On what we are erasing, and what we have already lost
A friend recently sent me a photograph. He is sitting on a ledge at the top of a peak in the Western Ghats, legs over the edge, back to the camera, looking at the ranges running into the distance and dissolving into haze at a point where the sky and the mountain become the same thing. He had been climbing since before sunrise. The panorama before him is extraordinary : green-brown, layered, ancient, the kind of view that makes the word view seem inadequate. He sent it with no caption. He did not need one.
I have been sitting with this photograph and what I cannot stop thinking about has nothing to do with the mountain. Somewhere in those ranges in the folds of the Nilgiris where shola forest meets high grassland, in the particular silence my friend found on that ledge and could not quite put into words, live the Todas. They are one of the oldest indigenous communities in India, pastoralists whose entire social and spiritual life is organised around the buffalo, whose barrel-roofed temples of bamboo and thatch look as though the hill grew them, whose embroidery encodes their cosmology in geometric patterns of red and black on white. They number perhaps fifteen hundred people. They have lived in the Western Ghats for longer than anyone has been keeping records of such things. And they are, by every available measure, disappearing.
They are not alone in this. Across India, nearly seven hundred distinct Scheduled Tribe communities more than a hundred million people, the largest indigenous population of any single country on earth are the living custodians of a relationship with the natural world that most of the rest of us have spent the last two centuries efficiently destroying and occasionally, on a long weekend in the hills, briefly and inadequately mourning. The Gond of central India. The Bhil of the Aravallis. The Dongria Kondh of the Niyamgiri hills, who fought a multinational mining company to protect their mountain and, for once, won. The Irula of Tamil Nadu, whose knowledge of snakes has saved more lives from venomous bites than any pharmaceutical intervention. The Jarawa of the Andamans, who have lived in isolation for sixty thousand years and in whose faces, when they are occasionally photographed against their will by tourists on the Andaman Trunk Road, you can read precisely what they think of us. Each of these communities carries within its daily life, its agricultural practices, its forest knowledge, its relationship with river and mountain and season, something that cannot be downloaded, cannot be archived, cannot be reconstructed once it is gone.
To understand what is being lost, you have to understand what my friend found on that ledge. He left camp before sunrise, in the dark that belongs to that hour in the hills: cold and absolute, the world reduced to the beam of a torch and the sound of his own boots. The Western Ghats give very little away in that first hour. The forest is dense and close; sounds arrive without context; the mind, stripped of its usual material, goes quiet in the way it almost never manages during the day. The body asserts itself — the breath, the foot placement, the gradient — and after an hour or two you stop fighting it and let it lead. This is not a spiritual experience. It is more basic than that. It is simply what happens when the noise stops and the body is asked to do something genuinely physical and all the apparatus of modern life, the phone, the calendar, the ambient pressure of other people’s expectations, falls away for lack of signal.
The tree line broke. The sky opened. Above it, the stars were unreasonably present — the sky as it was before we put glass and light between ourselves and it. He climbed the last hour above the tree line in a cold that was not hostile but indifferent, the cold of a universe that has not arranged itself for human comfort. The ranges appeared as the dark shifted first as deeper darkness, then as shapes, then as themselves, range after range twining like braids into the distance, each fold a different shade of the same green-brown, the furthest dissolving into a haze at a point where you could not say where mountain ended and sky began. The occasional cry of a bird or an animal rising through the stillness was not a disruption of that silence. It was the silence making itself heard.
He sat on the ledge and looked at it.
What he felt there and I am reading this from the photograph, from the particular quality of the stillness in it, from the fact that he turned the camera around and took a photograph of himself not looking at the camera, which is what people do when they want to remember something they know they cannot hold, was the original state. Not a mood. Not a break from real life. The original condition of the human animal, the one in which we evolved, the one our nervous systems were calibrated for across hundreds of thousands of years in an evolutionary conversation with a world that was mostly quiet and mostly slow. We have filled that world with our noise so completely and for so long that most of us have lost not merely access to the stillness but the memory that it was ever ours which is the more serious loss, because you cannot grieve what you do not remember having.
The Todas have not forgotten. They have never had occasion to.
For the Todas, the stillness my friend found on that ledge is not a discovery. It is the texture of daily life : the mist on the grassland at dawn, the buffalo moving through it, the wur on the hillside, the embroidered cloth on the body that is also a map of the cosmos. It is not something they retreat to on long weekends. It is where they live, and how they live, and what their lives are made of. The same is true, in its own form, for each of the seven hundred communities across India who have maintained, across centuries of pressure from every direction, a coherent and complete way of inhabiting the world that does not begin from the premise that the world is a resource to be extracted.
This is what I mean when I say they are custodians of something we cannot afford to lose. Not their crafts, though the crafts are extraordinary. Not their languages, though each language that dies takes with it a way of categorising reality that no other language contains. Not even their ecological knowledge, though that knowledge of forest ecology, of seed varieties, of water systems, of animal behaviour represents an accumulated intelligence that no university has fully mapped and no database has fully captured. What they hold is the proof of concept. They are the living demonstration that the relationship with the natural world my friend glimpsed on that ledge is not a fantasy or a memory or a mood. It is inhabitable. It is sustainable. It is, in the most literal sense, a way of being human that works, that has worked, continuously, for longer than any other human experiment currently on offer.
We are erasing it.
The erasure is not dramatic. It does not arrive as conquest or as massacre, though those things happened and left their mark. It arrives as paperwork. As policy. As the patient, distributed, legally sanctioned operation of systems that were designed without malice and function without any individual required to intend the outcome.
Dams that submerge ancestral land, displacing communities for whom the land is not property but identity and the displacement is a local administrative matter, processed case by case, its cumulative effect nobody’s specific responsibility. Mining leases granted on hills held sacred across a thousand generations, the lease issued by a ministry that did not consult the community because the relevant legislation did not require it. Forest rights denied by bureaucracies that have never set foot in the forests they administer, applying a legal category of encroachment to people who were in the forest before the category existed. Roads cut through territories whose inhabitants discover their construction from the sound of machinery, because the environmental impact assessment was conducted by a contractor hired by the project it was assessing. Each of these things happens individually, in a file, in an office, processed by a person who is not a villain and who goes home in the evening and loves his children.
The Dongria Kondh won their case at the Supreme Court. They are the exception so rare it proves the rule, and even they are still fighting. The rest seven hundred communities, the hundred million people, the accumulated intelligence of sixty thousand years of human habitation of this subcontinent’s forests and mountains and rivers are losing, quietly, case by case, file by file, at a pace calibrated precisely to stay below the threshold of outrage.
The word for this is not development. The word for this is not progress. The word for this is loss, specific, irreversible, and chosen, in the sense that it is the outcome of choices made by people with the power to make different ones.
My friend came down from the mountain the same day. He is back in the city now, in the traffic and the meetings and the noise, and the photograph is on his camera alongside five hundred other images he has not yet sorted. He will look at it sometimes, and it will do something to him that he will find difficult to name.
What it should do, what I want it to do, what I want this essay to do, is make us think about the Todas. About the Gond and the Irula and the Jarawa and the Dongria Kondh and the six hundred and ninety-six other communities for whom what he found on that ledge for one morning is not an experience to be photographed and returned from. It is home. It is the only home they have. And when it is gone, when the last forest is mapped and mined and the last community is resettled into a concrete house on the edge of a town that does not want them, we will have lost not only them but the last living proof that there was ever another way to be human.
The photograph is beautiful. What it is a photograph of is more beautiful still, and older, and almost gone.