Kulesh (The Region That Isn’t on the Map)

Written by Kulesh Bhandari

In the early days, I would climb into the hills with nothing but a notebook. I wrote down the names of trees, where they grew, which ones had flowered, page after page, day after day. To me, it felt like the most important work in the world. To everyone else, I was just a boy wandering the forest, wasting his time. When I told people I was doing research, they laughed, even the ones who half-understood what the word meant. The ones who didn’t just stared back, blank. Even my teachers questioned me. How could I do research, they asked, when everyone knew that research was something only PhD students did?

Back then, I had no funding and no equipment, just that notebook. I still head into the same hills today, only now I carry the tools too. But the way people see it has never really changed. Earlier, they laughed that I was wasting my time in the forest. Now they joke that Bihar’s name never gets attached to anything, while mine keeps turning up next to America, Brazil, Turkey, and China. When I come back from an international conference and share my photos, no one says “well done”; they just say, “Enjoy yourself.” As if I had gone there to have fun, and not to stand on a stage and defend my work.

And the work itself is no small thing. The hills of Santhal Pargana are steep, largely unsurveyed, and slow to move through, thick with invasive Lantana camara, home to venomous snakes and other wildlife you learn to stay alert for. Working here means reading the terrain carefully, placing camera traps where they will hold, and returning to the same slopes again and again to build a record where none exists.

When I came back from China, after standing on one of the biggest stages in my field, no one back home offered congratulations or even seemed to register what it was. Instead, people asked whether I’d had a good time, and how they might go on such a trip too. Some assumed I worked for a company that sponsors these travels and asked if they could come along. To them, it was a holiday I had somehow managed. That was the loneliest part, not the hardship of the hills, but standing in a room full of people and realising that the thing I had just done could not be shared with anyone around me.

And yet the hills are not an empty place to me. There are people there, generous people, who walk the paths with me, who show me the trails, who tell me what each plant and creature is called in their own dialect. They carry knowledge that no university holds, and they share it freely. It is a strange thing: those with the least to give often give the most, while the educated around me hold their knowledge close. When I look at the vast suffering within this landscape and its biodiversity, my own rejections and moments of silence seem small in comparison.

Once, I submitted a paper to a Q1 journal, and it was rejected- though “rejection” isn’t quite the right word because the response was some of the most encouraging feedback I had ever received. What it made me realise was that my field observations, the photographs, the GPS points, the habitat notes, were sound. I simply hadn’t yet learned to turn them into structured, formal data. That was its own kind of challenge, because the region I work in is almost entirely absent from scientific maps. Doing research in a data-deficient place, starting from zero, is hard enough on its own, and harder still with no mentor and no supervisor to guide the way. Much of this work I have carried alone, without a permanent field team or an institutional research group behind me.

I still remember the days when I would go from teacher to teacher with my grant proposals, knocking on doors, asking for a chance, and being turned away, again and again. It hurts, that kind of thing, when you aren’t given even the respect of being heard. And the truth is, nothing about that is fully behind me. Even now, every time I send off a new proposal, I have no idea whether it will be accepted or not. But I send it anyway. Tomorrow I will apply again, not knowing if the answer will be yes, and I will keep applying all the same.

I don’t know what the future holds. There is no guarantee that the next grant will come, or the next paper will be accepted, or the path I am chasing will open up. But I will climb again, and I will keep climbing. People travel far away to study and do their research, but I have a landscape of my own. What I want is to bring this region onto the scientific map, so that one day it is no longer a data-deficient place, but a place the data comes from. That is my dream, that someday, when someone carries research from the tribal heart of Jharkhand, from eastern India, to a big conference somewhere in the world, a scientist in the room will say: “I know this region.”

Kulesh Bhandari is an independent biodiversity researcher based in Santhal Pargana, Jharkhand, India. He can be reached at kuleshk46@gmail.com, and his work can be found at kuleshbhandari.org.