Raised to be Ecophobic

Right across the Hooghly river from Kolkata, is Howrah. Howrah has always been an object of curiosity for me. We always had to get to Howrah before we could cross over to Kolkata. We would whizz right past the colonial red stumps of the ginormous Howrah Railway Station onto the Howrah Bridge that would then take us into the city. I have absolutely no idea of what Howrah really looks like. But every time I look at the yellow taxi line right outside the platform exit, I hear my brain playing out the words, from Dilip Chitre’s Father Returning Home:

Now I can see him getting off the train

Like a word dropped from a long sentence.

Flooding in Howrah, Photo credits: Google images

Howrah represented that word absolved of any meaning or worth from a really long irrelevant sentence. But what does that have to do with ecophobia? Howrah isn’t what one can call a smart city, neither is it a suburb. I found its meaning only a couple of days ago at one of those loud nights of song, poetry and stories, where the family gathered to have an impromptu late night adda.

For the first time in twenty one years, I heard my uncle tell a story that night. A conversation all about himself beyond his usual mathematical and scientific preoccupations. It is 11 pm in the night, everyone in the family is readying themselves for bed after dinner. We somehow end up huddled into the living room. We are silent as he soulfully recites: Rudro Tomar Daroon Dipti, Rabindranath Tagore’s poem known widely as ‘Suprabhat’ in its English translation. Oh morning your glaring intensity!

The poem seemed to have moved something in him and opened the caves of deep thought. Two particular memories rose to the front. Both were an account of his memory of the widespread floods that devastated West Bengal in India and Bangladesh in 1978 (Above 20,000 sq. km. of flood affected areas). He begins with how 1978 was the last time he ever wore sanitary gloves before he had to put them on again for the pandemic!

This was Howrah at a time when my uncle was an NCC cadet in 1978, right across the Howrah Bridge from Kolkata. He wished that he hadn’t seen what he was about to tell us. He was on a rescue boat that was trying to deliver food and essentials to those stranded and ferry back the ones in dire need to the nearest hospitals. The first one was of a school building submerged in water. It was two stories high, but all one could see above the water was a little of the terrace embankment. The roof was teaming with survivors. They had almost nothing to eat and they would excrete over the edge of the terrace walls into the water. A corner had been set up as a women’s privy. A little farther off from the mass of bodies huddled together on the terrace, festering in fumes from the ecreta all around, was a huddle of snakes. They did nothing. They just stayed entangled into each other in one corner, while the humans counted their days on the other. That was one of the closest proximities in which my uncle had ever witnessed nature in action. It threatened to wipe out humans and animals alike. While the people drowned, starved, got washed away or infected, the dead cattle bloated up and floated through the water. A mere block of concrete seemed like the only space for solace in a flooded horizon.

Volunteers were warned not to hand out food and supplies, but were made to throw them at the survivors. There were risks. If a survivor caught your arm you would drown in the water. For a moment there, the humans were equal to the snakes.

A mother to her child hanging from the branch of a palm tree for dear life. The boat inched forward to save her. As they got closer, they realized that she was actually dead. She had managed to tie her saree around her waist to hold off the current from the flood. With her arms she tried to hoist her son higher on the tree. The scales on the tree tore through her saree and the skin on her arms. But even in death she had managed to keep her son hoisted. Her body had stiffened in rigor mortis. This was my uncle’s second memory. The baby eventually also lost its life and this story was recorded nowhere. Their death became a part of the numbers. No journalist, no photographer could have gotten into Howrah in the first place.

Children gathering in a crammed place to receive food from rescue workers, Credits: Google images

Fear. That is what his experience taught him. Fear nature. Fear that which can kill one of its own.

Everything that we do in this life is out of Fear of nature . Fear not just of the rules that the SoC has made for us but also fear of war gives rise to those rules in the first place. Do not go touch the fire. Do not go into the deep end of the sea. Do not engage with the lion. Still wear and stay away from the snake. Build walls. Keep your doors closed. And there's nothing else that is going to make you feel safe other than following those rules. So even when we are left into the open we are led to believe that door an award is enough. But the truth is that it is not enough, it will never be enough.

I don't know what Howrah looks like because it is the embodiment of a resistance to my ecophobia. It takes on modernity, machines and the modern state and blends it into its ecology. It makes it familiar to city-breds. Something that my phobia will never acknowledge. I will drive past the red stumps in an uber while a yellow taxi will roar right behind me, behind which will be a haunched man pushing a handcart-load of fruits. The person that just crossed the road right in front of my uber is rushing to catch the ferry across the Hooghly. He puts faith on the same swell that takes hundreds of lives every year. And every year DVC (Damodar Valley Corporation) fails to solve the drainage problem.

The Industrial Revolution redefined nature as a pure object, a machine that ideally could be intimately and indefinitely controlled and forced to spit out products in the service of an increasingly utilitarian capitalist economy. The role of humans in the ecosystem shifts from a participating subject, an organism in an organic community to a distanced consumer. This sort of shift accentuates fear of nature and taps into the insecurity that humans are not in control of the nonhuman world because of our inability to predict with any accuracy the effects of our actions upon it. Simon C. Estok calls this feeling ecophobia—"an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world…” The fear manifests itself into anthropocene (human-centric) behaviors like personal hygiene and cosmetics industries. It supports city sanitation boards that issue fines seeking to keep out “pests'' and “vermin”. It rallies behind landscape gardens and trimmed poodles in women's hands back handbags on the sole subway system. It is about power and control that inevitably makes looting and plundering of animals and nonanimal resources possible. It makes treating people like pets and vermins easier for others.

Any institution is ecophobic. Let’s take the farmer’s protest in India that reportedly injured 83 policemen (not just any men mark you!). I have a feeling that deep down the men that we call policemen are afraid of the men and women who rode into Delhi from the Singhu border on the 26th of January. It has been 5 days since the violence. It is getting harder and harder for the institution to hide how many of the protestors died in the two months of the protest. There seems to be no data for the number of farmers who killed themselves over debts, poor yield and countless droughts due to depleting ground water levels since 2014.

Now I walk the road between the Khunti and Dombariburu, in search of songs. Tall dry shrubbery looms over treacherous plateau mounds and hills. None of the villages in the thicket had doors in the houses. It was odd, but that did not affect much until I saw the brick house of a politician. It had gleaming white walls two storeys and a door! I never thought that just a lone door would make me feel safe. It was like finding concrete in the jungle. I could make out that it used to be blue at some point under the laal maati (red soil). The cream walls blended well with its red dust.

But the thing with feeling safe is that you are now aware that you were afraid. Our sense of control comes from a space of fear of the nonhuman world. What other wise people also know as the ‘natural world’. Turns out I suffer from something called ecophobia. It is intrinsic, one might say, as most phobias tend to be. But what we miss in this intrinsic fear, is the shared fear we hold with the people around us. Fear builds groups, communities and even nations. The fear of things that are not us brings us together.

How do you describe something that is not human? You call it inanimate, non-human, inhuman, superhuman, abnormal, monstrous? Animalistic? Nature itself?

If nature is non-human then is human unnatural?

I am not going to make this easy for you. We need to understand that we are all afraid. Afraid of nature. And we see it as something that is non-human. It seems to have a mind of its own even with all the scientific explanations. And as a species that scares us.

We sock ourselves up because it feels cold and that is a necessity. But is it a necessity to blast the heater in this weather in India? I don't think so. I remember my grandmother (Om Shanti!) would complain about the air conditioner in the summer. “Devil's contraption” (of course I am translating. Comment below to ask for her original phrase) she would call it. She couldn’t imagine sleeping without the window open and while I winced at the prospect of being bitten by mosquitos.

I was raised to be Ecophobic. We were all raised to be Ecophobic

I have never lived in Kolkata or Howrah longer than a couple of weeks at a time. Yet they form a considerable part of my life because of the frequent visits my parents made to our extended family during vacations. The oral history in my family revolves around these cities and their ecophobia-- a gripping mix of moments of deep attachment with nature and sheer fear in the others.