Book Extract | Speaking with Nature: The Origin of Indian Environmentalism by Ramachandra Guha

Spanning more than a century of Indian history and decidedly transnational in reference, Speaking with Nature offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.

Excerpted with permission from Speaking with Nature: The Origin of Indian Environmentalism by Ramachandra Guha, published by HarperCollins Publishers India.

In 1957, Elwin published a little book called, somewhat portentously, A Philosophy for NEFA, which appeared in an expanded edition two years later. Each time, it carried a foreword by the prime minister himself. The second of these forewords was drafted by Elwin, although it appeared in a slightly revised form under Nehru’s name. It listed five principles for administration in tribal areas:
First, that the tribals ‘should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing anything on them’ (the ‘we’ here connoting both non-tribal outsiders as well as the Indian state);
Second, that ‘tribal rights in land and forest should be protected’;
Third, that the state should endeavour to train and build up a team of administrators from a tribal background—while some technical experts would no doubt be required, ‘we should avoid introducing too many outsiders into tribal territory’;
Fourth, the state ‘should not over-administer’ tribal areas or ‘overwhelm them with a multiplicity of schemes’; it should work ‘through, and not in rivalry to, their own social and cultural institutions’;

Fifth, the results of these official schemes should be judged not in statistical or monetary terms ‘but by the quality of human character that is evolved’.
Of particular interest to this book is the second of these five points, the protection of tribal rights in land and forest. In the main text of A Philosophy for NEFA, Elwin dealt with this question in a section called ‘The Problem of the Forests’. ‘I have myself recorded,’ he wrote, ‘the melancholy story of the effect of reservation on the Baigas of Madhya Pradesh in my book on the tribe. Nothing roused the Saoras of Orissa to such resentment as the taking from them of forests which they regarded as their own property. Of the Bhuiyas and Juangs of Bonai and Keonjhar,

I wrote in a report in 1942: “It is necessary for us to appreciate the attitude of the aboriginal. To him the hills and forests are his. Again and again it was said to me, “These hills are ours; what right has anyone to interfere in our own property?”

The situation in central India was a warning and an example. As an independent writer, Elwin could only hector and preach; now, working in the belly of the Indian state, he could, with luck, ensure that in NEFA the administration followed a more humane and sensitive path when it came to tribal rights. He claimed that ‘the present forest policy in NEFA is one of exceptional liberality’, with the interests of the people placed ahead of revenue generation (unlike in other parts of India). He further claimed that the new Jhum [swidden] regulations ‘guarantee the rights of the tribal people over their traditional forests’. While forests in sparsely populated areas were being constituted as state reserves, elsewhere in NEFA ‘the whole concept of reservation has been modified considerably by rules that existing villages falling within the proposed reserves should not be uprooted, but that sufficient land should be demarcated for their present needs as well as for their future expansion’. These were all a result of policies in the framing of which he had a part: further, ‘the tribal people living in or near Reserve Forests also have the right to collect timber and minor forest produce for their customary personal use (but not for sale, barter or gift); to graze cattle; to hunt and fish freely; to collect orchids; and to keep skins, hides, tusks and horns of animals hunted in the Reserves as trophies’.

Elwin worked for the NEFA administration from January 1954 until his death in February 1964. During this decade, he sought assiduously to forge a different path for tribal development. He hoped to save, in the Northeast, at least some of what had been lost by tribals in central India. That he was now an officer of the state gave him hope; that some senior Indian politicians supported him was a further source of gratification. I have already spoken of his closeness to Nehru. In the summer of 1959, the Union Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant asked Elwin to chair a committee to advise on tribal policy for the country as a whole. Forty-three ‘Special Multipurpose Tribal Blocks’ had been set up in districts across India, and the committee was tasked with studying how they were faring and what could be done to improve their functioning.

Apart from Elwin, the committee included a social worker and several officials, all with experience of working in tribal areas. They travelled extensively, visiting tribal blocks in several states, taking copious notes. A year after the committee was constituted it produced a report several hundred pages long, largely drafted by the chairman and bearing the impress of his views.

In an early chapter titled ‘The Fundamentals of an Approach to the Tribes’, the report quoted the prime minister’s foreword to Elwin’s A Philosophy for NEFA, elaborating on each of its five postulates. Of the second point, ‘tribal rights in land and forest should be protected’, this report urged that tribals be granted the land they presently cultivated ‘in perpetuity’, and that there be an ‘adjustment of forest laws to tribal conditions’.

These recommendations were then fleshed out in two separate chapters. Chapter 7, ‘Shifting Cultivation’, began by quoting senior Indian officials, including a former Inspector General of Forests and a senior Adviser to the Planning Commission, to the effect that it was a mistake to see swidden cultivation as unscientific and destructive; rather, it should be viewed ‘as an agricultural practice adopted as a reflex to the physiological character of the land’. The report suggested that, instead of banning swidden altogether (which most forest officials and agronomists wanted), it should be regulated and improved, by following a proper rotational cycle and introducing certain plants to improve soil fertility.

Elwin had, from his days with the Baigas of Mandla, believed that swidden cultivation was much more than a means of economic livelihood. As he now wrote, some two decades after he had first encountered this much misunderstood as well as unfairly demonized means of livelihood, swidden was ‘as much a part of tribal culture as anything else and is a real way of life for the people’. Therefore ‘we should be very careful that in our enthusiasm for bringing shifting cultivation to an end, we do not injure the people psychologically or socially’. Where modernizing economists sought to bring the tribals into the mainstream—or maelstrom—of city life, this committee, speaking here in the voice of its chief draughtsman, argued that the Indian state had ‘to recognize and respect the tribal people’s rights in land and forest and also their right to settle their own destinies by evolution from within and not by force imposed from outside’.

Chapter 8, ‘The Problem of the Forests’, began by recognizing the importance of the scientific management of forests. It praised the commitment of forest officers who lived and worked in arduous conditions. However, it then stressed that the tribal people, who have lived for hundreds of years in the forest areas and in the past have enjoyed considerable freedom to use the wood, exploit the minor produce and hunt the animals, have an ineradicable conviction that the forest is theirs. Some of them call themselves Pashupati, the lords of the wild animals, and believe that they have a peculiar power over them. Their folktales are full of such ideas. Animals and human beings intermarry; they make ceremonial friendships with one another; they live, eat and talk together. This is, of course, much more than a mere sentiment. The forest not only satisfies a deep-rooted tribal sentiment: it provides essential food.

The report argued that this clash between the imperatives of state forestry and the cultural as well as economic needs of the tribals had been intensified by ‘the existence of a number of forest rules which have come down to us from British times and are not adjusted to modern conditions’. The enactment and harsh implementation of these laws had ‘deeply disturbed the entire tribal economy and has introduced a psychological conflict which discourages the people from taking up development schemes with real enthusiasm’.

The report then gave some examples of the conflict playing out in the field, of how the stringent forest laws bore down heavily on the tribals’ means of livelihood, by limiting access to essential materials for house construction, cultivation and local crafts. To mitigate the conflict, it made a number of suggestions, among them training to reorient forest officials so that they could ‘understand the tribal point of view and thus adopt a more sympathetic attitude’ towards them; the offer to the tribals of a share of the profits from commercial exploitation of forest produce (this at present was going directly and wholly to the state exchequer); the encouragement of tribal co-operative societies to make wood-based products and sell them in the market. Unless the tribal was given a direct stake, said the report, ‘he cannot identify his interests with those of the forest’.

In April 1960, even as this report on the functioning (as well as malfunctioning) of ‘special multipurpose tribal blocks’ was going to press, Elwin was asked to join a more high-powered government committee still. Chaired by the veteran nationalist U.N. Dhebar, a former president of the Congress Party, this had twelve members in all. They included several members of Parliament, among them the tribal leader Jaipal Singh, an Oxford contemporary of Elwin’s.

This time, since the anthropologist was merely a member, and not chair, and because several others were influential politicians, the report that the committee produced was probably drafted by several hands rather than just one. Nonetheless, some parts of the report were unquestionably Elwin’s handiwork, among them an important chapter on ‘Tribals and Forest Policy’, whose arguments were unmistakably his, and so also (as we shall see) was its prose.

In this chapter, Elwin, speaking through the committee, reprised five major themes of his writings over the decades. First, that for the tribes of India a healthy forest cover was crucial to survival and subsistence. It gave them food as well as ‘fruits of all kinds, edible leaves, honey, nourishing roots, wild game and fish’. It provided them ‘with material to build their homes and to practise their arts’, it kept ‘them warm with its fuel and cool with its grateful shade’, and it supplemented their meagre sources of cash by providing materials to sell in the plainspeoples’ bazaars.

Second, for the tribes the forests were central to their culture, their sense of self. To quote: ‘Their religion leads them to believe that there are many spirits living in the trees and forests. … Tribal folk-tales often speak about the relations of human beings and the sylvan spirits and it is striking to see how in many of the myths and legends the deep sense of identity with the forest is emphasized.’

Third, that the tribes had a sense of ownership over the forests in the traditional areas of their habitation. Since from ‘times immemorial the tribal people have enjoyed freedom to use the forest’, this gave them ‘a conviction that remains even today deep in their hearts that the forest belongs to them’.

Fourth, that the colonial state’s takeover of the forests in the late nineteenth century constituted a radical disruption of the economic and cultural life of the tribals. The commercial working of forest areas and the building of roads brought in outsiders who were in a position to exploit the tribals. Meanwhile, the ‘natural desire of the forest officials to exercise even closer control over the use of forest products deeply disturbed the entire tribal economy and introduced a psychological conflict’.

Fifth, the government of independent India had unfortunately continued the authoritarian policies of its colonial predecessor. The forest policy of 1952 emphasized total state control even more than the policy of 1894 which preceded it. The postcolonial state expanded its control over forests and woodland, and it began to more intensively work these areas for commercial exploitation. As a result ‘the tribal who formerly regarded himself as the owner of the forests, was through a deliberate process turned into a subject and placed under the Forest Department’.

State officials, both British as well as Indian, claimed that in forest areas now under their control, they had replaced the wasteful, erratic ways of the tribals with a professedly ‘scientific management’. This scapegoating of the tribals, this practice of blaming the victim, was brilliantly taken apart in one paragraph of the ‘Dhebar Committee report’ whose prose is unmistakably Elwin’s. I quote:
There is constant propaganda that the tribals are destroying the forest. We put this complaint to some unsophisticated tribals. They countered the complaint by asking how could they destroy the forest. They owned no trucks. They hardly had even a bullock cart. The utmost that they could carry away, was a head-load of produce for sale to maintain their family and that too against a licence. The utmost that they wanted was wood to keep them warm in the winter months, to reconstruct or repair their huts and carry on their little cottage industries. Their fuel-needs for cooking, they said, were not much, because they had not much to cook.

Having explained their own position they invariably turned to the amount of destruction that was taking place all around them. They reiterated how the ex-zamindars, in violation of their agreements, and the forest rules and laws, devastated vast areas of forest land right in front of officials. They also related how the contractors stray outside the contracted coupes, carry loads in trucks in excess of their authorised capacity and otherwise exploit both the forests and the tribals.

The Dhebar Committee’s, or rather Elwin’s, spirited defence of tribal rights in forests continued:
There is a feeling amongst the tribals that all the arguments in support of preservation and development of forest are intended to refuse them their demands. They argue that when it is a question of industry, township, development work or projects of rehabilitation, all these valuable arguments are forgotten and vast tracts are placed at the disposal of outsiders who mercilessly destroy the forest wealth with or without necessity.

Knowing this to be an official report, aimed at policy change, Elwin’s prose then moved from its habitually polemical style to one of reconciliation and accommodation. Although it was true that the restriction of the customary rights of the tribals was ‘the root cause of the delicate relations between them and the Forest Department’, the committee did ‘not suggest that all these complaints are justified’. Nonetheless, ‘there can be no doubt that a state of tension and mutual distrust’ existed. Therefore the report called for ‘a partnership rather than an exclusive approach which arises from the policy enunciated in 1894 and 1952 and the manner in which it has been implemented’.

If this change came about, argued Elwin on behalf of the committee, ‘the tribal can easily be won over to the view that the Forest Department is not his enemy, but a friend interested in helping him’.

The Dhebar Committee’s chapter on forests ended with a series of specific suggestions. These included the recruitment of tribals as forest guards, the award to tribals of plots of land controlled by the state, where they might grow trees and grasses for use and for sale, having a more liberal policy with regard to tribal access to non-timber forest produce from reserved forests, and setting up timber processing units near the forests where tribals could be gainfully employed.

Tragically, none of these recommendations were given effect to in the years and decades that followed. One consequence of the continuing alienation of tribals from their forest habitat has been an insurgency fostered by Maoist revolutionaries, prompting repressive action by the state, with the tribals trapped in-between. The forests have suffered as a result of the Indian state’s rejection of the anthropologist’s suggestions, and the tribals have suffered too. Thousands of lives have been lost in the conflict, of policemen, revolutionaries and innocent bystanders.

****Ramachandra Guha Speaking with Nature: The Origin of Indian Environmentalism, published by HarperCollins Publishers India, 2024. Hb. Pp.440

By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, 'too poor to be green'. In this deeply researched book, Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and well before climate change gained currency as a term, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context. In strikingly contemporary language, Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J.C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mira, Verrier Elwin, K.M. Munshi and M. Krishnan wrote about the forest and the wild, soil and water, urbanization and industrialization. Positing the idea of what Guha calls 'livelihood environmentalism' in contrast to the 'full-stomach environmentalism' of the affluent world, these writers, activists and scientists played a pioneering role in shaping global conversations about humanity's relationship with nature.
Spanning more than a century of Indian history and decidedly transnational in reference, Speaking with Nature offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.

The extract that has been published is from Guha’s informative chapter on Verrier Elwin. The text written in 1957 seems as timely then as it is now in the twenty-first century. Worth reading!

Ramachandra Guha was born and raised in the Himalayan foothills. He studied in Delhi and Kolkata, and has lived for many years in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods, a landmark history of the Republic, India after Gandhi, and an authoritative two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi, each of which was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year. His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Ramachandra Guha has taught at Stanford and Oslo, held the Phillippe Roman Chair at the London School of Economics, and served as the Satish Dhawan Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science. He is currently Distinguished University Professor at Krea University. Guha's awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Howard Milton Prize of the British Society for Sports History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Yale University