The ecopolitical assemblage of the Chipko andolan (movement)
This is the transcript for the geopolitics video assignment as part of my Masters course in environmental and social policy. I am unable to publish the video due to copyright issues regarding the videos and images used in the final video.
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Uttarakhand is one of India’s newest states, formed in 2000, yet its deeply rich heritage and significant cultural importance dates back millennia. Also known as the Dev Bhumi, or Land of the Gods, Uttarakhand is home to a myriad Hindu pilgrimages and sites, and it’s the spiritual and religious significance of the place which bring millions of tourists to Uttarakhand every year (Singh, 2021).
Amidst the beauty of this mountainous landscape, what perhaps has been overlooked is the geopolitical significance of the state following the uprising of the Chipko andolan/movement in the 1970s in Garhwal, Uttarakhand which became a watershed moment for environmental politics across India and beyond. In this video, I will explore this ecopolitical movement through the material ontology of assemblage theory, and how the centring of the more-than-human in the assemblage through embodied activism, particularly by Garhwali women, helps to capacitate human and more-than-human bodies for change-making and re-integrate human societies into nature (Rangan, 2004; Shiva, V. and Bandyopadhyay, J., 1986; Dittmer, 2014).
At the time, Uttarakhand was a region in the state of Uttar Pradesh until it was granted statehood in 2000. Pre-colonial forest management in the region was mainly informal, with village forests being responsible for sustaining forest productivity (Shiva and Bandyopadhyay, 1986). However, tensions following border wars between India, China and Pakistan during the 60s led to stronger state control on forest areas for construction of new road networks; combined with the closing of the trans-Himalayan trade and widespread flooding and landslide occurrence attributed to rapid increase in unsustainable commercial logging, Indigenous pahadi (mountain) communities were left economically decapacitated by the state government (Jain, 1984; The Indian Express, 2018).
The modern Chipko movement soon began after the state Forest Department rejected a petition by the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM) artisanal group to increase community allotments of ash trees to favour their logging contract with a sporting company (Rangan, 2004). DGSM activists, led by Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and activists from the Communist Party of India formed the first components of the ecopolitical assemblage, mobilising different groups to protest against the state government’s deeply damaging timber extraction system through the Gandhian political philosophy of forest Satyagraha (Aiyadura et al., 2022). One of the key acts of resistance, initiated by Bhatt, was to embrace trees to prevent them being felled, hence the name Chipko which means let’s “stick to” or “hug/embrace” in Hindi. This form of protest was monumental in both forcing contractors to withdraw and enabling women to lead demonstrations and run Mahila Mandals (women’s collectives) that would impose sanctions on unsustainable resource exploitation (Jain, 1984).
In Tehri Garhwal, another prominent Chipko leader Sunderlal Bahuguna entered the assemblage in 1977. He was credited in helping Chipko reach a key milestone in 1980 when Indira Gandhi’s administration imposed a 15-year moratorium on commercial felling in the region (Mitra, 1993; Nayan, 2013). Whilst Bhatt emphasised on eco-development for sustainable resource utilisation, Bahuguna advocated for restrictions on commercial felling for the ecological rehabilitation of mountainous areas because “ecology is permanent economy” (Shiva and Bandyopadhyay, 1986). Unfortunately, with the entering of the media in the assemblage, these two streams of Chipko began to be portrayed as separate clashing ideologies, creating a rift between the two. The media was also accused of exposing the movement to western environmentalists, and grossly transforming the livelihood struggles of pahadi people into an international “ideological battle”, ultimately affecting the influential power of the movement (Walker, 1998).
By applying the lens of assemblage, we can begin to see key issues with Chipko, the first being the fragmentation of the movement. The eco-political assemblage of Chipko was an open, non-structured resistance formation which allowed for horizontal and vertical connections between actors, especially historically marginalised groups such as women and lower castes (Nayan, 2013; Aiyadurai et al, 2022). But at the same time, it also gave invitation for influential groups outside of Uttarakhand’s political ecology to enter the assemblage, who de-politicised the multi-dimensional and self-organising radical political movement, reducing it to a purely environmental one (Mitra, 1993). This weakened the credibility of Chipko as a political movement advocating for a people- and ecology-centred development model, with many labelling it as “anti-development”.
There has also been issues around the mystification of Chipko as a non-materialist, spiritual movement by what Shiva and Bandyopadhyay (1986 p. 140) call a “deliberate introduction of a false dichotomy between development and ecology”, where “development related to material objectives and ecology concerned with non-material factors”. In fact, the Gandhian philosophy of Satyagrahas has also been misinterpreted as being an emotional force lacking a materialist base and objectives. Despite Gandhi never directly using the language of ‘materialism’, Satyagrahas were used against colonial systems which perpetuated material exploitation and material poverty for the Indian population (Shiva and Bandyopadhyay, 2019). Satyagrahas have always been used in response to material contradictions between people and exploitative colonial systems of capital production which threatened the material basis of survival for Indians. In the context of Chipko, the use of Satyagraha by Garhwali people was in direct response to the threatening of the entire life-support system of the Himalaya.
I argue however, that the materiality of Chipko extends beyond the actual conflict over resource access between the state government and Garhwali people to the specific relationships of care that pahadi people have with the material Himalayan environment, and that these relationships gave agency to both the human and more-than-human actors in the assemblage. The prerequisite to Satyagraha is the belief in a “higher being”, stemming from the Hindu ontology of prakriti (Nature) as being the primal creative force (Nayan, 2013). Pahadi communities have always been conscious of the animacy and divinity of the Himalayan ecology, from the life-giving and destroying forces of the monsoons to the trees as protectors of mountain slopes and Himalayan biodiversity (Aiyadurai et al., 2022). Therefore, the forests of India hold not just economic value, but also rich cultures of human-nature harmonious living which the Garhwali people were protecting.
Although every component of this assemblage played a key role at different stages of its development, I believe that the particular arrangement of Chipko empowered women to take the central human role in protecting the forests, and that the expressive element of kinship demonstrated in the assemblage between stree (woman) and prakriti enabled women to give agentic capacity to the trees marked to be felled, such as Gaura Devi’s work in compelling the government to impost a 10 year felling ban in the Reni forest (Aiyadurai et al., 2022). Women were in charge of cultivation, livestock rearing and children, so they suffered the most from the effects of environmental disasters attributed to commercial felling. Since most men had migrated for work to cities, women felt a stronger sense of agency in being part of Chipko (The Indian Express, 2018). However, it was the emphasis on the agency in the human body, and the body as a geopolitical space in itself (Dittmer, 2014; Hyndman, 2019) by Garhwali women that I think really foregrounded the more-than-human in the assemblage. The slogan “our bodies before our trees”, used as messaging for approaching loggers, illustrated the de-privileging of human interests by women who put the bodies and rights of trees before their own, which is reminiscent of the sacrifice of Bishnoi women who laid down their lives by clinging onto trees being felled in the 18th century. Chipko was able to successfully revive an old consciousness within a new geopolitical context that put the environment at its centre once again (Mitra, 1993).
Despite Chipko not being a feminist movement, I believe that this form of embodied activism by Garhwali women brought a different sense of awareness of their own material and non-material capacities in change-making (Jain, 1984). The Chipko movement, although deeply ecological in its arguments, delved much deeper into the feminist geopolitical argument of the body as political, where Chipko supporters were able to show how politics are embodied in everyday experiences and cannot be separate to their material realities. Through Satyagraha, Garhwali people were able to put trees on the political agenda for the country (Mitra, 1993), not by positioning forests as an essential source of livelihoods but through having a shared sense of agency to preserve their ancestral pahadi eco-cultural system in which relations of care are shared between people and the Himalaya, and that humans have just as much agency as the mountains, rivers and trees do.
As a Garhwali woman living in a political environment where the concept of posthuman geopolitical assemblage is still emerging, I feel empowered and inspired by the efforts of my ancestors, relatives and Garhwali community of getting on the body level as an act of resistance against harm towards their more-than-human family, and how a simple yet powerful act of hugging a tree can reformulate national and international ecopolitical thinking, where nature and human societies are seen as intrinsically connected and dependent on each other for survival.
References:
Aiyadurai, A., Rangan, H., Baviskar, A., Narain, S. and Pande, V. (2022) The Chipko Movement: A People’s History.
Dittmer, J. (2014) Geopolitical assemblages and complexity. Progress in Human Geography, 38(3), pp.385-401.
Hyndman, J. (2019) Unsettling feminist geopolitics: Forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement. Gender, Place & Culture, 26(1), pp.3-29.
Jain, S. (1984) Women and people's ecological movement: A case study of women's role in the Chipko movement in Uttar Pradesh. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1788-1794.
Mitra, A (1993) Chipko: an unfinished mission, Available at: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/chipko-an-unfinished-mission-30883 [Accessed 30/11/2022].
Nayan, S.M. (2013) Hugging the Trees for Life: Implicating Bitzer in the Non-violent Rhetorical Situation of the Chipko Movement. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 21(2).
Walker , P. (1998) Politics of nature: An overview of political ecology, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 9(1), pp. 131-144.
Rangan, H. (2004) The environment of protest and development in the Indian Himalaya. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development and Social Movements, 338.
Singh, K. (2021) Tourist footfall down to a 5th in 2 years, U’khand banks on winter tourism for revival. Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/tourist-footfall-down-to-a-5th-in-2-yrs-ukhand-banks-on-winter-tourism-for-revival/articleshow/86209789.cms [Accessed 23/11/2022].
Shiva, V. and Bandyopadhyay, J. (1986) The evolution, structure, and impact of the Chipko movement. Mountain research and development, pp.133-142.
Shiva, V. and Bandyopadhyay, J. (2019) The Chipko Movement. In: Deforestation, pp. 224-241, Routledge.
The Indian Express (2018) What is the Chipko movement? Available at: https://indianexpress.com/article/what-is/what-is-the-chipko-movement-google-doodle-5111644/ [Accessed 24/11/2022].
