The  butterfly effect 

CHENNAI : As a child, I used to hide from my mother and rear caterpillars at home,” recalls Bhanumathi R, as she holds three self-authored books in her hand. One of them is a compilation of over a 100 species of butterflies, with names coined by her, in Tamil. As we sit down for a conversation in her well-lit home, she admits that in the concrete jungle where she lived all her life, she could never take caterpillar-rearing seriously. But her childhood fascination of observing a caterpillar transform to a butterfly was enough to make her spend a lifetime photographing, observing, and documenting different species of butterfly in the Indian terrain.

She started her career with the World Wildlife Federation, way back in 1985. For 15 years, she visited forests, conducted nature camps, and collected about 4000 slides of photographs. “I would be on the ground, waiting patiently to photograph bugs, beetles, and mainly butterflies. I was interested to know why certain butterflies settle on certain plants, and during these years I learned a lot about flora, fauna and it’s interdependence,” she shares. 

This quest for learning about the life-cycle, mating and behavioral patterns of butterflies, later lead her to initiate a project called ‘learning through lens’. She travelled to Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam in the North-East; Goa, Kerala, and parts of Western Ghats; and smaller towns and districts in Tamil Nadu— it wasn’t aimless travelling. “A lot of homework goes into each trip. I identify places where research has been carried out, and butterfly clusters have been identified. Last month, I went to Kerala to see a congregation of over 100 butterflies that suck minerals from the soil in a cluster,” she shares. 

But why photograph them? “It’s for my learning. When you travel, observe many butterflies, and come back home, you’re not going to remember them all. And as a conservationist, I didn’t believe in catching and pressing them in a collection of books for study,” she explains. Her photographs capture butterflies during it’s transformation, sucking nectar, or mating. And they are distinct because backgrounds are not blurred out, helping us observe other patterns about its dependency on environment. 

Bhanumathi took her research a step further, while she was compiling her collection into a book for a lay reader. She coined and standardised a nomenclature, with inputs from a team of scientists and experts. “I was conscious about not literally translating the names. For example, calling the species ‘plain tiger’, saada puli in Tamil, would simply be stupid,” she says. And since plain tiger looks like vendayam with stripes on its wings, she called it vendaya vari. The species ‘psych’ which flutters like a snowflake was called suttrum vellaiyan; and a distinctly blue family of butterflies were called ven neelan, naatu neelan, elumichai neelan and more, with the suffix neelan. 

Bhanumathi’s work in documenting butterflies, however, is less known compared to her scholarship in shadow puppetry in south India. She got her PhD on this subject in the early 2000s, and later set up Paavai Centre for Puppetry, to promote the art from an educationist’s point of view. She says it feels like a lifetime of travelling on two tracks with both butterfly photography on one hand, and puppetry on the other. “They both are a quest for learning. When I travel to photograph butterflies today, I know the patience and care it requires. After all these years, when I’m on the ground with my camera, about to press the shutter, a butterfly might fly away. And I’ve learnt that it’s simply the natural way of things.”