http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/c3LVlRlFu7H93JQuPtXbbK/The-storyteller-of-the-islands.html
When
Pankaj Sekhsaria first travelled to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a
student, he had little idea of how enduring his engagement with the
islands would turn out to be. Over the last two and a half decades, he
has been an environmental activist, a journalist, researcher,
photographer and author—and in each of these roles, he has tried to
unravel and communicate the complex issues that define the existence of
the islands, its people and environment.
“What is the meta
question to be asked about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands?” asks
Sekhsaria rhetorically. “Broadly speaking, any system we are part of
consists of three elements—the socio-cultural-political, the ecological
and the geological framework. On the islands, all these three are always
in flux, and we need to find a language to articulate and account for
how they influence each other. All development planning needs to take
this constant change into account.”
As a member of the Kalpavriksh
Environment Action Group, Sekhsaria was part of the team of three
non-government organizations whose petition before the Supreme Court
resulted in orders for the closure of the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) in
2002. This ambitious road on the Andaman island links Port Blair in the
south to Diglipur in the north. It also cuts across the reserved
rainforests that are home to the reclusive Jarawa tribals, exposing both
the ancient rainforest and the Jarawas to exploitation. It was a
vector, both metaphorical and literal, that brought in a number of
undesirable and uncontrollable influences, on the one hand, and took
away valuable resources like timber on the other.
The victory in
the Supreme Court remained short-lived. Some of the orders, including
those for the closure of the ATR, have never been implemented by the
administration. The indigenous tribes that go back over 30,000 years
continue to be vulnerable to the state and to ideas of development and
mainstreaming that have not had any great successful precedence,
certainly not in the case of these islands.
After years of trying to influence change as an activist and journalist, Sekhsaria published a novel,
The Last Wave—An Island Novel, in 2014.
“The
fiction writing came from the disappointment of the activist,” shares
Sekhsaria. “The question became—can the same story be told differently?
“As
a journalist or activist, there is a particular form in which the story
must be told. There is a limited reach. Can a different genre of
writing tell the same story to the same people and make some headway?”
Sekhsaria
recounts the events that led to his book. There was the failure of the
administration to implement the Supreme Court order, followed by the
devastation suffered after a tsunami in December 2004. Around that time,
Sekhsaria was also reading Amitav Ghosh’s
The Hungry Tide, a novel set in the vulnerable archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal.
“It
was a little like a tubelight switching on in my head. Perhaps the
story of the islands can also be told in the same way. When you are
involved with any work for a long time, you understand that it is
multilayered. As an activist, you end up portraying certain institutions
as problematic. But, in reality, things are more ambiguous. The space
in the grey is where everything lies. There is no one villain.
“What
fiction allows you to do is explore motivations and actions in a
nuanced way. Good fiction demands that. There are certain voices that
are not heard in a certain context, and I wanted to express their points
of view and perspective.”
In a chapter in
The Last Wave,
Sekhsaria writes about the connect, or lack of it, between the ancient
community that faces inevitable annihilation and those whose actions are
leading up to it.
“The other original islanders, the Onge and
the Great Andamanese, who had cohabited these forests with the Jarawas,
had all but gone. The Jarawa were now being dragged down the same path.
There was the evidence and the weight of history—the Jarawa would be
pushed down the road to annihilation—that was the word David had used in
their first meeting. What do the annihilated feel? That was not the
question Harish wanted to ask. What does the annihilator feel? How would
he, himself, feel when the Jarawa were no more? Not because he wanted
them to be vanquished, but because he could do nothing about their slide
into oblivion. The world he belonged to did not want to annihilate the
Jarawa, but it did not seem to know better.”
Sekhsaria recounts a recent exchange with a friend from Port Blair. “
Hamara wajood kya hai,” asks the friend. “What is our relevance in the larger world?”
Like
all islands, this archipelago has its own allure in the imagination of
India’s mainland population. Besides the attraction of its beaches,
forests and sea, there is the historical connection to the freedom
movement and the Cellular Jail. The islands remain a strategic outpost
for the defence services.
Where
do the diverse people of the islands fit within this framework? Will
they continue to be on the fringes of the national consciousness, their
aspirations and conflicts forever marginalized?
Over the years,
says Sekhsaria, he began to question what the core conflict between
various people’s interests really was. “I realized that somewhere we are
dealing with a battle of ideas and ideology and knowledge and knowledge
systems. There is a certain hierarchy of knowledge creation. How can we
say the tribals’ knowledge is less than the scientists’? They
understand differently.”
“Has there been a difference in the way the book has been received in mainland India and on the islands?” I ask Sekhsaria.
“For
many of them, it’s as if the story of the islands has now been told.
There are friends who say that reading this book makes many people
change their perspective of their own islands. It is an amazing thing to
hear and extremely humbling at the same time.
“So what the
activist was not able to communicate, in a way the fiction writer could
do,” says Sekhsaria. “As an activist, your positions are pretty clear.
You broadly take a stand and draw a border between right and wrong.
Either the road is closed or the road is open. Either something is a
violation or it is not a violation. An able chronicler, on the other
hand, tells you all the stories.”
Sekhsaria explains, for
instance, that the ATR is a central element in the novel. The people who
will be affected negatively by the closure of the road have a strong
voice in the book, explaining why the road should not be closed. Why it
is not fair on them.
“It makes me wonder if it is possible that we
become sympathetic to the other side when we feel that our own point of
view has been understood fairly?”
As
Sekhsaria articulates the eternal conflict between outsiders and
insiders, the push for development and the pull of conservation, the
island story begins to sound like a microcosm of the wider world.
Conflicting interests, a hierarchy of power that seems immovable, a
rapidly deteriorating environment, and entire societies teetering on the
brink of annihilation.
“Why does it happen the way it does? Is it
completely unavoidable? Are we all, in some sense, prisoners of our own
context? We feel that there is agency but we are also caught up in our
own biases,” Sekhsaria says. “With time, you realize that as individuals
we are all as compromised as anybody else is.”
After touring with
his fiction and non-fiction books, Sekhsaria has also designed a
travelling exhibition of photographs from the island. He experimented
with printing images on a large canvas of silk fabric and suspending
them, so they moved in the air as light came through the prints. These
photo installations are part of The Story of Space 2017, a
science-meets-art festival in Panaji, on till 19 November.
“I
wanted to create another space of engagement between mainland people and
the islands,” says Sekhsaria. “The same words and photographs that I
had used in court petitions or journalistic articles were now available
in a new form—seeking to create a different experience and reflect the
idea of flux and fragility. It is the same, yet it is new.”
Just
like the islands, which are also always in flux, responding
simultaneously to destruction and renewal at the hands of nature.
Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and author of the book My Daughters’ Mum.
She tweets at @natashabadhwar
