Environment and Society in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 190 pp. US$104.00, cloth. ISBN 9789462984431.
Environmental Movements of India: Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Navdanya by Krishna Mallick is the latest addition to the bourgeoning field of environmental studies in India. The book attempts to map the local and global resonance of the Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan, and Navdanya movements by focusing on broad frameworks like development ethics, global environment ethics, feminist care ethics, and capability approach, among others. Mallick proposes that all three movements were fundamentally interlinked with two strands of thought, namely Gandhian non-violence and Hindu Vedic wisdom. However, this ambitious setup fails to conjure a new analytical lens to further explore these movements. Instead, it offers stereotypical explanations of terms, concepts, and regions and further obscures our attention from the new archival and analytical breakthroughs in the field of environmental studies in the recent past.
The introduction lays out three principles which seem to have governed these movements, namely environmental justice, intergenerational equality, and respect for nature. Throughout the book, the emphatic claim is to resist the forces of globalization and the ravenous shenanigans of markets and capital. The alternative proposed is to unearth the pristine logic of a seamless, “natural” relationship of humans and nature found in the ancient Indian texts. Chapters operate in the Manichean binary of Western modernity and Eastern spiritualism. Mallick offers nothing to deconstruct terms like West, modernity, and spiritualism. Without offering any conceptual nuance, she collapses everything that is wrong with capitalism into the capacious umbrella category of globalization. In opposition to the ethical practices ingrained in the sacred nature of the East, the West gets categorized as a profane, capital obsessed monolith. This becomes evident in the chapter titled “Historical and Cultural Contexts in India,” which begins with providing a brief summary of colonial legacies of environmental laws like the India Forest Act, 1865 and Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Mallick swiftly moves to laying out the cultural landscape of the three movements by reducing all the social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of an environmental movement to Gandhism and Hinduism. For instance, there are intellectually jaded subtitles like “How Navdanya Followed Hinduism through Gandhi.” Ramchandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil’s pioneering work on environmental studies hinted at both these strands, which over the years have provoked researchers to critique and propose alternative ways of thinking (Guha and Gadgil, This Fissured Land, Oxford India Perennials Series, Oxford University Press, 2012).
The chapter on the Chipko movement, like the rest of the chapters on Naramada Bachao and Navdanya, begins by giving a synoptic overview of the genesis of the movement and its achievements in the quest for environmental justice. Like the other chapters, the one on Chipko treads the familiar path of invoking leading personalities like Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna, the latter being a self-avowed Gandhian. By opting for the calculated approach of avoiding any hitherto untapped approaches or archival sources, Mallick merely repeats the movement’s all too well-known skeleton, which becomes a mere exercise in documentation. She registers her indifference to Marxist and radical strands by a one-line statement in the abstract, which curtly describes it as a strand that was later dissolved. Far from being a minor strand and a school of thought that emerged later, the communist contribution to peasant struggles in the Kumaon and Garhwal regions can be traced back to the 1930s. The vibrancy of the Chipko movement is evidenced by the participation of students and women as well as the central role of folklore in it, all of which was captured in Shekhar Pathak’s magisterial work on the Chipko movement (Pathak and Manisha Chaudhry, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, Ranikhet, 2021).
Furthermore, two specific omissions can be identified in dealing with Narmada Bachao and Navdanya. First, Mallick regularly relies on secondary sources. Large portions of the book come across as a perfunctory review of the literature on all three movements. Second, for a work that looks to inspire hope among grassroot activists, the author makes no use of oral and written accounts of the poor and disadvantaged who have suffered displacement during the Narmada Bachao agitation. Similarly, there is scant critical insight into the reception of genetically modified crops by farmers and rural consumers alike. The chapter on Narmada Bachao Andolan registers administrative and political hurdles the movement has faced since the 1980s but offers no new critical appraisal of the actors involved and the trajectory of the movement. The Navdanya chapter continues with the descriptive style by explaining sundry concepts and terms like seed sovereignty and earth democracy, and documents leaders like Vandana Shiva and her usage of indigenous knowledge ideals of Swaraj, Swadeshi, Sarvodaya, and Satyagraha. The narrative angle begins with this description and concludes on the note of romanticizing the fight against patents and privatization of the anti-GM crops. Mallick reserves bare minimum space for criticism of the approaches she deploys, only to once again document these without providing any response of her own to these critiques.
Arguably the weakest link of the book remains the way Hinduism gets invoked. Hinduism is almost understood as an eternal, ontological category whose metaphysical, mystical dimensions overpower the lived realities of those fighting for environmental justice. In explaining Hindu ethics and ecology, Mallick dwells on the evolution of Vedanta and Advaita philosophy and glides through debates on how ethics in the East are markedly different than the West. There are separate sections on Gita and Dharmic duty, which involves a subsection on Arjuna’s ethical jostling on the battlefield. How all of this is related to environmental movements in contemporary India is anybody’s guess. Mallick uses the phraseology of “familiar Brahmanical Hindu paradigm,” which connects the purported virtue of renouncing material desires to Gandhian non-violence. Ethically speaking, can a “Brahmanical Hindu paradigm” be used to comprehend the grievances of all the poor and disadvantaged who mostly come from lower-caste backgrounds? Can intergenerational equality be achieved through a paradigm that has kept the majority of the Hindu population away from learning the ancient texts which are used as the hallmark of indigenous knowledge systems by this book? Mallick offers insufficient engagement with pioneering recent works which explore the dynamics of caste and nature (Mukul Sharma, Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics, Oxford University Press, 2017.) Would it be a far-fetched question to ask what exactly is getting saved when the author gloats about Hinduism’s potential in saving the environment?
It is intriguing to discover that the narrative focus of the chapter, and also the book toward the end, shifts from opining on Hinduism’s centrality in shaping the three movements to how the Hindu scriptures should be the basis of reducing the environmental damage caused by humans. Perhaps also, in the midst of our deeply divisive political climate of religious nationalism, one needs to contextualize this work by asking: How does one ensure that a proposed textual, scriptural alternative of Hindu ethics and ecology does not get appropriated by the rising forces of nativism and atavism?
Surajkumar Thube
University of Oxford, Oxford