Marginlands: Indian Landscapes on the Brink

The North American debut of an acclaimed journalist, Marginlands documents the slow violence of environmental degradation in India’s most vulnerable landscapes and populations.

India is often represented with textbook tropes--ancient mountains, bustling cities, lush tropical landscapes--but there is much more to this mega-diverse and rapidly modernizing nation. In Marginlands, Arati Kumar-Rao invites readers to join her expeditions to the regions and communities of her homeland that are most impacted by industry and urbanization to learn more about the traditions and adaptive strategies of all those who call these imperiled places home.

Among the seemingly featureless dunes of the Thar desert, secret water basins have sustained life for generations, despite the encroaching threat of harsh mining practices. And along the Southwestern tip of the Indian peninsula, one of the most dynamic and densely populated coastlines in the world, is eroding due to the invasive implementation of dams. Elsewhere, Kumar-Rao discovers how state-sanctioned interventions have turned verdant stretches of the Sundarban delta--the world’s largest unbroken stretch of mangroves--into a deadly place for local fisherman, and the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna river basin into a desiccated grave.

Still, life persists, and echoes of beauty abound--which Kumar-Rao captures faithfully in storytelling grounded by deep empathy for the human and more-than-human worlds. With sweeping lyricism and unmatched attentiveness, she celebrates the overlooked, the unseen, and the anything-but-ordinary, testifying to the power of alternative visions of coexistence and the need for conservational advocacy. At once dazzling and edifying, Marginlands encourages readers from any place to fall in love with the world outside of ourselves and to honor interconnectedness everywhere.

Arati Kumar-Rao is a National Geographic Explorer, an independent environmental photographer, a writer, and an artist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Emergence, BBC, and in leading Indian publications. When not on assignment, she splits her time between a biodiversity hotspot--the Western Ghats--and Bangalore in India.