Latest revision as of 16:22, 21 July 2017

[edit] About South Asia

Latha Anantharaman , Indica Earth “India Today” 29/12/2016

In the most desperate hours of the past two months, someone probably cheerfully reminded you that in the long run, we'll all be dead. That's not as bleak a thought as it sounds. It is, in fact, the everyday world view of any good geologist. Natural historians lean so far back for the larger picture that they routinely visualise a time when our world was a stew of molten iron with a glassy vapour floating above it, a time when a day was just six hours long and the moon was close enough to shake the earth in its orbit. When the roiling elements on our planet eventually resolved themselves into a recognisable ocean and land masses, those masses continued to collide, break apart and slide around time and again. Even the poles were not exactly opposite each other.

Our planet has an eventful past, and in writing its natural history in Indica, Pranay Lal zooms in on the Indian subcontinent. In map after map of land masses over the aeons, a small yellow star marks our own diamond-shaped Jambudweep, which seems to have been more restless than the rest.

Some parts of the earth, Lal says, are older than others, and our land has more ancient bits than most other continents. The Indian subcontinent was attached to Madagascar, Africa, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and even Antarctica at various times. Either the land masses fit snugly together like a nest of puppies or were connected by land bridges, so that a dinosaur might have sauntered from Chennai to New Zealand in a few days. We know all this because of the similar rocks and minerals that are found in places now separated by vast oceans. Just one example of the writer's copious evidence for these connections is the startling fact that the Western Ghats range, with its Palakkad Gap, has a corresponding range of mountains with a corresponding gap in Madagascar.

This is how Lal reads the rocks to draw out his deep natural history. Lean back far enough in time and rocks are not durable features of an unchanging landscape. Over the aeons, they boiled, crystallised, collided, shattered, and took impressions of all the elements they came into contact with. And that was long before there was anything to fossilise. As the earth's surface cooled, those elements became the first films of amino acids and nutrients that made life possible. That was the scum that harboured organic bubbles of jelly from which we descended.

Lal gets even more interesting once he starts on bacteria, and then the more complex life forms. Any review must drastically and unfairly compress the range of life this writer so richly visualises. He talks of the first animals that developed the need, and then the ability, to sense day and night. He tells the saga of the backbone. We have all read about the emergence of animals from sea to land, but Lal also describes the life forms that went back into the sea, and specifically the whale, whose ancestor resembled a mouse-deer!

Alongside the development of animal life, Lal keeps up with the dizzying array of changes that continued to transform the earth. Fallen trees changed into coal, coal hardened into diamond, the shells of sea creatures became chalk, and chalk cooked into marble. Then there were the cataclysmic events that wiped out most life forms again and again over the ages: lethal rises in temperature, acid rains, ice ages, and undersea volcanic eruptions. In our time, when they are not staging spectacular quakes, the plates of the earth's crust still adjust and nudge each other-like commuters in a Mumbai train, as Lal puts it-and in some parts of the world, there are little tremors every day.

Even in our much-trampled subcontinent, the fossil evidence for all these histories is plentiful. It is embedded in cliffs and hills, but also lies in riverbeds, under temple idols, or even behind garages in the middle of a metro. Lal specifically locates geological formations and fossils, even giving road directions sometimes. Maybe there is a slip in tone in all that, from hi-sci to DIY. But heck, this is what excites the reader. We feel we may ourselves discover a fossil one day while wading in a creek, just break open a round rock and reveal the imprint of an ammonite. At the very least, we may learn to read the rocks in a rudimentary way, even if we never learn to read between the lines, or between the lava flows, as the geologists do. In any case, Lal has given us back our childhood certainty that every stone underfoot is a treasure of secrets.

There are no laws, Lal says, to protect geological formations like the upswept magma chambers of Manawar near Indore, which are quarried for gravel, or the fossil-packed 'supari' limestone of Habur, which is excavated for use in handicrafts. But such laws can come only when we know what it is we must protect, when we have learned to name it, and weigh its importance to our survival or simply to our science. Indica takes us a step forward in that direction. The last chapters chart the rise of primates, made possible by the evolution of flowering plants. For ages, primates stayed up in the trees, safe from the fearsome behemoths that still owned the earth. When a few apes ventured to the ground about seven million years ago, they began to keep their heads up to watch for predators and walk on two feet; and before we knew it, we had the hominid species, of which Homo erectus, Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals roamed out of Africa to Potwar, and then to southern India and Bengal.

The how and why of human migrations, of course, are work in progress. Lal summarises the theories that have been woven from the axes, charred bones and other litter of wandering humans. DNA studies have rearranged those theories, but we know one thing. We are not a reproducible result. If life had to start all over again on earth, we have no idea how it would play out.

Indica is generously illustrated. There are imaginative paintings of Rajasaurus roaring at an Indosuchus, or a thumb-size early primate. There are beautiful old prints of the Ellora temples, plants, animals and birds. The present-day images are no less important: flaming rivers of lava, fossilised tracks of a metre-long centipede, and rocks of all types and ages. Lal's explanations add interest even to everyday photographs of coal mines and limestone quarries.

Lal's writing is far from the polished prose of Siddharth Mukherjee or Atul Gawande, and the text in the first edition of such an important book should have been more carefully edited, but it is highly readable and often entertaining. Still, a greedy reader wishes for more. I would like to have seen the land mass maps side by side, so as to appreciate the shifts in plates. Some timelines would have helped us keep track of all those volcanic eruptions and ice ages. Amidst all the illustrations, a few graphics would have made the statistics easier to absorb. With a full-page physical map of the present-day subcontinent, we could have more easily followed the shifting lines of rivers, mountains and coasts that Lal describes. There can be few surprises in the content of Lal's natural history as he walks us to our present recognisable planet, but the physical book itself holds one surprise that will delight every nature lover, and even the greedy reader. I leave that surprise for you to discover.

Latha Anantharaman is the author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year