By just one yardstick alone – simultaneous book release in 9 different Indian languages, including English – the publication of Madhav Gadgil’s A Walk Up The Hill is unprecedented. Gadgil translated the Marathi edition himself, since he writes and thinks with equal facility in both languages. The other editions include Konkani, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Bengali. I don’t know of any other Indian author in recent years who has taken this much trouble to ensure that his new book could be read by literally everyone, in whichever state they reside, in their mother tongue. This is not just something to be commended, but to be emulated. It sets a very high bar for the Indian intellectual who may be convinced he has something of importance to say to the people of the country. Most of us address our books to the English-speaking circles of the Indian ruling class, and are grateful for translations, if and when someone can be persuaded to work on one.

A Walk Up The Hill, however, may not claim any distinction as a literary production. The language is plain and direct, blunt in sections to the point of discomfort, shorn of any unnecessary decoration, and reflects very much Gadgil as the person we encounter in real life. The author has remained, despite a career that has taken him from Pune to Harvard to Bengaluru and other parts of the world, always outwardly simple and unpretentious in appearance and dress, perennially in chappals, eating his food with his hands, and rarely crippled by the desire to please. During the years he describes events for us, he ate anything and everything including horsemeat, raw crab and rat, slept on bamboo mats on the hard floor when visiting homes of social activists, used a cycle, public bus or simply walked for his field research.

Sometimes, comparisons may help make a point. Scientists of Gadgil’s kind would include C.K. Raju, C.V. Seshadri and Rahul Sankrityayan. None of these are, or were, academic intellectuals of the kind that has seen mindless proliferation through West-intoxicated university education, de-linked from Indian society at large, its ordinary folk, their traditions and its bewildering diversity. Like C.V. Seshadri, Gadgil walked out of the niches offered by conventional research centres, and ended up with a brand new Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), whose focus enabled him and his younger colleagues to deal with people and nature conflicts through formulation of pro-bono policies, programmes and movements.

But A Walk Up The Hill is not an autobiography in the strict sense. On the dedication page, Gadgil calls the volume “a love story of mine.” But elsewhere, he has referred to it as his “scientific autobiography.” Indeed, this man was besotted with science. Of the 412 pages, only the first 60 deal in any real sense with his personal life, including childhood, marriage, and his intellectual skilling, with several years at Harvard in distinguished company, which included E.O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin and Giles Mead.

Therefore it would be unfair to compare it with other autobiographies of similarly motivated individuals or with other passionate memoirs dealing with environmental or wildlife conservation of which we do not have many in any case. Ones that most readily come to mind are Salim Ali’s The Fall of a Sparrow (OUP, 1985); M.K. Ranjitsingh’s A Life with Wildlife (HarperCollins, 1971); Rauf Ali’s raunchy, irreverent and fairly humourous memoir, Running Away from Elephants (Speaking Tiger, 2016) or Jairam Ramesh’s book on Mrs Indira Gandhi’s engagement with environment conservation, Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature (Simon & Schuster India, 2017) which is a first rate read, priceless and simply un-put-downable.

In comparison, Gadgil’s book is neither racy nor humorous. Nor is it self-critical. Though it refuses to hide things that went seriously wrong, it sometimes succumbs to the temptation to be defensive, as reflected, for example, in the long, published diatribe to fellow colleague, space scientist Dr K Kasturirangan, after the latter had attempted (together with Sunita Narain ) to belittle and disparage the report of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel (WGEEP) over which Gadgil and his colleagues had laboured several months. But despite these comparisons, which could be construed as odious, the book is indeed very rich and tells some very, very interesting stories, underscored by some firm opinions against the establishment.

With almost the entire country of 1.4 billion individuals today – including those who claim to be intellectuals –  pretending that someone has cut off their tongues, a book like A Walk up the Hill is a matter for thunderous celebration for Indian publishing as well! Arundhati Roy is no longer the one and only.

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“At the age of ten, I read through the Marathi translation of Plato’s Republic.” Gadgil states this almost matter-of-factly, as if it were the done thing for persons of that age. The legendary Salim Ali is a close associate of his father, so he will not only learn from him, but will eventually criticize him and part ways, but at age 14, he is obsessed with being a field biologist or field ecologist like Ali. Ali has reminded him that working with dead animals in labs is not the best way to spend a life, and has long broken out of any association with academia on his own. In his tenth standard, Gadgil is already writing articles for the Marathi popular science magazine, Srushtidnyan on animal behavior. For the rest of his life, he will continue to follow this practice of writing on scientific issues in the popular Marathi press. Proficient in Sanskrit, he reads the Rigveda, Ramayana, Mahabharata and Gita in the original. Already part of a universe peopled with the likes of Mahatma Phule, Ambedkar, his own illustrious father, Irawati, JBS Haldane and D.D. Kosambi, and profoundly influenced by the thinking of persons like the Buddha, Gadgil declares that by the age of 15, he “had clearly formulated religious beliefs. I do not believe in any institutionalized religion and am not a Hindu or a Muslim or Parsi or a Christian or a Buddhist.” All the seeds of an emerging and highly motivated public intellectual are there for all to see.

The other tug on his heart-strings is his magnificent obsession with doing hands-on scientific research. He will spend another 6 years pursuing his scientific training and interests at Harvard, assuring himself that he is as good, if not better, than the best in that institution. By the time he has completed his association with America’s higher education elite, he is already rated as an outstanding biologist capable of independent and creative scientific work recognized by international peers and other scientists already citing his research.

Throughout all his intellectual skilling, and all the high positions he will occupy, he remains firmly rooted on the ground. “When the Buddha attained enlightenment, he pointed to the ground, signaling that his enlightenment was achieved through his experiences of the mother earth and not through any divine inspiration.” But the ground in his case is not only the birds and the bees in the natural environment, but mostly farmers, adivasis and other rural folk which the scientific community of which he is a part is rarely known to take seriously into consideration when it thinks and works.

On his return from the US, Gadgil migrates to IISc, Bangalore, where he finds his watering hole under Dr Satish Dhawan. In 1983, he founds the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES) within the IISc. He will be with the CES for 30 years. His work as an ecologist in the broadest sense will encompass a bewildering range of issues that would have intimidated any wildlife biologist – even one trained at Harvard.

One of his first published papers is on sacred groves. His preoccupation and grand sympathy with tribals, farmers and peasants leads him to investigate the huge problems of pollution and scarcity created by paper mills, whose very existence was predicated on destruction of entire naturally grown bamboo forests which they were handed out as raw material on lowest possible rates, in fact, as nothing but largesse. This study itself took 5 years. He also undertook a detailed investigation of the Chipko Andolan, interacted with Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sundarlal Bahugana. He had an opportunity to formulate the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve proposal, then visited the four corners of India to study and understand people’s perceptions of the environment in connection with Mrs Gandhi’s proposal to set up the central government’s department of environment. Later, he was part of the committee that drafted the Biological Diversity Act. After the Act was passed, he developed the methodology and database for People’s Biodiversity Registers to be created under the Act. He worked on the Silent Valley project, the Bedthi project: the list is almost endless. In all these involvements, he appears to have mostly thought on his feet. In most, he interacted closely with knowledgeable local people on the ground. I have nothing but admiration for a researcher of this kind. Indeed, to use the terms of his own speciality in science, Gadgil has remained one of a species.

Which ecologist of his stature has worked on a history of Gavlis? Which scientist would dare do a report that disclosed the seamy sides of the EIAs that Goa’s mining industry had exploited to conceal its destruction of Goa’s pristine natural environment? Which professional ecologist would spend 7 years walking the length and breadth of protected areas? Which establishment scientist would have worked with the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad or the River Research Centre? Even while this book was being written — and already 15 years into retirement from CES — he was still working (till 1922) with the tribal Gond villages of Menda Lekha and Pachegao, attempting management plans for Community Forest Rights (CFR). In fact, it is only after serious successful involvement with these tribal villages and their inherent capacities– and much after his retirement from science — that he appears to have become convinced that the “key to empowering people” was to “give them rights over the natural resources of their own localities.”

In the thirty year period of active involvement in ecological issues having large scale repercussions, he has been awarded the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan, nominated as chair of the United Nation’s Global Environment Facility (GEF), worked as a member of the Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the Prime Minister (Rajiv Gandhi), and named chairperson of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel (WGEEP). His late father would be proud of him. As for us, when a person of such remarkable distinction reflects on his life and work, it becomes incumbent on us to listen.

*

On his return to India, Gadgil discloses fairly early in the book: “I was confident that I could do high-quality ecological field research…without being hampered by the lack of funding which is a handicap to those engaged in experimental research. I also hoped that I could inject at least some of the spirit of the liberating atmosphere that I had enjoyed at Harvard into whichever institution I ended up joining. Finally, I hoped to have a positive impact on Indian society at large, like my father.”

Did Gadgil indeed succeed in re-creating the research environment of the premier American institutions he had worked with in the Center for Ecological Sciences? At CES, he began with a clean slate and a bunch of young researchers. The book, however, offers no clue. There is nothing to match even remotely the pages written on his working experience with American scientists and labs when in the US. Despite the fact that he spent practically all of his active 30 years doing science at CES, the institution is almost non-existent as an intellectual environment in the book. It merits just one mention in the index. The working culture at CES was, for me, an important expectation from a “scientific autobiography”. That expectation is belied.

That may be bad news for the development of scientific institutions in India. However, looked at another way, it has turned out to be good news for the brand new niche for scientific research that Gadgil created for himself and others which was quite unheard of among professionals of his ilk. The bulk of the book is about this more realistic and far better paradigm of science-society interaction that all young researchers ought to get familiar with, if science in this country is going to be of any further use.

Gadgil also offers no serious reflection on why two of his principal contributions to science and society crashed. The first, of course, is the WGEEP report, despite all the support it received Jairam Ramesh and environmentalists down the line. Was the WGEEP report thrashed because, as Sunita Narain claimed, it was impractical? More than a decade has passed since the report was submitted, then replaced in its entirety by the Kasturirangam HLWG’s report. The GOI of course treated the second report too with serious contempt. Despite issuing an order in 2013 to implement Kasturirangan’s recommendations, the final notification to determine finally those areas of the Western Ghats that must be absolutely protected, is yet to see the light of day. The second matter is the complete ruin of the PBRs, an exercise to be carried out in every village under the provisions of the Biological Diversity Act, and of course, after soliciting inputs from village communities. The National Green Tribunal ordered the PBRs done in a fixed time frame. State governments hired consultants who fabricated the PBRs without the village communities being even aware of the exercise. Being a principal actor in both events, it was incumbent on Gadgil to shed better on the enfeebling of both ideas. We need to grapple with the reality that we are unable to protect, for future generations, one of planet’s eight biodiversity hotspots, despite two high brow scientific reports.

Which brings me to the issue that turns the book into a hot potato. This concerns Gadgil’s perceptions about the man-wildlife conflict which the Indian union has sought to reconcile within the framework of the Wildlife Act. Gadgil’s recent interviews asking for the Act to be scrapped have created consternation among wildlife groups and environmentalists alike. In a country where Maneka Gandhi and Ranjitsingh still stalk the land, Gadgil boldly ventures out to announce that the consumption of wild animal meat is a legitimate practice across the world. Animal populations can only be kept in check by predators, and human beings are the largest predators on the planet. He refers to Salim Ali, who proudly proclaimed he had enjoyed a tiger steak with S. Dillon Ripley after a shoot. He insists that the WL Act has no ecological basis. The Act was drafted by former members of the elite ruling class who had themselves inflicted severe damage already through purposeless hunting. Lord Linlithgow, British Viceroy for India, for example, shot 4273 birds in a single day, simply for pleasure.

Gadgil’s views are naturally coloured by his experience of large-scale corruption in the forest department, and the misuse of legislation like the FCA and the WLI by its officials and staff to extort income from poor villagers and tribals. He refers to the manner in which the Goa forest department claimed for years that there was no tiger population in its sanctuaries, simply to protect the interests of the rich and power miners who had looted the state for more than a decade. Though such evidence is available in plenty, he accuses “urban nature conservationists” of turning a blind eye. He accuses Salim Ali of having the same prejudices.

“Salim Ali…played a prominent role in shaping the policies for wildlife protection in independent India. This began with the constitution of the Indian Board for Wildlife in 1952. It was chaired by the Mysore maharaja with Dharamkumasinh. from the royal family of Bhavnagar as vice-chair. The members included Sali Ali and two tea/coffee planters….In 1972, the Act was drafted by M.K. Ranjitsingh from the royal family of Wankaner. The entire effort was thus driven, firstly, by maharajas who tended to have little sympathy for their subjects and were used to paying homage to their British rulers, and secondly, by British tea- and coffee-estate owners who treated the Indian labour on their estates as slaves.”

Gadgil says the Act criminalized the entire population of India that sometimes had recourse to wildlife meat for nutrition (unlike the upper classes, who shot for entertainment and trophies). In other countries, wildlife protection acts focus on management of national parks and reserves and ban hunting, but the rest of the country is kept outside their purview. In India, wildlife is the property of the Government of India, so anyone found in possession becomes a target for criminal prosecution. Even if any wildlife enters your home, you cannot kill it. If it crosses over and damages your fields, there is no forester who will register an offence against the animal. In all likelihood, he may file against the complainant!

“The countrywide total ban on hunting of a whole range of wild animals is completely irrational and betrays a total lack of understanding of ecology…. Clearly, the way forward for us is to scrap this unconstitutional act and promote conservation of the entire range of biodiversity including flagship wildlife species, by empowering local communities to manage these resources in the same fashion as the Scandinavian countries do so effectively.”

Gadgil’s evaluation of the Wildlife Act should be made a subject of a country-wide debate. This is one of the country’s most respected ecologists and wildlife biologists talking.  He is convinced that “50 years of the rule of the WLPA has precipitated a monstrous human-wildlife conflict.” In the circumstances in which we find our existing wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, biosphere and tiger reserves, Gadgil’s suggestion in my opinion may do more harm than good. In Goa, for example, as in many other places, wildlife has migrated out of protected areas because the force maintaining them – the forest department – has long since abandoned any professionalism in doing its job. The issue is not the killing of animals. We are one of the biggest animal killing factories in the world, and the world’s largest exporter of beef. So there is no need to be sanctimonious. Wildlife, however, has a right to life. At present the entire wildlife of India gets restricted to protected areas in a space that amounts to just 4% of the country’s landmass. The National Board of Wildlife, since 2014, has sanctioned wildlife habitat damaging projects including expanded roads, freeways, linear projects and even mining activity in more than 500 protected areas. This is the grim reality. At the moment, if conditions are indeed driving the animals out, something has to be done to improve the conditions within. If that is achieved, if the necessary professionalism and funding are brought into the game, I dare say Gadgil’s recommendations would be seen as reasonable and the way to go.

A Walk Up The Hill (Living with People and Nature)

By Madhav Gadgil

Penguin Random House India (2023)

Pp.412. Price: ₹999 ISBN No: 9780670097043