Sucheta Dasgupta | India’s unsung green heroes

The philosophy of environmentalism is no more than one century and a quarter old, and marked by intellectual scepticism regarding poor countries' contribution; as economists Lester Thurow and Eric Hobsbawm, curiously, respectively, maintain, “they want[ed] more ‘development’” and “they simply aren’t interested”. Never mind if the 1973 Chipko movement in the Himalaya gives the lie to these assertions. Although, it was not until the 1980s that the environmental debate did take off in India, and the Government of India started the department (now ministry) of environment. Hence it makes sense to trace the origins of environmental thought in our country, and salvage any ideas of merit, if only to settle this question. An important task, that Ramachandra Guha (The Unquiet Woods, 1989; This Fissured Land, 1992; Environmentalism, 1999) does with aplomb.

Take economist-turned-sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee, b. 1881), for instance. In 1922, he formally advocated the communal sharing of natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests for the sake of both economic and ecological sustainability. He also highlighted the connections between the natural and the social sciences and called for the interdisciplinarity of the academic structure. In 2009, the economist Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Prize for disproving that communal resources would be destroyed by overuse. Clearly, Mukerjee’s work remains entirely relevant, especially as the Indian government is still reluctant to cede control over woodlands to adivasis even as it happily does to mining companies that finance the ruling party. Then we have the Gandhian J.C. Kumarappa (b. 1892). He rejected Europe's urban-industrial model of development. He argued that India must build its economic future on its agrarian foundations. In 1973, economist E.F. Schumacher published the environmental classic, Small Is Beautiful, wherein he quoted Kumarappa, but before that, in 1970, he wrote an article titled 'The Economics of Permanence', which is also the title of a book by Kumarappa, to urge a “new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle...”

The idea of organic farming was in fact developed in India. Some four decades earlier, it was Albert and Gabrielle Howard who first proposed organic farming here, warning against the use of fertilisers and monocultures. Globally, Albert is known as the “main founder of organic farming”, but as the Imperial Botanist his studies, developed based on his extensive travels and interactions with the farmers of India, were met with considerable opposition in his time. As, too, happened with ecological town planner Scotsman Patrick Geddes, mentor of Radhakamal and friend of the brilliant J.C. Bose, who took issue with Edwin Lutyens, designer of New Delhi, over his ignorance of Indian aesthetic traditions, and thereby lost his commissions.

“Nehru’s anthropologist” Verrier Elwin was the first to document the tribal communities of central, eastern and northeastern India, among them the Baiga, Saora, Muria and Agaria, and championed swidden agriculture, which some of these communities were being forcibly barred from practising, later advising on the administration of the North-East Frontier Agency, and urging among the mainstream middle classes a greater respect for adivasi rights on the forest and land. In 1960, Elwin was asked to join the U.N. Dhebar committee through which he put up a spirited defence of these, laying bare the scapegoating of tribes by the forest department and the merciless destruction of forest resources at the hands of “outsiders” and officials. In fact, the Maoist insurgency has been a consequence of successive governments not implementing this committee's recommendations, Guha writes.

Guha’s widely researched volume enlightens its reader about the faith-driven Vana Mahotsav ethos invented by K.M. Munshi, whom he dubs the “Hindutva environmentalist”, the passionate environmentalism of “Gandhi’s Englishwoman” Mira/Madelaine, as well as the insights and convictions of “modern India's greatest naturalist” M. Krishnan of The Statesman’s Country Notebook column fame (which was published till his death in 1996), not to mention the practical component of the “myriad-minded” Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan initiative as an educationist building on children’s innate interest in nature. While the significance of his work is undeniable in today’s times, what impresses the most is his complete impartiality as he also discloses his subjects’ particular faults and failings (Radhakamal Mukerjee bore regressive views on the place of women in society; K.M. Munshi’s Vana Mahotsav was a publicity stunt; while focussing on fauna, M. Krishnan forgot the tribals). He also does not shy from putting the present-day government on the mat.

Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism

Ramachandra Guha

Fourth Estate India

pp. 440; Rs 799