Book Box | Wandering in the wild pages: A literary exploration of wildlife
Take a safari through the pages of wildlife books, exploring the impact of various animal-focused books and the enduring connection between words and the wild.
Dear Reader,
When I was eleven years old, we went to an exhibition of Russian books and came back with Kids and Cubs by Olga Perovskaya.
It features four sisters, who live in a forest near Alma Ata, in the Kazakh Republic. In every chapter, a new animal enters their lives, from Mishka, the deer to Vaska, the tiger cub. I read and re-read this in utter fascination.
Kids and Cubs led me to other wildlife books like the Gerald Durrell series, books by the veterinarian writer James Herriot, and Joy Adamson's trilogy on lions, set in South Africa. Closer home, I read Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett. More recently, I found H for a Hawk, a stirring memoir of an English woman who drowns her grief at her father's death, by embarking on a project to train a wild hawk. Another touching and profound read was The Elephant Whisperer, a moving story about people and elephants, set on a game reserve in South Africa.
Then there have been the crossover books - like Mystery of the White Lions. This intriguing read mixes rescuing lions with symbolism, spirituality and a dash of South African culture. A few years ago, I picked up Women Who Run With the Wolves, supposing it to be about women and wolves. It surprised me and it drew me in, this narrative of a woman as a powerful wild creature, who was being pulled away from her natural energy. It’s not a conventional wildlife book, but this link between the human and the wild, quickly became one of my favourites, repeatedly drawing me back to re-read a chapter or even a few pages.
When I heard about Women in the Wild, I was hooked by both the title, and the premise of women wildlife biologists, and couldn’t wait to read it. It launched earlier this month, commemorating Wildlife Week, and it’s been a treat to read.
But before we get to the stories of India’s most brilliant wildlife biologists, here is Tiger Season for you, a recently released, frothy feel-good, fictional romance in tiger country.
In this tale, an impassioned wildlife reporter and a film star, come together in a royal Rajasthani hunting lodge, transformed into a heritage hotel. Their collaboration revolves around filming a tiger reality show; the television channel seeks ratings, while the actor, who has been embroiled in a drug scandal and lost endorsements, believes aligning with a tiger conservation cause could help resurrect his reputation.
During their stay at the lodge, they encounter the enigmatic owner, the scion of a royal family, formerly a prominent figure in Delhi society and now a dedicated conservationist. The stage is now suitably set for a love triangle. As the group embarks on a safari, sparks fly, and dramatic events ensue. The plot is predictable and the characters fit into familiar stereotypes. Yet I enjoyed reading it – for the feel of the forest, and for the issues this book raises – everything from the questionable motives of people in the conservation movement to the man-animal conflict. Author Gargi Rawat has been an environmental reporter for NDTV, this is clearly familiar territory as she writes with fluent ease.
And now back to Women in the Wild.
The very first story by Raza Kazmi on Jamal Ara, the first lady of ornithology, and author of numerous monographs like ‘Field notes on the birds of the Kolhan Forest Division’, pulled me in. I love Neha Sinha's columns on wildlife, and here as always, she writes beautifully, this time on Ghazala Shahabuddin, a wildlife biologist, who moved from Venezuela to Algeria to Delhi, with many fieldwork trips to Mukteshwar in the Himalayas.
Editor Anita Mani does a virtuoso job of putting all these stories together, taking us from the turtle girl J Vijaya, to snakes, leopards and birds, acquainting us with the scientific method, everything from studying poop to using radioactive trackers and enlisting the help of local communities in monitoring wildlife.
Anita and I chat about her new publishing imprint and the kinds of stories she is looking to publish. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.
Tell us about your childhood reading
I grew up in Chennai with my nose buried in a book after school and most weekends. My father, who worked for an automotive machinery company, used to take me to the local lending library each Saturday, where the budget of ₹5 brought home a bag full of books to be devoured that week. My mother worked with her father in the family printing business (they published chemical industry publications that are around even today); she has been a reader all her life and it was she who bought me books and took me to book fairs. On one momentous occasion (as it seemed then) we ordered books from a mail catalogue and I recall my excitement when we went to the post office to collect the book – a prized collection of fairy tales.
You founded and edited Child Friendly News (CFN) a children’s newspaper, what was the experience like?
The best part of writing for children is that you have to be absolutely clear in your mind about the facts of a story before you can start explaining it to kids. That forced a discipline in reading and understanding which has helped me a lot. Plus, when writing for children you always focus on the big story; the incremental news of day-to-day is not as important – it struck me then that this was true for adults as it was for kids. A lot of news today obsesses on incremental detail and writing for children taught me to cut through the clutter.
I particularly enjoyed all the ‘build your own newspaper’ workshops that I conducted at schools and educational institutions. What I also remember, with no little satisfaction, is that the adults in the family of the children reading CFN also loved the paper. They used to tell me that the news written in CFN was so much easier to understand than the complex reportorial style of mainstream media.
Your son is a prolific reader - what is your advice to parents on helping their children become readers?
We just bought him and continue to buy him tons of books. That’s all. A definitive interest – such as sport, science, art etc. also helps, and reading becomes a scaffold to understand that subject better.
When it comes to the natural world, how important is it to bring in real-world exploration with reading?
When it comes to books on birds, these certainly go together. I suspect that in some cases possibilities are remote. As much as I loved John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, I’d be a complete disaster at mountaineering, given my absolutely terrible levels of mechanical intelligence. But, last year, I came back from Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary and read Nandini Velho and Anjana Noronha’s book called The Eaglenest Memory Project which speaks of the history of the communities that live in the area of the sanctuary. The road on which we had birdied for so many days was a vital theatre of action in the Indo-Chinese conflict and events of that time shaped topography and the movement of people. Reading it was like adding a new layer to a fresh memory and enriching what I had seen. So yes, reading and reality complement each other I think
How did ‘Women in the Wild’ begin?
The trigger for this project was the story of J Vijaya. In fact, the specific hook was the picture that’s on our cover that I had seen years ago in a magazine/online. Since then, I’ve been reading every bit of information on her that I could find. When I launched the Indian Pitta imprint last year, I knew I had to bring out something about her. Around that kernel grew this idea for an anthology on women wildlife biologists. I was lucky to find a fantastic set of writers who knew their subjects well and were able to translate that understanding into words. The idea always was to go in-depth and not be constrained by a tight word limit. That’s why the long-form style and also the reason why this is not an anthology of say 50 great biologists, though for sure, there are many, many women wildlife biologists doing brilliant work on the ground.
Over the last few years, what trends have you observed in writing on the natural world?
I don’t know if we have enough books coming out to see a particular trend. But it's good to see books like Arati Kumar-Rao’s Marginlands, which poignantly record the losses within our ecosystems, being written.
What was the inspiration for the Indian Pitta imprint?
I started the Indian Pitta imprint with Juggernaut books to fill a need for books on birds and natural history. When it comes to birds, we have stellar field guides and that’s the bulk of books on birds. But there is so much more to explore – the ecology of a species, the mosaic of habitats and ecosystems and of course human interactions that touch the lives of birds. Indian Pitta’s direction is precisely that of exploration.
What are the kinds of writing/manuscripts you are looking out for?
Our focus is books about birds and natural history so all themes related to that. Successful conservation programmes or troubling environmental challenges, personal exploration of a landscape, deep dives into the ecology of a species, the biogeography of bird populations, the quest for a rare species – these are some of the ideas that we want to explore within the pages of our books.
Finally, what are some of your personal favourites in natural history writing?
As a wise friend recently said, one has current favourites rather than all-time ones. So let me share what I am reading rather than an ‘all-time’ list. I am re-reading Pranay Lal’s Indica, and understanding so much more during this second pass, while also enjoying Mark Obmascik’s The Big Year (on which the movie is based). I also recently finished Zai Whitaker’s Termite Fry, a wonderful tale about the Irular of southern India. Tim Dee’s Greenery was also a brilliant read.
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With this, it’s a wrap. Until next week, happy birding, happy forest wandering and of course happy reading.
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com
The views expressed are personal
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