AS a historian of Shimla, one of my favourite stories of the town relates to a certain Nasreen Azhar, the Pakistani human rights activist. A schoolgirl in the 1940s, Azhar and her family had resided in colonial ‘Simla’ before being whisked away to Pakistan a few months after the Partition.
Half a century later, in an interview, she remembered her departure after midnight through her mother’s injunction to “bid farewell to Simla." The family dearly loved the town, but the final memory didn’t hark to buildings, for it was reserved for the stately deodars flanking the roadside. “Dono taraf pahaadon ke lambe lambe darakht andheron mein khaday huay thhe…" Only the trees remained standing on both sides of the road in the thick of the night, witnesses to one of the most harrowing, heartbreaking events in human history.
Trees, as Robert Macfarlane poetically puts, “are curators of time." But in measuring lifespans far exceeding the human age limit, they also become signposts and anchors for human growth itself. Isn’t it true that many of our best memories relate to the outdoors, which is never barren but always infused with greenery? And trees, surely, are the triumph of that greenery, holding in their shade and strength the proofs of an enriching life that joyfully brings together the human and non-human. As German thinker Goethe pithily remarked, “All is leaf."
And all was leaf, or at least so it felt until the early years of my childhood, before the turn of the century. Mostly growing up in Himachal and for a few years in present-day Uttarakhand, I was unaware of any modern infrastructure whose height dramatically surpassed the tallness of deodars, oaks, chestnuts or sals. Even the occasional visit to metropolises in the plains until the end of the 90s would typically bring us face-to-face with ‘flats’ that were ‘manageable’ (read ‘navigable’) by foot and not a total affront to the eye. They also seemed to match the height of trees.
It was only later that I realised that urbanism dominated by real estate megalomania had already been underway since the onset of liberalisation. But its instant visibility in the form of what are known as urban heat islands was relatively absent until two to three decades ago. These densely packed metropolitan zones of glass, concrete and tar experience far higher temperatures than their vicinities, and they metamorphosed into the defining symbols of modern development post 2000. This model of development colonised entire landscapes with narcissistic disregard for greenery, unless it fulfilled the token role of ornamentation. This plain-based model of progress also spread to the hills in the new millennium. Had Kipling been alive, the title of his anthology ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’ would have certainly taken on a new, worrisome import.
There is something overwhelmingly coarse, crass and crude about the ways in which we as a species and especially as a country have come to treat natural vegetation in the last few decades. While a detailed historical perspective is beyond the scope of this article, a cursory look at the umpteen recent developments proves beyond doubt that we have successfully settled on a new collective enemy: trees.
Pick up any part of India, and examples spill forth with a dangerous ease. From the 7,500 trees cut for the recently inaugurated Delhi-Dehradun Expressway and over 8,600 in Pune for various departmental works during the past four years, to more than 45,000 mangroves slated to die for the Versova-Bhayandar Coastal Road project in Mumbai, and one crore trees facing the same fate in the Great Nicobar Project (this being an ecologist’s estimate, as against the government’s projection of 8.5 lakh), the numbers are staggering. Similarly, Nashik’s Kumbh Mela preparations have already seen hundreds of trunks felled and millions are at risk of extinction in Madhya Pradesh’s Ken-Betwa River Linking project.
It isn’t that the ordinary layman hasn’t taken notice. In fact, some of the most moving news from recent times relates to the multiple protests erupting across states against these ill-conceived endeavours. The ‘Chita Andolan’ led by tribal women and indigenous families with regard to Ken-Betwa has already grabbed headlines, poignantly showing people lying on mock funeral pyres, demanding justice and adequate compensation. But, as has become the norm over the past decades, almost every other protest courts the ire of authorities and paves the way for newer threats and intimidation instead of dialogue or introspection.
It is tragic that we have reached a situation where the authorities themselves – a case in point being the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) — openly admit that they have run “out of space" within the city limits of Mumbai for large-scale compensatory plantation. And only a month ago, it was reported that 43% of the trees transplanted for the Central government’s Rs 20,000-crore Central Vista Redevelopment Project have also perished. On the other hand, we are supposed to marvel at India’s first ‘Algae Tree’, an artificial solar-powered bioreactor installed in Bhopal a few days ago, that absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen with the help of micro-algae. What an irony.
Coming back to Shimla, I can never forget how the terrifying monsoon of 2023 spurred so many residents to go on a tree-cutting spree like never before. All of a sudden, the very tree that the state of Himachal had worshipped for centuries — the deodar — turned into a receptacle of evil, and was mindbogglingly attributed as a major reason for landslides (thereby triggering the massive chopping). Months later, in January 2024, the highest court of the country went against the National Green Tribunal’s pause on the disastrous Shimla Development Plan 2041 (the NGT had previously termed it “illegal," given the SDP’s aim of building in the 17 green belts), and approved it for implementation. A year and a half later, when calamity again struck the state, the same Supreme Court defended Himachal’s ecology and warned that if strict measures weren’t taken, “the entire state may vanish into thin air."
How do we make sense of such blatant contradictions? What and whom do we believe? As authorities await forest clearance to fell more deodars in order to install a gigantic statue of Lord Ram adjacent to the world’s tallest Hanuman statue atop Shimla’s highest hill, I am gripped by a burgeoning sense of horror and anxiety. How is it that we constantly forget that it isn’t the presence of mythology that readily renders a mountain divine? Rather, it is the mountain, complete with its micro-climate, that lends divinity to real and imagined stories.
In these dark times, one may do well to heed the writer JRR Tolkien’s words via one of his fictional characters who, interestingly, is depicted as a god: “Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!"