Pointed mangrove shoots stand like hairs on end, popping out of the wet earth; the silhouette of a bare tree with a sea eagle seated on one end rises against the blue sky; a plywood factory has men slicing wood on a machine… These are some of the stills that environmentalist Pankaj Sekhsaria displays at a photo exhibition on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and their ecological wealth, which began on September 2, in Chennai. The exhibition is a celebration of a 20-year-old romance with the Islands, during which the author of The Last Wave travelled extensively across the place, photographing it.
In fact, the story of how Sekhsaria got involved with the Islands and their history is itself interesting. “I had flunked my engineering exams viva voce and had the gap of a year to kill. That’s when I landed up in the Andamans, thanks to a friend who was with the Navy and invited me to Port Blair,” says the author. After that first visit, during which he explored the Islands for over a month, Sekhsaria was hooked. “I experienced my first turtle nesting there. I learnt about the struggles for the rights of the indigenous people, about the issue of timber logging… Even after I had returned home from the first visit, I knew I had to go back.”
In 1998, as a Kalpavriksh staff member, Sekhsaria returned to the Islands, working for over six months on a grant proposal to address some of their environmental issues. “Even though timber logging was legal, it was being done in excess, and in areas where they should not happen. The coastal areas too suffered from the impact of indiscriminate sand mining for construction. The Andaman Trunk Road, which ran through Jarawa territory, also became a part of activists’ concern,” he said.
The 2002 Supreme Court order, calling for closure of the Andaman Trunk Road, in response to petitions filed by Kalpavriksh, Bombay Natural History Society, and Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, marked a landmark victory for the activists working to protect the Islands and their tribal inhabitants from harmful intervention. But, the Court’s order was never implemented and the Road has ever since been a bone of contention between settlers from outside the Islands and the indigenous inhabitants. They have suffered from disease and unhealthy intrusion into their lives, due to increased tourism and everything else that the road has made possible, Sekhsaria said.
“It was the kind of disappointment that arose from my activist engagement that prompted me to tell the story of the Islands in a different form,” said Sekhsaria, whose 2014 novel, The Last Wave, was a fictional portrayal of the ecological crisis that the Islands are facing.
On Wednesday, Sekhsaria read out his favourite passages from the novel to a small audience of urban planners and architects at the Urban Colloquium in the city.
One of the passages recounts the local history of how Aniket, a place in the South Andamans, got its name. The author traces back to the story of Anne and Kate, the daughters of a British officer. “There is a real place called Aniket in the Andamans, but I fictionalised the story in the novel,” he said.
Sekhsaria stressed that there was more to the Islands than what mainland Indians assumed they had to offer. “The Islands have a fascinating ecology and geology. The exhibition aims to communicate its importance by way of a format that is accessible to ordinary people. Both the novel and the photo exhibition are a new kind of engagement with the subject.”
The photo exhibition is thus just one way to spin a visual yarn around the Islands, which are blessed with an evergreen tropical rainforest canopy, of which over 1000 varieties of plants do not exist in mainland India.
According to the local administration, the Islands are blessed with over 200 species of timber, 50 varieties of forest mammals, over 200 species of butterflies and moths, besides a wealth of shells, corals, fishes and sea horses.
Check out the exhibition that is on till September 6 at The Folly, Amethyst, Royapettah, Chennai from 11 a.m. to 7.30 p.m.
