Chipko’s variegated roots
The denial of access to ash trees to the contractors of Symonds Company in the vicinity of Mandal village, Chamoli district, on March 27, 1973 seemed like a local event. The same trees had been sought after for making farm tools by the local Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal, a Gandhian voluntary group.
But this collective action soon grew in symbolic importance. It soon got a name that became world famous: Chipko. Chandi Prasad Bhatt had used the pahari or hill term angalvatha, but it was Chipko, the Hindi term, that gained currency.
A year later in Reni, Gaura Devi faced down a group of labourers out to fell trees in accordance with a forest auction. A small band of 21 women and seven girls halted a juggernaut even as word went out and others arrived. “The forest,” she said, “is our mother.” Here, the contrast was also one of gender: Women defying the government.
Mandal, Reni and later Phata, all these hamlets would soon be well known. As Shekhar Pathak shows in The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, this non-violent resistance to claim local rights was one of a series of events that has left a mark on the hills of Uttarakhand that remains relevant to this day.
Chipko has long been claimed as a grassroots movement for a new compact with nature. In 1989, Ramachandra Guha’s work showed a more complex picture of a peasant movement that was wrapped in green colours that took much away from its distinctive roots.
Now, Dr Pathak goes more than a step further. This rare book combines firstrate story-telling with a widening of the canvas. The author’s own engagement began as a student activist and continued over the decades as scholar and chronicler. In contrast to the most popular versions, he goes well beyond the personalities of the leaders, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna.
Students and left-wing radicals, village women, singers, local journalists and political leaders all come alive in the narrative. The characters and initiatives he writes of with verve and sympathy will long linger in the reader’s mind.
Most crucially, he shows that the early struggles for access to and control of the forest echoed those of the imperial era. British rule over Kumaon and Pauri and indirect control of Tehri Garhwal entailed new levels of exactions of timber and labour.
In 1924-25, Devaki Nandan Pande had written of how those who robbed them of the forest endangered the very existence of the hill people. An essay in the local paper, Shakti explained how forests, not farms, were the real property of the people — not just the key implements and inputs of production, but livelihood in terms of farming and husbandry that relied on forests.
Dr Pathak shows a clear continuity into the early years of independence. Local access to forest resources and cooperatives for resin and timber had long been advocated by Gandhians and even found their way into reports of government committees. But by the early 1970s a tipping point had been reached.
Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of events and places, the author shows a movement with many strands and dimensions. From 1973 on, there were protests across many sections of society in the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh.
The movement itself was like a rainbow with many strands but by 1978 there were radical and regionalist voices that went well beyond the older
Gandhian framework. The author is careful to show the contributions and limits of different players. For instance, the Dasholi-based efforts at growing broad leaf trees vital to the local economy on village commons will soon be half a century old with survival rates of saplings among the best in the country. By contrast, Tehri was the base of Sunderlal Bahuguna who took over leadership of the movement to halt the Tehri dam. Though this failed, it raised awareness of the dangers of large projects in the tectonically young foothills of the Himalayas.
Dr Pathak himself was in the more radical Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini and with four others undertook a foot march, or padayatra, from Askot on the Himachal Pradesh border to Arakot on the Nepal border in 1974. He has repeated the journey every decade and looks set to go again three years hence!
He candidly admits to how the new state of Uttarakhand has continued the old model of development giving priority to dams, townships and highways. Yet commercial green felling was halted four decades ago and there is an efflorescence of local initiatives around local afforestation, rivers and alternative agriculture.
The book itself is a shorter version of the much longer Hindi work, Hari Bahri Umeed (Green Hopes) published two years ago. Though a translation, this is a fresh work.
Chipko raised issues that resonate all the more in the world of 2021. This work is a story of hope of those who went against a model of development that saw growth as an end in itself. It is also about how those who eked out a living the hard way but found the forests vital to them being taken out of reach. And changed beyond recognition. These are voices long hidden from history. This a book you will not want to miss out on.