If she has a choice to be reborn, Charles Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel, would like to be born an Indian. Her reasons are far removed from any evolutionary theories though. "I will then know how to drape the saree," she exclaims.
Padel is the first woman professor of poetry at Oxford. She is also the first woman to be given a research fellowship at Oxford's Wadham College tospecialize in Greek tragedy. And she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London. But all these laurels pale in the face of her lineage, particularly vis-a-vis Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution and author of the seminal 'On the Origin of Species'.
But at 64, the award-winning British poet isn't overly perturbed about her forefather's fame overshadowing her achievements. Her concerns are more immediate. About 170 years ago, Darwin went through the Tropics (South America) to understand how species came into being. "Today, in a different continent (Asia), going through countries like China and Laos, I was carrying on 'The Origin of Species' while learning how the species came to be extinct.
"China gave me a nervous breakdown. What particularly upsets me is their attitude to nature. They want to legalise tiger farming so that tourists can come and enjoy seeing these species, then eat them or use their bones for medicine. If tiger products are legalized, India will be emptied of tigers in a year because it is so much cheaper to poach a big cat here."
Like Darwin, animals are central to Padel's work. At the Bombay Natural History Society, she will read from her debut novel, 'Where the Serpent Lives', set partly in the forests of Karnataka and Bengal, her celebrated account of tiger conservation, 'Tigers in Red Weather', and 'Darwin — A Life In Poems', her biography of Darwin in verse. She finds India inspiring as it boasts of a significant number of natural reserves with the original species still around.
