For love of a forest

Today, on November 15, Kerala’s Dr Satish Chandran and Dr Shanti are driven to happy tears as guests arrive to celebrate their “child’s” 25th birthday. It’s been a tumultuous journey for the family. But the biologist couple has no regrets about the decision they took 32 years ago. The days and nights apart, communicating with each other only through letters, cash crunch... it all seems worth it when they see how well their child, the Silent Valley National Park, is doing. If only Indira Gandhi had been around, the family portrait would have been complete.

It all began in 1977. “We had been following news reports about the government wanting to put up this massive hydel project across the Kunthi river inside the Silent Valley. Soon after our marriage, Satish announced that he would visit the valley to see for himself what was better — building the dam or protecting these virgin woods”, said Dr Shanti.
Dr Chandran, then 28, visited the Silent Valley for the first time. It was love at first sight. Fortunately, his new bride, Dr Shanti, too missed a beat for the 50 million-year-old rainforest, known as Sairandrivanan in native Malayalam and famous as the Silent Valley across the world.
But those were different times. Environmental activism was a joke and Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous words, “dams are the temples of modern India”, were fresh and firm in the mind of every Indian. Electricity was magical, and Emergency had just been lifted. Challenging decisions of the government didn’t win many friends.
But then, the biologist couple had each other. And they decided to dedicate themselves, all their time and finances, to saving the forest. Silent Valley was to be the child they decided never to have.

DR CHANDRAN always loved forests and it was probably his concern for nature that attracted his junior researcher Dr Shanti to him. “He was my senior by two years, doing research in wildlife biology at the Kerala University. We shared the same interests and that brought us close”, recalls Dr Shanti, looking fondly at the grey-bearded man guiding a group of writers on a trip through the Silent Valley National Park that is spread over 89.54 sq km in Kerala’s Palakkad district.
Life was tough for the young couple. Not only was there no time for romance, there was hardly any money to carry on with their “green” passion. “I still remember how I had to borrow Rs 500 from my mother-in-law in Thiruvananthapuram to purchase a film to photograph the forest. The first-ever pictures of the Silent Valley were from the money that I borrowed from her”, said Dr Chandran.
“During that period, we communicated only through letters, mostly despondent ones from him. In one of his letters he told me about his encounter with a tribal man Lachi who became his guide. Satish and Lachi spent weeks trekking 235 sq km in the Silent Valley, making detailed notes of its unique flora and fauna”, says Dr Shanti.
Lachi and Dr Chandran trekked for days with little food, got bitten by leeches, all to prepare a compelling case to convince the Union government and the Kerala administration to abandon the dam project. After his return from the valley, Dr Chandra made presentations at every possible place on the importance of preserving the forest and the disaster the dam would cause to its fragile ecosystem. “Not just large gatherings in auditoriums, he would even catch total strangers to first ask if he/she had heard of Silent Valley and then go on to explain how vitally important it was to preserve it for our children”, says Dr Shanti.
It was his infectious enthusiasm that, perhaps, led a group of young environmentalists, scientists and nature lovers to join this fight and together they formed the Save Silent Valley Society in 1979. Protests gathered momentum and several more such societies were formed, from Mumbai to Thiruvananthapuram. The campaign attracted support from littérateurs, artists, media barons and celebrities from across the country and outside. Renowned ornithologist Dr Salim Ali and poet-activist Sugathakumari were among the hundreds who put their weight behind the movement.
“Young scientist Dr Chandran pioneered the movement (to save the Silent Valley) and collected lots of data to back up the campaign”, said Sugathakumari.
Experts from various fields visited Silent Valley till the early ’80s to study the dam’s feasibility. Every statement on the Silent Valley made headlines. Proponents of the project claimed that only a small portion of the forest would be destroyed by the construction of the dam and that its fragile ecosystem would be preserved. They said this campaign, spearheaded by a crazy couple, was just to save the habitat of the lion-tailed macaque and a few other species unique to the region.
“But they missed the bigger picture. Besides being millions of years old, rainforests are prime catchments for the rivers. Construction of a dam on the Kunthi river would have created a large watershed, besides introducing human settlement in the area and damaging its fragile ecology. The forest would have vanished, rain would have been scant, and finally the rivers would have dried — then the dam itself would have become redundant”, Dr Chandran said.
As protests grew louder, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi formed a multidisciplinary committee, under Prof M.G.K. Menon, to find out if the hydropower project was feasible without any significant ecological damage. The report, like most earlier ones, did not conclusively recommend abandoning the project. But Indira Gandhi took a decision —to abandon the dam project and declare the rainforest a national park. She was to dedicate it to the nation on November 15, 1984, but was assassinated 15 days before. The park was inaugurated quietly on the appointed day.
The Silent Valley is now home to 1,000 species of flowering plants, 107 species of orchids, 100 ferns and fern allies, 200 liverworts, 75 lichens and hundreds of algae, besides the lion-tailed macaque, tigers, leopards and varieties of snakes — including the King Cobra. The hydel project would have seriously challenged the survival of all of these and the Nilgiris biosphere, which constitutes the Silent Valley as its core area, would have been severely damaged.
Taking inspiration from the wonder couple, author Vikram Seth also led a similar fight to save a forest in West Bengal.

Dr Chandran becomes emotional when he visits the
proposed dam site. Sitting cross-legged next to him, Dr Shanti listens intently as her husband addresses yet another batch of guests.
As the evening unfolds, the forest gets wrapped in animal calls, broken only by the euphonic voice of Dr Chandran: “Please don’t kill those leaches. This is their home and we’re the intruders”. Dr Shanti’s chuckles.