I began to frequent the deep Thar desert in 2013 with three friends: Pradip Krishen, Payal Mehta and Harsha J. We’d visit almost every month and walk through the desert commons: grasslands and arroyos, rocky areas and dunes, spending hours on our knees examining and photographing plants, lizards, snakes, gerbils, scorpions, mantids, and rocks. We’d scan the horizons and skies for raptors and chinkaras, desert foxes and sandstorms. And at every step, we’d seek out and use the place-names and local names of things.

To spend time in a swathe of land, allowing it to reveal things. About itself. About its people. Its moods. And through names, to begin to know it …

This kindled in me a deep appreciation for the lexis of the western Thar. A few months later, in April 2013, I met Chhattar Singh who further stoked this fire.

“Yeh drishya ka roop hai, bhaasha nahi!” he’d say.

[This is a manifestation of the land, not a language!]

Over the visits with Chhattar Singh, I realized how intensely evocative and expressive their landscape lexis is. In contrast to bland but precise scientific terms we in the cities use, the local names of things conjure up visions of the land. Their observation, so keen and deep, drives their ability to understand the land and live with it, even thrive in it.

My son is forgetting this language, Chhattar Singh had said ruefully one day. I realized he was not mourning a boy lost to the big city — it was the loss of an ancient wisdom that he was lamenting. The names these people give clouds, for example, are not merely evocative — they are manifestations of the rhythm of life in the desert. Thus, they can look at a cloud formation and recognize it as a kanThi, which could mean that somewhere out there kalaan was billowing up pregnant with rain, which in turn could mean that farmers prepare their dhoras and their khadeens and pastoralists pack for migration …

The loss of such a lexicon, I realized, was more than just the vanishing of words. It foreshadowed, in some way, a lack of a need for it. That inability to describe vividly aspects of a landscape was leaving us bereft, sterile, disconnected. Preserving particular native descriptions for things and phenomena in landscapes, on the other hand, keeps alive a connection with the very creature that sustains us, the land. It keeps us observant, curious, wondrous, respectful of the connections in nature, each vital to the next, cogs in giant interconnected life-wheels.

This glossary is just the beginning of an effort towards that end. It is also a long-term effort; the more time I spend in a land with the native people, the deeper I will learn.

I invite you all to be a part of this journey, this collection, and to contribute to it.

Have you experienced evocative vernacular terms describing particular aspects within landscapes — any landscape — or a natural phenomenon or a wild creature? You can chime in through the comments section on this page, for starters. If you’d rather send me words by email, please do reach me at: arati.rao@gmail.com