Indian environmentalism did not start with Chipko

New Delhi: It would be a mistake to think that India’s environmental consciousness began fifty years ago with the Chipko movement. Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking to Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, tells us why.

In a return to his academic roots, Guha presents an intellectual history of Indian environmentalism by chronicling the lives and contributions of ten diverse individuals.–known, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Verrier Elwin and Mirabehnand some much less–known, such as JC Kumarappa, M Krishnan and Radhakamal Mukerjee.

“This book was conceived in the time of Chipko and will be published forty years later, in the time of climate change,” says Guha. “Climate change is a real threat to India and the world. But even if it didn’t exist, India would be an environmental problem.”

And that’s where the work of these thinkers comes in: They anticipated the mindless imitation of a certain “Western” development model in India, Guha said, and tried to warn of the looming consequences.

The origins of the book lie in a university archive in the USwhere Guha happened to come across pamphlets written by Kumarappa and Mukerjee in the 1930s and 1940s. He was struck by their astuteness and the fact that they anticipated both the Chipko movement and the Narmada movement. Bachao movement – ​​both hallmarks of Indian environmentalism, especially as they were driven by the poor. This was in stark contrast to American environmentalists and their long lineage, who saw environmental protection as the domain of the rich and not the poor.

“My book is called Speaking with nature. All those (Western) thinkers spoke on behalf of nature,” Guha said in a 30-minute lecture before his conversation with Baviskar and a round of questions and answers from the audience. “Here were Indians articulating a different kind of environmentalism – speaking to nature and combining notions of equality and social justice with environmentalism.”

His book might have started as a conversation with WThere are strict views on when and where environmentalism originated, but Guha assured the public that he is not xenophobic; it features five Westerners. And all their work predated the explosion of environmental studies as a discipline, because they were all talking about similar themes, sometimes without the vocabulary for it.

“This book is interesting because it combines biography and genealogy,” said Baviskar. ‘This book is a pantheon of prophets.’

A Guha beyond Gandhi

Baviskar started her conversation with Guha by narrating the famous myth of Ganesha: his brother Kartikeya, and their celestial race all over the world. Shiva and Parvati offered them two sons a mango given to them by wise Narada. The one who could complete three laps of the world First the mango would win.

Kartikeya started running around the world, while Ganesha simply made three rounds around his parents – his entire world – And won the mango.

In the same manner, and much to the amusement of the audience, Baviskar recited the entire work of Guhald was Gandhi. “Why did you choose not to do this latest book on Gandhi?” she asked him.

Guha admitted that this is because he has already written so much about Gandhi, and perhaps he will do so in the future. “But I wanted this book to be about little-known people, or little-known facts about famous people,” Guha said.

Still, while Gandhi may not have a special chapter in the book, but two Gandhians do. JC Kumarappa was “Gandhi’s economist”. Mirabehn is best known as a devoted companion of Gandhi. But Mirabehn’s Environmentalism is never mentioned: she left Gandhi in 1945 and moved to Rishikesh, where she spent fifteen years in the Himalayas. Here she tried to rebuild the village society from an ecological perspective by trying to solve the waterlogging, recognize and educate people about ecologically valuable plants, and raise awareness about the consequences of the unbridled exploitation by the forest department at that time .

“She was a precocious and early proponent of what we know today as sustainable agriculture,” Guha said.

Similarly, Guha explored the lives of other thinkers who were closely related to the development of different approaches to the Indian environment.

The Academic Radhakamal Mukerjee, for example, was a pioneer of interdisciplinary research and ecological thinking. He was one of the world’s first thinkers to advocate a closer relationship between the natural and social sciences, Guha said, and worked to develop the theory of common property — for which political economist Elinor Ostrom would win the Nobel Prize seven decades later. .

Novelist KM Munshi is an icon of the Hindu right. But he was too known as an environmentalist. That was him the Minister of Food and Agriculture, and that was because of him both the ecological and economic reasons behind tree planting took on new religious dimensions. Promoting the conservation of trees and forests was an important theme everywhere Munshis life in government service.

“The chapter on Munshi confirmed my view that saffron environmentalism can be very superficial,” said Baviskar, adding that it reminded her of the subaltern environmentalism and the ways in which “religious relations can actually be a tool to way of life. nature that is not so instrumentalist or disenchanted.”

That is why India, and Indian environmentalism in particular, is so different from the West, both Guha and Baviskar agreed. India is an example of how environmentalism starts from the bottom up – because it is mostly driven by the poor, who are most affected by it.

---

Also read: Cuba beyond postcards. This photographer didn’t want to come back with just ‘travel photos’

---

Away from the West

India is particularly important for the future of the world – not because it claims to be the mother of democracy, Guha said – but because of its ecological diversity.

But Indian intellectuals – like Kumarappa and Mukerjee – have been buried by the discipline. It’s a shame, Guha said, because many of them were actually responding to the rampant exploitation of colonialism.

Colonialism played a major role in the development of every intellectual movement in India. And thinkers like Gandhi and Tagore did not simply understand that the Western model of industrial development could do that are copied and pasted in the Indian context. They both saw that the global replication of Western structures was not sustainable.

“Tagore recognized that Western imperialism is a system of political domination and economic exploitation, but also a vehicle of ecological destruction,” Guha said. “This is part of today’s dialogue, it is prophetic for him: he really predicted where India would go.”

At one point the conversation turned more seriously about the current state of India.

“It is scandalous that the current government has done nothing about air pollution in northern India in 11 years,” Guha said. “It is convenient for both Congress and BJP and any other political party to ignore these issues.”

When asked why India is not seeing a movement like Chipko or the Narmada Bachao Andolan today, Guha had a simple answer.

“Since 2004, the Indian state has much more suppressed dissent, especially on environmental issues,” he said.

“The state in the 80s and 90s was different, it gave space to civil society. And the other reason why we don’t see such a movement today is because of the smartphone – which individualizes everything, including dissent.”

Like most conversations about climate, the conversation turned to youth and what they need to do to combat an ecological crisis that is only getting worse.

“I try to stay away from both prediction and prescription,” Guha said as the conversation ended. “The young people are aware and have a deeper environmental consciousness than when we were young. Something will seep. So I still feel like there is hope.”

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)