I wrote this bunch of reflections when in the Valley, returning after 29 years...
My land
Consider the constant migrations of people all over the
world , from the smallest groups to the largest, out of Africa, eddying and
swirling across continents, even crossing oceans, and it becomes clear that no
particular land ‘belongs’ to any specific group. The flows of genes (Y- and
mitochondrial), languages and cultures - all of them continuously changing –
have been used to map the migrations, often with contradictory results.
What does it mean to be the ‘original’ inhabitants of
Africa, if these autochthons just barely qualify as being (recognizably)
‘human’? Even hunter-gatherer societies are territorial, but with the advent of
agriculture and ‘settled’ populations, land ownership became even more of an
issue. So, to define ‘original’ inhabitants, do we stop at ‘recorded history’ –
or do we carry on digging into the often mythical past?
Plants and animals often seem to be more rooted than humans
to particular geographical areas – but even they have travelled extensively,
sometimes on their own, most often using birds and insects, and sometimes with
human aid.
Still we are tied to the land we live in by quirks of
geography, weather and food which affect our customs, clothes and language in
odd ways. (Bengalis must have hilsa, mutton for Kashmiris, maple syrup for the
Canadian…) There are ‘geographical indicators’ in our genes e.g. the lung
capacity of Sherpas and Tibetans and the sickle cell anaemia (malaria-resistant)
genes in parts of India and Africa. Other traits may not be so obvious. Some mutations
may be neutral.
Although we are ‘tied’, we are not truly bound to a given
place: one sibling may stay a whole lifetime in one place, another may land up
in some other continent, and yet another may be travel all over the world and
never settle anywhere – while eyeing the other planets in insatiable wanderlust.
In principle, anyone could live anywhere – but in practice there are many
barriers to overcome.
But in what ways does a land alter your perceptions, your
language? The story that the Eskimos have 40 words for snow turned out to be an
exaggeration. Yet it is true that the seasons and the plants (some of them
carried along with us), leave their imprints upon our languages. Landmarks acquire
historical overtones and memories that last centuries if not millennia – like
Mt. Kailash for Hindus or the Wailing Wall for Jews - even if they have been 'lost'. These can arouse feelings
of connection with the land, and feelings of ownership. Most of these seem to
be for religious reasons, which would naturally get entrenched in the
collective memory of a community or group.
But in many places this sacred feeling can be fixed on a
river (the Ganga, the Nile, etc) or a lake, that would mostly be adjacent to a temple.
It could be a place of pilgrimage (e.g. the Amarnath Yatra, Kailash Manasrover
Yatra - which is a mountain and a lake – or Lake Baikal,…). Often the river has sufficed to demarcate ‘us’
and ‘them’… but the paths of neither rivers nor men are invariable and stable.
Imagine belonging to a nomadic community that has always
gone South in the winter, and returned North in summer, along well-worn paths
marked and traced by numerous generations of ancestors, along with ‘their’
herds of reindeer, or cattle, or whatever…
The feeling of being attached to some place could also be
related to some purely individual memory: like some place you went to with your
parents as a child… or it could be an accretion of memories, just the sights,
sounds and smells of the village or town that you grew up in…
For many a Kashmiri Pandit, his or her identity is bound up with
temples of Shankaracharya, Martand, Tulla Mulla,.. And with the lakes and gardens
of the Valley, the apples, the mulberries, the rainbow trout … yet, it may just
be the very quotidian, mundane place you grow up in…it doesn’t have to be a
putative paradise!
But it is very hard to pin it down: why do we have these feelings for our ‘homeland’? For me, the song from the film Kabuliwala, “Ae Mere Pyare Watan…”
comes closest to expressing the ineffable feeling of nostalgia and homesickness. I do not relate to the ridiculous anthropomorphism of “Bharat Mata”…
Farmers and fishermen are closest to the land and the sea. They
are tuned to the seasons and the soil, and the tides and currents of the sea. Local
knowledge is important: take the case of the Turkish farmers who refused to
remove stones from their fields, because they – counter-intuitively – boosted
their yields. That knowledge, often accumulated over generations, ties farmers
to their land.
But this is a paradox: we don’t ‘own’ the land – it doesn’t
even need us! – and yet we have this feeling of ownership. And particularly in
the Anthropocene, humans have made irreversible changes at the global level,
leaving behind detectable residues of plastic, concrete and radioactivity.
Food is sourced from so many countries today that we are in
denial of the seasons, of the annual and decadal rhythms of the land. The
elites imagine themselves as global citizens – and think that there is no price
to be paid for these extravagant, profligate ways of global citizenry.
Does the land ‘belong’ to us? No matter how many fences we
weave, how many walls we erect, how many canals we dig, dams we build, whether
we map it with rulers, theodolites or GPS – the land does not need us – as in
Nevil Shute’s “Earth Abides”, it will be there long after we are dead and gone
and long forgotten, both as individuals and as a species, that tends to think
too much of itself. We may irrigate the land with water, tears or blood, and we
may indeed belong to the land – as do countless other organisms, ranging from
bacteria to whales, but it does not belong to ‘us’.
