Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  I once wrote of the opening batsman Krishnamachari Srikkanth that he was the only Tamil Brahmin who did not have security as his watch word. I had forgotten about Krishnan. His brother was in the ICS, ending up as Chief Justice of Madras; his son in the Indian Forest Service, his final posting as the principal chief conservator of forests, Tamil Nadu; a nephew in the Indian Foreign Service, ambassador to Germany and to Japan. But Krishnan would be his own man, and not just in the matter of regular employment.

  III

  The library of natural history is dominated by spectacular habitats—oceans, mountains and deserts—and by charismatic megavertebrates—the whale, the lion, the tiger. Krishnan wrote, by choice, of the humdrum landscape of peninsular India, a countryside ‘broken up with ridges and depressions, stones and burrows, wiry, much-branched shrubs and thorn and dessicated grasses, and an occasional patch of sand or rock or some succulent xerophyte’. It was his special gift to make this land come alive, to write about its apparent lack of colour in understated but wryly effective prose. While he knew the tiger and the elephant, he wrote as lovingly of the jackal, the ghorpad, and the spotted owlet, the small, homely, unglamorous denizens of the Indian countryside. That he wrote of the blackbuck in Ranibennur instead of the tiger in the Himalaya is one reason why he is not as well-known as Jim Corbett, a state of affairs that does not properly reflect their respective skills as writers or naturalists. While we are in the business of comparison, let me also say that Krishnan had a sharply developed visual sense unmatched by other Indian nature writers.

  Krishnan never talked down to his readers, assuming in them a knowledge and range of interests equal to his own. If they had not read Blake (and committed his poems to memory) or did not know who ‘Eha’ was, they could always go to the library and find out. In what I regard as his finest period (which ran, roughly, from 1948 to 1961), the learning was carried lightly, leavened by the more than occasional flash of humour, which in the best Anglophone fashion was generally directed at himself. But as he grew older the tone grew more sombre. The essays were still beautifully crafted and rich in detailed information. However, they were no longer so attentive to the human or cultural context, being natural history in a more straightforward sense. Krishnan changed, so to say, with the times: if from the 1970s we find an intensity of tone and even an impatient hectoring in his essays this was not unrelated to the rapid disappearance of forests and wildlife all over India.

  The ecologist Raman Sukumar has pointed out that Krishnan worked at a time when the ‘environment’ was not a glamorous subject attracting millions of dollars of research funding. This naturalist did most of his fieldwork, and took all of his photographs, from his own funds. When Sukumar started his own research he went to Krishnan, who told him, ‘When watching elephants for heaven’s sake keep looking behind your back,’ thus alerting the novice to the straggler to the herd, who would come up suddenly after the rest of his mates had passed you by. Sukumar, who is now a world authority on the elephant, tells me that in a little-known note of 1972 the naturalist had anticipated hightech science in two respects. Here Krishnan had observed that elephants communicated at sound frequencies not easily audible to humans, sounds he described as ‘throaty, hardly audible, a throbbing purr’. Twelve years later, three scientists at Portland Zoo, working with fancy equipment among captive elephants, gave the phenomenon a name, ‘infrasound’, and a number, 14 hertz, a decibel level way below the range of the human ear. Krishnan also speculated that female elephants sometimes chose their partners, a claim that then flew in the face of a consensus among scientists that mating was determined by dominance hierarchies among males, but is seemingly confirmed by recent work on the African elephant. It is not unlikely that other theories of Krishnan’s, likewise based on close observation in the field, shall in time be certified by technology-driven research.

  Krishnan had also told the beginner ‘to study the elephant for its own sake. Don’t expect anything to come of it.’ Brave advice, even if he didn’t always follow it himself. This man outside the system occasionally tried to manipulate it, as a member of the Indian Board for Wildlife (for more than three decades) and the Steering Committee for Project Tiger. Now and then he sounded the tocsin, the chronicler of nature becoming the crusader for its protection. A 1970 essay on ‘The Dwindling Animals of the Forest’ (reprinted in this collection) complained that ‘neither at the level of the illiterate poor nor among the educated people is there any popular feeling for wildlife in India today’. He wondered why ‘the Centre cannot prevail upon the states to adopt a more conservationist attitude towards its wild life’. His last column, printed on 18 February 1996, provided part of the answer: the snag ‘seems to lie in our Constitution, evolved by men with formidable knowledge of legal and political matters and hardly any of the unique biotic richness of India—they do not even seem to have realized that the identity of a country depended not so much on its mutable human culture as on its geomorphology, flora and fauna, its natural basis’.

  Krishnan was an ecological patriot, who believed (to quote from a 1974 piece not included here) that only if ‘we can save India and her magnificent heritage of nature for the generations of Indians to come, and safeguard the physical and organic integrity of our country, threatened today’—only then can we ‘give them a country to be truly proud of. This meant pushing back the forces that would destroy nature—dams, mines, commercial forestry, cattle, exotic species—to thus maintain ‘the equipoise of nature and to do nothing to upset it’. It is time, he wrote, that ‘we cultivated a narrow sort of patriotism in our floral preferences’. He could be ruthless in his opposition to species introduced from outside. He was once asked to speak at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, by common consent the most beautiful of our university campuses. It was late February, and the avenues were set alight by the tabebuia, whose spectacular yellow flowers were in blossom. The planting of this Central American tree, as of the other species that adorn the Institute, was the handiwork of the wife of the director. At a reception the lady asked Krishnan what he thought of the campus. ‘Disgraceful,’ he answered, ‘you should uproot all those foreign trees, and plant some of our own.’ On another occasion, when a kinsman wrote of the death by felling of a gulmohar tree near his house, Krishnan shot back: ‘Anyway, why regret the demise of a gulmohar—an exotic that litters the ground beneath with fallen, faded flowers—a vermilion strumpet from Madagascar? If you want to see a truly impressive crown of red flowers, you should see the flame-of-the-forest, Butea monosperma, entirely our own, early in summer—3 or 4 trees close together setting the horizon ablaze.’3

  Krishnan liked to contrast two authentically indigenous traditions of nature conservation, the traditions of Vedanthangal and of Ashoka. The first referred to a village near Chinglepet, where custom and religious tradition had saved, for generations, breeding birds from the hunter’s arrow and the shikari’s shotgun; the latter to the Mauryan emperor whose edicts commanded his people to protect rare animals and plants. Krishnan first visited Vedanthangal in the early 1950s (as he writes in this collection), studying its avian life and history of protection, and succeeding in having it designated as a formal ‘sanctuary’. He knew that cultural traditions could be in harmony with nature—consider also the essay on Bishnoi and blackbuck printed here, which was written years before the Salman Khan incident had made this a topic for cover stories in upmarket magazines. But he also sensed that in an altered modern context, with rapid economic growth and human population growth as well, traditional restraint had in many cases given way to greed. There would, he hoped, come a time when local traditions could once more contribute creatively to wildlife conservation. Meanwhile, the state had to take a proactive role in effectively protecting the habitats and species that remained.

  As a naturalist, Krishnan was singular in many respects, as will become clear to the reader who reads through this volume. What will not be so immediately apparent, however, is that he was a vegetaria
n who never held a rifle, a man who was exceptional in his generation for being a conservationist qua conservationist, not a shikari-turned-protector and member of the repentant butchers’ club. The finest students of our natural history have either been Europeans, or Hindus and Christians of working-caste origin, or members of the Rajput and Muslim nobility. Europeans have been inspired to more serious study by their experience of the wild and their adherence to a post Enlightenment scientific rationality; naturalists of plebeian background familiarized by an occupational tradition of working with animals or plants; thakurs and nawabs challenged by their aristocratic lineage to move from hunting to conservation. And yet, it fell to a rasam-drinking, gun-loathing Tamil Brahmin to become the ablest naturalist of them all.

  IV

  This book will give one a fair idea of Krishnan the naturalist and writer, but what kind of man was he? His character is, I think, nicely revealed in the technical apparatus of his photography. He came to the craft late, when he was past forty, but brought to it a ferocity of commitment that was all his own. He strongly preferred black-and-white film to colour, and roll film to 35mm, for it enabled him to make large prints (36" by 24" or bigger still) that showed up animals in the wild in proper detail. However, these preferences ruled out the use of any of the makes of camera then available in the Indian market. This man, who in his lifetime was unquestionably the ‘biggest name in India’s wildlife photography’, had more or less to manufacture a camera himself. This was, to quote his fellow naturalist E.P. Gee, ‘a large, composite affair, with the body of one make and the tele lens of another, and other parts and accessories all ingeniously mounted together by himself. I cannot swear that I saw proverbial bootlace used to fix them all together, but I am sure there must have been some wire and hoop somewhere!’

  This contraption was known, to master and acolyte alike, as the ‘Super-Ponderosa’. In 1974 the body needed to be changed; the problem was that it was a German make, an East German make. If Krishnan wanted to import a Pentacon Six body without the accompanying lenses he had to overcome both the Iron Curtain and the swadeshi-minded Indian government. He wrote for a replacement to 120 suppliers of photo equipment in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Only one replied, Andrews and Company in Hong Kong. This, he thought, was actually a slice of luck, for his nephew had just been appointed to the Indian mission in the colony. He could, when required, pay up, collect the box, and send it along to Madras. Krishnan now flew to Delhi, and ‘after a specially unpleasant series of engagements with the bitter cold [it was December] and Sardul Singh, Deputy Chief Controller of Import and Export’, succeeded in getting a licence allowing him to import two camera bodies alone.

  Meanwhile, back behind the Iron Curtain, the East Germans had stopped production of the P-6. Andrews and Company, who had promised to supply Krishnan a box, now wrote to him saying they were ‘temporarily out of stock’, and would send the item later in the year. The truth was that having heard of the brand’s demise, the canny Chinamen had no wish to sell the box on its own—how then would they dispose of the lenses (which this particular customer had no use for?). The story has a tame and typically Indian ending—a P-6 box was donated to the photographer by some friends in England.

  Even when he could afford it, Krishnan never bought a car or a motor scooter. In the late 1960s, his son Hari briefly contemplated buying a car, for as a forest officer he had much roaming to do. Father and son worked out the economics, and decided that each could afford a four-wheeler. No longer, it seemed, would the naturalist have to trust to his feet or a bicycle in negotiating the roaring Madras traffic. Days before the order was to be placed, recalls Hari, ‘rescue arrived swiftly and unexpectedly from the Union Finance Minister in the form of an “upward revision” in the price of petrol’, that (for both of them) put the issue beyond doubt for good.

  It is also in character that in 1995 Krishnan was still using the Swan Signature fountain pen with which he had written his BA examination. His attitude to the ‘latest’ in technology can be usefully contrasted to that of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Born in a Georgian valley, Mayakovsky was unmoved by the glories of the Caucasus. He grew up in the woods, with a father who was a forest ranger. Accompanying his father on a round one night, the boy saw a factory on the far side of a river, gloriously illuminated. ‘After seeing electricity,’ recalled Mayakovsky in his memoirs, ‘I lost interest in Nature. Not up-to-date enough.’

  Krishnan happened to be in the crowd that saw the display of India’s first jet aircraft. But he came away unimpressed—it was not natural enough. For these were ‘just big, loud engines’, whose power and speed was ‘mechanical, chemical, inhuman’. What moved him was the ‘living, muscular speed of animals’, a quickness he could marvel at. ‘If you like speed,’ he told his readers, ‘and want to see something sustained in its effortless, rhythmic impetuosity, you should watch a herd of blackbuck going all out for a few miles—there is tangible, real speed for you.’

  A younger friend who knew him well writes that while ‘never guilty of under-estimating his exceptional talent, Krishnan nonetheless lived a life of self-imposed obscurity. When not in the forests, he hibernated in the bush cover of his home-cumstudio in Madras.’ There, when he was not developing film, painting a sketch or typing a column, Krishnan indulged in his un-natural interests—detective fiction, Carnatic music, and cricket. Of these I share only the last, but can certify here to a high degree of understanding. In a family history he once wrote (‘The Descent of the P.H. ites’, 1991), against the name of his brother P.M.Y. Narayanan—a medical doctor who died young—he had entered this significant detail—‘Was a lefthand batsman and bowler and could bowl the Chinaman.’4

  ‘Krishnan’s reclusion was notorious’, remarks the same friend, and two stories testify to this. In the mid-1960s, when Air India started a non-stop service to London, they offered to a select group of ‘eminent Indians’ free tickets for the inaugural flight, with a week of travel in the United Kingdom thrown in. A Tamil manager with Air India, devoted to Krishnan and his works, knew the way things were ordered in India Krishnan would not be put on the list. Yet who could be more properly deserving than this scholar of English literature and this master of English prose? What could more become a public sector airline than to pay for Krishnan to walk in the Lake District and examine the collections in the British Museum? After special pleading the manager got Krishnan’s name put on the list, and himself flew to Madras with the offer. It was refused, as was an all-expenses paid invitation from the Smithsonian Institution soon afterwards, the money to come this time from the United States treasury. It was not that this patriot could not cross the Kala Pani, but that the self-reliant, Thoreauvian individualist would not allow a mere government to pay for him.5

  Then, in the last months of 1969, when Krishnan was away in a forest, his wife Indu received a telegram from the government of India, asking whether he would consent to being awarded the Padma Shri. Indu thought on her feet—who knew when her man would be back, and how he would respond to such a request. She wired his acceptance immediately. Once Krishnan returned he saw there could be no second thoughts, and accepted the honour with grace.

  V

  Krishnan once told a friend that he was better known in West Bengal than in his native Tamil Nadu (this was said with some regret, for he was, after all, Madhaviah’s son). Copies of the Statesman rarely reach the city of Madras, but its Delhi edition found its way to the small sub-Himalayan town where I grew up. My father read the Statesman for much the same reason that Krishnan wrote for it (it had fewer misprints). The photograph that introduced his column did not hold me—newsprint could scarcely do justice to this master of the black-and-white art—but the writing did. In those days ‘Country Notebook’ alternated with a column by the politician Minoo Masani, likewise a man of strong opinions, but not his own (these came from Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher). I closely read the Sunday Statesman one week and stamped on it the next. (At least that is how I
wish to remember it; in fact I probably snatched the paper from my father one Sunday and allowed him first shot the next.)

  While visiting Madras in the summer of 1979 I found that I was connected to Krishnan. The connection was tenuous—his brother the Chief Justice was married to my mother’s cousin—and all I knew of his house was that it was ‘somewhere near Rajeshwari Kalyana Mandapam’. That was enough, for the Tamil is the best short-distance cartographer in the world. Walking down Edward Elliots Road, I was quickly directed to where Krishnan lived. His home was nondescript; a grey cement block tucked away behind an old Madras bungalow. It was late evening when I got there, catching the naturalist as he emerged from his darkroom, wearing a red checked lungi, a roll of film, dripping wet, in his hands.