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The 'new traditionalist' discourse of Indian environmentalism Subir Sinha a; Shubhra Gururani b; Brian Greenberg c a Environmental Program, University of Vermont, USA b Department of Social Anthropology, York University, Canada c Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, USA

Online Publication Date: 01 April 1997

To cite this Article Sinha, Subir, Gururani, Shubhra and Greenberg, Brian(1997)'The 'new traditionalist' discourse of Indian environmentalism',Journal of Peasant Studies,24:3,65 — 99 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03066159708438643 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066159708438643

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The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. The 'New Traditionalist' Discourse of Indian Environmentalism

SUBIR SINHA, SHUBHRA GURURANI and BRIAN GREENBERG

In this article we identify 'new traditionalism' as the discourse that dominates the historiography of the Indian environment. We challenge the new traditionalist equation of 'forests' and 'nature', their assertion that 'traditional' agriculture was ecologically balanced, and was practised by self-contained communities, and their claims that women, forest dwellers and peasants were primarily the keepers of a special conservationist ethic. We next examine the new traditionalist claim that colonialism, modernity and development were exclusively responsible for the degradation of nature in India. Finally, we examine the new traditionalist interpretations of popular politics around environmental issues, specifically the Chipko movement. We make explicit the assumptions and political implications of new traditionalism and provide an alternative reading of Indian environmental history and politics.

I. INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND THE

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 INTERPRETATION OF INDIA'S ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS The extent of environmental change in India over the last 200 years is difficult to overstate. A growing population, expanding industrial economy, and intensive agricultural use of the countryside have combined with resource-intensive state development policies to deplete the biological and mineral resources of the country [World Resources Institute 1994, Ch.3,

Subir Sinha, Environmental Program, University of Vermont, USA; Shubhra Gururani, Department of Social Anthropology, York University, Canada; Brian Greenberg, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, USA. The authors' names are arranged in reverse alphabetical order. The authors would like to thank Ann Gold, Ron Herring, Bill Munro, Rashmi Varma and Sue Wadley for reading and commenting on various drafts of the article. Special thanks to Tom Brass for his detailed and thought-provoking comments, which helped them sharpen their arguments. They are alone responsible for the uses they have made of their suggestions. The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.24, No.3, April 1997, pp.65-99 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON 66 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

CSE, 1985]. In response to these environmental and economic transformations, there has arisen in India an oppositional environmental discourse which advocates alternative modes of economy and resource use. As a politically engaged critique, this discourse forms a central part of ongoing challenges to the project of Indian development, pointing to its ineffectiveness in the areas of social and economic justice, emphasising the unequal burden which development often imposes on women and the poor, and the links between development and the degradation of natural resources [Shiva, 1988]. It has highlighted the voice and agency of rural people, women and forest dwellers, often lost in the official discourse of development [Agarwal, 1989]. It has sought to highlight the mechanisms of colonial control over natural resources and challenged the validity of India's post-independence model of state management of resources in the name of 'scientific' economic development [Alvares, 1992; Nandy, 1988]. The vigour and commitment with v/hich this discourse has linked social equity issues to troubling environmental trends has helped to widen debate beyond conventional and narrowly economic definitions of development [Kothari and Parajuli, 1993]. While drawing a blueprint for relations between the natural environment, state and society, this oppositional discourse has also created images of Indian environmental tradition now popular worldwide. Examples of grass-roots Indian environmental activism such as Chipko, invoking images of poor peasant women hugging trees to prevent their felling, have become global icons of popular political, and, above all, 'indigenous' mobilisation and resistance to unjust and unsustainable economic development. In this article, we identify and challenge what we call the 'new traditionalist' discourse, widely accepted as the most authoritative account of ecological degradation and political ecology in India.1 We evaluate it against historical evidence of ecological change in

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 India, of gender relations of production, forest use and agricultural ecology. We examine new traditionalism as a political program for changing relations between nature, society and state. We present an alternative explanation of the ideological basis for movements such as Chipko, and of women's relationships to rural society and ecology. For reasons we will detail below, the new traditionalist project is unacceptable for its implications for social relations, for the distribution of benefits from resource use, and indeed for ecological sustainability. Indeed, its grass-roots purchase is more questionable than its acceptance within the global environmental movement and the academy. Our critique of new traditionalism also implies a political project. Much of the established 'left' in India has not taken the problem of resource degradation seriously enough, or in any case has not articulated resource use 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 67

alternatives to 'traditional' use or to statist policies of the last century and a half. Our assessment of new traditionalism and of Indian ecological history comes from an 'eco-socialist' project [Pepper, 1993], which includes equitable resource use, the participation of women and subordinate classes and castes in local institutions of resource use, decentralised, democratic and collective local control over state institutions for resource use, a priority for the provision of 'basic needs' to the rural and urban poor over other uses, and programs to regenerate resource stocks. We hope that this re-evaluation can inform current debates on socially just and environmentally responsible resource use in India.

II. THE NEW TRADITIONALIST DISCOURSE: POLITICAL ENGAGEMENTS, ROMANTIC RETROSPECTIVES, AND THE EXPLANATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE New traditionalism's specific critique of colonialism and 'development' is accompanied by an equally specific reading of Indian 'tradition'. Within this discourse, traditional or pre-colonial Indian society was marked by harmonious social relationships, ecologically sensitive resource use practices, and was generally far less burdened by the gender, economic and environmental exploitation which concern contemporary observers [Gadgil and Guha, 1993: Ch.4; Shiva, 1988: Chs.l and 2].2 It sees colonial rule as having imposed a pervasive and alien set of social, economic and ecological relationships on India, which post-independence economic development policies continue more or less in toto. These policies are seen as having fundamentally transformed patterns of resource use in India, and as having no basis in Indian tradition. The discourse points out that the colonial and post-independence state's support for scientific, technical and economic systems gave little attention to the preservation of indigenous

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 environmental knowledge [Gadgil and Guha, 1993: Ch.6; Agarwal and Narain, 1992]. This colonial rejection of traditional economy, society and knowledge, new traditionalists argue, disrupted India's traditional ecological and social relationships. The revalorisation of 'traditional' society and 'indigenous' knowledge in new traditionalist discourse aims to recover a socially responsible and ecologically harmonious alternative to conventional development strategies. In this effort, as Agarwal and Narain put it: 'Traditional knowledge is vital because of its ecological rationality - its inspiration being the sustainable use of the ecosystem in which it developed' [1992: 221]. Social movements, specifically the Chipko movement, are represented in this discourse as popular initiatives to repudiate modernity and recover tradition. A number of important assumptions and assertions about nature and its 68 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

use in pre-colonial India typify the new traditionalist discourse. Prominent among these assertions are that: (1) the traditional agricultural production system practised by village communities, in particular those in the Himalayas, are, or were, eco-friendly and 'balanced', and would not, of themselves, cause a degradation of nature; (2) villages were stable and autonomous until disrupted and dismantled by the colonial and post- colonial successor states; (3) women, peasants, and forest dwelling communities, especially those dwelling in forest areas, possess and practice a special 'conservationist ethic' which underpins traditional production [Shiva, 1988; Banuri and Marglin, 1993; Pereira and Seabrook, 1992]; (4) pre-colonial villages maintained relatively autonomous relationships with non-local political authority (such as hill-state Rajas, Gurkha rulers, etc.) and market forces; (5) environmentally deleterious patterns of production and consumption are of recent vintage, traced to colonialism and its impact; (6) human and livestock populations have little to do with explaining environmental change; (7) under contemporary conditions, restoring 'traditional' knowledge and practices is a means of re-establishing ecological stability and social well-being, and popular indigenous efforts at the recovery of traditional knowledge and stable ecologies are reflected through mobilisations such as the Chipko movement. New traditionalists draw a sharp dichotomy between 'India' and the 'west', the 'indigenous' and the 'foreign', and between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. This formulation allows for at least three lines of inquiry, regarding the indigenous ecological past, the foreign projects of colonialism and modernity, and the nature of the alternatives posited by social movements such as Chipko, which are said to have sounded the death-knell of development. It is certainly not our intention to suggest that India's colonial experience was marked overall by beneficial economic or environmental changes, or to minimise the degree of exploitation generated

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 by 'development'. Neither is it our intention to suggest that traditional ecological practices have nothing to offer modernity in terms of lessons on ecological sustainability. Rather, we wish to argue that the new traditionalist depiction of Indian tradition and of colonial rule cannot sufficiently account for the kind and scope of environmental transformations which have occurred in the subcontinent over the past few centuries, nor provide an acceptable alternative for the future. In our reading of the ecological evidence, in addition to the critical impact of colonial rule, the range of factors propelling environmental change predate the colonial presence, and include processes beyond those initiated and controlled by the colonial economy and administration.' Further, our reading of social movements suggests a far more complex and ambiguous project than merely the recovery of 'tradition', as new traditionalism would have it. 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 69

As with any discursive formation, the new traditionalist discourse incorporates nuanced and distinctive arguments which are not part of a self- professed ideological position. The set of understanding we are describing has taken shape around assumptions which are widely shared, but by no means monolithic or homogeneous. Many of the authors we cite as new traditionalists differ with other authors on one or more of these constitutive elements of the discourse, as we will point out in the course of the article. Nevertheless, the far-reaching influence of a relatively small number of writers has given coherence to this discourse. A complex inter-textuality appears repeatedly in Indian environmental debates, contributing to a sense of shared foundational ideas. Indian new traditionalism is important not simply as an appealing interpretation of environmental history, but because it mobilises a version of the past as a template for alternative development policy.4 It has implications for the construction of ecological history and for alternative patterns of resource use as a political agenda. We therefore take this discourse not simply as an intellectual formation, but, as we have noted above, as an effort to reshape relationships between local people, the environment, and the developmentalist state. We will interrogate the new traditionalist discourse for the political and ideological premises and implications which inform or flow from it, in precisely the same way in which it insists that mainstream development should be interrogated on these same issues. This questioning is necessary, since we need to know how a reliance on a reconstructed Indian tradition perceived as unadulterated by western values and institutions, would enable us to generate strategies responsive to contemporary understandings of ecological stability and social justice. However widely these latter goals may be shared, the question is whether an uncritical and romanticised appeal to a geographically, historically and socially homogenised 'Indian

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 tradition' provides the basis for them.

III. SITUATING TRADITION: HIMALAYAN FORESTS IN NEW TRADITIONALIST ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY Within new traditionalism, India's 'traditional village ecology' has been imagined against an Himalayan backdrop. Forests, especially Himalayan forests in Uttarakhand (a collective term for the eight hill districts of Uttar Pradesh State in northern India), occupy a privileged position in new traditionalist environmental history. The emphasis on Himalayan forests is not simply ecological. In the new traditionalist discourse, the forest dwellers' community, and their relationships with forests, are metaphors generally for human relationships with 'nature' in India. The agricultural 70 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

ecology of the Himalayas is made to stand more generally for that of the Indian village, and ecological transformations which have taken place in the Himalayas are seen as encapsulating the consequence of changes introduced across India by the colonial state. This extension of the Himalayan case to a much more general Indian archetype has attracted little comment in the environmental literature. New traditionalism constructs the Himalayas as a profoundly rich and important symbol - as a quintessential example of the relationship between Indian civilization and nature [Vatsyayan, 1992]. Perhaps the most prominent of the images identifies the Himalayas as the location of balanced agriculture and enduring forests, and, since the colonial period, of deforestation. The paradox here is that brunt of deforestation in the Himalayas occurred considerably later than it did on vast areas of the Indian subcontinent. None the less, colonial and post-colonial deforestation in the Himalayas is presented as typifying the historical processes and patterns through which deforestation occurred elsewhere in India. Changes in resource stocks in other areas, which likely occurred in the pre-colonial era as a product of other social and economic forces, are refigured or historically foreshortened as colonial-era changes, after the pattern which is seen to have applied in the Himalayas [Eaton, 1990; Richards and Flint, 1990; Guha, 1995]. The extent to which commentary from a range of colonial and contemporary writers echoes, the perception of the hill people as conservators of 'authentic' Indian tradition is even a bit surprising. Colonial settlement reports, gazetteers and the more recent surveys which have accompanied development projects, all deploy the imagery of a well preserved 'traditional' hill cultivation and society [Lyall, 1865; O'Brien, 1890].5 Both new traditional and official historiography operate within a wider popular mentality on the Himalayas which identifies them as potent

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 spiritual sources and as the location of authentic cultural tradition [Bharati, 1978; Krishnamurti and Schoettli, 1985; Chaitanya, 1992; Radhakrishna Rao, 1982]. What did this authentic ecological tradition comprise, and how do new traditionalists construct it? Shiva [1988] uses classical texts as sociological reportage to construct Ihe image of 'authentic' social- ecological relations before colonialism, and creates a spiritualised view of the Himalayas and a romanticised view of 'traditional hill society'.6 As her concept of aranya sanskriti underscores, forests are the cradle of 'authentic' Indian civilisation. She invokes Tagore [1988: 55] to argue that 'the distinctiveness of Indian culture consists of its having defined life in the forests as the highest form of evolution'. In its deployment of such venerable ideas about the hill areas, Shiva's ecological radicalism is thus profoundly conservative in inspiration and attitude. 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 71

New traditionalist formulations represent forests as highly valued and revered, sentiments which then apply by extension to nature more generally. Within this pristine consciousness, the worship of specific trees is understood as leading to a general reverence for forests, in turn leading to an even broader reverence for nature. As Bandyopadhyay and Shiva [1985: 201] put it: 'In India, trees have been an object of worship, and cutting of green trees has been religiously prohibited.' For Pereira and Seabrook [1990: 50], it is 'natural' for forest-dwellers, given their benign dependency on trees, to recognise and worship in them their godly virtues. The existence of ecological values or ideas has often been taken as evidence of the pervasive practice of ecological preservation and sustainable land management in traditional India [Singh, 1986: I].7 As this discourse depicts Indian ecological tradition, forests are constituted simultaneously as quintessentially 'natural' and 'Indian' cultural space. Forests are also important within new traditionalism, as Banuri and Marglin [1993: 4] explain, because they are inhabited by many indigenous groups whose conservationist ways of life are seen to contrast so vividly with modern resource profligacy. The essential virtue of such non-modern subjects is that they are seen to have resisted, or at least remained uncontaminated by, colonialist and modern values toward nature, which are otherwise seen to have pervaded contemporary Indian society. For this discourse, it is particularly among hill women that a 'truly Indian' environmental ethic resides. It is paradoxical that new traditionalism should claim that forests were the centre of Indian civilisation, when the popular belief that forests must be cleared to prepare a proper setting for people and gods has been rather pervasive [Guha, S., 1995: 9]. To be sure, forests were regarded as places of contemplation and spiritual access. But more widespread was the impression that forests are a threatening space, inhabited by threatening

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 people. Forest-dwellers have traditionally been regarded as inferior to agriculturalists, and the clearance of trees has often been a requisite for claims to occupancy of land. Successive dynasties across the subcontinent attempted to expand cultivation at the expense of forests, a policy continued by the colonial regime. Sumit Guha suggests 'the denudation of the plains was in part a deliberate strategy adopted by the villagers. The low esteem in which untilled land was held is certainly indicated by the long list of almost uniformly pejorative compounds with "ran" to be found in Molesworth's dictionary' [1995:18]. The idea that forest preservation reflects classical Indian values rather than those of marginal groups such as tribals and the Bishnois is certainly open to question. Kelkar and Nathan [1991] note that the forest tribes of Jharkhand were seen as less than human on the surrounding plains. Berreman [1961] reports that plainsfolk saw those from 72 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

the Uttarakhand hills not as ths bearers of a 'true' Hindu tradition, but as peripheral to it. The 'yakshas' and 'yakhshanis', local hill deities, were attributed demonic rather than divine attributes by those claiming lineage to the Hinduism of the plains. There is thus this unresolved tension between new traditionalist valorisation of forests and forest dwellers, and the widespread fear and revulsion inspired by them in popular culture. Consistent with the emphasis placed on forests as the location of Indian tradition is the new traditionalist focus on colonial forest 'settlements' - a legal and administrative practice introduced by the colonial regime. Forest settlements were intended by the colonial state as charters of forest use rights, and as a codification of the state's ultimate precedence with regard to particular forest resources. In the new traditionalist narrative, forest settlements are markers of the colonial appropriation of forests, and of their destruction through commercial exploitation, the defining symbols of an alien and eventually destabilising process. The emphasis on colonial and commercial deforestation assumes that commercial forest use accounts for most Indian deforestation during the colonial and post-colonial periods [Gadgil and Guha, 1993: 120]. It also conveys the notion that commercial deforestation began with the colonial state. Local traditions of forest use, on whatever scale, are usually assumed or explicitly described, in a contrasting fashion, as non-commercial and ecologically balanced, whether or not local populations were using the forests heavily for other purposes [Gadgil, 1992].8 So prominent is the weight assigned to commercial deforestation in new traditionalism that an adequate assessment of deforestation resulting from local subsistence uses of forest resources has been neglected or downplayed [Rawat, 1988]. As a result, the ecological condition of forests, rather than that of the land converted to subsistence agriculture, becomes the prominent, even exclusive index of environmental change.9 In the new traditionalist view, British colonial forest policy is a

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 metaphor for British colonialism itself. Shiva, for example, sees British colonialism primarily as colonisation of the forests [1988: 88]. This simplifying image serves as an important rhetorical device to underscore the violation of indigenous tradition by the colonising west. However, it overlooks an important consideration with regard to forest settlements and forest use. Forests were classified into different categories depending upon location, type of forest, usefulness of trees for industrial and commercial usage, and rights traditionally accorded local people for the uses of forest produce. It was not simply a matter of the colonial state comprehensively excluding people from forests while appropriating them for its own uses, though certainly in formulating regulations the colonial state was concerned primarily with preserving its own entitlement to certain classes of forests. Many forest settlements, for example, those in Kangra district of Himachal 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 73

Pradesh and in the Uttar Pradesh hills, granted broad rights to local people for various uses of forest products, even if the cutting of green trees was not permitted [Mittall, 1988; Rawat, 1988]. In Kangra, forest rights were sometimes far more liberal and on far larger areas than had previously been permitted under the regime of the local Rajas.10 In response to effective protests which accelerated in the twentieth century, forest rights expanded further in many areas of the Himalayas. This suggests that colonial forest policy was considerably more complex in the access rights and privileges which it allowed to local people than new traditionalism seems to suggest. The new traditionalist discourse mobilises a closely related assumption, that colonial forest regulations were effectively enforced according to the letter of various forest acts and laws. All across the Himalayas, however, there are accounts which call this image of effective and minute administrative control into question, and which suggest a colonial state considerably 'softer' at its margins than many accounts would lead us to understand. In other words, whatever colonial forest regulations may have specified on paper, their enforcement proved beyond the capability of colonial forest officers in many areas." Weber [1989] recounts that colonial state control over forests in Kumaon became more exacting after 1886, indicating that even 'colonialism' displayed temporal and spatial variation in the exercise of state power over forests and forest dwellers. New traditionalists portray a diverse and intense traditional use of Indian forests, but this effort to refute the claims to superior management made by 'scientific forestry' hides a paradox. On the one hand, new traditionalists assert that forests were heavily used by local people in the pre-colonial era, which establishes their 'traditional rights' of forest access [Gadgil and Guha, 1993: Ch.4]. On the other hand, it evades the issue of the impact of such heavy and prolonged use imposed on the forests, arguing that forest deterioration began in earnest only with the advent of the British colonial

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 state. As accounts such as Sumit Guha's [1995] history of pre-colonial western India, Bishop Heber's [1849] reports from lower Kumaon in 1824-25, and Tucker's [1988b] forest history of Assam and Kumaon document, deforestation in many areas was well advanced prior to the arrival of the colonial state. We do not wish to exonerate the colonial or post-colonial states for their central roles in deforestation. However, the lack of attention to the historical ecological impacts of local patterns of forest use in new traditionalism conveys the idea that they were ecologically stable and benign, and that without state-sponsored commercial forest use, deforestation during the colonial era would not have occurred. Below, we provide an alternative reading to this image of comprehensive state forest appropriation and of benign traditional forest uses. 74 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES IV. THE INTENSIFICATION OF TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURE AND THE IMAGINATION OF ECOLOGICAL BALANCE The primacy accorded forests in the new traditional discourse is significant in both an historical and an ecological sense, because it has deflected attention from an adequate environmental assessment of traditional Indian techniques of cultivation. The new traditionalist discourse tends to describe traditional Indian agriculture and subsistence systems using terms such as 'stability' and 'balance' [Guha, 1990: 442; India International Center Quarterly, 1992: section IV]. But precisely what such terms might entail in an ecological sense is rarely specified with much precision. The fact that there are flows of nutrients between forests, livestock and fields is offered as evidence that the traditional system is, like a triangle, ecologically stable on all three sides [Shiva, 1988: Ch.5]. Working from the assumption that through this regenerative triangle soil fertility is renewed, the conclusion is advanced that the traditional production cycle as a whole is regenerative and ecologically balanced [Guha, 1989: 75; Gadgil et al, 1984: 257, Ghosh, 1992; Agarwal and Narain, 1992].12 One of the reasons that the new traditionalist depiction of Indian cultivation has seemed plausible may have to do with this invocation of 'cycles' and 'flows'. These terms are important in ecological analysis, but by themselves have little to say about resource stocks and their regeneration. Identifying flows from forests to livestock and then to fields is not an adequate assessment of the ecological relationships on which agriculture depends. The notion that an agricultural system is ecologically 'balanced' simply because of its ability to renew the fertility of fields and thereby continue to provide sustenance for people is a reductionist and anthropocentric understanding of an ecosystem concept, precisely the charges leveled by new traditionalists against 'scientific forestry'. Based only on the criterion that people have been provided for, such an outlook

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 overlooks other broad changes that have occurred in local ecologies as a consequence of traditional systems of cultivation.11 To take one example, the depiction of livestock in Indian cultivation is pivotal to the new traditionalist notion of beneficial 'flows' within agricultural ecology. Its assessment of the role of livestock in traditional agriculture is that they are essential to the regeneration of soil fertility, and that they provide vital human nutrition through dairy products [Shiva, 1988: Ch.5]. The implication is that large numbers of livestock are an inherently effective solution to the loss of soil fertility. We suggest that while it is important to recognise the role of animals in renewing soil fertility, it is important to note that popular mentality might rule out alternatives which are less environmentally damaging ways of accomplishing that goal [Nayar, 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 75

1983: 21]. New traditionalists seem not to recognise the profound ecological impacts of India's livestock herd, and therefore offer no viable alternatives to present agricultural practices and production patterns. A second related reason for the credibility of the new traditionalist vision of stable ecologies may have to do with the fact that it does not undertake an assessment of the magnitude of human demands on the environment. The neglect of scale issues makes it possible to avoid consideration of the possible impacts of human and livestock numbers on forests and agricultural lands. As we have pointed, the new traditionalist discourse tends to deny that there are harmful outcomes of interactions between human and livestock populations with local ecosystems. In a debate with Ashish in 1979, for example, Shiva and Bandyopadhyay argue that human and livestock populations have little to do with deforestation [Ashish, 1979a; 1979b; Shiva and Bandyopadhyay, 1979a; 1979b]. Banuri and Marglin [1993] take a more moderate position, arguing that population is not the main reason why natural systems stand devastated in much of the south today. We do not wish to reduce deforestation and ecological degradation generally to population figures, but to point out that interactions between human and livestock populations, land and forests must be addressed in an ecologically sustainable resource use agenda. Contemporary evidence suggests that with traditional Indian land management techniques, between 25 and 50 hectares of well-forested support land are needed for each hectare of cultivated land, in order to allow the regeneration of forests.14 Even at that ratio of land use, lopping and grazing over time produced a profoundly transformed assemblage of forest flora and fauna all over India.15 The assumption within the new traditionalist discourse is that the number of livestock and the limited area of forested and non-cultivable land available to support them are not problematic variables. Instead, the ownership and management structure of those lands, along with the relative

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 equity in their distribution, is assigned virtually complete precedence in the explanation of ecological changes. Given the injustices and inequities of colonial rule, it is obvious why equity and ownership have become central land management issues. The reasoning seems to be that a return to pre-colonial resource management will ensure the re-establishment the traditional balance on agricultural lands, and in the forests and pastures on which cultivated land is ultimately dependent. Absent is any consideration of inequity and injustice within the 'traditional community'. However, as Chatterjee and Rudra [1989: 1172], relying on Habib's previous work on precolonial agrarian relations, argue, 'there is now a near consensus that the rural society was quite well- stratified from much before the coming of the British'. While laudable goals in their own rights, equity and ownership issues interact with many others to produce a range of economic and 76 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

environmental consequences. Yet the exclusive emphasis on equitable local management has tended to obviate other basic questions, such as whether India's livestock and human populations can simultaneously be sustained under any known system of land management system - traditional or modern - without profound ecological changes. The new traditionalist discourse also does not acknowledge that limited land and a growing population lead to an intensification of the traditional farming system. Not the agricultural system but its intensification might cause serious environmental consequences.. Given the centrality of forests within new traditionalism, it is perhaps not surprising that the colonial agricultural settlements are virtually ignored by the discourse. To the extent that agricultural settlements have attracted comment, it is in reaction to the inequitable or exploitative economic arrangements they are seen to have instituted. The ecological continuities or breaks in patterns of land use as a result of agricultural settlements have attracted much less consideration, this despite the fact that these settlements codified and institutionalised peasants' rights and titles to their land under colonial rule. Current research indicates that the ecological consequences of intensified traditional agriculture were not necessarily benign, and well preceded colonialism. As Sumit Guha [1995] has pointed out, dramatic ecological changes accompanying settled cultivation had begun to occur in many areas centuries before colonial land settlements. The most intensively cultivated areas of the country had been deforested well before British rule. After the British colonial agricultural settlements, the vast majority of land holdings continued to be used for generating subsistence rather than for commercial crops. Yet however limited commercialisation was across most agricultural regions, it is often broadly invoked in the new traditionalist discourse to explain the spectrum of environmental changes which occurred during the

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 colonial period, deflecting a closer scrutiny of the ecological impacts of traditional cultivation. Instead, ecological changes are referred almost invariably to either commercial agriculture or to forest settlements. Given the close connections between farm demands and impacts on forests, this separate consideration of forest settlements and farm activities depicts an unrealistic independence between the two intimately connected domains. Ironically, the conceptual separation of forests and agriculture recapitulates colonial and developmentalist 'scientific knowledge' which new traditionalists are otherwise at some pains to challenge.

V. GENDER, CASTE AND THE USE OF NATURE A prominent component of global ecofeminism, the new traditionalist 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 77

discourse advances the idea that women are especially sympathetic and responsible managers of the rural environment.16 Such sensitivities and knowledge of relationships in nature are seen to inhere still in some groups of contemporary Indian women [Shiva, 1988; 1992]. Indian ecofeminism links its basic principles about the mutuality between women and nature with a more culturally and historically specific critique of western-oriented modernity adopted from post-colonial and post-modern critiques in India. It echoes the idea that the discourses of modernity, masculinity, science and development have privileged 'rational' and 'objective' western modes of knowing [Alvares, 1988; 1992; Nandy, 1988; Vishwanathan, 1988]." It asserts that contrary to its claims of 'objectivity' and 'universality' all modern knowledge is socially constructed and historically defined, and is shaped by the interests inherent in class, gender, race, ethnic, and national identities. The knowledge generated in 'objective' scientific exercises, such as projects of 'development', they point out, has often been used to legitimate the domination and exploitation of non-western people, especially women, and natural resources. This Indian ecofeminist discourse is not just a nostalgic reference to an era when women were more knowledgeable, moral, and powerful partisans on behalf of nature. In that it proffers a rather idiomatic version of India's pre-colonial, Vedic and Hindu pasts as a desirable model for contemporary gender and environmental relations, it is revivalist as well. Shiva argues that women and nature in the 'traditional' order were linked cosmologically and at the level of everyday practice [1988]. She invokes classical Hindu scriptures to try to establish the power, fertility, and initiative which she sees as women's traditional attributes in Hindu society. Such texts, she suggests, establish that traditional society venerated women. As evidence of this, she notes that both shakti, the 'feminine primordial energy' and prakriti, its manifestation as nature, were venerated as feminine entities.18 Women's

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 'invisible work' to make things grow, Shiva argues, was central to their roles in the traditional system. Those roles were displaced, she feels, by the arrival of patriarchal development and science [1988: Ch.3]. The veneration of divine femininity as shakti did not, however, translate into its practice in everyday life, and neither did the veneration of nature. Shiva appeals to classical Hindu texts to establish the source of such ideas about women. Yet the concepts to which she appeals are components of the elite Brahmanical tradition, not that of the forest-dwelling communities whose lifeways and ecological sensibilities she identifies with mainstream Hindu women. It is also far from clear that this classical shastric tradition was free of gender and caste-based domination; indeed, women and subordinate castes were forbidden from even reading texts such as the Laws of Manu. It is paradoxical that while women, subordinate castes and forest- 78 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

dwellers were its victims, yet in the new traditionalist account, they were the keepers of the shastric tradition. New traditionalist ecofeminism does not rely exclusively upon this 'great tradition', and draws as well upon popular cultural sources within indigenous women's traditions, such as folk-songs. Such components of popular culture, however, express not only women's subsistence-related and ecological perceptions, but also their positions of subordination in traditional society, within which women's intimate knowledge of forests, fields and water systems was tied to labour relations that were above all maintained by coercion. These relations were lamented, resented, and resisted in everyday lives. Women performed labour wholly out of proportion to their numbers, and male control over female labour involved the threat of physical violence.19 More than anything else, the value of a wife was measured by the quantum of labour that she could perform both in producing male progeny and foad crops, in addition to expectations about her performance of household labour. Folk-songs provide numerous examples of the trials and tribulations women face as agricultural labourers, collectors of fodder and firewood, and, within the family, as uneducated daughters, young wives, overworked mothers, and subordinate members of her husband's household. A folk-song from the central Himalayas, for example, compares the fate of women to that of 'cooked vegetables'. A proverb states that the skin of a drum and that of women have to be beaten for them to be of any use. Several songs lament the tyranny of the mother- in-law within the domestic sphere [Chatak, 1990: 236-7). These representations of women as subordinate household labourers are not simply artifacts of western values injected through colonialism, but predate it considerably. The neglect of women's location within relations of power reduces women's agency to the preservation of nature, missing the multiple interests

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 in resource use, as well as the many strategies they deploy in their pursuit, and thus does not take into account the social or ecological determinants within which women produce subsistence. More than anything else, we would argue, the relationship between hill-dwellers, including women, and forests, was a material one; forests had long been a resource upon which local subsistence depended. As Bina Agarwal [1989] and Jackson [1993] have noted, ecofeminist reasoning takes as its point of departure the valid observation that women disproportionately bear the social, economic and personal costs of environmental deterioration. From this insight ecofeminists conclude, however, that because women often suffer when nature suffers, there is an inherent identity between women and the natural world. In new traditionalist ecofeminism, women's interests seem necessarily to translate into action. Since women often manage the 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 79

subsistence activities of their households, the destruction of the environment which supports that subsistence base is clearly not in women's best interest. Since it is not in their interest, so the reasoning goes, it is logical that whatever their subsistence activities may involve, women in traditional societies do not harm the environment. New traditionalist ecofeminism suggests that a bio-ideological link between women and nature, specifically forests, defines women's interactions with the local environment. Our fieldwork experience in the western Himalayas suggests, in contrast, that women make decisions shaped by local environmental constraints and social conditions, often in conflict with ecofeminist idealisations. In the central and western Himalayas, the high rate of male outmigration in the last 125 years has left women as the primary caretakers of their households [Mishra et al, 1986; Mukherjee, 1989]. In order to fulfill this responsibility, women develop relationships with the forest which are conditioned by such factors as the scarcity of alternative local fuel and fodder, the shortfall in production from cultivated land (which increases the value of seasonally available fruits, nuts and tubers in the forest), and access to resources based on state- determined land classifications. These variables can each significantly affect women's relationships with forests. Our fieldwork in Chamoli and Pithoragarh presents a picture of women's relationship to forests as quite variable: women are very protective of the community forests that they control, but risk being caught by forest guards to take wood from the reserved and protected forests controlled by the state. Not nature per se, but women's sense of 'needs' and 'responsibilities', and the property institutions that regulate their fulfilment, are important in determining the way in which they approach the issue of their rights, responsibilities and relationships toward nature. The testimony we heard from women about the rigours and hardships of these arrangements suggest that they do not experience this set of relationships as 'natural' or as fulfilling their Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 aspirations 'as women', but as a set of activities they must perform to meet their multiple responsibilities. By reducing women's interests, attitudes and behaviour to biological attributes, new traditionalist understanding of the gender question seems to devalue women's structural location, personal motives, and agency as explanations for their actions. In our view, women in 'traditional' societies are not only 'embedded in nature', but also embedded in social and gender relations that were and are, firstly, relations of dominance and subordination. We find it entirely plausible that women's roles as caretakers and nurturers and their image as bearers of natural fertility stems from and reinforces their dependent and subordinate domestic status. If women are equated with nature or have an identity inextricably connected with it, and 80 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

if the exploitation of nature is accepted as inevitable, necessary or desirable, then the exploitation of women becomes 'naturalised' through that identity. This naturalised equation between women and nature has been used quite frequently to dominate women, as many observers have recognised [Ortner, 1974; Jackson, 1993; Nanda, 1991: 47]. Women's 'indigenous knowledge' idealised in new traditionalist formulations, too, differ from field observations. In our fieldwork sites, women usually resisted the notion that their personal use of the forests might be contributing to ecological damage. Women often rejected ideas of shared womanhood by citing caste divisions, but also mentioned other differentiating social markers such as age, marital status, position in the household and geographic location. Their perception of who was responsible calls into question the notion of women acting or thinking in a unified or gender-consistent way with regard to one another or to nature.20 The rather monolithic 'Indian Woman' of the new traditionalist discourse contrasts with fieldwork evidence not only from our Himalayan field sites, but from all over India and south Asia. Incidentally, 'women' is not the only naturalised social category which is constructed in this discourse, 'men' are no less naturalised and essentialised entities. While women are seen as repositories of traditional ecological wisdom and concern for the future, men are seen to have lost such qualities through participation in the commercial economy. As counterparts to ecologically regenerative and responsible women, men are depicted as powerful, exploitative, and environmentally irresponsible. The problem here, of course, is chat such naturalised attributes of men naturalises gender-based exploitation itself. There is also an inconsistency between new traditionalism's valorisation of 'traditional' institutions such as village forest councils and the fact the women were not allowed access to such decision-making bodies [Kelkar and Nathan, 1991: Ch.8]. Other

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 socially homogenised terms such as 'hill peasants', 'community', and 'forest dwellers', are also encountered in the discourse, but are difficult to associate with identifiable people in actual situations. The category of 'women' is, moreover, complicated by caste and location. When Gururani asked who had cut most of the local trees, she found that Brahmin women of one village blamed Brahmin women from other villages; Brahmin women collectively blamed women from the Thakur caste, and high-caste women blame those deemed untouchable. As for gender differences in perceptions of forest use, Gururani and Sinha found that village men did not believe that women interacted with forests in ways resembling the new traditionalist construct of nurturing, regenerative managers. Indeed, women themselves did not think that this was an accurate characterisation of their behaviour, arguing that they were limited in their 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 81

quantum of forest use only by the technology at their disposal, and not by any inherent spiritual or ethical links with forests. Kelkar and Nathan [1991 : 116] provide evidence from Jharkhand of large numbers of women selling headloads of firewood in neighbouring cities. Our point here, of course, is not that women's use of forests is inherently destructive, but that such use is located in the material context of gaining subsistence, a constraint which finds no place in the new traditionalist discourse Greenberg's experience in Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh suggests similar attitudes towards trees and forests on the part of women. Lopping trees for livestock fodder, a task usually performed by women, along with intentional burning to encourage the germination of grasses on the forest floor, has deforested large sections of the Kangra valley. As elsewhere in the Himalayas, as broadleaf oak and rhododendron forests retreated as a consequence of these practices, a monocrop of Chil pine was produced, which is useless as fodder, and so is spared from lopping. Most women, though aware of the long-term destructive effects of lopping, none the less felt compelled by the absence of alternative fuel and fodder sources to continue the practice. The new traditionalist discourse has tended to contrast patently destructive commercial cutting of trees for lumber to women's 'sustainable' lopping of branches for fodder and fuel. In ecological terms, however, there is no reason to suppose that lopping, as it is practised by women across much of the western Himalayas, is not destructive over time to the health of trees and to forest regeneration. Another analytical and descriptive concept central to new traditional historiography of environmental change is that of pre-colonial 'village communities', described as self-governing decision-making and resource management units. Forests use is usually depicted as locally managed. This image of village communities assumes effective autonomy from external political and economic forces. The self-regulating village community is

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 seen as socially and ecologically stable until the emergence of colonial administration [Gadgil and Guha, 1993: Ch.3]. Evidence from across the Himalayas suggests, however, that villages were embedded in regionally fluctuating political entities. The Gurkha, Sikh, and Mughal empires, for example, imposed confiscatory sharecropping arrangements throughout their domains in the hills. As in the case of the Punjab hill Rajas, whose lineage endured for more than two millennia, local resource use was micro- managed through a pervasive system of middlemen and intermediaries [Government of Punjab, 1924-25]. Once again, the specificity of community-state relations in Uttarakhand is extended to speak for all of the Himalayas, and in turn the Himalayas are made to stand for a tradition of local level resource use. As the ultimate unit of resource use in the new traditionalist discourse, 82 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

the 'community' is an over-arching collective identity and proof of social- ecological harmony. Commenting on pre-colonial forest use, however, Hardiman [1991] points to caste-differentiated practices of forest use in the southern Dang region of Gujarat in which Bhil ruling castes had preferential access to forests, which they maintained through coercive practices. Bhils exercised dominance over Kunbi and Gavit castes. Gururani [1995] demonstrates that in addition to caste, age, and residence location complicate gender as a unitary category beyond the easy reductions found in the new traditionalist formula. Kelkar and Nathan [1991] also show caste and gender differentiated access to forests and cultivated land in Jharkhand. Our emphasis on caste based disparities and power relationships contrasts with Gadgil's [1985] interpretation of caste as naturalistic, niche-like occupational categories. For Gadgil, the caste division of labour reflects the organisation of nature in any particular location. The caste system, in his formulation, acts in a functional way to prevent competition for resources, while at the same time as it prevents resource exhaustion which would otherwise result from multi-caste use of a single resource niche. Such a naturalisation of caste in turn naturalises caste-based systems of domination. In sum, the new traditionalist assertion of a bio-ideological and 'natural' links between women, indigenous peoples and nature provides no referents apart from a naturalised ecological sensitivity to account for pre-colonial, and thus non-modern, use of resources, and does not locate these relationships in local conditions of domination and subordination. While new traditionalists call for the recovery of counter-memory and counter-practices of women and indigenous peoples, as a corrective for historically unwise resource use and 'maldevelopment', they do not contextualise women's knowledge, agency and practices in the oppressive power relationships of the 'traditional' order, or in relations with the state and markets.21 Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009

VI. CHIPKO: A PARADIGM OF POPULAR POLITICAL ECOLOGY? We had pointed out at the outset that the new traditionalist account is 'authoritative' in that it shapes global understandings of Indian environmental history and politics. We have presented an alternative approach to environmental history in the sections above. Here we argue that despite its popularity within the Western academy and environmental movement, the new traditionalist representation of popular movements such as Chipko as 'civilisational responses' lacks local purchase and is at odds with historical evidence. To be sure, Shiva [1988] herself acknowledges a split between the 'deep ecology' and 'social ecology' wings of the Chipko movement, while Guha [1991] identifies a more 'socialist' wing which later 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 83

became associated with the demand for the creation of a hill state. Our point in this section is that Chipko does not demand unequivocally a retrieval of 'tradition'; it reflects a more complex political project, and not one necessarily in line with the political project of new traditionalism itself. One indication that new traditionalism is an 'authoritative' discourse is that, with few exceptions, Chipko is imagined globally as a paradigmatic, popular, 'civilisational' response to India's contemporary ecological crisis, a latter-day example of the great value that 'traditional' Indian culture placed on the active defense of the forests. For new traditionalists, historical precedents such as the Bishnoi sect's resistance to the cutting of the small khejari grove near their village in Rajasthan provide evidence of an active and widespread tradition of forest preservation [Gadgil and Guha, 1993: 108].22 Indeed, Shiva traces Chipko's lineage not only to the Bishnois, but even further back to depictions of tree worship on the seals of the Indus Valley. For Pereira and Seabrook [1992: 179], the principle of ahimsa or non-violence, associated with Gandhi and later with Chipko, is itself traceable to the Harappan age. We do not question the existence of indigenous practices of restrained forest use, but only if by 'indigenous' we mean 'precolonial'.23 There are reasons for scepticism about the notion of an unbroken and all- encompassing 'civilisational' mode of regulating relations with forests with consistent historical continuity. In the new traditionalist narrative, Chipko invokes and articulates precisely this mode as a collective political demand; the movement itself is a series of autonomous, spontaneous, local acts of women protecting trees from felling by hugging them, coordinated, if at all, by Gandhian activists. The aim of such mobilisation, according to this narrative, was ecological regeneration and a return to the ideal precolonial community [Linkenbach, 1994: 70]. Our contention is that Chipko was concerned primarily with defining and achieving 'social justice' through the

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 twin transformation of local community and state interests in the forest. While it is important to acknowledge the affiliation of several key Chipko activists with Gandhian activists like Sarlabehn and Mirabehn, and with the Sarvodaya movement, Chipko's ideology and mobilisation strategy also go beyond the Gandhian agenda as described by new traditionalism.24 Many students from .leftist political parties and other activists were also involved in the Chipko movement, giving it an uncompromisingly militant edge across a spectrum of issues.25 Some of these activists were self- described communists, who complemented Chipko's mass mobilisation strategy with more aggressive and confrontational actions, such as setting fire to forest auction halls. The fact that Chipko represented diverse political commitments is submerged in new traditionalist accounts which draws a picture of ideological uniformity. 84 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

The characterisation of Chipko as a 'civilisational' response enables the discourse to describe local episodes as spontaneous and autonomous [Shiva; 1988]. We argue in contrast that village level 'direct actions' were in fact well thought out and coordinated enactments of rebellion which had been rehearsed over the four years prior to the celebrated Reni village incident. Confrontational politics involving direct action came after the movement had made efforts to persuade the state to act on behalf of local hill community demands. The Reni episode, in which village women led by Gauradevi stopped the felling of their forests, followed an unsuccessful series of attempts by activists to block the auction of village forests through a strategy of negotiations with state and central government authorities.26 The resistance of women to the forest contractor's team was a consequence of their radicalisation through previous protests.27 This genealogy of political mobilisation is foreclosed by an interpretive language of spontaneous, autonomous civilisational responses. We need to remember also that the hugging of trees, which new traditionalism celebrates as empathy with the forest, stands in stark contrast to protests involving the burning of forest tracts which, too, have been a 'traditional' mode of protest in hill communities [Guha, 1989]. Other forms of protests included burning down forest auction halls, as in Nainital. Within new traditionalism, Chipko is a recent articulation of an ancient Indian environmental sensibility. However, the preservation of forests was not articulated initially as Chipko's political program; indeed, Gandhian activists themselves did not consider forests to be defended primarily as ecological complexes. Sarvodayis in the 1960s had established labour cooperatives which bid competitively for forest tracts to be used for local, small-scale industries to bring about local prosperity. Early movement documents reveal that the Sarvodayi notion of 'social justice' closely mirrored the goals of 'community development' articulated in the state's

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 planning documents of the 1950s [DGSM, n.d.]. Deforestation became an issue only after the Alaknanda floods of the early 1970s, which provided devastating evidence that social justice, indeed survival itself, would be impossible if forest use was not curbed.28 Nor was Chipko against state intervention in forest use per se. Indeed, several Chipko afforestation projects depended crucially upon funds from the state's 'food-for-work' programmes [ibid.]. Chipko is less an articulation of uncontaminated traditional ecological values than of contemporary concerns for social justice and political democracy. Chipko activists clearly did not view 'traditional village communities' as ideal or just forms of social organisation, as seen in their constant concern to abolish untouchability within hill communities, and, above all, to open spaces for women in the local institutions of such as van panchayats (forest councils). 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 85

The slogan, 'Chipko ki hai yeh lalkar, panchayat ko van adhikar' (Chipko demands forest rights to village panchayats), indicates the sort of property arrangements favoured in Chipko's political project.29 By demanding collective forest rights, however, Chipko did not articulate the need to return to the 'traditional' community; it was instead involved in creating a new kind of ideal village [Bhatt, 1981; Sarla Devi, 1979; Uttarakhand Observer, 1974].30 The creation of such a new community was a political project, and reflected ideas on forests, population, livestock, the state and science which directly contradict their representation in the new traditionalist discourse. Certainly, the invocation of devbhumi, or the hills as the 'land of the Gods', was a common Chipko mobilisational strategy. However, as we have mentioned earlier, Chipko's central theme was not that forests should be left alone because they are holy, but that they should be used for local needs. Toward that end, it demanded that local industries should be established to create value-adding and employment-generating facilities in the hills, as well as afforestation projects undertaken and common forests demarcated.31 The valorisation of 'traditional agriculture' in new traditionalism does not find echoes in the writings of movement leaders themselves. Even Chipko activists favoured by new traditionalists, such as Bahuguna [1989], give far more of a role to population in deforestation than Chipko's new traditionalist champions would allow.32 Likewise, the rising livestock population is seen by the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandai (a Sarvodayi group which played a key role in Chipko), as a major contributor to deforestation.33 Given these more pragmatic approaches to issues of scale, it is not surprising that movement leaders present an agenda for reforming local agriculture rather than valorising it, in contrast to new traditionalism. Bahuguna calls for the consolidation of scattered plots, the most prevalent form of land holding in hill villages, and also suggests a move away from

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 agriculture to horticulture. Modernising agriculture and creating new links between hill production and markets were important parts of the Chipko agenda, but they do not find a place within the new traditionalist discourse. Far from delinking from the state, Bahuguna explicitly suggests the mediation of the UP Government's Hill Development Council to enable local people to get good support prices for forest products manufactured in the hills through cooperatives [Bahuguna, 1972-73]. In addition, we find that Chipko's critique of the state, scientific forestry and development differs substantially from that of new traditionalism. Chipko certainly provided a popular political critique of state-led development, but its key activists accepted the state's ultimate claims to territory and authority, seeing themselves as reformists [Bhatt, 1968; Mishra, 1973].34 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the critique of 86 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

development that emerged among Sarvodaya activists, later to be associated with Chipko, linked state policies over the last century and a half with massive deforestation. At the same time, they argue that these policies were inconsistent with the professed objectives of the developmentalist state, which was to bring about 'socialism'. Recommendations of the planning commission were regularly adopted by the movement as part of a platform of local demands for a just development. Within Chipko's political project, the state was urged to take a central role in creating and supporting village forest councils, in awarding contracts to local co-operatives, in making development more participatory and the distributions of its 'benefits' more equitable, and above all, in regulating commercial clear-felling in the hills. Likewise, whereas modern science is demonised in the new traditionalist accounts of deforestation, participants in the Chipko camps included scientists such as M.S. Swaminathan and Madhav Gadgil, among others. Hydrological, zoological, botanical, géomorphologie, demographic and other scientific studies were carried out by Chipko partisans, though of course they were meant to aid local knowledge and capacity rather than to replace them. The challenge from Chipko was not to modern science per se, but with its specific relation to power within the statist development project. Indeed, for Bhatt, it was the responsibility of Chipko activists 'to develop scientific thinking and make individuals progressive and prosperous' [Bhatt, n.d.]. Finally, there is new traditionalism's generalisation from Chipko as a specific episode of popular mobilisation in Uttarakhand to speak for 'Indian civilisation' at large. No doubt Chipko was influential in so far as its demands for regulating felling of the forests, and giving local institutions and needs priority in forming forest use plans resonated in subsequent forest movements in India [e.g., Kanvalli, 1990]. The specificity of Chipko, despite its wide influence, needs to be emphasised as well. Though we have

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 documented above that hill communities were split along lines of gender and caste, relatively little variability in household land holdings and in preferences of resource use indeed gives these communities more class homogeneity than in most of the rest of India [Guha, 1989]. Similarly, compared to areas where the 'new farmers' movements' had mobilised by the 1980s [Brass, 1995], the Green Revolution had made limited inroads in the hills.35 Chipko reflected patterns of land holding and relations between peasants and the state in Uttarakhand, conditions that did not prevail countrywide. In this section, our aim has been not to argue against the importance of Chipko as an exemplary episode of popular mobilisation around issues of resource use. Rather, it has been to outline an analysis of the Chipko movement which challenges new traditionalist accounts of the same. A 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 87

close study of the internal debates and tensions within the movement presents a picture at substantial odds with the received wisdom of the narrative. As a theory of social movements in which an organic community is shown fighting the demons of state and science in defense of an authentic indigenous tradition which was conservationist at its core, new traditionalism is at variance with the movement's own stated objectives and aims. Whether or not Chipko was 'truly' socialist, it certainly shared notions of progress and socialism with planned development. To be sure Chipko used aspects of popular memory to place itself within a larger 'tradition' of protest.36 But we argue that this is not in itself evidence that Chipko aimed at returning to the past. While our alternative readings of Chipko challenge several aspects of the new traditionalist narrative, we feel further that the discourse would have even more serious problems explaining social movements such as the Kerala fishworker's movement, in which large numbers of participants are Christians and do not share the classical Hindu indigenous tradition constructed by new traditionalists [Sinha, 1994]. Chipko and other movements have quarrels with 'development' as well as with 'tradition', and the range of their demands and activities tests the limits of the 'civilisational response' thesis.

VIII. CONCLUSION It is interesting to speculate why the new traditionalist version of environmental history has achieved such prominence. Perhaps its affinities with ecofeminism and deep ecology, which have been enormously influential within the international environmental movement, help to account for its popularity. By the same token, our specific critique of new traditionalism in India has wider implications for the debates over environmental history and sustainable resource use in agrarian societies. A

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 key premise of new traditionalist environmentalism, the idea that there is an essential difference between 'the west' and 'the non-west', or between 'modernity' and 'tradition', in modes of resource use, finds echoes in contemporary critiques of development elsewhere Asia, Africa, Latin and South America [Escobar, 1995; Worster, 1994; Esteva, 19$7; Nandy, 1994]. These contemporary narratives valorise an ecologically sensitive 'indigenous knowledge' held by 'traditional cultures' and 'indigenous peoples', counterposed to alien, scientific, modern development introduced under colonialism and perpetuated by post-colonial regimes and global capitalism [Gonzales, 1992; Redford, 1991]. Our purpose has been to open up these hermetically sealed categories and to argue that social movements neither repudiate development-as-modernity nor embrace tradition, but remake both. 88 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

We have argued that the new traditional environmental discourse centrally engages a critique of colonialism in its construction of environmental history, in which ecological degradation is an artifact solely of India's colonial political history and of post-independence 'development' policies, rather than linked in any way to enduring relationships with local environments. Two opposing sets of continuities are invoked: one representing Indian 'traditional" or 'civilisational' modes of interacting with nature, which links the Vedas, the Bishnois, Gandhi and the women participants of Chipko. The other continuity is between colonial rule, the developmentalist state, modernity, science and the new global economic order. In this ideological configuration, a conservationist ethic belonging to the former is contrasted with the degradation caused by the latter. References to 'millennia' of 'balanced' resource use leads to the notion that the more gradual changes of the pre-colonial era represent no change at all. Conversely, the fact that ecological changes accelerated during the colonial period is taken as evidence that colonialism caused all such changes. New traditionalism has so focused on an explanation based upon colonialism for the present predicament that it has rendered 'tradition' largely immune from the kind of critical assessment it directs at colonialism and development, leading to the creation of dubious images of traditional ecological 'balance'. Our reading of environmental history suggests that both aspects of India's legacy have much to answer for in terms of ecological degradation. We agree with an epistemological critique of 'development' which sees it as culturally constructed, and reveals in its practice a specific deployment of power over people and nature. We feel, however, that a critical approach to 'development' should not lead to an uncritical acceptance of alternatives to it; both need to be investigated for their cultural moorings and power connotations. Given the consensus among environmentalists about the 'North's' predominant responsibility for global resource degradation,

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 claims about ecological wisdom vested in the indigenous people of the 'south' are accepted with little scepticism or scrutiny [Linkenbach, 1994; 69]. We have problematised the romanticisations of the new traditionalist discourse by arguing that for all its claims to holism, new traditionalism presents a singularly unidimensional view of peasant life, in which local people used forests only in ecologically sensitive ways. Such romanticisations now broadly symbolise 'civilisational' patterns of resource conservation in India. However, they are open to challenge on the basis of historical evidence of environmental change which local resource use has brought about. Our analysis of new traditionalism also has implications for theories of 'ecology movements', which the discourse sees as aimed at dismantling development. Yet while these movements in India have questioned modern 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 89

science, markets, the state and so forth, they have, in several crucial ways, embraced other modern ideas. For example, Chipko's own vision for the future drew in part from notions about social justice and forest use which were not in fact radically different from the stated objectives of planned development. To the extent that these movements represent challenges to modernity, it is not because of their outright rejection of modern ideas. Rather, it is because the demands they make seek to fundamentally alter the nature of the modern post-colonial Indian state, its role in using natural resources, as well as regnant notions of citizenship, democracy and development. Similarly, if the gender, caste and economic equity demands of social movements are realised, such an agenda would significantly rework new traditionalist models of 'Indian tradition', not simply re- institute them. Chipko's political project was simultaneously a renegotiation of peasants' rights with the state, and an effort to address inequalities within the community. The new traditionalist discourse we have identified and analysed above is part of a wider and ongoing critique of Indian modernity, which is currently taking place within the context of global neo-liberal economic reforms. The Indian state has responded to the political challenge of movements such as Chipko with policies of sustainable development and conservation. In the policy environment of liberalisation reforms, this has mostly involved attempts to give some respite to badly degraded natural systems, even as new resources are identified and articulated with the world economy. The intensification of commercial exploitation of resources with its promise of deferred 'trickle-down' benefits appears irresistible to planners, but faces increasing challenge from marginalised social groups. Our worry primarily is that as these policies begin to have a wider effect, the increasing scarcity of India's biological and natural resources will translate into higher market prices for raw materials, and into decreased

Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 access and control of local people over them. The new traditionalist critique of globalisation is primarily that 'Indian tradition' is under fresh assault from the 'west', and that these movements represent a collective rural will and wisdom. As essays in Brass [1995] demonstrate, however, several of these new agrarian movements are attempts by a rural elite to establish hegemony over the rural sector and to speak on its behalf with the state. Rural sectoral unity and collective identity is a political project, not an already given fact. As part of the ongoing critique of Indian modernity, the construction of a tradition of unity and ecological sustainability addresses a post-colonial sense of cultural fragmentation, inauthenticity and loss of integrity. The distance from modernity, the quest for authenticity and purity, become the measure of contemporary social-ecological relationships. Environmental 90 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

history becomes another location in the struggle for the construction of and control over a national political memory, and is not innocent of its own implications. Over the last few years, organisations such as the Hindu nationalist Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) have articulated a politics which shares many of the assumptions of new traditionalism, defining Indian authenticity on the basis of 'Hindutva'. Our contention has been that a socially just and ecologically sustainable society will not be created by a return to traditional social- ecological relations or through economic and cultural nationalism. Principles and practices of equity, equality, participation, and ecological responsibility are not already given; movements such as Chipko create them in the process of social struggles and political renegotiations.

NOTES

1. As we will show throughout this article, new traditionalism imagines an 'authentic indigenous tradition' of social equity, democracy, gender equality, sustainable resource use in India. While resonating with the nationalist valorisation of 'tradition', this discourse specifically responds to 'development' and 'science'. 2. As Gadgil [1985: 135] puts it, pie-colonial Indian society 'maintained an ecologically steady-state with the wild living resources from 500 B.C. to 1860'. The latter date approximates the consolidation of Eritish political control of the subcontinent. 3. See, for example, Ashish [1993], Gorrie [1937; 1946], Kaur and Singh [1989], Mittall [1988], Singh et al [1984]. 4. Authors as diverse as Redelift [19S8] and Escobar [1995] draw almost exclusively on the new traditionalist account in constructing broader theories of environmental change and critiques of modern development. 5. Behind the presumably polarised perceptions held by colonials and new traditionalists, there is a surprising set of shared historical and cultural assumptions about the Himalayas. In both cases the region appears culturally traditional or retrograde, and in quite similar ways evidence of customary or ancient cultural practices is associated with ecological attributes. In both cases the Himalayas are seen as a quintessential location of human relationships with nature. This sounds remarkably similar to bureaucrats writing annual reports of failure in achieving 'development', ceaselessly invoking 'tradition's' tenacious hold over hill dwellers. Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 Forests and what happened to them is a key metaphor in both discourses on the encounter of 'tradition' with 'modernity' in India. 6. See Bharati [1988] for a description of the romanticisation of spiritual life in the Himalayas. Bharati describes the tendency of plains dwellers to imagine Himalayan traditional religious practice as especially rigorous, authentic and Brahamanical. Hinduism in rural Himalayan villages, Bharati discovered, is considerably more syncretic than a reading of the classical texts alone might suggest. 7. Some of the strongest statements of ecological values are found in minority and heterodox religious traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism. New traditionalism does not recognize the tension between them and the Hinduism of the scriptures, subsuming them all within a homogenous and continuous pre-colonial tradition [Lott, 1985: 180-91]. 8. Historical trends in proportional causes of deforestation are difficult to assess with much precision. However, as Richards and Tucker [1988] note, in many parts of the developing world the timber trade has been a far less important factor in forest depletion than has the expansion of agriculture. Tucker [1988a: 103] confirms roughly the same deforestation pattern for the U.P. Himalayas, noting that 'subsistence demands on U.P. forests must have 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 91

been several times the commercial demand. This was registered only in the long slow decline in the density and regeneration of the Himalayan hill forests.' He points out that the premise that commercial fellings are more significant than subsistence-related may derive from a reliance on Forest Department records rather than those of cuttings from Civil Forests or private wood-lots. He notes that the policy of agricultural expansion - advanced by the pre-colonial and British colonial regimes alike - affected vast areas and had a profound effect on Indian landscapes. Intensive timbering was underway in places such as Dehra Dun when the British first arrived in 1815 [Tucker, 1983: 157]. Commercial timbering was concentrated in areas where commercially viable species of trees such as sal and deodar were available in significant quantities, and cannot account for all deforestation.

9. New traditionalists similarly argue that traditional subsistence agriculture has minimal negative effects on agricultural ecology, in contrast with modern agriculture. While the environmental consequences of the green revolution in India are well documented [Shiva, 1991], such cultivation occupies perhaps one-quarter of the agricultural land in India, and so cannot explain the kinds of ecological deterioration which have affected the far larger area of agricultural land. 10. The assumption that forest settlements represent novel regulations on forest use is contradicted by the fact that forest settlements such as the 'san assi ka paimana' [the colonial forest settlements of 1823] were a formalisation of 'long usage and custom' governing the use of the Garhwal forests [Guha, 1989: 32], and formed the basis for many demands articulated by popular movements throughout this century. 11. On non-enforcement and non-compliance with British forest regulations see Ashish [1993], Guha, S. 1995: 26], Gorrie [1937], Negi [1983], Joshi [1979], Kollmansperger [1978], Stracey [1979], Mittal [1988], Rawat [1988], Somanathan [1991], and Whyte [1968]. 12. Essential to the persuasiveness of the new traditionalist vision of Indian resource management is the notion that it offset local resource demands with collective restraints on ecosystem exploitation, and with careful regenerative practices. As Bandyopadhyay and Shiva put it: 'Traditional world views and practices deterred over-exploitation of natural resources at all levels. Being based on ecological perceptions of nature and being guided by restraints in resource use, they used technologies which prevented ecological disruption' [1985: 197]. For Agarwal and Narain: 'Traditional systems of land use have invariably been locale-specific and also invariably ecologically sound [1992: 221]. 13. These changes have include deforestation, soil erosion, overgrazing, and reductions in biodiversity and biomass production. While providing sustenance to people, as traditional Indian agriculture expanded and intensified it brought about progressive reductions in habitat and life opportunities for non-human life of all kinds, as well as a complete landscape transformation in all but the least densely populated areas. This contrasts with the new traditionalist assumption that the ecological ethic of village communities incorporated the preservation of non-human life forms. See Agrawal, D.P. [1992], Agrawal, A.K. [1990], Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 Sharma [1986], Voelker [1987], Lewis [1958], Greenberg [1993, 1996], Saxena [1992], [Guha, S., 1995], Melkania and Tandon [1988: 147]. The process of biotic transformation began in earnest at least 2,000 years ago. Massive deforestation and transformation of forest species took place from Kashmir across the Punjab and south India. See Vishnu-Mittre 1963; 1984, Sharma et al. 1966, Gupta 1978, Janaki Amal 1956, Buth et al 1982]. 14. These estimates of agricultural dependency on forests reflect some imprecision and regional variation. See Ashish [1983], Pandey and Singh [1984], Andress [1966], Singh and Singh [1987], Hoffpauir [1978], Gupta [1978], Mahat et al. [1986], Mahat [1987], Moench [1989]. 15. As Sumit Guha explains, traditional agricultural activity 'would result in a forest type quite different from that which might be found in the absence of human manipulation. Thus not only the fields but even the forests of western India were shaped by human action - they were not the primeval wildernesses that the Conservators of Forests so fondly hoped to conserve' [1995: 16].. 16. For a review and critique of diverse ecofeminist perspectives, see Fox [1989], Warren [1987], Agarwal [1992], Spretnak [1988], Franklin [1991], Sallen [1983], Merchant [1981] and Zimmerman [1987]. 17. Images of Indian women in the new traditionalist narrative of the environment share features 92 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

in common with a wider valorisation of Indian tradition seen to reside in women. Nandy [1980: 35], for example, finds that it was 'the Indian woman' who was 'primarily involved in gentling and nurturing and breeding'; it was her 'capacity for tenderness which gave the earliest agricultural settlements of man their touch of security, receptivity, enclosure, nurture; and it was she who made fully possible the growth of civilization'. In Kothari's formulation [1990: 32], women 'clearly believe that trees have rights, and that the rights of trees are of a higher order than those of human beings because trees provide the conditions for life on Earth'. 18. As Wadley [1977] notes, the Hindu classical tradition of the Manu Smriti unequivocally prescribe controlling both facets of women's nature, the fertility and benevolence of Lakshmi and the aggression, destruction and malevolence of Kali, through their subordination to men. 19. Men usually perform only those agricultural tasks which they deem women too frail to undertake, such as ploughing, irrigation maintenance, and the opening of new fields. 20. See Sharma [1980; 1982], Sharma [1989], Agarwal [1989; 1992], Burman [1981], Schroeder and Schroeder [1979], and Pitt [1986]. 21. As Dietrich [1992: 99] points out, for Shiva such patriarchal oppressive relations are primarily the creation of colonial and post-colonial modernity. 22. The Prince of Jodhpur required wood fuel for lime kilns used in the construction of his new palace. Bishnoi villagers resisted the efforts of his troops to cut down their trees for the purpose, and were killed for their principled stand. New traditionalists read this story as indicating an historically deep rural Indian environmental ethic. We read the Bishnoi resistance primarily as an account of the arbitrary and unchecked power which local rulers exercised over villages and their forest resour;es. Though more conveniently located for the Prince's purposes of extracting the wood, non-Bishnoi village forests had already been deforested under traditional management systems in the pre-colonial era. Lastly, the story indicates variability between the B ishnoi ethic of respect for plants and trees and that found in surrounding villages. 23. For a history of peasant movements around forest issues, see Guha [1989: Chs. 4, 5 and 7]. 24. The Sarvodaya movement, while drawing from Gandhi's essay on the 'Constructive Program', saw itself as a bearer of a certain kind of socialism [Narayan, 1964], We take it as unresolved whether Gandhi's ideas are traditionally Indian or represent a distinctively hybrid and modern metamorphosis of them. The invocation of Gandhi is significant because he is seen as having formulated a civilisational response to colonial modernity; as Nandy [1987] puts it, Gandhi lay 'outside the Imperium'. For Shiva, women's ecological knowledge, dormant after a century of colonial rule, was jogged into action by the intervention of Gandhian activists such as Mirabehn and Sarlabehn, which led to women's decisive participation in movements such as Chipko. 25. Uttarakhand, Chipko's place of origin, was home in the 1950s and 1960s to intense activism from the left political parties. Important issues included the price and supply of food grains Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 and water, and the demand for a university located in the hills. For an account of the role of militant students, who later formed the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal to demand regional autonomy, see Shekhar Pathak [1979]. 26. Letter from C.P. Bhatt to H.N. Bahuguna [Chief Minister, UP], 12 March 1974; telegram from C.P. Bhatt to H.N. Bahuguna, 26 March 1974. Bhatt went personally to the state capital in Lucknow to present demands, 'Women's Crusade Against Denudation of Forests', The Times of India, 17 April 1974. See also 'Chamoli People Fight to Save Forest Wealth', National Herald, 4 April 1974. 27. 'Chipko Andolan: Ek Nazar Me' [The Chipko Movement: One View/Opinion], Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandai typescript, ND. 28. For the aims of Sarvodaya activists until the mid-1970s, see the autobiographical undated monograph 'Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandai, Gopeshwar, District Chamoli [UP].' 29. Paradoxically, critics such as Brass also read off Chipko's politics from another already- given collective identity, that of a class of petty commodity producers. But while 'petty commodity producers' formed the bulk of Chipko's membership, they were in crucial alliance with local students and residents of hill towns. Surely, the movement does not stand up to Brass's project of 'socialism', despite its self-description, and it also contained 'NEW TRADITIONALIST' DISCOURSE: INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM 93

elements of the 'populism' criticised by Brass [1995]. Leaders such as Bahuguna rejected the goal of a larger class alliance. But it was certainly a progressive movement in so far as it demanded local democratic collective control over resources, and challenged caste and gender based systems of domination. 30. For Sarla Devi, Gandhi's disciple long active in Uttarakhand, Chipko was not aimed at proving the government's guilt or hindering its program, but at giving a new direction to hill peasants to reorganise their use of the forest. Both hill villages and the state were responsible for deforestation in this view. Newspaper reports indicate that such reorganisation was necessary since several Van Panchayats [forest councils] were auctioning off their forests to private contractors well after Chipko had gained momentum. See Uttarakhand Observer [1974]. 31. Slogans in support of such demands were regularly raised in Chipko demonstrations [Uttarakhand Observer, 1971]. 32. 'The single common factor in the Himalayan region is deforestation, which is closely connected with the population explosion .... Increase in population has led to clearing of forests for agriculture' [Bahuguna, 1989: 29]. 33. Chipko held local people at least partly responsible for reversing deforestation, posing them the questions: What were they doing for forest protection? What were their elected representatives doing toward the same end? DGSM [1976]. 34. Bhatt described the Sarvodaya 'Gramdan' Program for rebuilding local community as necessary for the security of the borders in the aftermath of the 1962 Indian loss in the war with China. The movement in support of cooperative rights to benefits from forests carried on together with the movement for the abolition of alcohol, was suspended in 1971. Since India was at war with Pakistan, 'those involved in the movement wanted that during this moment of external crisis, the state should be free from internal problems' [Mishra, 1973] 35. To be sure, procurement prices for commodities manufactured by Sarvodayi cooperatives and state intervention in making possible an entry into the national market were among demands made by the movement, but these were not class-specific demands. Profits would go to cooperatives, membership to which was open. Support prices, as essays in Brass [1995] argue, reflect the specific interests of those who have benefited from post-1947 rural development policies, notably the Green Revolution. However, such policies were not the fulcrum for the relations between hill peasants and the state, it was forests and forest use. State led forestry had accelerated deforestation whose impact had been more uniformly negative for the hill peasantry. There was certainly more material basis for a rural sectoral solidarity in the hills than in several areas which had experienced the Green Revolution. 36. Chipko turned the anniversary of the Tilari Incident of 1930 [when the Tehri state ordered its troops to fire on peasants demanding forest rights] into a day of mobilisation. Likewise, it created new public spaces through the commemoration of the birthdays of Nehru and the local nationalist Sridev Suman, and through holding public meetings to honour the local sage Downloaded By: [Yale University] At: 23:41 31 March 2009 Swami Ramtirtha.

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