Nature writes back: Conservation as a literary leitmotif

My adventure novel for young adults, titled The Kaziranga Trail, was published in 1979, over four decades ago. Critics have attributed a number of “firsts” to this book. For one thing, it is considered to be the first juvenile novel written in English having Indian child characters as well as an Indian theme and background.

I well recall that, as a child, in the absence of alternative reading material, I had to gorge on books in English with Western characters, themes and backgrounds. There was a paucity of good children’s books in the regional languages too. Thus our generation had grown up on books by writers like Enid Blyton and became familiar with characters like the Hardy Boys. Such a dearth had induced me and others to make a determined effort to create a body of children’s literature in English that was totally Indian in texture.

The Kaziranga Trail had been my maiden essay in that endeavour. Critics have also called this the first English juvenile novel in India to have conservation as its thematic core. The central characters in the book are three youngsters, Dhanai, Bubul and Jonti, from a village adjacent to the Kaziranga Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam. The Sanctuary, apart from other wild animals, is home to over half the global population of the Indian one-horned rhinoceros, an endangered species.

Because of false beliefs associated with it, the rhino’s horn is in great demand in many regions of Asia, where it is used as an ingredient in traditional medicines. Unimaginably high prices are fetched by rhino horns, which make this ani-mal vulnerable to poaching.

The story of The Kaziranga Trail centres on these three village boys who find a dead rhino in the wildlife sanctuary. The missing horn on the carcass alerts the boys that the animal had been killed by poachers and they report their discovery to Neog, the forest ranger. The latter seeks the help of the boys in identifying the poachers, who might be local village residents. After a series of escapades the boys manage not only to identify the poachers, but also assist the authorities to nab them.

Without being overtly moralistic, the novel attempts to drive home the importance of wildlife conservation. Take the following passage as an example:

“How ugly these vultures are,” Bubul said in disgust. “I love most birds, but not these vultures. Maybe because they feed on dead flesh.”

“Ugly, perhaps, but very useful,” replied Mr. Neog.

“What purpose can they serve?” Bubul asked.

“Oh, they clean up dead animals and prevent them from rotting and contaminating the area. It’s rather odd, but the ug-lier the bird, the more it helps to keep our earth beautiful. Crows, you know, are not pretty. But as garbage-disposers, they are second to none.”

It was the conservation leitmotif which induced the editor of 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up to comment that “with its strong focus on environmental issues, it (The Kaziranga Trail) was ahead of its time when it was first published.”

Indeed, the kind of focus that is being lavished on environmental issues nowadays was absent four decades ago, and I cherish the belief that a novel like The Kaziranga Trail was instrumental to some degree in arousing awareness. Perhaps it was the thematic novelty which ensured that the book achieved phenomenal success, becoming a bestseller and being translated to a number of Indian and foreign languages. The fact that it was made into a feature film, titled “Rhino”, enhanced the range of the “message” it carried.

The success of the novel also made me conscious of the potential of literature to create awareness of the need to preserve and conserve our environment in young minds. As psychologists would vouchsafe, childhood is the most im-pressionable period in an individual’s life, when ideas are formed and attitudes are shaped. That was why I wrote more juvenile adventure novels with conservation as the leitmotif.

For instance, I followed up The Kaziranga Trail with four sequel novellas, using the same background of the Kaziranga Wildlife Sanctuary (now upgraded to a National Park) and having the same set of child protagonists, Dhanai, Bubul and Jonti.

The first of these, published as Save the Pool, has as its theme the exigent requirement of protecting our waterbodies from human depredation and uses a heinous practice, the poisoning of such waterbodies (in some cases explosives too are used) to catch fish en masse, to drive home the point.

Kaziranga’s beels, or large pools of water, which are essential to the maintenance of its wetland character, have occasionally in the past been illegally poached upon, resulting in environmental degradation. In this story the three boys successfully track down a gang of poachers which had poisoned a beel, leading to the arrest of its members.

The novella throughout makes explicit the core thematic intention:

“The method they employed was simple,” Neogmama continued. “They poured a good amount of the chemical into the water and waited. As the chemical spread, the fish had trouble breathing and rose to the surface en masse, making it easy to net them… With the price of fish being what it is, this catch would have brought them thousands of rupees.”

“We have heard of people killing fish in mountain streams using explosives,” Bubul said, “but this is even worse. It not only kills the poor fish. It also harms the people who unknowingly eat the poisoned fish.”

“The poachers, mind you, have destroyed the environment too,” the forest officer pointed out. “The beels are the life-blood of Kaziranga’s animals. This beel, for instance, will be unusable for a very long time.”

Another of the novellas, titled The Baby Elephant, alludes to human-animal conflict. A herd of wild elephants attempt to make a night raid on crops grown by farmers in a village adjacent to the wildlife sanctuary. The villagers chase them away with flares, drums and firecrackers. In the ensuing confusion, a baby elephant in the herd falls into a ditch and is left behind.

A village hoodlum named Nalia spots the trapped baby, lassoes it with the aid of a koonki or trained, domestic ele-phant and tethers it to his cowshed with the intention of selling it. How Dhanai, Bubul and Jonti rescue the baby and enable it to rejoin its waiting mother makes for an exciting story.

I have, of course, dwelt on environmental issues in some of my books for adults as well as in my newspaper columns. However, I derived far greater pleasure in writing realistic adventure novels with conservation and environment as leitmotifs because, I believe, these have served to shape children’s perceptions about issues that matter.

(Arup Kumar Dutta is a writer based in Guwahati, Assam)

This series explores the most pressing environmental issues through the prism of literature

This article was originally published in the May 16-31, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth