Abstract
Susan Visvanathan. 2022. Work, Word and the World: Essays on Habitat, Culture and Environment. New Delhi: Bloomsbury India. xiii + 315 pp. Index. ₹1,299 (hardback—ISBN: 9789354353734)
Susan Visvanathan, the author of the book under review, asks crucial questions about modernity and the struggles of surviving in a precarious and increasingly vulnerable world. This multidisciplinary book takes us to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Ladakh to share stories about communities whose lives are impacted by climate change in the age of the Anthropocene. These stories emerge from years of her fieldwork and interactions with various professionals, PhD students, practitioners, social workers, activists and ordinary citizens. Her ability to weave in narratives, spread across time and space into an effortless reading, makes this book highly engaging. Partly a memoir of her journeys, the book, through her ethnographic observations, shows how the world is changing. With archival material combined with interviews, Visvanathan writes about the societies being transformed and how they bring in novel adaptations grounded in indigenous knowledge systems of local suitable and sustainable practices. The book teases out the multilayered paradoxes that the world is currently witnessing, namely, tradition versus modernity, faith versus science, environment and development.
The 10 chapters, divided into three sections, present a highly engaging collection of essays that critically uncover significant social and cultural changes. We often examine environmental changes and problems with our disciplinary boundaries, which are frequently rigid and impassable. Visvanathan’s writings powerfully break disciplinary walls and direct us to understand people and their everyday lives better. Therefore, the title of the book is appropriate: Work, Word and the World: Essays on Habitat, Culture and Environment. One can feel a sense of scholarly freedom through the free flow of words, thoughts and presentation. This, I found, very refreshing and liberating. The way we understand modernisation and development needs new language and imagination. In that sense, this is a unique work that embraces interdisciplinarity and practices inclusivity by bringing in stories of farmers, plantation workers and other marginalised people whose lives are impacted more by climate change than those who have contributed to it. Visvanathan’s conceptual and empirical approach captures the past and witnesses the present for the future without missing the larger picture of the framework of modernity and tradition.
The book begins with the chapter ‘Sacred Rivers’, an exploration of the interplay between the political, legal, socio-religious, secular and economic, through questions of water and land. The construction of Kerala’s Mullaperiyar dam faced resistance from the public, both in making the dam and over its sustainability. In modern India, according to Visvanathan, displacement due to dams is a ‘symbol of reorganisation of society’ for middle-class citizens, the primary beneficiaries, while the rest of the population are ‘silent witnesses to the transformation’ (p. 15). Their anxieties, struggles and lived experiences become the thread that binds the book together, be it the condition of the landless wage labourers during COVID-19 or the changes in the Kalpathy Heritage site of Kerala as a result of tourism.
While Visvanathan raises the complexities of multiple actors in development, she also brings in examples from community-driven initiatives that give us hope for the possibility of a better future. In Ladakh, the inspiring alternative school run by the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Sonam Wangchuk, is well-known. SECMOL (the Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) democratises traditional education through holistic education as a lifestyle for young people and their relations with the Earth. Examples of other grassroots non-governmental organisations are equally encouraging. Anita Varghese and her team in Keystone Foundation, Tamil Nadu, have been working with honey collectors from tribal communities and have made significant contributions to the health, Ayurveda and tourism industries while keeping the needs of the people at the centre. Through the questions of borders and boundaries, the book shifts to important questions concerning host societies and settler communities, to discuss migration histories. Who is the ‘outsider’ or an original habitant is contentious. Visvanathan creates a tapestry of nature–culture stories of people who often travel. She states that nomadic groups across interstate boundaries are like rivers, who ‘become prisoners’ of their own histories (p. 74) because their point of origin creates friction with the different political interpretations. Questions of modernity and tradition evoke the notion of co-existence multiple times across the book. As often understood, co-existence is the ability to adjust or to accept the rule of the host or the dominant society, but according to her, co-existence is dependent on mutual dialogue, with the understanding of one another’s vocabulary. The co-existence of detachment and faith, true and false, science and religion are the themes of the section on ‘Literary Encounters’. Works of eminent poets and travellers Stephanos Stephanides and Ari Sitas help us examine the concepts in the organisation of time and space through nostalgia as a useful way of thinking about belonging.
Drawing on the rich narratives about Tamil Brahmins of Palakkad who live in the Kalpathy Heritage site, the book engages in the questions of capital transactions and new values of land that modernisation brings in through tourism. The same question is asked about the right to education, forest conservation, infrastructure development and social inequality. Along the same lines, the author attempts to examine the moral dilemmas of forced segregation during the pandemic in the chapter titled ‘The Abyss: Covid-19 and Its Implications’. Through her own experiences as a patient in the general COVID ward of a hospital in Delhi, she presents a personal history of her pain, the trauma of other patients and the conditions of manual labourers and workers in the city.
This book is an admirable example of building bridges across disciplines. It provides rich ethnographic accounts that could, however, have been presented better. In some sections, entries or diaries are lengthy, which run into more than two pages.
The book will be valuable for those interested in modernisation, environment and development debates, anchored in the societal and human stories. Several stories from the ground will make excellent reading material for research scholars and university students. I am personally keen on using some of the material in the book for teaching in my class.