Marginlands

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" Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India's marginalized landscapes and inhabitants, written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force."—Robert Macfarlane As a child growing up in Mumbai, Arati Kumar-Rao's parents instilled in her an abiding love for the natural world and a passion for storytelling. Years later, adrift in a corporate job and concerned by the unbridled development of her country, she asked herself, "When will you stop doing what you can do and start doing what you really want to do?" Animated by an instinctive sense that our fate is bound to that of the earth and the more-than-human world, Kumar-Rao sets out on a journey across India, listening along the way to stories the land and its people share with her. In the Thar Desert, often reduced to the value of extractable commodities, she learns about ancient methods of harvesting rainwater from shepherds with deep