Green pioneers who shaped India

While the Chipko Movement occupies a place of pride in India’s environmental history, it is also important to discover and reclaim the work of other environmental thinkers and doers in India who have shaped conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature. Writer-historian Ramachandra Guha takes on this responsibility in his new book Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, which features 10 pioneers who deserve to be more widely known.

The book has a chapter each on Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukherjee, J C Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Madeleine Slade, Verrier Elwin, M Krishnan, and K M Munshi. Albert and Gabrielle Howard, who were married to each other, share a chapter.

Guha’s introduction skilfully lays out the thought process guiding his vision for this book. The most crucial takeaway is his wish to counter a belief in North America and Europe that “individuals and societies needed to achieve a certain degree of economic prosperity before they developed any sort of environmental sensibility”. This view does not hold true in India as socio-economically marginalised communities have been at the forefront of movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy.

A harmonising of life

The chapter on Tagore looks at festivals like Briksharopan, Vasantha Utsav, Varsha Mangal, Sharad Utsav, Halakarshana and Nabanna Utsav that Tagore encouraged students at Santiniketan to celebrate to nurture “an affectionate and caring relationship with nature so that they could seek to harmonise their own lives with its rhythms and variations”.

While writing about Radhakamal Mukherjee, Guha focuses on the man’s critique of industrialisation in the West which depends heavily on access to raw materials from overseas colonies. Sadly, this was accompanied by misogyny. Mukherjee was of the opinion that economic independence rendered women in the West “unfit for motherhood—the essential and incontestable right of every woman”. As evident here, Guha does not deify any of the people he writes about.

Apart from championing village industries to generate local employment and prevent the wasteful use of natural resources, Kumarappa was an innovator. He designed a lamp that used vegetable oil rather than kerosene to reduce pollution and supervised the development of a smokeless stove that burnt biomass without endangering the health of women in rural areas.

Miffed with Lutyens

The chapter on Geddes highlights his work as a town planner who prioritised respect for nature, recycling, and the needs of less privileged groups. According to Geddes, architect Edwin Lutyens who was commissioned to design key public buildings in newly Independent India was “not sufficiently aware of the circumstances of Indian lives”. Geddes was miffed with Lutyens because of the latter’s “disregard for Indian artistic and aesthetic traditions”.

Readers interested in such juicy details will appreciate the chapter on Slade, also known as Mirabehn, who did not hesitate to dash off letters to Jawaharlal Nehru, Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi to express her reservations about large dams and advise them on planting oak trees rather than pine trees in the hills. Elwin drew attention to how colonial forest laws were destroying the profound relationship that tribal communities shared with their surroundings.

The book shows how Munshi used his religious fervour and rhetorical skills to cloak the environmental agenda in a distinctly Hindu garb whereas Krishnan claimed that no scientific systematic study of plant and animal life was made in India until the British came here. Ironically, he was vociferous in opposing the promotion of tree species “alien to India”.

The chapter on the Howards is well-written, underlining how it is possible to learn from indigenous methods of farming while also speaking about the advantages of modern science. Guha points out that, despite all their good intentions, they were naïve about the impact of colonialism and the caste system in India. This reduced the impact they were able to have.

The book is rigorous in terms of research yet accessible to the non-specialist. On the flip side, it features only two women. Guha is aware of this and mentions so with regret. However, one wonders why he excludes Rukmini Devi Arundale whose advocacy as a member of the Rajya Sabha was instrumental in passing the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960. She also chaired the Animal Welfare Board of India, which was set up as a statutory body in 1962.