshangabad; that is a blur of steel girders. I absorbed the Narmada while walking along the rocky gorge from Kevadia Colony (the temporary town for the construction workers for the Sardar Sarovar dam) to Bamni in 1991.

Flowing through the rift valley, the Narmada has the Vindhyas flanking its north and the Satpuras in the south. The river valley is a platform of sharp-edged rock, and I trekked gingerly to avoid a slash on my feet and shins. The mountains are not tall – a few hundred feet at the most – but they rise sharply from the line where the earth broke millions of years ago.

I was representing the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) at a meeting organized by Medha Patkar at Bamni. The Narmada movement was strong in those days and the meeting had drawn many people from different parts of the country. We slept on the sloping ground while the river rippled gently below us. I saw stars in the sky, something that I had not seen for years in the smoggy Delhi.

We went to the river to bathe in groups. There were gharials (alligators) in that part of the river. There was this guy, more or less my age, who sang full-throated, baul-like as we held out our towels to dry in the damp river breeze. He had long hair, which he tied loosely in a turban. He had a PhD in environmental toxicology from Cornell University. When we climbed back to the hill top the smell of warm khichdi from the thatched kitchen pushed against the river breeze. We ate in leaf plates.

Chambal has alligators on its banks. It is muddy, washing the ravines continuously. The river takes a turn before the rail bridge. Whenever I crossed the river by train in the evenings, I have loved the brown of the river silhouetted against the orange of the setting sun.

The river Bhagirathi, which later goes on to become the mighty Ganga, was mucky as it reached Tehri town. The point where I stood, then, is below the water of the Tehri reservoir today. I traveled upstream by bus to Silyara village which is on the banks of the river Ramganga, which later joins Bhilangana, which in turn joins Bhagirathi at Tehri. On our return, my friend and I were 45 minutes early at the bus stop. A delay would have meant loss of half a day to catch the next one to Tehri. While waiting we drank tea from the only shop in the village. There was nothing extraordinary about the milk or the tea leaves, but the glacial-melt water from Ramganga ensured that my tongue remembers the taste after 20 years.

Scores of Ramgangas join the Ganga by the time it reaches Rishikesh and Haridwar. It carries the copious amount of swift-flowing water that is needed to wash away the sins of the hundreds of thousands of people who bathe in the river every year.

River Indiravati drains the moist deciduous forests of the Bastar Plateau in Chhattisgarh, curves and joins the Godavari. At Dhantewada, two tributaries join Indiravati. One flows clear and serene, and the other flows rapid and red, bringing down ore-rich soil from the Bailadila iron ore mines.

Crossing the Godavari at Rajahmundry is like crossing the ocean. The bridge almost never ends. In 1993, I was in this area covering a story on a gas well blowout in the Komarada region of the Godavari delta. In the evening I sat in the balcony of my hotel room and watched the solitary lights of the ferries fade as they carried passengers to the island villages in the river and across.

I have seen the Godavari in Ramagundam, Basar and near Shirdi. She is at her most magnificent at Rajahmundry. After this point the river breaks into multiple distributaries of the delta, creating hundreds of islands or lankas.

Beyond the Grand Anicut at Trichy, the Cauvery too splits into a delta. The land between the multiple branches of the river has traditionally been the most important rice growing region in Tamil Nadu. The water flowing into the delta has also been the bone of state’s constant contention with Karnataka. Driving through the winding roads of the delta, I realized that there was space for everything except automobiles on the tarmac. Harvested paddy stalks were laid out to dry and thresh, people were sitting and working on it, dogs, cows, crows, everything but cars. With thousands of years of agricultural history, the delta region is also the home to delicious cooking.

In the Nilgiris I was in the land where rivers began. There is no shola from which a stream is not born. More than thousand such streams join to form the four rivers from the mountain block – Bhavani, Moyar, Kabini and Chaliyar. While the first three in turn join the Cauvery, Chaliyar flows westwards into the Arabian Sea.

A river is only a drainage channel through which rain water flows into the sea. While Bhavani has water flowing throughout the year, the adjoining Noyyal basin, draining the dryer slopes of the hills, runs dry most months. Modern-day engineering is required to move water from the Siruvani and Bhavani rivers to be moved to Coimbatore and the other industrial towns in the Noyyal basin.

I could not have grown in the Thrissur-Palghat region without Bharatapuzha etching a long line on my psyche. I love to ride along the river every time I travel by train into Kerala. I had bid goodbye to my father and father-in-law on the banks of this river.

*****
After two decades I saw the full-throated singer from the Narmada valley: on YouTube. Rahul Ram is the lead singer for the band Indian Ocean. When I heard his voice crack at the highest note of arey ruk ja re bande, I remembered the chitter-chatter of the river, the breeze on my face, the stars in the sky and the smell of Medha’s khichdi.