On the Book of Central India – Part I: The Drive

 

Returning to the roots, the book sits along one of the many rivers it journeys with, Banjar

On February 1, 2025, Our Roots Run Wild, a book of the history of the highlands of Central India, was published by The Alcove Publishers of New Delhi. Released at a small non-event at the New Delhi World Book Fair where I felt too embarrassed to talk or sign the book, it marked the day the book became available as paperback and e-book, primarily on Amazon India. This is a short three-part series on the writing journey of this book that I let consume me.

In 2016, I started writing a longform essay hoping to publish it as a booklet of my experiences working in Madhya Pradesh, particularly in the region of Balaghat, Mandla, and Seoni districts. Working on the issues deemed important for wildlife conservation – particularly of large wild mammals – had put me in touch with the grassroots quite intimately. I worked not only for but also with the local communities, the Baiga folk, in particular, were my foremost colleagues and soon companions cherishing the fruits of working under the sky, far from the urban façade I felt arrested in when I worked in Mumbai – a part of my urban work life I very much wanted to leave behind.

Having seen, heard, and read enough for three years, I thought I could bring my experiences but more-so the story of this land called the Central Indian Highlands in a singular narrative. Without a count of the number of chapters or the broad narrative except that I wanted to talk about Central India, half the book was ready within two years. Thinking back to it, it was terrible. It lacked substance, it lacked essence, personality, quality.

I continued working in and for central India, and learning and reading deeper into its oral and written history. In the next three years, I continued to write the story I wanted to tell, adding more substance, nuance, and looked forward to a finished piece. Parallelly, I was experiencing the landscape – its wildlife, its people, their interactions. There was a period of more than a year when I didn’t write at all – I experienced, and a realisation dawned upon me: I wanted to write, but what was I really writing? What was there to be said that has not been said before or is being said now? Central India is a hotspot of researchers – ecologists, taxonomists, anthropologists, historians. It is a well-marked region from where a hundred (if not more) publications are churned each year.

Then COVID-19 hit. Between the first and the second wave, living isolated from friends and family took a toll. I travelled back to those eventful summers of yore, but I grew restless. Work kept me occupied in a good way, and my camaraderie with colleagues helped me get through, but my breaking point came when my mother was hospitalized for covid soon after I lost my grandmother during the second wave. I had to go home, and the unfinished story began to nag me. Although I did not write much during this period, I researched and read and travelled to know the region.

At the onset of Central India’s monsoon, I returned home, but it took me four more months to adjust to the routine of writing. I had left a chapter unfinished for over a year, and I dreaded returning to it. I picked it up after a refreshing exploration of insects and spiders of the Western Ghats shola forests. Since I could focus and spend longer hours researching and writing, the next three chapters were ready, but they looked markedly different from the previous five.

For someone who has only written articles, longform and short, this was a first time writing such a large narrative, a narrative that required weaving different events, experiences, and accounts of past and present together. It was only when I sat down at home and wrote all day (learning I am not at all a night person), did I realise what I had started was something humongous, a far cry from the first draft of the first four chapters (excluding the introductory chapter). At this point, too, it sat as a manuscript without emotion, essence, and personality. Fortunately, I had spent the previous year thinking about weaving the narrative as a story, this was set in my mind. It was going to be a narrative non-fiction, hard on facts, but told through a creative way – a journey through the land, through time, through stories. It meant that this was not going to be a scholastic publication.

Spending time to develop the story, I could weave many narratives together, whether by correlation or causation, this helped me expand upon things we took for granted – say how the wild buffalo went extinct in Central India – but also probe why, when, and where. In order to bring such many episodes together as a part of the bigger history of Central India, I read while I wrote. This was a lesson in note-making and writing: while I am fluent writing on a computer, I am comfortable taking notes by hand than pasting sticky-notes to the book or virtually highlighting e-books. This helped me maintain my flow through the course of a chapter, taking time off to read for the next only once I finished drafting the previous.

After completing the three chapters, I stopped before I wrote the last. Each chapter concludes by the end, so the conclusion of the book had to build upon it. But before I could do this, I had to revise the earlier drafts of the four chapters, then work on the creative narrative to weave them all together. It was going to take a long time to write the ending chapter, I realised, and got to rework the first four chapters. This took me a good half the year, well into the monsoon of the next since I got down to writing.

This is not the usual way of writing a book, I thought. When I came back home, I created a worksheet detailing how I would finish the manuscript within a year. As the year went by, I realised I was all over the place. It made no sense finding the second half of the book to be more well defined than the first half. But here I was, making my own way into the nitty-gritty of writing a book, a book that is a labour of love, without its formal institution- or grant-bound restraints, without so much as a crash-course in book-writing, but that also meant that I had to finish as soon as possible. I was writing of my own accord, without pay. It was led by a drive, but also, as I realise, a privilege not most have at their disposal. Yet in every story to tell there is struggle that is internal – this is elaborated in Part II.

Completing the seven chapters, without the introductory and the concluding one, took me another eight months. I started writing the introductory chapter, and began wearing the creative narrative into the manuscript. While it was going to be a first-person narrative, I needed a guiding light to show me direction – this was through the people I interacted with through the many years without whom this wouldn’t have been possible. As I met them to give them a copy of the book, we all joked about our greying beard. But in the eight years I had briefly interacted with many people, formally and informally, and I decided to merge them with all the things I loved about Central India. This is for you, if you read, to discover.

This is how I put the first eight chapters into place, renaming them and rearranging them, and turned my attention to the last chapter. Writing the end is the most dreaded part of story-writing. I leave it to you to decide whether it’s an end or really another chapter in the story, I wrote it with the intention of it being both – where my story concludes the history of Central India continues on. This is true for all the chapters. When I sat to write it under a number of tentative titles (I love titling my pieces when I start writing, but also change it as the piece takes shape), I decided to go with the flow (you’ll understand the pun when you read it). And without any device or scheme, it fell into place. The challenge was to weave many contemporary narratives together, the present and the future, many investigative cases and theoretical concepts, in view of the past. It flowed through me passionately, and in doing so I know I have introduced a part of me, the narrator, into the story, but that is really how I wanted you to read it, to feel happy and sad and angry the way I did, but more aptly, to agree or disagree with me.

In integrating myself into the book, I wanted to give you the chance to realise how your views differ from mine, whether they match or if you beg to differ. I had realised long ago that this was far from scholastic piece of work, I am not providing factual information but also emotions attached to it, I am not quoting others but interacting with the scribes by engaging with them, and having relied on many scholastic pieces from 19^th to the 21^st Centuries, I had made a decision to make this piece critically personal.

This is what drove me to write in 2016, to tell the story of Central India, not just a book about the natural history where peacocks scream and tigers charge, but to tell it from the lens of the first man and woman who heard and saw and weaved stories about them. By integrating myself into the story, I tried to present myself as an outsider partaking in the narrative that brought about a change, not merely as a storyteller, but someone who grew roots in the earth.

Even as I am aware of this bias, it is for the reader to discover why it is so - the hint lies in the title. It is, after all, another book of the history of this ancient land, one of the many written and many more to come.

The book is available on the publisher’s website: https://thealcovepublishers.com/product/our-roots-run-wild/

It is available on Amazon India: https://amzn.in/d/7FZNOEs