‘Throughout history, indigenous peoples have worked with land and nature in incredibly sustainable ways’ Premium

Arati Kumar-Rao whisks her audience away from the relatively colder climes of Bengaluru to Jaisalmer district in the heart of the scorching Thar desert. “It has been almost two years since there has been any rain,” she explains at a talk titled Marginlands: An Exploration of Indian Landscapes, which was part of the fourth edition of the recently-concluded Green Literature Festival (GLF).

Arati Kumar-Rao whisks her audience away from the relatively colder climes of Bengaluru to Jaisalmer district in the heart of the scorching Thar desert. “It has been almost two years since there has been any rain,” she explains at a talk titled Marginlands: An Exploration of Indian Landscapes, which was part of the fourth edition of the recently-concluded Green Literature Festival (GLF).

“This is what it looks like, the dunes we are on,” says the Bengaluru-based writer and photographer, displaying photographs of this arid area.

But the pastoralists who call the desert their home also know the secrets it harbours, including where to find water, even during prolonged droughts. Rao talks about sitting on top of a dune with her friend, Chhattar Singh, a shepherd farmer from that area, watching him unearth water from the belly of a dune.

“It hasn’t rained here for 22 months. How is this dune wet?” she asks before sharing what Singh has told her: there are places in the dunes in the Thar desert where they hold water in their bellies.

It is why the desert is dotted with self-replenishing, pitcher-shaped hand-dug wells or beris, a system suited for, “the youngest and most populated desert of the world.” The Thar, clearly, thrums with life, from pastoralists like Singh, who spend their lives walking their ungulates through the undulating landscape, to many plants and animals like the small but deadly saw-scaled vipers, hunting for food as the sun goes down and the hardworking scarab beetles, moving large balls of dung several times their own body weight to secret chambers deep in the dunes. “If you look around in the desert, it’s hardly deserted,” says Rao. “Our metaphors are so wrong; there are signs of life everywhere.”

Over hundreds of years, people living in and off this harsh desert landscape have learnt how to not just survive but also thrive here, creating adequate water systems in a land that gets only 4 inches of rain annually, even managing to farm here. But life is now proving to be a struggle for many of these people. They have to deal with extreme climate events, laws and policies that are not always friendly to them, government interventions, or the rapid urbanisation taking over their commons, becoming scapegoats in the ongoing tussle between rapid development and conservation.

“For the Indian government, the Thar is a wasteland…something that has to be better utilised,” says Rao. To “improve” this wasteland, water is piped from the Sutlej down to the Thar. “By the time it reaches, there is hardly any water and what does is putrid…stinking,” says Rao, pointing out that this district, which did not even know what a mosquito was, is now the district with the highest incidence of malaria in Rajasthan.