Nature writing has always been a niche space. There has been a revival in this genre of late, perhaps driven by the urgency of the pressures placed on the natural world. This writing is often steered by young, passionate authors, who have used it as a tool for conservation.
The revival has also seen a change in tonality. The focus has shifted from inaccessible wilderness to the ultra-local and often neglected spaces around where we live. There are also more women and people from varied cultural and scientific backgrounds writing now, not just the adventurer or the explorer.
Contemporary nature writing is often as much about inner reflection as it is about the world outside. It is infused with grief over what has been lost, a scientifically based recollection of what remains, and an attempt to reconnect with nature.
In many ways, this is exactly what Neha Sinha’s Wild Capital (HarperCollins India) does: it richly showcases a side of Delhi unseen by most, switching effortlessly between a well-researched field report and an intensely personal memoir in lyrical language.
The book is at its best when it immerses the reader in the sensory experience of being outdoors, especially its sonic ambience. It often steps back into 1990s Delhi — a lost world of nature’s sacred static, from howling jackals and rain dripping onto the forest floor to insects, owls, and frog calls, now swallowed by the noise of a callous city. As Sinha writes, “What we have now are the clues remnant populations leave us. How important the most basic things are to wildlife — a mature tree, a patch of chemical-free earth, clean amphibian-filled water, dark and damp places where fireflies can light up the way.”
A sense of loss threads the different sections together. Sinha tells us not only how the city changed without remembering what is important, but also catalogues what has been lost. Delhi, in the not-too-distant past, harboured healthy populations of wolves, vultures, hog deer, black buck and hyenas, to mention a few.
The writing frequently emerges from walks with friends and colleagues and their own experiences, in a city where, as a young girl, Sinha was advised by her father not to venture out alone. It reflects her own steady learning and deepening appreciation of the natural world — how she once mistook the Semal for the Palash, how that tree still holds powerful, multi-sensory memories for her, and how it taught her to pursue things that touch lives with meaning.
But not all is lost. Sinha drives home the point that the human experience is not separate from the natural world. The power in her writing is in making us realise that there is another world out there, a parallel city, if you will, a living and breathing world that is struggling to exist and thrive, hidden beneath the concrete behemoth. The Sanjay Van, the Delhi Ridge, the Mangar Bani, and their residents — the Dhau trees, the summering Pittas, the cuckoos — are all worth protecting.
She emphasises that interactions between humans and human-built environments with animals and trees are complex. The conflicts that arise between them require a deeper understanding and not textbook solutions. Cities such as Delhi need to rethink how they design and care for their green spaces, of what it means to be a city. “People have built their houses on leopard land and possess paper declaring it so,” she writes in Wild and Wilful (2021). “The leopard has none of these niceties. So it must go.”
This book records the gentle passing of time in the heart of a most urban environment. It is a memoir of collective forgetfulness and of an absence of loss in an unforgiving city, which has allowed so many beautiful things to fade away. Sinha captures this best when she explains the shifting baseline syndrome: when the past is forgotten, the depleted present comes to feel normal, and we may not even realise what we are missing.
The book is also a call to action: to observe, understand, and empathise with the overlooked, to learn to live again with creatures different from us.
Delhi and its history have been written about so many times. And yet, a part of it has never been spoken about. A city’s history is incomplete and not separate from the memory of its ecological landscapes — the rivers and rocks and creatures that lived there. Delhi is India’s capital, and it is worth remembering that a capital is not just wealth and assets; it is also the land we live on and share.
The writer is a birder and is based in Chennai.