Ramachandra Guha’s Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism should make our eyes widen and perhaps even make us shake our heads in regret. Environmentalism has only lately come to the fore of our consciousness – especially with the undeniable impact of global warming and climate change. But as Guha shows, through the work of people as varied and brilliant as Rabindranath Tagore, Verrier Elwin, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, M Krishnan and several others, the subject – and the problems it presents – were thoroughly thought through and expressed by these deep-thinking minds, and solutions proffered, most of which we have totally ignored if not gone completely counter to. They all, however, had as Guha writes in the Epilogue, “intellectual and ideological trajectories that were very diverse. They present before us many varieties of environmentalism, not just one.”
A composite image of the whole
Most of them were resolutely against the development model India followed – especially after independence – which was based on the Western model – involving huge capital-intensive industries, the building of mega-dams, and infrastructure projects. The West got away with it because they pillaged the resources needed from their colonies, stripping them bare of forests, minerals, and other natural wealth – on which locals, tribals and farmers had depended and managed perfectly. Further, an overpopulated country (population then, 300 million!) like India could simply not consume and waste at the scale of America – if we did as Mahatma Gandhi said, “took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locusts.” Which, alas is exactly what we are doing.
Each of the ten proponents presents the issue from slightly different points of view – rather like the different facets of a dragonfly’s eye focus on a slightly different area – to give it a composite image of the whole. Many had a romantic, spiritual attitude towards nature and lamented on the loveliness and beauty that was being so rapidly destroyed, all over the country. Tagore hated big cities and their ugliness as did Gandhi’s English disciple Madeleine, aka Mira Ben. She was appalled by the excesses of the Western economies and lamented: “We are caught in the meshes of a gigantic, mechanised money-making economy – produce and sell, produce and sell – on the one hand, and buy and throw away, buy and throw away, on the other.”
JC Kumarappa – “Gandhi’s Economist” – among other things was dead against the power vested with bureaucrats, who had no experience of rural life and ignored their proposed practical solutions to problems like the building of tanks to mitigate the shortage of water. He was a great admirer of the discipline, diligence and cleanliness of the Chinese, and back then in 1951, he maintained that “a people with this spirit will never be slaves. It seems presumptuous on our part to think that India leads the East; China is miles ahead of us!” And alas, still is. Another major issue was the universal use of dung as fuel, instead of for the making of excellent compost – a matter passionately advocated by the “dissenting scientists” Albert and Gabrielle Howard, which would have made the use of expensive toxic chemical fertilisers largely unnecessary. Verrier Elwin lived with tribals and married two tribal girls, extolling their way of life. They lived in complete harmony with nature.
It was, of course, the agriculturists, peasantry, and tribals that suffered the most from this West-aping development model. It stripped them bare of the natural resources they depended upon, and a way of life they had followed for eons – without causing wholesale harm to the environment. In addition, there were India’s complex social structures – like the caste system which further complicated issues: where for instance access to water from village wells could be denied to “lower caste” people causing unnecessary hardship to a large section of society. KM Munshi introduced a “Hindutva” aspect to the subject, while M Krishnan passionately advocated the total exclusion of human activities and presence in national parks and sanctuaries.
Even then, most of the ten environmentalists featured believed that more decentralisation of power was required if more equitable development were to take place – without incurring the huge costs of environmental degradation. The Forest Department, for example, came in for special criticism, for its ham-handed implementation of laws that kept villagers and peasants out of the forests and for the mindless plantation of monocultures in lieu of mixed forests, for the sole purpose of extraction of timber for revenue. One major bugbear was the replacement of ban oak forests with those of pine monocultures, which did not allow a healthy forest ecosystem to develop.
Taking the bull by the horns
What is interesting is that four of the ten proponents in the book are foreigners – three British and one Scottish. The axiom that developing countries like India cannot think of the environment as an issue – until their population is adequately fed – is also dealt with. This is something we should be thinking of seriously especially now as we go gung-ho on coal and fossil fuel extraction and use. Guha takes the bull by the horns, again, in the Epilogue where he writes, “Regimes led both by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have granted free license to coal and petroleum extraction and other industries that devastate landscapes as well as human communities. Perhaps no government has so actively promoted destructive practices as that led by Narendra Modi, who became Prime Minister in 2014.”
Guha sketches brief biographies of each of the ten proponents – especially in relation to their take on development and the environment. He has delved deep into their background and work – all of them, scholars in their own right. He writes fluidly, and conversationally, quoting extensively from their writings. These were idealistic, deep-thinking men and women far ahead of their time in their vision, who realised how big-buck capitalism based only on profiteering or even gunpoint communism – would lead to the ruination not only of local people but the places, resources and forests they lived in and depended upon: their entire way of life. All it had achieved was to make the rich, richer and the poor – especially rural folk and tribals – more miserable. All of them had alternative solutions on offer and were more or less united in the view that the model of Western development was a complete no-no for countries like India, which had to carve out a unique, gentler path of their own.
This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all policymakers and bureaucrats, not to mention the school and college-going students – regardless of their subject specialisation. We’re raving about Artificial Intelligence these days, but the thinkers in this book – used something far less complicated and perhaps relevant: Real Intelligence.
Ranjit Lal has special interest in areas like natural history, photography, humour, satire and automobiles, on which he writes for both adults and children. He has written more than 35 books.
Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, Ramachandra Guha, HarperCollins India.
