Category: Non-fiction
Publisher: Penguin Random House India (forthcoming)
Rights: Translation rights available for Indian languages (excluding Marathi)
Few places in the Indian subcontinent have inspired the imagination of civilized man as the Malabar Coast. The earliest traders had sought the riches that came from the Malabar region; missionaries tried to establish religion among the natives; and seafarers and explorers rested in its ports and inland lakes before continuing their journey onward. Although the history of Malabar is well known and well documented, the underlying reasons for its riches are poorly understood. It is hard to overstate just how unusual the Malabar region is. The story of Malabar starts at the very beginning, with its rocks, hills and rivers. The oldest piece of Malabar rests to its northwest – somewhere between Coorg and Palghat – and is nearly three and half billion years old. This ancient landmass was the nucleus around which other rocks began to accrete and these became the building blocks of the Indian subcontinent. The land rises from deep sea forming a narrow shoreline with a chain of high mountains that face the full frontal force of the most powerful weather phenomena in the world – the Indian monsoon. Although the Malabar region forms just 1.1% of the area of India, this knife-shaped terrain that is eight hundred kilometre long and 200 kilometres wide (at its widest) holds nearly 15% of all species on the Indian subcontinent. Every year new species of plants, frogs, fish, and even mammals and minerals are discovered in Malabar which are completely new to science.
Malabarica takes the reader through deep time to show how Malabar became such a fascinating marvel of natural history. It reveals how this ancient land of contrasts was created and explores its unique forests, landscapes and wildlife. It is a lavishly illustrated book with over 100 stunning rare archival drawings, paleo-maps, cross-section diagrams that take the readers deep inside the layers of rocks, and full-colour photographs of rare flora, that celebrate the natural history of this spectacular region.
Translations:
Malabarica – The Marathi translation of Malabarica: A Deep Natural History of the Malabar
The author: Pranay Lal