Indian cities – Over the last two decades, a small shelf of Indian nonfiction has treated the city itself as an environmental object. Jyoti Pande Lavakare’s Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health and Siddharth Singh’s The Great Smog of India explored North India’s atmospheric pollution as a human-made crisis with human costs sustained by official short-termism and social inequality. Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli’s Cities and Canopies documented how trees in Indian cities have become a record of planning decisions and civic memory.
And Krupa Ge’s Rivers Remember returned to the 2015 Chennai floods to show how “natural disaster” is often just the afterlife of encroachment and bureaucratic habits. Writer and environmentalist Neha Sinha’s forthcoming Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi promises to extend this line of thinking. I really enjoyed her first book, Wild and Wilful (2021), and I don’t expect anything less with Wild Capital.
Its choice of subject is particularly interesting because Delhi resists being treated as just another metropolis in duress. Its wilderness is entangled with its self-image and its habits in ways that are more public than could be in any other Indian city. There have been hints of this in some books from the recent past, for example River of Love in an Age of Pollution (2006) by David Haberman, which was about the Yamuna, but there’s certainly more to be written.
Politics of people In India’s environmental history, Delhi is perhaps most notable for having been the site of highly visible experiments in governance. Few other Indian cities seem able to reveal how power makes landscapes and how landscapes in turn discipline power. It’s not unreasonable to expect to find imprinted in the habits of Delhi’s nonhuman lives the evidence of state formation, ideas of cleanliness and public order, bureaucratic improvisation, and the everyday bargains with which its residents make room for their lives.
The Aravalli outcrops and Ridge bear a semi-arid scrubland intersected by the Yamuna floodplain and its riparian logic, so to speak, and the planned gardens and avenue trees impose a third logic of aesthetic governance. These sensibilities overlap, and cohere and clash, and eventually make peace.
When empires and later the republic decided Delhi should look at least outwardly like a seat of authority, they pieced together shaded avenues and ceremonial vistas and presumed to move the “wilderness” to the edges. The state used trees and gardens to insist on order, hygiene, modernity, and permanence and thus a politics of people began to determine which species could thrive. And in the same way each carefully architected avenue encapsulates larger decisions about water, labour (to maintain it), shaded areas, and public spaces for the people.
Good opportunists But control is doomed to fail. The Aravalli Ridge alone is an inalienable reminder that the city rests on an older and tougher landscape and thus that its carefully trimmed lawns — even if they’re home now to birds and butterflies — are decorative.
The Ridge’s scrubs are nothing like gardens: they’re hardy, resist straight lines and perfect circles; the Ridge itself is an archive of institutional habits such as the reflex to plot and fence, to reduce ecological complexity from being a chance to live within one’s limits to a management problem. If the Ridge teaches the city grit, the Yamuna floodplain has lessons on denial.
The river once created wetlands and sandbars that allowed people to settle down in particular seasons. Over time however Delhi came to view that restraint as an inconvenience, exemplified by the contest between what the river sees as a floodplain and what the Delhi government calls real estate. Of course Delhi negotiates all these issues like other Indian cities, through politics, committees and departments, the courts, a bevy of ‘National Missions’ and State schemes, media reports, and so on.
But Delhi also holds more power and commands more attention, and so the changes that happen there seem to be more consequential. If the air is particularly foul on a winter day, it could draw the ire of the local government as much as of the Supreme Court. But that has also meant the city’s plants and animals are governed in a style that swings between emergency and amnesia.
Yet how they’ve done it! Delhi’s most visible animals are good opportunists. Monkeys have turned temples and markets into sources of food. Nilgai wander across institutional boundaries.
Crows and kites surveil waste from the sky. Street dogs map the social geography of care and abandonment. All these species of plants and animals say something about the local political economy.
The local flora is part of the chorus too. Because of the care the state has displayed towards maintaining its gardens, lawns, parks, and avenues, the places where trees are absent also speak volumes about where the state accepts degradation, and perhaps why. Lutyens’ Delhi and elite colonies for example receive shade and their trees are healthy and old whereas the city’s peripheral settlements live closer to, if not amid, heat, dust, and not-coincidentally-thin public services.
This in fact amounts to climatic injustice in a warming world. The greenery cools neighbourhoods, allows their children healthier childhoods, and gentrifies the area and raises the land value while the city’s poorest face hotter streets, longer commutes, and noisier environments. And thus Delhi is revealed to be a selective welfare state.
Do better Ultimately the city needs to resist the temptations of nostalgia — the idea that it has fallen from a ‘natural’ baseline it once enjoyed. The antidote is to remember that Delhi has always been a palimpsest of settlement, agriculture, invasion, courtly buildings, colonial planning, and postcolonial expansion.
That in turn also means we must restore rather than romanticise coexistence. There is virtue in treating the wounds of colonial aesthetics and extractivism and in recovering better baselines. As Neha Sinha told me, “The British once found the [Aravallis’] spiny, scrawny vegetation ugly, and we need to decolonise and restore our minds and forests, too.
” However, this enterprise must not come at the expense of believing that the past is how far we can go. The science of restoration allows us to go farther, and do better, even today.