As a child growing up in Mumbai, Arati Kumar-Rao's parents instilled in her an abiding love for the natural world and a passion for storytelling. Years later, adrift in a corporate job and concerned by the unbridled development of her country, she asked herself, 'When will you stop doing what you can do and start doing what you really want to do?'
Animated by an instinctive sense that our fate is bound to that of the earth and the more-than-human world, Kumar-Rao sets out on a journey across India, listening along the way to stories the land and its people share with her. In the Thar Desert, often reduced to the value of extractable commodities, she learns about ancient methods of harvesting rainwater from shepherds with deep ancestral memories. In the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers at the Bay of Bengal, she walks ancient shorelines and mangrove forests with a marine biologist, exploring tidepools and learning of the extent to which this astonishingly diverse ecology is increasingly endangered by commercial trawlers and overfishing. And on India's northernmost plateau, surrounded by the Himalaya and home to snow leopards, ibex, and numerous endangered species of eagles and owls, she finds glaciers disappearing at an alarming rate and meets with inhabitants who play little role in creating climate change but now bear the brunt of it.
Richly illustrated with the author's photographs and drawings, Marginlands is a vibrant and compelling account of the changes reshaping India today. Engaging and urgent, infused with wonder and profound empathy, this is a work of love and hope, inspiring readers across the world to preserve and protect the world around us.
'Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India's marginalised landscapes and inhabitants, written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force.' Robert Macfarlane
Industry Reviews
Praise for Marginlands "Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India's marginalized landscapes and inhabitants (human and more-than-human), which takes its readers from the high Himalayas to the Sundarban delta, from the deserts of the Thar to the climate-change-ravaged Keralan coastline and beyond. Born of hard, committed, long-term first-hand witnessing of places and people, it is written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force. Kumar-Rao's book joins new voices, including Yuvan Aves (Intertidal) and Neha Sinha (Wild and Wilful), proving that a powerful, hopeful resurgence of Indian nature writing is happening right now."--Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey"Arati Kumar-Rao writes with grace and empathy about traditional forms of resilience and how they help ordinary people survive, and even flourish, in the most demanding environments--and about the often devastating impacts of clumsy interventions by the state. This is some of the best environmental writing I have read in a long time."--Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable"Our grandchildren will be reading Arati Kumar-Rao to understand the momentous decisions that our generation faced--and, shamefully, more often than not shirked--in valuing and safeguarding the last dazzling but imperiled ecological riches of the Indian subcontinent. Luminously written with slashing honesty and profound empathy, Kumar-Rao gifts us with a traveler's haunting account of the vast stakes involved in India's environmental emergencies, as well as moving homages to the keepers of traditional systems of knowledge who, if we only listened to them as carefully as she does, could help rescue what remains."--Paul Salopek, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer"From startling images and evocative prose to brilliant sketches, what a glittering array of tools Arati Kumar-Rao has in her quiver! She is going to make a lot of people exceedingly envious."--Pradip Krishen, author of Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide"Arati Kumar-Rao has written a book from the heart, infused with her poetic voice and humanistic soul, on topics she has explored for many years. Drawing on her multiple talents of writing, photography and sketching, Kumar-Rao has documented pressing issues affecting India while making much deeper connections with the relationship of humans to their resources, lands, and the wildlife they must coexist with. A monumental lesson for all of humanity to pay attention to so that we might redirect our course to a better, more sustainable future, this book is a work for the ages."--Ed Kashi, author of Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
