While listening to well known academician and professor of Environmental Sciences, Mahesh Rangarajan at the release of India’s Environmental History (Permanent Black) that he has edited with Mahesh Rangarajan and K Sivaramakrishnan, I wondered why don’t we have more of these uncomplicated and informal talks on nature, environment and the idea of the much connected human- being.
Today only a handful of writers on environment speak along the simple strain which could connect you and me, to what’s been happening around us. It is simple aspects which do matter, those basic factors which are vital to us and the planet we inhabit. In fact, Mahesh Rangarajan is one of those environmental experts who analyse present-day conservation conflicts and find their roots in India’s colonial past and in the very governance/administrative system that was adopted by us, as an independent nation state. As he stresses,“Awareness of history is definitely important, for it helps to bridge, and to solve issues…after all, environmental issues are basic to lives and lifestyles and we have to connect at the individual level and then take it further, to the societal levels.”
Rangarajan is presently director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, also a member of the executive board of the Association of South Asian Environmental Historians, and he has authored several volumes on Environmental History and has also undertaken extensive field work, coming forth with some far reaching research findings. In fact, in 2010 he had headed the Elephant Task Force set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. And with that, he had come up with some of those crucial basics, “Laws alone cannot protect elephants from humans. What’s required is a working relationship between the two species. We need a working relationship with elephants as a species as they are close to human beings in terms of emotional intelligence and social life. For this, what is crucial is the way in which science, culture and citizens come together to minimize conflict and keep viable habitats intact.”
In fact, if his research findings were implemented on an urgent footing , our very connectivity with Nature and environment would get compatible . What can be termed realistic about Rangarajan’s works , writings is this factor – he does not view environment as some isolated sphere but connects it with the human being, who lives in it, around it, surrounded by it .
Perhaps, what connects him to his readers or the very audience is this basic fact- he relays an abundance of knowledge of our environmental history and the connected current offshoots . And relays it in an informal way. More akin to a dastangoi /story telling session, talking of those bygones, laced with anecdotes and rational and simple solutions. That’s probably why, though it was last Autumn that I’d heard him speak at that launch, each of those words still hold out , resonating in some little corner of my head .
Humra Quraishi is a freelance reporter and columnist based in Delhi. Her features and interviews appear in The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, The Statesman, Pioneer and Tribune. Since 1990 she has been visiting Jammu and Kashmir regularly to report on the turmoil there and the effect it has had on the lives of the Kashmiri people. She is also the co-author of Absolute Khushwant: The Low Down On Life, Death And Most Things In-Between.