Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India’s marginalized landscapes and inhabitants (human and more-than-human), which takes its readers from the high Himalayas to the Sundarban delta, from the deserts of the Thar to
the climate-change-ravaged Keralan coastline and beyond. Born of hard, committed, long-term first-hand witnessing of places and people, it is written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force. Kumar-Rao’s book joins new voices, including Yuvan Aves (Intertidal) and Neha Sinha (Wild and Wilful), proving that a powerful, hopeful resurgence of Indian nature writing is happening right now’~ Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind and Underland
‘Arati Kumar-Rao writes with grace and empathy about traditional forms of resilience and how they help ordinary people survive, and even flourish, in the most demanding environments – and about the often devastating impacts of clumsy interventions by the state. This is some of the best environmental writing I have
read in a long time’~ Amitav Ghosh, author of The Hungry Tide and Gun Island
‘Our grandchildren will be reading Arati Kumar-Rao to understand the momentous decisions that our generation faced – and, shamefully, more often than not shirked – in valuing and safeguarding the last dazzling but imperilled ecological riches of the Indian subcontinent. Luminously written with slashing honesty and profound empathy, Kumar-Rao gifts us with a traveller’s haunting account of the vast stakes involved in India’s environmental emergencies, as well as moving homages to the keepers of traditional systems of knowledge who, if we only listened to them as carefully as she does, could help rescue what remains’
~ Paul Salopek, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer
‘From startling images and evocative prose to brilliant sketches, what a glittering array of tools Arati Kumar-Rao has in her quiver! She is going to make a lot of people exceedingly envious’
~ Pradip Krishen, restoration practitioner and author of Trees of Delhi
‘Arati Kumar-Rao has written a book from the heart, infused with her poetic voice and humanistic soul, on topics she has explored for many years. Drawing on her multiple talents of writing, photography and sketching, Kumar-Rao has documented pressing issues affecting India while making much deeper connections with the relationship of humans to their resources, lands, and the wildlife they must coexist with. A monumental lesson for all of humanity to pay attention to so that we might redirect our course to a better, more sustainable future, this book is a work for the ages’
~ Ed Kashi, photojournalist, filmmaker and educator