Soil as a marker of identity, memory, rootedness

What is soil? This was the question posed to a group of children from Kerala’s Wayanad district at a recent workshop I attended. In recent years, Wayanad has been ravaged by landslides and floods, making it a critically sensitive ecological zone. Among those most affected are the children — forced to grapple with trauma and the uncertainties that such disasters bring.

The question, posed by an artist-educator conducting the workshop, prompted the children to reflect deeply. They had spent the day working with soil — muddied from play, sculpting figures, toys and bricks, revelling in the uninhibited joy and creative freedom such an artistic engagement offers. But what, really, is soil — this substance so familiar and abundant in their lush surroundings, and yet so taken for granted?

The answers came, one after another. Initially, they were straightforward: “Soil gives us food”, “It harbours snakes, insects and worms”, “We use it to make mud bricks for our homes”. Then, the children began to take notice of the urbanisation creeping into their idyllic hamlets. Soil, they said, was about highways, bridges, and tall buildings.

As the list of material benefits grew, the discussion gradually shifted to a more scientific realm. What differentiates sand from mud? How does rock become soil, or soil return to rock? Their curiosity led them to talk about topography, sedimentation, erosion, and gravity.

Then, a quiet shift in tone. The conversation turned philosophical. “We are made of soil, and we return to it,” said an older boy, invoking the Biblical phrase: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” In fact, the Hebrew word for Adam shares its root with adamah, meaning earth.

In India, where nature is often humanised and worshipped, soil carries a sacred dimension. Across languages and regions, we call her Mother Earth. A verse from the ‘Atharvaveda’ says: “Mata bhumi putro aham prithivya” — The Earth is my mother, I am her son. Soil, too, embodies suffering and endurance. As monk and pacifist Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “Without mud, there can be no lotus. Without suffering, there’s no happiness.”

In agrarian societies, soil is not just a resource — it is identity, memory, and rootedness. We speak of the ‘sons of the soil’ to describe farmers. In much of India’s heartland, land is tied to belonging. This core idea resonates deeply in Odiya writer Gopinath Mohanty’s novel ‘Paraja’, which tells the tragic story of Sukru Jani, a tribal man whose ancestral land is taken by exploitative landlords and a corrupt system. As his family is uprooted, their bond with the land is severed — fracturing both kinship and identity.

When land is seen merely as a commodity to be mined, owned, or fought over, it becomes spiritless. This is the barrenness that TS Eliot speaks of in ‘The Waste Land’: “Here is no water but only rock/Rock and no water and the sandy road.”

In ‘Little Gidding’, he extends the metaphor: “The parched eviscerate soil/Gapes at the vanity of toil, /Laughs without mirth. /This is the death of earth.”

Back in 1922, while addressing students at Calcutta University on ‘The Robbery of the Soil’, Rabindranath Tagore reflected on the intimate link between society and soil. “We are as much the children of the soil as of the human society,” he said. “If we fail to make commensurate returns for what society contributes to nurture our mind and spirit, then we shall only exploit, and, in time, exhaust what society gives us.” Environmentalist Wendell Berry deepens this insight in ‘The Unsettling of America’: “A culture disintegrates when its sense of the land as something to be revered and cherished fades.”

So, how well do we know our soil, “the central processing unit of the earth’s environment”, as a scientist referred to it? A single shovel of good garden soil is said to nurture more species than exist above ground in the entire Amazon rainforest. Yet, has soil today become the concern of a small group of specialists, or something we merely celebrate in songs and festivals? Has it become only the preserve of literature? Author Nirmal Verma once observed, “Poetry cannot prevent the axe from destroying the orchard, and yet, it is in some mysterious way connected with the trees, the garden, the birds.”

The soil has indeed suffered for too long, from human ignorance, greed and neglect. It may be time to remind ourselves of Berry’s profound, poetic words, that beneath grass lies soil dreaming of a young forest. And beneath pavements, lies soil dreaming of grass.

— The writer is a contributor based in Bengaluru