In the early 1950s, a pesticide named endosulfan was developed. For nearly half a century, it was used across the world, sprayed on various crops to get rid of everything from aphids to leafhoppers—but, in the same duration, people living in areas that had been subjected to endosulfan spraying began to experience its side effects. Dizziness, convulsions, skin diseases. Far more horrifying, reproductive and developmental issues, permanent brain damages, deformed babies and congenital illnesses.
Today, in over 80 countries, endosulfan is banned. India and China are among the countries where it is still used, though the Indian government has promised to phase out the use of the lethal chemical by this year. One of the major protests that led to this decision was that which erupted in Kerala’s Kasaragod district in 2011, where the Plantation Corporation of Kerala had been, since the late 1970s, aerially spraying thousands of acres of cashew plantations with endosulfan.
Ambikasuthan Mangad’s Swarga (originally published in Malayalam as Enmakaje, named after the Kasaragod village that became the hub of the anti-endosulfan agitation) is about the horror wrought by endosulfan.
Stunted children, deformed calves, kids with grey hair and blank minds are the sores that never stop running. There were four or five deaths every week, each a result of endosulfan, that made its way into every stream, every pool, in Enmakaje.
The two central characters of Swarga are a man named Neelakantan and the woman he lives with, Devayani. He was once a journalist, a man who cared for those rejected by society: dying lepers, abused prostitutes, abandoned and ill people. She was once a prostitute whom he had looked after and brought back to life from near-death. Together they came to the conclusion that life in the midst of society was meaningless, so they uprooted themselves and came to the wilderness. To a place named Swarga, ‘heaven’, in Enmakaje. There, discarding even the trappings of names, they became Man and Woman and made a tree house. But they didn’t live happily ever after as one day, the outside world intruded, bringing with it endosulfan.
Swarga is one of those rare novels that makes a very lucid, factual point about environmental degradation and political corruption, while also being almost magical in its metaphors and its mythology. The Tulu people and their reverence for the Jadadhari Hill, the tale of Mahabali, the austerities of the Balakhilyas, the connection, deep and intrinsic, between man and nature, between man’s deities and nature’s wonders make Ambikasuthan Mangad’s book such a deeply disturbing, unforgettable work. It shows what man’s relationship with nature can be, and what it actually is, far too often. For commercial gains, and with complete disregard for not just nature but for the rest of the human race too, people go their own way, wantonly destroying. How long will nature tolerate this, asks the book in an inspired climax.
This is a book that combines, intriguingly, some very varied styles of storytelling: the lyrical, steeped-in-mysticism lore of the people of Enmakaje; the heart-wrenching plight of the victims of endosulfan; the brutally selfish and corrupt nexus between politics and business that suppresses all dissension. Mangad’s skill lies in letting each aspect of his story be impactful on its own, and yet melding perfectly with the others.