This booklet about Karnataka comes as a new addition to the ongoing Nature-Society Series authored by Yemuna Sunny, which finds ways to think in innovative and imaginative ways about maps. With its striking sketch map and detailed artwork by Trripurari Singh, the book engages with socio-spatial transformations and seeks to converge ‘cartography and art, nature and society, information and criticality, map and text, and knowledge and change’ in the words of the author.
Often the practice of school geography deals with the realm of the physical and the human as two independently existing entities. The study of physical features in an area, say, a river, can be completely silent on the issue of developmental projects, displacement, treaties, disputes or any other socio-political processes. Similarly, while climate change will be part of most course work in schools and list ‘human domination of nature’ as one cause among many others, it’s often without any structural, contextually rooted or even evolving questioning of the human-nature discourse.