Book Summary: "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" - Ramachandra Guha
"India's Environmental crisis is more incredible than political corruption or even caste and communal conflict," says Ramachandra Guha. He worries that our preoccupation with climate change distracts us from more pressing ecological concerns.
India faces severe environmental challenges, such as air pollution, groundwater depletion, soil contamination, dying rivers, and forest degradation. While climate change can worsen these, they primarily result from domestic policies and attitudes. Guha criticises the tendency to dismiss environmental concerns as a Western conspiracy against the Global South. " The West is indeed hypocritical," he argues, "but our government, industry, people, and laws cause these problems."
Although influential economists dismiss resistance to development as a luxury that poor nations cannot afford, history suggests otherwise. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution introduced technologies leading to environmental damage, raising questions about sustainable political systems, technologies and laws. Environmental movements in the Global North emerged from awareness of widespread degradation, while in the Global South, they were driven by ecological threats and the denial of livelihood rights.
The Western response, led by Americans like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, dominated the global discourse and climaxed with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. However, its parallel in India, which unfolded over the last century with its nuances of colonialism and caste, has not been given its due. Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism makes an assertive stride to bridge that chasm. It also leaves us wondering about the costs and consequences of our indifference to history.
As a historian, Guha says, "I have always believed that one should not predict or prescribe but understand how people have thought about these issues for a long time. So, this is a history of ideas."
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Book publication date: October 2024.
Brief about the Author:
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), which was chosen by The Guardian as one of the ten best books on cricket ever written. India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007; revised edition, 2017) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and as a book of the decade in the Times of London and The Hindu.
Ramachandra Guha's most recent work is a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi. The first volume, Gandhi Before India (Knopf, 2014), was chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. The second volume, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World (Knopf, 2018), was also chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times and The Economist.
Awards
Ramachandra GGuha'sawards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society prize, the Malcolm Adideshiah Award for excellence in social science research, the Ramnath Goenka Prize for excellence in journalism, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies.
Speaking with Nature:- Book Review
Exordium:
Ramachandra Guha "tumbled across"the works of Mukherjee and Kumarappa in a library during the late 1980s and searched for other such "early environmentalists" Having found several who preceded even these two, Guha says he filled several notebooks with material on IIndia's" first wave" environmentalists.
But quantifying and recording such history — more so when much of it is not documented — is no easy task. Having started with an essay in 1992, Guha wrote this meticulously researched, highly engaging book about India's relationship with Nature through the years and the history of environmental thought and activism in India. Guha, a well-known historian and environmentalist, has put together the writings and thoughts of 10 remarkable individuals who wrote with deep insight from an Indian context about the dangers of environmental abuse. Guha weaves together the stories of these individuals and the movements and ideas that have shaped India's ecological consciousness.
The book explores India's environmental history from the ancient Vedic period. Guha highlights the contributions of key figures, from Rabindranath Tagore to KM Munshi, whose writings significantly shaped the country's environmental movement.
Chapter One | The Myriad-Minded Environmentalist: Rabindranath Tagore
Tagore was one of the founders of Indian environmentalism, "Ram Guha wrote in his book.
The author waited keenly to read?Speaking with Nature, a book described by Guha as a "Group portrait" of 10 nation-shapers who were also the founding figures of environmentalism in India. Their ideas, once pervasive, have somehow sunk to the bottom of the public consciousness now. This makes?Speaking with Nature?a marvellous resurrection text, a powerful genesis story of our country's environmental movements and ideas. The personalities it profiles, in order, are Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J.C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mirabehn, Verrier Elwin, K.M. Munshi, and M. Krishnan.
The poet has consistently exhibited a profound awareness of nature's influence on the human psyche, one of the primary motivations for the frequent presence of birds, trees, butterflies, bees, and rivers in his literary works. Tagore articulated, We can draw a profound and secret joy from nature only because we feel a profound kinship. He understood biophilia, a human being's inherent affinity for nature, five decades before Edward O. Wilson introduced the term in 1984.
Chapter Two | Ecological Sociologist: The Work and Legacy of Radhakamal Mukerjee
Sociologists have a well-deserved reputation for producing cumbersome prose. Although I was initially trained in sociology, I gradually came to identify more as a historian. This shift in perspective was influenced by my preference for archival research over fieldwork and my appreciation for the language employed by historians, which I found to be significantly more appealing than that of sociologists.
This chapter is focused on the legacy of an economist-turned-sociologist and may be less readable than the others in this book. Rabindranath Tagore, of course, was above all a writer, and his prose was eloquent and evocative. The chapters that follow deal with individuals who took some care with their writing, seeking to make it clear and accessible. The sociologist I now turn to had none of these attributes. One of his students described his prose style as 'rather hurried, repetitive, verbose, and replete with cross-disciplinary citations'' It may be worth attending to what he had to say, nonetheless.
Chapter Three | GGandhi'sEconomist: J.C. Kumarappa and Rural Renewal
THE LAST WEEK OF MAY 1929, a letter arrived at the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad, intended for the place's founder and moving spirit. Written on the letterhead of Cornelius and Davar, Incorporated Accountants and Auditors, Bombay, it addressed its recipient, in South Indian style, as Gandhi.
The correspondent enclosed an essay he had written, analysing how the British colonial government's taxation policy had lessened the productivity of the Indian masses in the last hundred years. He wanted Gandhi's advice on whether to publish it and wished to consult him on how he could best serve our country. The letter ended by asking Gandhi to give the writer an appointment whenever he could.
The writer of this letter was a Christian from the Tamil country called J.C. Cornelius. Born in 1892, he grew up in a devout Bible-reading home, educated in institutions run by Christians in Madras before studying accountancy in the United Kingdom. After being articled, he returned to India and set up a commercial practice in Bombay. The practice, established with a Parsi partner named Dorab Davar, attracted many colleagues but left Cornelius somewhat dissatisfied. Seeking further academic qualifications in 1927, he went to the United States, where he did a BSc in business administration at Syracuse University before moving to Columbia University to do a master's in economics.
Chapter Four | Scottish Internationalist: Patrick Geddes and Ecological Town Planning in India
Gandhi liked to say that ''India lives in her villages'' This was true in a demographic sense- most of the subcontinent's population was indeed based in the countryside and depended on agriculture and animal husbandry for a livelihood. However, for many nationalists, the village was also the centre of Indian culture and civilization. They were hostile to the idea that their country should follow the path of the West, where, in recent decades, a more significant number of people had migrated to the cities and worked in factories. While modernizing intellectuals thought this urban-industrial future was inevitable and desirable for India, thinker-activists such as Tagore and Kumarappa dissented. They saw the modern industrial city as parasitic and exploitative. The main thrust of their work was the renewal of rural life and making it compatible with its natural surroundings.
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Radhakamal Mukerjee had slightly more time for the city. He did not think it possible to reject urban life altogether. However, his focus remained on the village too. From his early writings celebrating communitarian living in rural India to his later works on planning the countryside, it was peasants, pastoralists and rural artisans whose well-being he was most concerned about.
The ecological problems he wrote about were quintessentially agrarian in their character-deforestation, soil erosion, the scarcity of water, and the like.
Chapter Five | Dissenting Scientists: Albert and Gabrielle Howard and the Quest for an Ecological Agriculture
In the mid-I98O, while teaching in the United States, The author was introduced by a student of mine to the work of the poet and critic Wendell Berry. I read his book The Unsettling of America, a searing critique of agro-business and its destruction of the human community and the land itself. I found that, unlike most writers or ideologues before or since, Berry sought to put his ideas into practice by cultivating a small farm in Kentucky on ecological principles.
In India, where I had come from and where I would return, most farms were smallholdings of the sort that the Kentucky poet himself lived and worked on. Unlike in the United States, there were no massive, single-owner farms of thousands of acres each. However, other elements of the American model of commercialized agriculture had entered the Indian landscape.
These included chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which became ubiquitous in many parts of India during what became known as the Green Revolution
Wendell Berry was a dissident voice in the American landscape. Would his ideas resonate with my country?
India had turned to chemical farming out of desperation. A series of monsoon failures and a near-famine situation in several states in the early 1960s compelled the government to promote high-yielding hybrid varieties of wheat and rice, which required large infusions of water and chemical fertilizers to deliver the best results. Areas where water was readily available and with a history of commercial agriculture were identified; in these districts, seeds, chemicals, loans, and marketing facilities were made readily available.
Chapter Six | GGandhi'sEnglishwoman: The Passionate Environmentalism of Madeleine/Mira
Many years later, Mira behn she recalled her grandparent's estate, where she knew every corner of the garden, the different flowers, the vegetables, and the fruit'' As a child, Mira was forbidden to pluck the flowers in the garden. She could look at and smell them but not pick or damage them. She was convinced this restriction heightened the admiration with which I looked at the unique blooms in my grandmother's rose garden, where every plant was labelled. I studied their qualities and the distinctive smells associated with the different colours. If I had been allowed to tear the blossoms and do what I liked, I should never have learnt to enjoy them as I did.
Mira was also ''aught to look at, and later on to handle, with intelligent interest'' the animals in the estate. As she grew older, she learned to milk the cows, groom the horses, and feed the chickens. I was brought up and remembered Mira's teasing of animals, birds, or any live creatures as despicable. This, coupled with my natural love of animals, led me to find companions in them whose joys and sorrows I shared with intimate interest and sympathy.'
Chapter Seven | Culture in Nature: The Forest Anthropology of Verrier Elwin
In time, Elwin found the Christa Seva Sangh too confining for his sensibilities. In 1932, seeking to root himself even more firmly in Indian soil, he moved to a forest village in the Mandla district of the Central Provinces. For the next thirty years, he lived and worked amongst IIndia'stribal peoples. Tribals were scorned and condescended to by urban as well as peasant society (itself dominantly Hindu), and to redress this, Elwin wrote polemical pamphlets and articles in the press urging tremendous respect for their culture and safeguarding their traditional rights in land and forests. His complete immersion in tribal culture was signified by his marriage to a Gond woman, Kosi, in 1941; when that marriage broke down, he married another tribal, Lila.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Elwin travelled widely across the tribal heartland in central India, writing books on folklore, religion, art, and the economic life of different communities.
Once an ordained priest, Elwin became a bitter critic of Christian missionaries and turned his back on his ancestral faith. A worshipful admirer of Gandhi in his early years in India, after living with the tribals, he came to reject aspects of the Gandhian credo, such as its opposition to alcohol consumption and its emphasis on sexual restraint.
Chapter Eight | The First Hindutva Environmentalist: K.M. Munshi
Munshi said planting trees and forests was imperative for India to overcome desertification, moderate the climate, and enhance food production. However, he confessed that something other than utilitarianism prompted him to promote the festival. "We love trees so much," remarked the minister, "we cannot help being a little romantic."
Who can forget the loveliness of the blossoming fruit trees, the noble dignity of the venerable trees, and forests which, like ancient rishis [sages) live but to save mankind; the richness, plenty and happiness they bring; the joy which would be ours if every man and woman like Parvati reared a tree with parental affection and if every village and town enveloped itself in groves of verdant beauty?
As the reference to SShiva'swife Parvati and programmes in temples showed, Munshi promoted this new festival with distinctive Hindu imagery, perhaps hoping to stoke traditional sentiment in a modern cause. Indeed, the imagery was not just Hindu but Brahmin, as witnessed in his saying that ''f the Vana Mahotsava is to be celebrated in the proper spirit, everyone in India should, during the Mahotsava week, live on vegetables, fruits and tubers'' For the Gujarati Brahmin, vegetarianism was a mark of ritual piety. While a majority of Hindus were meat-eaters, they were being told that if they became vegetarian for this week, at least, they would elevate themselves spiritually by living more like the ancient Brahmin sages who had composed Sanskrit texts in the forest.
Chapter Nine | Speaking for Nature: M. Krishnan and Indian Wildlife
In 1965, Krishnan was in his early fifties. He had three decades of field experience as a naturalist behind him. He had travelled to all parts of India, spending time in all its varied landscapes, whether forested or otherwise. While he knew the tiger and the elephant, he wrote lovingly of the jackal, the ghorpad and the spotted owlet, the tiny, homely, unglamorous denizens of the Indian countryside. As a trained botanist, he had a deep knowledge of plants and was a close student of bird life.
Krishnan's four-part series in the Illustrated Weekly drew on this formidable reservoir of knowledge to analyse India's wildlife's past, present and possible future.
The naturalist argued that it was 'especially concerning the decline in bird life that I deplore this craze for exotics...''He talked of how, in the past, Indigenous species like the mahua, the banyan and the Indian laburnum were widely planted around villages and along roads, adding that these trees tract birds to themselves when in flower and fruit, a thing that the exotics now in vogue do not.'
Epilogue:
Historians who write about environmentalism are also prone to 'patriotism', seeing events, processes and individuals in their country as models for the rest of the world to adopt and follow. Once again, American historians have been in the lead, though historians of other nations have not been slow to follow. In his 'New History of German Environmentalism',
Frank Uek?tter argues that 'it is rewarding to approach Germany as a kind of laboratory for the future: what does the German case say about [global] environmentalism in the twenty-first century?" Likewise, in his history of Norwegian environmentalism, Peder Anker explains how thinkers from his small, remote, scantily populated, and unglamorous country shaped global debates in the twentieth century by coining such influential frameworks as sustainable development and deep ecology. This salutary environmental influence of Norway on countries far more populous and politically crucial than itself demonstrated for the historian the 'power of the periphery.'
Learning:
As Indian towns and cities have expanded immensely over the decades, a series of questions arise for citizens and planners alike, writes Guha. “How can we provide safe, secure and pleasant housing for the different social classes in the city? What forms of transport will city resident use to commute to and from their workplace? Where will the water and energy to sustain them come from? Can one reconcile growth and development with environmental sustainability? And with aesthetics? ... How can we make the lives of city residents more habitable, in all senses of the word?”
These questions apply to every human settlement in India, anywhere. However, less thought has been given to these issues in India than should have been.
Speaking With Nature is a landmark book of immense value to scholars, activists, and anyone interested in understanding India's complex and multifaceted history of environmentalism. Guha’s deft way with words, easy to take in without being facile, and presenting heavy-duty ideas in eminently palatable form is a testament to the power of storytelling and the importance of understanding our environmental past to build a more sustainable future. His writing is engaging, accessible, and jargon-free. At the same time, the book cites a wealth of primary and secondary sources throughout, bearing testimony to the painstaking work put into it.
Guha is well known for his writing on political thought, history, cricket, and ecology. This book is an important addition that anyone interested in our world and the air we breathe should acquire.