Nature is alive. Always has been. It breathes, feels, and remembers.
If you’ve ever taken a stroll amidst nature—trees swaying to the tunes of the wind, birds chirping to welcome the day ahead—you’d have observed how the natural world takes on a life of its own. It moves with quiet intent, a rhythm, a harmony; an equilibrium that emerges from what might, to the untrained eye, look like chaos.
What if this wasn’t just a metaphor? What if the forest were truly alive with thoughts and consciences and consciousnesses? What if it saw and thought and felt just like humans do? What if trees held thoughts like roots? What if rivers carried emotions? What if the mountains dreamed? What if nature itself was alive in the truest sense of the word?
Such is the premise at the root of Vardhini Amin’s The Forestborns.
Anthropomorphism, or ascribing human traits and emotions to nonhuman entities, has existed since the Paleolithic period. We’ve imbued animals, rivers, and even stars with our emotions and desires, not out of whimsy but as a way to understand a world too vast to grasp. It’s tied into our storytelling instincts. For tens of thousands of years, we have been projecting ourselves outward, seeing intention in rustling trees, emotion in a fox’s gaze, personality in the moon. We humans love to see others in our own image, from animals to objects to the gods we worship. Almost all religions and mythologies have early examples of anthropomorphic storytelling. As the Greek philosopher Xenophanes put it aptly:
But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods’ shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.
The more they resemble us, the more we feel we can understand them. And the more we understand, the more we care.
This impulse to see the world through human eyes has continued across ages and civilizations. From Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864) and Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), children’s literature especially has flourished on anthropomorphic imagination. Disney, of course, took this tradition and turned it into an empire, its canon filled with animals that speak, feel, and dream like us, from singing lions to fishes that long for home.
And while these personifications are great storytelling devices, they also act as conduits for empathy toward the flora and fauna by forging bonds. By giving a voice to the voiceless, so to say, they can bring overall positive ecological outcomes. Perhaps the more we relate to the natural world, the more likely we are to protect it. As the academic David Whitley, the author of The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (2008), says, “Conservation is so central to Bambi, for example, that the film is credited with having inspired many 1960s environmental activists at an early age. It also sparked protests from pro-hunting groups fearful of the ‘Bambi Factor’ before it had even been released.” Fiction, unlike scientific literature, has the freedom to make us feel something without the burden of proof. It speaks in symbols, sings in metaphor, and opens doors by the pulse of feeling.
In The Forestborns, Vardhini Amin brings this global tradition of anthropomorphic storytelling to Indian soil, language, and spirit with a gentle, fable-like charm. In her world, trees (vriksha) are alive. Like all animals (prani), they are made up of two parts: the physical body (deha) and the soul (vruha). At night, when the pranis go to sleep, the vruha of every vriksha comes out to play. And the forest comes alive.
They communicate through the gentle rustling of leaves, their voices carried by the whispering breeze. They dance in the moonlight, their movements a graceful symphony of nature’s beauty. They share laughter and stories, weaving tales as old as time. (p. vi)
We walk beside two unlikely kindred spirits: Siah, a tree en route to becoming the leader of her sandalwood grove, and Avni, a girl who often visits the grove for some moments of calm. They are connected by a haunting past—a forest fire that killed Avni’s father and destroyed Siah’s home—and an approaching threat: a group of poachers who seek to ravage the precious sandalwood grove who both are helpless to stop.
Amin writes with a simple, unadorned style that creates an effortless reading experience. Her prose is grounded, welcoming readers of all ages and making The Forestborns a book you’ll finish in one sitting. It reads like a gentle walk through dappled woods, and before you know it, you’ve reached the clearing, heart full.
Though the story is rooted in the present, it wears the garments of timeless folklore. Wise sages roam the Himalayas, grey-haired grandmas recount stories, a moral world is painted in bold strokes, and the familiar template of a hero’s journey is called upon. However, these familiar shapes don’t weigh the story down but instead serve as scaffolding, holding up the book’s core message gracefully: that of harmony, balance, and the desperate need for ecological preservation.
Forests are falling into silence. What takes centuries to grow, we erase in moments. The scale of destruction is staggering: Since 1990, over 420 million hectares of forest have been destroyed, an area larger than India. Every minute, we lose an estimated twenty-seven soccer fields of forest. Every year, nearly ten million hectares of forest vanish, roughly the size of Portugal. We rationalize it—don’t we need all that paper, palm oil, pasture?—but every lost forest is a lost future. In The Forestborns, the poachers are the approaching threat. But the greatest threat to the forest is the one who doesn’t even see himself as a villain: manushya. Us. We don’t need to imagine the enemy. We already are him. Not evil, but oblivious.
In the face of such loss, stories can help us remember what we’re losing and why it matters. They give us a chance to listen differently, to feel more deeply, to recognize the world not as mere resource. And like the best of anthropomorphic stories, The Forestborns by Vardhini Amin makes nature more alive.