India, Jan. 24 -- In the introduction to Landscapes of Wilderness, the author Narendra confesses that his book is "not a formal sociological work" and is "more like a traveller's tale". The 39 chapters draw from his "wanderings" in Bastar, and Abujhmad, which he describes as "pre-society". When he arrived here in 1980, the three or four bamboo and thatch huts did not meet the "criteria of forming villages". They lacked hierarchies and occu- pations. In Abujhmadia, the people, were "soft-footed and soft-spoken, never loud, assertive or intrusive". Much of Abujhmad is "revealed-concealed" by the "ancient dark that comes each night." Once he began moving deeper into the interiors, he experienced the "vast ancient silence of centuries". Not surprisingly, he stopped taking field notes. The book is about powerful truths. "Nature has the materials to create the atomic bomb but Nature by itself is not an atomic bomb." "Human society is as much a human invention as the steam engine." All this is written without scorning or overtly critiquing "modernity". In Abujhmad, Narendra is reminded of his native village, in the 1950s and '60s. People rarely left the area. When they did, to visit a daughter, for instance, they walked or rode donkeys. The old life changed after the Green Revolution. In the same sentence, he talks of the "felling of orchards", "erosion of mounds of dung as manure" and the coming of "schools and formal education." He describes doors that were oiled twice a year but never shut, so "other people, dogs, cats, birds, winds, sounds, dust and the young buffaloes, cows and goats" freely walked in. Years later, the author revisited his village over and over, but he could "never regain it." He brings it alive to the reader, just as he does Abujhmad. His descriptions of this region of Bastar are delicate and detailed. In one poignant passage, the author sees people and creatures crammed in a home and asks the villager, Banda: Why don't you make your house larger. Banda is puzzled. To him, home is the outside. The hut is a mere shelter. Cooking, eating, drinking, conversations and weddings all occur outside. That partly explains why there was no division of property in the region. Because there "exists neither property, nor the notion of ownership." A few decades ago, at an event in Delhi, Narendra got "an earful for wasting away in primitive Abujhmad". The people at that premiere and progressive university expected him to be elsewhere, a place they approved, that would have signalled, or maybe shouted, that he was in "solidarity with the progressives." The essays in the book, bound by space and time, seem like a slow, soft rejoinder. Narendra says "words like 'participation' and 'access' come from vocabularies of power and inequality." In the early 1980s in Bastar, the government decided to construct houses and settle the Adivasis. "That people would rush into free cement and brick houses was considered a foregone conclusion". Except, people rushed out as quickly, back to the wilds, in the middle of the night. A similar thing happened when they decided to introduce Abujhmad to a "better life of settled agriculture". At a time when a one-size-fits-all development is seen as the solution to all ills, Narendra quietly asserts that "much goes away when the landscape is torn apart". He cites the example of ghotuls (a space where unmarried young people live together and learn about emotional and physical relationships), which were violated and spoken about as "centres for indulgence of flesh and orgies." But in Bastar, they "held their intimacies in utmost sacredness." The author struggled to speak about Abujhmad freely, both to friends and at formal events. Asked to write about the status of women in Abujhmad, for a magazine, in 2017, and given a set of questions to frame the report around, he was flummoxed. That wasn't how the region could be "sensed and spoken about", he writes. But he does elaborate. Both genders have the "same or overlapping tasks". None of the "other manifestations of maladjusted societies", such as rape, molestation and violence, existed there. Ironically, he says people there never grilled him about his life in Delhi. But 40 years after leaving Abujhmad, people in Delhi still do. Through the book, Narendra's voice is meditative. He admits that some might accuse him of romanticising the village and the people. Abujhmad cannot and "ought not be converted into the lowest denominator of latitudes, longitudes, data or economic indices," he writes. "Perhaps the absence of clarity" the author adds, "is also the book's strength." I am tempted to agree. After a careful, close read, tamping down every other page and making notes on the sides, I cannot describe the book in a line. At a time when everything is reduced to a meme or a Reel, Landscapes of Wilderness defies the trend....