Telling visual style

M. KRISHNAN WAS a serious naturalist at a time when it wasn't too fashionable to be a naturalist or a conservationist. And unlike many of his tribe, who preferred to commune with Nature, Krishnan had also the gift to communicate what he knew, saw and felt through his writing and photography. Through both, he caught the excitement and magic of Nature over a span of almost half a century.

The Madras Book Club met recently, to launch the latest Oxford University Press title, Nature's Spokesman: M. Krishnan and Indian Wildlife, edited and with an introduction by Ramachandra Guha. As an event, it was unusual in that the meeting was highly focussed on the subject matter of the book, in this case M. Krishnan, and not on the speakers, editor or the luminaries in the audience. The speakers were people of substance with titles of consequence to their own credit, many of them OUP publications. They were articulate and witty and gave the audience a vivid glimpse of M. Krishnan, his thinking, and his personality and whetted the audience's interest to actually read the book.

Again, it struck one about the speakers that at least two of them saw Krishnan as their mentor. All three of them obviously held Krishnan in very high esteem and were awed by the person and what he had achieved. They communicated their personal feelings and thoughts about their interactions with Krishnan, laced with considerable humility.

The hall itself packed with Krishnan's family, contemporaries, friends and admirers exuded an unusual level of warmth and goodwill.

Mr. Theodore Baskaran, the director of the Roja Muthiah Research Library and an enthusiastic naturalist himself and who had known Krishnan over 40 years, set the man and his work in perspective. "He was great and had that proverbial courage of conviction. God, religion, rituals and caste had no meaning for him. He was truly a naturalist who believed that the laws of Nature sustained the universe." He shared with the audience a lesser-known side of Krishnan. "He first started writing in Tamil.... What is special about his writing in Tamil, particularly about wildlife, is that he drew heavily from the traditional language and idiom and the traditional ecological prudence of the Tamils. He used phrases familiar to the villager and the common man - a lost art today. We are struggling to draw up a jargon for discourse on conservation and environment in Tamil. Tamil names for birds and animals are being forgotten, translations of English names coming in instead. This is one reason why there is no environmental movement in Tamil Nadu as there is in Kerala, where the whole discourse is in Malayalam. In the context, we need to redeem the words and phrases which Krishnan used and facilitate a complete environmental discourse in Tamil. Should we not salvage Krishnan's Tamil writing just as Ramachandra Guha has salvaged his English writings?"

Mr. Gopal Gandhi, Indian High Commissioner designate to Sri Lanka, gave away the first copy of the book to Mr. M. Harikrishnan (Krishnan's son and himself a retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests of Tamil Nadu) and remembered taking a photograph of Krishnan (the only one the book carries) at work photographing the frescos in the Sittannavasal caves. Gandhi, who did not have a camera of his own, borrowed one and had accompanied Krishnan on his expedition. "To say, Krishnan can I take a picture of you taking pictures of Sittannavasal is like some amateur saying to M. S. Subbulakhshmi, can I hum in your presence while you are practising?"

"Krishnan's photography somehow had not just subjects; it went within the subjects. It had great movement. This extraordinary photographer could capture the wild in art and art in the wild...." Gandhi shared with the audience how Krishnan had once discussed the tethering of animals as bait to get wild life photographs. "...But here the animal seems to get eaten before it has died. In the wild, when an animal is being chased by a predator the victim forever sublimates its fear in the heat of the escape. That sublimation is denied to it in this death." This anecdote gives us an idea of how Krishnan empathised, how he was different from other "animal lovers". He looked at Nature through Nature's eyes rather than refract Nature through his own eyes and values. He saw himself not as a steward but more as a spokesman or at best an advocate for Nature.

For his book, Ramachandra Guha selected sixty-eight pieces from out of more than two thousand that Krishnan wrote for Madras Mail, TheHindu, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Indian Express, Shankar's Weekly and The Statesman and gave it a remarkably comprehensive introduction - almost a biography. As a result, through the book you get to know Krishnan and his thinking. What makes the book especially important is that it makes available Krishnan's work, almost all of which was in newspapers and journals and not very accessible to people. "Very few encapsulations of a person's life can do the justice that Ram has done to Krishnan's life in his introduction", commented Gopal Gandhi.

To quote Guha, "He was without question the finest wildlife photographer of his time. He was without question the finest all- round naturalist of his time. He was without question the finest Nature writer of his time".

Krishnan regretted that he was not as well known in Madras, where he lived, as he was in some other parts of India. The real reason for this is that his mainstay was the "Country Notebook" column he wrote for The Statesman of Calcutta for forty-six years, starting in 1950. The last column was printed on the day he died.

Guha looks at the book and the energy and emotion he invested in it. "In my twenty years as a work away writer and professional, nothing has given me remotely like the exquisite pleasure in conducting this exercise. The diversity, the richness, the insight, the humour and the robustness and above all the sheer excellence of everything that Krishnan did as a writer. I feel truly humbled, joyful and privileged to have had the opportunity of having to go through most of his collected works."

ELIZABETH ROY

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