Urban Nature and Its Publics: Shades of Green in the Remaking of Delhi

Abstract

Faridabad toll road, your standard highway on Delhi’s outskirts, rolling through a landscape where dusty scrub vegetation is being rapidly replaced by dustier highrise construction sites. There’s an eyesore called the Gurgaon Faridabad Combined Solid Waste Management facility, with acres of open garbage, some scrawny cows, and flapping crows. Beside the kachcha (unpaved) road along the dump’s broken boundary wall, there are deep, jaggededged craters, relicts from the stone quarrying that was done here until ten years ago. The land is rocky and open, dotted about with trees and shrubs, one of those ennuiinducing views where your mind begins to wander to more interesting things like the grocery shopping list or reminding yourself to call the plumber when you get home. In the middle of this nowhere, Pradip Krishen, author of Trees of Delhi, whom I am accompanying, stops the car. We walk for about ten minutes, winding our way past rocks hugged by stunted plants, between trees twisted by hot dry winds. It is 8:00 in the morning in late March, and it already feels like summer. And then, suddenly, we arrive at the lip of a cliff. The ground drops away and so does my jaw. Spread out below us is a deep wooded valley, densely yet delicately green, the expanse of its tree canopy broken only by the whitewashed domed tower of a small shrine in the distance. Besides the shrine, the only other sign of human presence is a boundary pillar on the far end of the valley. That’s it; the rest is undisturbed forest. The only sound is the plaintive call of peafowl, the only movement their ponderous glide from one tree to another. Oh, there’s also the racket of parakeets arrowing across the sky. Some grasses wave as the breeze catches the outcrop of rocks below our feet. Everything else is still. We could be two hundred kilometers away in the middle of Sariska National Park except 8 Urban Nature and Its Publics: Shades of Green in the Remaking of Delhi