Aravallis: Love and Fresh Air

The Central Ridge is alive with sounds and the deep marks of being an old place. A few kilometres into its forest, ronjh trees stand tall, full of their buttercup-yellow flowers. Pansy butterflies flap their wings through the undergrowth. Gull butterflies drink deeply from flowers. Handmaiden moths, insects that mimic wasps, with their alarming stripes and yellow-black colouring, feed from Calotropis procera shrubs. A cloud of moths rises like a dream in one portion of the undergrowth. The sounds of the city are muted. Cell phone reception drops. A chamrod tree hunches over a dargah. The wall of a historic monument stands like a long, fulfilled sigh under a tree. People have been here for centuries, yet you feel part of the wilderness.

A few miles south, across the border in Haryana, citizens are fighting to save their last wildernesses from a jungle of buildings. For years, Haryana has been trying to amend the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA,1900). The PLPA Haryana amendment bill, introduced over a century later in 2019, is ironically retrograde. At present, areas that are declared as ‘closed areas’ under PLPA 1900 are considered as forest land—and so mining and construction are not permitted. But the PLPA Amendment seeks to open these areas by not considering them forest land anymore.

This would open up the forests of the Aravallis to mining, real estate, farmhouses — everything except forests. Already, the Aravallis face a great threat. In Bandhwari landfill in the Aravallis, garbage mountains tower higher than the actual Aravalli hills. A waste to energy plant is planned here, which promises to spew air pollution in some of our cleanest places. Citizens protesting against this plant were arrested in December 2021. Other citizens have gone to Court against the PLPA amendment, taking out months and years of their lives to fight a state that sees a real estate cash cow in the Aravallis.

“When I was growing up, Damdama and Surajkund lakes were the places we went for picnics,” says environmentalist and Delhi NCR resident Chetan Agarwal. “We would lay picnics on the banks and go boating in the waters. This was our day out.” Now, there’s no water in the lakes, and the catchment areas have been eaten up by constructions. Yet Chetan still has a favourite place in the Aravallis — one precious stream of water that still flows. Behind Kot village near Mangar, there is a stream which runs for about ten months per year. “I like to go there, and I want this stream to run forever. Earlier, there were many more streams,” he says. Near Kot, I have seen pittas and heard nightjars. I have tracked warblers while listening to the sonorous, solemn church-bell sound of a cow walking with a bell around her gentle neck and have watched Indian thick knees stand like little gnomes in the soil.

In the monsoon, many little streams rush in a hurry over the Aravallis, with little froglets watching us with eyes like buttons. For a dry area, streams and lakes are even more precious. Many Aravalli tree species are thorny, spiny, and well adapted to the heat and dryness of the area the rest of the year. In Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, one sees many thorny bistendu trees, producing a poisonous orange fruit that birds cherish. The rocky area positively radiates with heat in the summer months, the dappled brown-grey of the landscape concealing painted sandgrouses who live there.

Apart from water, for the strained air of the Capital, perhaps nothing could be more important than love and fresh air. The Aravallis, like many great forests, give lungs to the cities of Delhi and Gurgaon. But they also provide love — the strange love for wild creatures and wildernesses that many feel while living constrained city lives with limited access to open areas. And they hold both places and creatures that surprise us, shrouded with mystery and a touch of intrigue.

Recently, a striped hyena, a doglike, scavenging animal threatened as per the Uttarakhand state list, was caught on camera trap in Asola. Persecuted across much of its range, the fact that the hyena can find refuge in the National Capital is testament to Nature’s ability to surprise us.

For birder Arun Kamath who often visits Mangar Bani, a sacred grove in the Aravallis near Faridabad, another animal’s presence made him feel electrifyingly alive. “My teenage son and I were in the Bani searching for nightjars. We were the only ones there, and we entered the area which has nightjars. On the ground was something unexpected,” Kamath says. “The area was full of leopard pugmarks — fresh ones by the look of it. We were scared, we were excited. We didn’t know whether to watch out for the leopard, check out the nightjar, or look for the Indian pitta couple that was nesting there!”

The thrill of real wilderness, touched by mysterious animals, creates a unique heritage that should outlive our own development plans. The architecture of time and human hand is of great interest too. Many parts of the Ridge are dotted with old monuments, but the gentle hills and tongues of rock are older still.

That day in the Central Ridge, we were stopped by policemen asking what we were doing in a “high-security area”. I am willing to be denied access, but only if the claws of development or beautification don’t rip out the last Aravallis. Our hearts were sinking — in the echelons of an aspirational city, forests are the first to either be cut down or be cut off from the rest of us. Since August, my last trip to the Central Ridge, I have wondered: the ronjh must still be flowering quietly, standing between cirrus clouds of dragonflies. The Krishna kadam would be swaying, dreaming of its funny, round flowers, and the slope-loving dhau trees must be holding down hill-soil with their usual quiet efficiency. If I were to imagine the Aravallis and its forests and lakes as an animal, then I see it as a protective canid, guarding us from deserts and the vagaries of climate change.

A dark, spiky-haired wolf with golden eyes the colour of Aravalli dust.