In the forests of Vidarbha, where he spent most of his adult life, Maruti Chitampalli did not walk so much as listen. While others mapped territory, he absorbed language—of birds, of trees, of the people who lived among them. Over four decades as a forest officer in Maharashtra, he moved not as a bureaucrat but as a student, learning from former hunters, Adivasi elders, and the long silences of the jungle. To them he owed his real education. The theory he had picked up in the Coimbatore Forest College—on timber yield and tree girth—was soon rendered secondary.
He rose to become Deputy Chief Conservator of Forests, but it was his work outside of formal duties that left a deeper mark. He helped shape protected areas such as Karnala Bird Sanctuary, Nagzira Wildlife Sanctuary, and the Melghat Tiger Reserve, and designed orphanages for displaced wildlife. Yet his most lasting achievement may have been as a communicator of the wild to those who would never step into it.
He wrote 25 books in Marathi—some factual, some impressionistic, some encyclopedic. His first, Pakshi Jaay Digantara (“The Birds Migrate Beyond the Horizon”), published in 1981, was an immediate success. His later works—Pakshi Kosh (on birds), Prani Kosh (on animals), and the unfinished Matsya Kosh (on fish)—made scientific knowledge accessible in local idioms, often borrowing from tribal dialects. He introduced new terms to the Marathi language, blending folk knowledge and field observation with philological care.
Chitampalli’s commitment to language was methodical. When he realized he could not understand the Sanskrit and scientific texts he needed, he enrolled in language classes—first Sanskrit, then others. He kept to a monkish discipline: waking at 3am to write, even in old age, and filling diaries with observations drawn from campfires and canopy walks.
His admirers called him Aranya Rishi, the forest sage. But unlike the mythical seers of Hindu lore, Chitampalli made no claims to spiritual insight. His knowledge was built from patience, repetition, and a deep respect for what he called the “minute details” of the natural world. He believed diary-keeping to be a moral obligation for foresters—an ethic largely absent, he lamented, among newer generations.
Though he received the Padma Shri just months before his death, recognition came late. He presided over the Marathi Sahitya Sammelan in 2006, rare for someone from the forestry profession. And while his books are required reading in Maharashtra’s universities and schools, few were ever translated. That bothered him. The forest, he felt, belonged to all—and so should the stories it held.
He returned to Solapur, his birthplace, shortly before his death. From there, too frail to roam, he continued writing from memory and notes. “My readers and various organizations,” he said, “are my successors.” He was not being humble. He meant that the work of listening—and of passing on what is heard—is never truly finished.
Header: Chitampalli. Screenshot from Wildlife of Vidarbha
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