My friend Joby Varghese, a filmmaker, resides next to the enchanting, enigmatic Chalakudy river in central Kerala. I have visited the place umpteen times, especially during the monsoons. The rains, lashing on the roof, then the windows, doors and corridors, are a delight to experience, with the mighty, melancholic river flowing quietly at a safe distance.
But all that changed in August 2018. In the unprecedented fury of the rains, the river encroached its neighbouring geographies, fully submerging hundreds of houses including that of my friend in a matter of hours. Joby’s family thought the incident would be a one-off. But they were wrong. The floods, which claimed more than 500 lives in Kerala, damaging property worth over ₹50,000 crore and affecting nearly 8 lakh people in 2018, hit the land in 2019 as well, forcing Joby’s family, like lakhs of others, to take shelter elsewhere.
Never the same
Life will never be the same for Joby’s family, and thousands of people in and around the Western Ghats. The pitter-patter of rain, the country orchestra of frogs, the wild winds, the chillness in air, all have become imageries and metaphors of looming disaster. Kerala’s government and people now expect such vagaries of nature to revisit God’s Own Country in the coming years.
Why did calamity strike two years in a row? Though this question is still being debated in Kerala, there is consensus among the public that the root of the crisis lies in the way the State’s topography has been altered in the past few decades courtesy unbridled real estate development. Evidently, the floods were not an isolated phenomenon.
As Viju B., a journalist with a leading English daily in Kerala, infers in his neatly researched book, Flood and Fury: Ecological Devastation in the Western Ghats , they stem from what humans have done to the pristine mountains and its surroundings. Viju begins the book with an eerily apt quote, by Naranathu Branthan (The Mad Seer of Naranathu, who is the Malayalee’s suitably funny reply to The Sisyphus of Greece). “He rolled the boulder to the hilltop,/ Then rolled it down and laughed.” Metaphorically speaking, the Branthan’s act represents what Keralites have been doing to the land they live in. With a great deal of effort, they have built up a land that’s rich in flora and fauna, cultural diversity, social mobility, only to offset all those gains with acts of madness such as the alarming scale of ecological destruction incurred on the Western Ghats.
Most Malayalees bear a default pride for their seemingly unique culture. But when it comes to acting according to it, they miserably fail on many spheres. Negotiating nature is one such. Viju, who has extensively covered several of India’s natural calamities and tracked how people have responded to it, knows this for a fact and picked W.H. Auden to prove his point in the epigraph: “A culture is no better than its woods.” It seems the people of Kerala are learning this the hard way.
Man-made disaster
The book has 11 chapters. Six are dedicated to Kerala, where Viju travels from Idukki in the south towards Wayanad up north, visiting disaster-hit regions and recording public acts of resilience, mapping policy response and lack thereof, acts of kindness and compassion, and more. He provides insights, which could be helpful in future policymaking. The book also covers areas such as Coorg, Bicholim, Sindhudurg, and beyond, to offer a panoramic view of the Western Ghats and how the damages to it are altering climate and culture.
Rich with data and anecdotes, Flood and Fury asks crucial and relevant questions about the way we mistreat our pristine forests and rivers. Given the way natural calamities are revisiting the region, this is a neat handbook (which could have been edited better) for scholars and the people alike.
Flood and Fury ; Viju B., Ebury Press/Penguin, ₹399.
