Book Excerpt: Past Is Forward By Shubhanshi Chakraborty

There are certain memories I remember from my childhood, images, as faint as whispers and as hazy as a winter morning. Sometimes I don’t know if I have lived through them in this life or if they are dreams passed on to me from previous lives. I grew up visiting a village, surrounded by mountains, hidden amidst golden farms caressed by winds. And somehow many of these memories belong to that small village: the trembling drums of Durga puja felt like tear stained prayers calling down the divine mother to bless us; the soft crushing of berries to extract a red pigment used carefully to give colour to the sweet lips of Lord Sri Krishna’s beloved on pattachitras; the rustle of dried mango leaves, assembled into garlands to adorn the doors before weddings, in my memory, still signifies the eternal promise two people make, holding fire as their witness. 

This village remembered its past, and the people accepted it. They didn’t feel ashamed of it, they wore it on their head, the same way they wore wildflowers. But I have also seen how many people in this country are taught to hate their past. They are told that where they come from is backward, primitive and even embarrassing. I personally felt this, even in college—professors who spoke of our ancient texts with sneers, almost as if everything that is sacred to us doesn’t extend beyond being a mere joke, something desperately needing to be replaced by globalised logic and cold data. It hurt.

Mostly because I came from places where our script of life was tangled with nature in a way that made it impossible to tell them apart, where people refused to unnecessarily cut trees because they wanted to stand strong like them, be generous like them and grow like them.

Every village back then was wrapped in a green cover so thick the sky yearned to steal a glance of the soil. Today ironically, those same villages are being certified “green villages”, a cruel joke on a generation which watched their forests disappear, their soil crack open, and their elders die in grief, leaving behind their barren land. It's almost absurd how we are branding what we once lived through as something new and futuristic.

This ache, this love, and these memories brought my book, Past is Forward to life. I wrote this book not for the policies that people in black toss around at conferences, but for the children who grew up hearing that the forest was their mother, the boys who were told not to pluck flowers for they carried old gods within them, the girls who learned to revere the rain like a prayer.

I wrote it to remind the people of this country that sustainability isn't something we can buy or even measure, because it is something we once lived within. And maybe for Gen Z, the way forward is not to invent a new world from scratch but to remember the way we treated the Earth, like our mother, gently, with love. This is why the past is forward, and this is why I will keep telling these stories, even when the world calls them worthless.

Shubhanshi Chakraborty is a 17-year-old author and environmental advocate. Views expressed by the author are their own.