“The wretched thing about being a naturalist is that one is so handicapped in one’s expression,” wrote M. Krishnan, a pioneering wildlife photographer and writer, in one of his essays published in the collection Nature’s Spokesman, edited by historian and author Ramachandra Guha. This sentiment of Krishnan will undeniably be shared by anyone desirous of chronicling him.
To call Krishnan a naturalist would be inadequate. Perhaps, he was best described by his sister, Muthu, when Mr. Guha met her as someone interested in knowing more about Krishnan. She asked: “Which Krishnan? The artist, the writer, the photographer, the storyteller, the scholar, or the naturalist? You must know all the Krishnans if you wish to understand the man.”
From law graduate to artist
Born in Tirunelveli in 1912 to Madhaviah, who worked for the British government and was a distinguished bilingual writer, and Meenakshi, Krishnan attended the Hindu High School and went to the Presidency College, Madras, from 1927 to 1933, where he graduated with a master’s degree in Botany. He went on to study law at Law College, Madras, and after a brief stint in the court, he worked as the Chief Artist at Associated Printers and subsequently at the Madras School of Arts for a short period before a tenure at the All India Radio.
After marrying Indumati Hasabnis in 1937, Krishnan and his family moved to Sandur, a princely State near Bellary, and joined the Sandur State Service in 1941. He is said to have found the days in Sandur’s countryside and dry deciduous forests highly rewarding. In 1950, when Sandur was no longer a princely State, he returned to Madras and, turning down a job in the Indian Administrative Service, started freelancing.
Krishnan started writing nature notes for The Hindu (under the pseudonym ‘Z’) and for the Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1950, he began a fortnightly column for The Statesman named ‘The Country Notebook’, which was published without a break for 46 years. The last column appeared on February 18, 1996, the day he died. Most of the writings came along with his sketches and paintings.
Sharp commentaries
In ‘The Country Notebook’, he wrote field observations about all aspects of nature and wildlife one can think of — from birds to big cats, and geckos to gaurs. His commentaries were as sharp and biting as evocative.
While Vedanthangal is now practically every naturalist’s backyard, Krishnan wrote about the “sanctuary off the beaten track” in 1956: “Vedanthangal is one of the most picturesque and interesting breeding grounds of waterbirds in our country. A naturalist can spend a lifetime here, profitably observing the local avian life, but even to the layman the lake during the nesting season is fascinating, the compact field of observation, the teeming colonies in the water, the constant passage of birds to and fro, and the rural setting combining to capture and hold his eye.”
Distaste for invasives
With a particular distaste for invasives, he wrote extensively about the many exotic herbs and weeds — the Argemone mexicana, Alternanthera echinata, Croton sparsiflorus, lantana, and “the ugly, assertive, and ubiquitous Prosopis juliflora”, which penetrated into forests, parks, and roadsides in Madras in the late 1950s.
Perhaps, one grouse his readers continue to have is that only two collections of his writings were published in his lifetime — Jungle and Backyard and Nights and Days — apart from a children’s book. According to Mr. Guha, his early writings were light and humorous, and as he grew older, the tone grew sombre. The iconic naturalist was prolific not only in English but also in Tamil. His essays on wildlife were compiled by writer and conservationist S. Theodore Baskaran titled Mazhaikkalamum Kuyilosayum.
As wildlife expert Raman Sukumar put it, Krishnan worked as a devoted ecologist when environment was not a glamorous or pressing subject that attracted hefty research funding. He saw nature as was — without wanting to gild the lily — in all its imperfections. On an incident involving his photographic assistant, who remarked how it would be a ‘paradise’ to have the colourful grandeur of the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam, combined with the magnificent Bandipur forests, Krishnan wrote, “Personally, I do not believe in any sort of existence after death, but if there is a paradise, let us wait till we are decently dead before we aspire to it.”
Seminal work
In 1968, the first year the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund began granting fellowship, he was awarded the grant for an ecological survey of the mammals of peninsular India. His work for the fellowship was published by the Bombay Natural History Society as India’s Wildlife, 1959-1970, in 1971. This work, including striking photographs by him, for long remained the definitive text on the country’s wildlife.
Krishnan served on the government’s wildlife committees for decades and was one of the founding members of the Indian Board for Wildlife (now the National Board for Wildlife). He conducted wildlife surveys for the Centre and 14 States. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1970 in recognition of his work on wildlife conservation.
Flagging the dwindling animal population in forests over three decades, Krishnan advocated 10% of the total land area, representative of the diverse wildlife, to be left untouched. “Surely, with 90% of the land at their disposal, our governments should be able to meet the people’s demands, but so far no government we have had has resisted the temptation to achieve popularity at the expense of our country’s entity,” he wrote in 1991.
A trailblazing elephant whisperer, Krishnan had a subconscious understanding of the beloved pachyderm. In a 1995 interview to Frontline, he said, “I think I am half an elephant myself. In 1967-68, I was the last word on the elephant. Today, I know how little I know. That is the elephant. What ganja is to the addict the wild elephant is to me.”
