Birdsong with Krishnan
When natural history writing attained one of its liveliest levels
have just finished reading a fine book and I cannot resist the temptation to write about it,
though I have never written about a new book
in this column. But, then, this is not a new book,
for the stray pieces on jungle and home birds compiled here come from a long time ago. That does
not mean they have become dated, as all political
journalism normally does. In fact, they will never
become dated as long as the birds, that form the
subject of these pieces, keep flitting and flying
about us. This is natural history writing at its liveliest. Madhavia Krishnan, the author of these casual
but crisp and concise pieces, was a naturalist in the
manner of the British naturalists active in different
parts of India in the 19th and early part of the 20th
centuries such as, EHA, Fletcher, Cunningham,
Stebbing, Inglis, Antram, Forsyth, Dunbar Brander,
Douglas Dewar, Kipling—Lockwood, not Rudyard –
and many others like them who are not so well
known as they are.
Most of them were amateur naturalists, more
nature lovers than natural historians. They came
and lived, here as if in exile, working, first, for the
East India Company and later for the imperial government. They worked as civil servants and, occasionally, as surveyors, soldiers and surgeons in the
army. They spent a large part of their lives far away
from the diversions of big cities in remote, inaccessible moffusil towns, often moving from village to
village, camping under an open sky in clearings, in
a jungle on the edge of some village. There was no
radio then, nor the television nor the cinema nor
the internet. There were no newspapers either and the few weeklies that were published in far off presidency towns took a long time coming by mail bag
on dawk ghurries. Mail from home took two or
three months to arrive. And, most often, there was
no family and no White company. With the Indians,
whom they dismissively called natives, they had little contact outside their offices.
Their only diversion was shikar or watching birds
and bees, and butterflies and moths, and other
insects, rats, lizards and jungle cats. Many of them
kept meticulous journals and made large collections
of animal specimens. Others wrote regular columns
for far-off newspapers and journals. EHA wrote an
occasional column for the Times of India, Fletcher
for the Agricultural Journal of India, Douglas Dewar
for the Madras Mail and the Morning Post, while A
O Hume published his own journal, Stray Feathers.
Such pieces were often afterwards compiled as
books. Some like EHA’s the Tribes on My Frontier
and A Naturalist on the Prowl, Kipling’s Beast and
Man in India, Stebbing’s Insect Intruders in Indian
Homes, Cunningham’s Plagues and Pleasures of Life
in Bengal, Forsyth’s the Highlands of Central India,
and Dunbar Brander’s Wild Animals in Central India
became collectable for their beautiful writing,
woodcut or photographic illustrations and gilded
bindings. Even today, they are favourites among collectors of rare books and lovers of nature and natural history. Some of these books became hugely
successful.
A number of Indians took to this genre with great
enthusiasm, though few could write as beautifully
as Krishnan did. Salim Ali too tried his hand at
popular writing but could not make a
mark in this genre. He was a man of a
different mould, more of a technical and
scientific ornithologist than a writer of
natural history for the lay reader. There
were a few others too but no one could
build or acquire a following among readers like Krishnan did. Actually, even
Krishnan is forgotten today, except in a
narrow circle of wildlife enthusiasts. It is,
therefore, nice of the Chandolas to have
brought forth this collection of his writings from the 1950s and the 60s for those
who have not known the flavour of such
writing. As for me, this beautiful collection energised me to look into the long
forgotten natural history section of my
library. I was happy to once again run my
fingers through the pages of books that I
had collected long years ago, some of
these from Jaivelu, the great second-hand
bookseller of Moor Market, Madras, now
Chennai, whose shop Krishnan also used
to visit in search of books.
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