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The original landscape surrounding Mehrangarh Fort
has been restored in a project by Indian
environmentalist Pradip Krishen who was the initial
Visiting Fellow at the Australia India Institute.
Image: courtesy of the University of Melbourne Voice

A pioneer of the nascent environmental movement in India recently visited Australia to recount his restoration of the complex desert landscape surrounding a 17th century fort in Rajasthan.

Pradip Krishen, author, filmmaker and environmentalist, came to Australia on a lecture tour organised by the University of Melbourne’s newly established Australia India Institute.

For the past three years Mr Krishen has been working on the revegetation project at the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park which surrounds the historic and enormous Mehrangarh Fort, now a museum, known for its intricate carvings and courtyards.

The Fort, one of the largest in India, rises 122 metres above the city and dominates the skyline of Jodhpur in Western Rajasthan.

Mr Krishen was approached to restore the land, to attempt to re-create its original landscape and to give a green cover to the 70 hectares of rugged, rocky landscape surrounding the Fort.

“The sixteenth century historic city wall had just been restored so it now seemed possible to protect the landscape from foraging animals,” says Mr Krishen.

“The land around the fort is made up of volcanic rock and was almost completely dominated by mesquite.”

In the 1920s and 1930s the Jodhpur landscape was aerially seeded with mesquite, a Central American invasive plant which is now a pest in India and has also spread through Africa, the Philippines, Pakistan and India.

Mesquite has a deep rooting zone and it was necessary to reach to about 60 centimetres below the soil to remove it. After failed attempts to remove the mesquite with small charges of dynamite and by ring barking the trees, traditional stone miners (known as Khandwaliyas) were employed and eventually eradicated it.

“The Khandwaliyas have this incredible ability to strike the surface of the rock with their heavy hammers and from the sound it makes they can tell how far to go in, how the rock is layered and where to cut it,” Mr Krishen says.

Once the mesquite was removed from the rocks, pits were dug to plant the native species. Seeds from plants that were indigenous to the rocky parts of the Marwar desert were collected to restore the landscape to as close to its natural state as possible.

“Eco-restoration is where you use plants which have already adapted through millions of years of evolution to local conditions and then these plants should need nothing else, no water or artificial help to survive in the natural environment,” Mr Krishen says.

“There has not been a lot of interest in eco-restoration in India and in some ways this park works well as a demonstration of what this sort of restoration can achieve before moving into more mainstream areas.”

While Pradip Krishen calls himself a ‘self-taught botanist’ he has also been a history lecturer and filmmaker and is well known for his independent films Massey Sahib, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Electric Moon.

“This career, as such, happened quite by accident – I gave up filmmaking in 1994, it was a definite decision, I then spent nearly three years nursing what I called my ‘mid-life crisis’ not sure what I wanted to do next,” he says.

In 2006 Mr Krishen published The Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide which became a best-seller and sold out in two months.

“My hobby was being a tree-spotter and I thought doing a book on the trees of Delhi would take about a year – in the end it took six and half years,” he laughs.

The book grew out of Mr Krishen’s interest in the trees around Delhi and he led numerous public tree walks on Sunday mornings through Delhi. The tree walks were free and Mr Krishen says it taught him about what people wanted to know and let him aim the book at the right audience.

“People liked the book because they could understand it.

“It is like detective work, there are 252 species of trees in Delhi while in New York for example there are only 130 species, so with the tree walks I wouldn’t tell people what the trees were – just gave them hints and they worked it out for themselves.

“Eventually I got a publisher who made me feel that they were doing me a huge favour, stooping very low and that I should be grateful but on the other hand they didn’t interfere.”

Mr Krishen has been working on a book about jungle trees in Madhya Pradesh for the past three years, researching, writing and photographing, with 26 field trips covering 70-80,000 kilometres. The book is due to be published in mid-2010.

“I love doing it, to go by myself or sometimes friends come with me for part of the trip. I stay in jungle camps in the wilderness.”

He is also involved in creating a nursery in Delhi on 23 acres in an attempt to recreate the natural environment of Delhi in the 11th century.

Using information from the mid-19th century British Land records, which clearly adopted a Moghul land classification, is helping to recreate the native flora.

“Any ruling power who lives off the revenue needs to know about the land so these records are full of information,” he says.

“As it is, most people living in Delhi wouldn’t know what the native flora of Delhi is.”