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’.