Documentary ‘Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness’ an effort to salvage wild beauty & invite rethinking of our relationship with nature

“We can draw a deep and secret joy from nature only because we feel a profound kinship with it. We are related to [nature] through the blood-beat in our pulse — we are bound by the same rhythm as the entire universe,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. To beings like us, endowed with hundreds of billions of brain cells and a capacity for poetics, wilderness may offer more than just reprieve — it may offer the very meaning of life.

Wilderness as species assemblages, shaped over millennia of evolution and coevolutions — and geological contexts created over billennia — invites an understanding of this profound meaning. Something that is, paradoxically, mostly lost on humanity. In some sense, we may be the only species capable of comprehending this, yet so often, we fail.

Machines, minds and making friends with nature

Tagore, a nature poet who is recognised as the founder of the modern Indian environmental movement, extolled sailing boats for enabling humans “to move in tune with nature”. He also disparaged steamships as machines that “look down upon nature from the pinnacle of power” and have lost their beauty.

Homo sapiens, in their purported ascent to the pinnacle — standing atop the world with dominion over it — scientist and artist alike, may glimpse the profound responsibility this knowledge bestows. But then there is a woebegone lot among us — those in power of defining policy — who imagine they occupy a position of ultimate superiority. It is this vanity that Tagore perceives in machines — and because of this vanity, machines become ugly.

The idea of the machine, then, is more than just a tool — it is a metaphor for a way of thinking. A sailboat is a machine, too, but it "has to make friends with the wind and the waves, and so it comes to partake of their beauty".

So too the scientific mind — the engineering mind — that makes friends with nature, partakes in beauty. Yet, to comprehend nature — and our place within it — we must first be inspired by it. This is fundamental.
We cannot leap into debates and policy prescriptions about the ‘stewardship’ of nature without first experiencing awe for nature.

To be moved into that inspired state, any help will do. Art and its poetics are the definitive aids toward this inspiration. That is what this film becomes for those who have no direct access to the experiential wonder of nature.

This wonder is not confined to art. Modern scientists, too, encounter the mysterious and are seized by awe — perhaps more often in disciplines like mycology or quantum physics, where the world’s strangeness resists easy explanation. Some fields simply offer more glimpses into the unknown. Ecology is one of them and should evoke deeper reverence towards nature.

Aesthetic corruption: From polyester to ropeways

Yet, when we talk about sustaining a healthy relationship with nature in policy spaces, the discourse frequently settles into a transactional framework: Monetising ecosystem services. The mystery of nature is then lost in one of conservation science’s most uninspired categories: “Cultural services”.

This ecosystem service recognises nature’s recreational value, spiritual value and considers it a source of aesthetic inspiration. Whatever their intended meaning, this translates to gaudy interpretation centres, ropeways across gorges and cancerous webs of road networks, along which irreverent tourists catcall wild animals.

In modern conservation practice, the uglification of nature begins somewhere else, with the banalisation of traditional aesthetics: With polyester shirts, plastic shoes — facets of cultural colonisation. The white man’s hegemony over coloured people, the Plains people’s economic and aesthetic choices over the Hills people, so on and so forth.

And this politics involves not just the dispossession of the rights of local people over resources, but the very pride in their aesthetic is undermined.

There is even greater need to confront the aesthetic vulgarity of the elite — and much more justifiably so. The selfie-shaped vanity, the pretentiousness of open jeeps in cities and camouflage dress in malls are as ugly as the aesthetic of poverty that these snobs look down upon.

Neither of these is a mere question of taste to be brushed aside under the democratic ethos of ‘live and let live’. Both the constrained aesthetics of poverty and the garish excesses of wealth wither when held against nature’s unselfconscious beauty.

This contrast is not trivial — nor is it merely a matter of personal taste. While invoking theories in political economy that explain such vulgarisations of taste requires its own reckoning, what concerns us here is more immediate and more urgent: To rescue wild beauty from the machinery that commodifies it — a machinery that grinds the poor into aesthetic compromise just as it inflates elite consumption into pompous spectacle.

The task is urgent: To salvage the beauty in nature itself. Where does this beauty still survive? And how, in an age so prone to spectacle and transaction, are we to truly see it? The wild’s aesthetic— unselfconscious, uncommodified — becomes our touchstone for what beauty itself is.

In the recently released documentary Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness, the camera in the documentary Nilgiris intervenes to listen to the wilderness, revealing its charm and rekindling our attunement to the wild aesthetic. The film lays bare the aesthetic’s quiet defiance in consummate detail: The graceful shuffling of a fig fruit inside the arched beak of a hornbill — drop-hold, drop-hold between the mandibles — ratcheting the fruit down to the tip, its skill surpassing a juggler’s; or the single, gliding leap of a blackbuck behind the vertical blinds of trees — just a couple among the many details that might quietly enchant the audience.

This is the poetry in nature that the documentary by Sandesh Kadur captures on film — a world not easily grasped by the self-absorbed human. In its every detail, it offers a quiet rebuttal to the barren logic of environmental governance, which — stripped of awe — reduces nature to a machine for pumping out ‘cultural services’ to be traded in the marketplace.

Ecological truths, told with poetic grace

At the heart of the film is not just the majestic or the endangered, but also the small and the ruthless. Dragonflies in aerial pursuit of fig wasps, and before that, dragonfly nymphs devouring tadpoles underwater. Then, a hornbill swoops down on the dragonfly — one life becoming sustenance for another. One species flows into another, and the film sees this chain with intimacy.

There are no anthropomorphised superheroes here, only the laying bare of relations — functionally stratified, not ranked. From the carnivorous plant to the canopy hunter, the structure of the web is revealed: Life consuming life, energy flowing through trophic levels in the great continuity of the wild.

This fidelity to ecological entanglements — and the breadth of species portrayed, from Drosera to fig wasps to dragonflies — reflects the deep insight the script draws from research director Priya Singh’s experience as a wildlife biologist.

The visuals, shot in 8K, are detailed — colourfully wild, and the film unfolds smoothly to a well-researched script, narrated in a voice with gentle modulations — like a musical composition. Susheela Raman, who lends her voice to the narration, also composed the original soundtrack with Sam Mills and Neel Adhikari. The voice-over and score do not merely accompany the images — they become part of the sensory fabric of the film. The audio is not secondary; it is a beautiful work in its own right.

Alongside ecological patterns, the film offers stories too — amusing, heartwarming, complete. Stories with a beginning, middle and end. The one that smote the storyteller in me is a short film-within-the-film that I would title: The Burglar Bear. Set to playful heist music — Un-Bear-Able Mischief — a rhythm so slick it slid into my bones, the action had me swaying with every sly beat.

It’s a night scene. A sloth bear ambles up to a bungalow, inspects a window, breaks the glass pane and enters. It wanders around the house, seemingly disappointed at finding nothing to munch on and decides to leave.

It must have explored the first floor, too. A light flicks on in the master bedroom. Our burglar bear opens the window, steps out carefully, hangs by the sill, and lets go — dropping behind the compound wall, the fall unseen by the camera.

Cut!

The bear that didn’t knock: Semantics of ownership

The burglar bear throws its weight against the heavy wooden door, arching its back and shimmying side to side — a carefree, hakuna matata–style dance, it seems. An instinctive groove to scratch an itch or stretch its spine? Perhaps.

But, this is bear behaviour, the ethologists will say. Not just spreading a little joy, our burglar is spreading his scent. He is scent-marking — erecting a new picket around his home range.

In doing so, has he staked a claim to ownership — or simply to use? A rub on a tree in the forest goes unnoticed by humans, even though it marks dynamic boundaries. But here, he has marked a bungalow — laid a claim on a property with a legal owner. A right taken — but what kind of right? One not recognised in any human constitution. Amusing as it may seem, the sequence stirs up compelling questions.

When wild animals enter farms and estates to consume cultivated crops, they are not invading or raiding. They are using. This semantic correction matters. It is similar to how forest dwellers — who may use or even overuse resources out of desperation — should not be accused of ‘encroachment’. The film restores the word ‘use’ to its rightful moral tone — clear and unambiguous — within what remains a shared wilderness.

Speak in any human language, and you fall into the anthropic trap: Our very words often emerge from a presumption of ownership over nature. When a wild animal, say a bear, enters a human dwelling, the poor may throw stones and the rich may smile. But both reactions, however different, stem from the same assumption: This is mine. The beast, however, uses without owning. It is a true community-ist — one might say, a communist!

Thanks to the film, I could imagine animals entering villages, towns and cities not to steal, but simply to use. And when wildlife survives despite intense anthropogenic pressures, it is framed as a result of our benevolence — our so-called “tolerance”, our “ability to coexist” or our magnanimous gesture of “granting them rights”.

Dominant conservation discourses — anthropocentric and egotistic — seldom pause to wonder, as Emily Dickinson once did, “How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!”

And hence, we would not even notice when wild species quietly rise and depart, silently into extinction.

From stewardship to reverence: A shift in imagination

The film does not offer grand solutions. But it quietly unsettles the way we’ve come to speak of aesthetic value. It becomes a gentle, poetic vessel for this revelation — for urban multiplex-goers and rural schoolchildren alike. It leads its audience into the emotional terrain of affection and wonder.

The crowds in the theatre may not know of the policy battles in conservation. The film bypasses those debates to offer something more enduring: A glimpse of nature.

Wilderness, seen from within a shared space — could we imagine a future where inviolate places are not ours to grant, but simply not ours to own? Where respect, not regulation, draws the boundary? The film doesn’t answer this for us — but invites us to imagine.

Perhaps such a future requires not only new laws, but a shift in imagination — where pride and vanity dissolve into awe.

The film’s strength lies in its ability to evoke wonder. By bringing the beauty of the wild not just to policymakers or park patrons, but to the farmer, the baker, and the banker, it may quietly turn the tide of conservation at the roots of our society.

Not through dominion, but through friendship.

Like the sailboats Rabindranath Tagore once described — boats that, having made friends with the winds and the waves, “skimmed over the surface of the water to the rhythm of the wind”.

Narendra Patil writes on ecology, wildlife and nature conservation. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.