Taking a book to India
The Bishnois and the Jaipur Literary Festival
Are writers truly shy creatures?
I’ve just been with hundreds of them, gathered in Jaipur for the annual literary festival. The largest in the world, it runs simultaneous sessions of panels and solo events, hundreds of thousands of readers passing between them.
I enjoy the camaraderie of these gatherings, chancing upon people with novel insights into the world.
And then of course there was my own event, in a large packed hall and broadcast live on the festival’s youtube chanel. An hour before the show started my scheduled moderator dropped out. ‘Fine,’ I said blithely. ‘We’ll run without one.’ But then Siddharth Shrikanth stepped in, brought out his journalistic training to speed-read the book in a hour, and did an excellent job.
And I was grateful. My book (My Head for a Tree) tells the story of the Bishnoi community – and more than fifty Bishnois turned up to join a crowd who thought they were set for a regular book event. I had invited Narendra Budhnagar Bishnoi to share the stage with me, knowing him as a mild schoolteacher. He was terrific – but the opposite of mild. The event verged on becoming a rally, a clarion call for nature, a demand that people don’t just wish the Bishnoi well but join their fight to protect the natural world. In their millions.
We answered fiery questions. The moderator closed the session. And then Narendra stood up and took the microphone again. Another rallying cry, and a call for his brother Ram Niwas (who features strongly in the book) to come up on stage.
Dressed in his traditional white, including a turban, Ram Niwas duly presented me with roses, a framed award, and placed a white turban on my head. The Jaipur Literary Festival runs with clockwork precision, the next event lining up while the first politely leaves the stage, but the Bishnoi made new rules.
Book signings later, a flurry of photos and selfies and meetings, and I headed into the night. Job done – the book both launched at the Rajasthani festival but also landing there, where it began five years before.
In my head, I know it went well. People told me so. However you enter a project like this tale of the Bishnoi people, you take the stage and face an audience, and all you have worked for is then exposed. I championed this transfer of a book from my life into the lives and imaginations of readers, with passion.
And afterwards I felt emptied and fragile. A little teary.
The next afternoon I skipped the festival and took a walk from my hotel to enter the edge of a leopard reserve. For twenty minutes I sat on a wall surrounded by birdsong and gazed at the surrounding hills. This was Nature putting me back together again.
It was a few years since I’d been with the Bishnoi. The separation helped me view them afresh. I admire their culture inordinately, the community has treated me with utter grace and kindness and respect, and yet these are the people who give their lives for trees and form the Bishnoi Tiger Force, the fiercest defenders of wildlife in the history of Earth. And when they unleashed their energy and cries into the literary festival’s hall, I sensed that this people who live to the rhythms of the natural world retain wildness. Civilization as refinement, as separate from nature, is sick in comparison.
Dam your flow of wildness and you damn yourself.
From the festival I took a train ride two hours’ south to the national park of Ranthambore. For hours fume-laden open-top trucks bounced me along rough tracks. And at the end of the final hour of nine the guide heard the alarm call of a deer and off we roared.
We were in Zone 3, a part of the park that is the territory of a six-year-old tigress and her three cubs. We saw the female cub walking away through the forest. And then the two males, full-sized, stretched across the dirt road. The mother sat at the road’s raised edge, still and watching. Just thirty feet away from us, I drew her closer still with my binoculars. Later they walked into the forest but still in clear sight, the cubs crouching to lick the ground at the edge of a pool.
‘I don’t know what words describe that experience,’ my bench companion later said.
‘Profound,’ I suggested, and it was. Deeply moving. It’s akin to the feeling I once had out in the Pacific Ocean when entering the space of a blue whale. Inside the forcefield of one of the planet’s mightiest animals, your being is inverted. It’s a merging, human identity no longer something separate for a while, tigers and people and forest all nothing but nature.
The park closes, and humans are trundled back to their guesthouses. I suspect tigers are not altered by these encounters. Was I?
There’s a chance. Those moments of exposure to the utter wild are a chink. We are not separate from nature because we are nature. Tigers don’t need to know that because they are that. Through that chink we experience full nature for a while. Our minds have the sick skill of closing it off, or leaving it open.
I opt for open.
I’ve been back in Jaipur, as a guest at the Indian Birding Fair. It’s a great volunteer-driven event on the shores of Man Sagar Lake. Started back in 1997, when the lake was a stinking mess, its first aim was to restore it so migratory birds would return in winter. The other objective is to introduce children to the wonders of birds and birdwatching. Both have been achieved, this now the 28th annual edition of the festival. I gave seven short talks on the Bishnois as more than two thousand school students passed through – the tales are part of their Rajasthani heritage.
And then I gazed across the lake’s still waters toward mountains and paused to enjoy a sense of peace. I’ve been chasing this book into existence for five years. Now it’s out there. There’s a lot of beauty in it, and I hope it finds its way to readers’ hearts.