A walk on the wild side

Researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) have reported a unique discovery: wild bonnet macaques have learnt to make ‘begging gestures’ to demand food from tourists at the Bandipur Tiger Reserve. Published in April 2018 in the renowned journal Nature , the research suggests that this offers new insights into ‘intentional communication’ by primates, and possibly a precursor to the evolution of language among humans.

Running Away FromElephants:Adventures of aWildlife BiologistRauf AliSpeaking TigerNon-fiction₹499

Incidentally, Rauf Ali’s memoir, Running Away from Elephants: Adventures of a Wildlife Biologist , published about the same time as the NIAS study, offers a similar insight for another monkey, the Hanuman langur: “Whenever there were Indian tourists the monkey would walk up to them and hold out his hand, exactly as the beggars outside did. He would be rewarded, usually, with a few peanuts.”

But this is Ali, and things take a radically different turn: “[But] if the tourists were foreigners, the technique changed. He would charge at them, screaming. Whereupon they would also scream, drop the peanuts and run! […] Come to think of it, this was also my first encounter with racism.”

Wildlife biologist, field ecologist, educator, and a self-described maverick, the late Dr Rauf Ali was many things packed into one. In his memoir, we are forewarned in the first line itself that this is “most definitely not an autobiography”. Written in a jovial and irreverent tone that, I am told, mirrored his personality, Ali describes his life as a student at BITS Pilani, and through his pioneering doctoral research on bonnet macaques (“the nasty one you get in towns all over southern India”), as well as career as a field ecologist in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

Raised in a well-to-do business family in Mumbai, Ali visited a variety of forests from an early age, guided by his famous grand-uncle, Dr Salim Ali, India’s foremost ornithologist, also known as ‘the Birdman of India’. For the younger Ali, though, this meant other things: “the slightest noise and the old man would be out there, screaming at us. Also for eating too many sweets for dessert, for expressing opinions he didn’t agree with, and for criticising his good friend, Indira Gandhi.”

The ‘Birdman’ also had a penchant for shooting birds, a ‘behaviour’, Ali tells us, that extended well into his eighties, when he spent evenings shooting crows.

Peppered with such anecdotes, Ali offers an honest account of an ecologist’s encounters with the bureaucracy, academia and ordinary folks in the ’70s and ’80s, at a time when conservation was barely ‘in’ and the establishment could not make sense of ecologists. He remembers the intelligence officials who thought he was a spy, and police and district officials who thought — to their peril — that he could help them go hunting.

But the takeaway from this book is its lesson in ‘ecological thinking’ — that nature is made up of multiple, interrelated actors, and an action could lead to unexpected, often contradictory, consequences. Ali recounts how buffalo grazers were stopped from entering the Bharatpur wetlands after it became a bird sanctuary, but the buffaloes would actually clear space for ducks to thrive by eating aquatic vegetation. In Bastar, he found that a new pine plantation had better chances at rejuvenating the ecology and sustaining livelihoods than the existing natural sal forest. This challenges predominant ideas of conservation that prefer the one-line advice of ‘preserve or perish’. In his words, the ‘Rauf’s Rule of Ecology’ is “if it is logical, don’t do it!”

Quite expectedly, these views were either ignored or misunderstood. In his later years, Ali had recommended culling chitals that had been introduced in the Andamans. They had caused deforestation by eating new saplings and thus qualified as an ‘invasive alien species’. This was met with a moronic response from the chief forester, who said that the chitals being within the national boundary could not have been alien.

Ali clearly had a rough time with institutions on similar matters, and he spares no words in reporting inefficiency, corruption or nepotism in well-known universities, NGOs, and even his adoptive home, Auroville. “I shall probably get sued anyway,” he writes in the preface. The book is written without airs. We learn about Ali’s achievements in science and policy mostly from the foreword by Jairam Ramesh and the introduction penned by eight of Ali’s fellow travellers. By staying away from bragging, the book reads like a curious student’s diary or a tale told to friends at a neighbourhood bar.

In 2016, Ali passed away at 62 with years of work still left to complete. He had finished his memoirs, but perhaps the book was still a work in progress. The descriptions of research are well-written and engaging, but the irreverence often turns into breezy and, at times, incoherent prose, especially when Ali deals with specifc events or characters. No doubt this makes the book more “accessible” to a wider audience but frequent diversions, abrupt endings, and the lack of an index make it a nightmare for those seeking to take forward, or go back to his ideas and recollections. One wishes that if only Ali was around, an editor could have assisted in completing the book, taking it from a delightful memoir to a solid personal history of ecological research. That is now for his companions to take up.

Nihar Gokhale is a freelance environment journalist

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