Knowledge Politics and the Making of Indian Environmental History: A Conversation with Ramachandra Guha

Earlier this year, I spoke with Ramachandra Guha on his book, Speaking with Nature (Yale University Press, 2024). We discuss the origins of Indian environmentalism and how Indian thinkers played a crucial role in the conversations shaping humanity’s relationship with nature, notably through “livelihood environmentalism.”

Together, we reflect on Dr. Guha’s ambitious project, the role identity and dissent plays in intellectual histories, and the global ramifications of the way Indian thinkers have historically engaged with the environment. Towards the end, we also discuss the importance of communicating, with rigor and precision, academic ideas to as wide of an audience as possible and alternative modes of media.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Laleh Ahmad: Ram, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Your new book, Speaking with Nature, provides an ambitious and comprehensive intellectual history of Indian environmentalism. I really enjoyed reading it. I would love to start with the inspiration behind this book and how you came to this project.

Ramachandra Guha: This book, which appeared late last year, has actually been almost four decades in the making.

Four decades ago, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on a celebrated, peasant environmental initiative known as the Chipko Movement in the Himalayas. The Chipko Movement was a grassroots protest movement to protect the forest, not merely for ecological purposes, but also for livelihood security. My dissertation argued that the movement represented environmentalism of the poor, a counterpoint to what was known as full-stomach environmentalism (concern for protection of nature for aesthetic beauty, for saving endangered species, and a kind of environmentalism that was then very characteristic of the West). North American and European environmentalism was dominant in the literature, and it was largely (not exclusively) focused on wilderness and the non-human aspects of nature.

I argued that what was happening in the Himalayas and later in other parts of the South (for example, the rubber tappers movement in Brazil led by Chico Mendes or the tree planting campaigns by Wangarĩ Maathai in Kenya), is a bottom-up environmentalism that blends environmental sustainability with social justice. They were environmentalists of the poor, which did not exist in social science theory. Social science theory essentially argued that environmentalism was a post-materialist concern; it was only visible in fairly wealthy societies.

After I finished my dissertation, I found the writings of some Indian thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s, who anticipated the social ecology that Chipko was articulating. I realized that there may be the potential to write an intellectual history of socially responsible environmentalism as a counterpoint to my history of a social movement from below.

But then I got distracted by other projects. I started writing on politics and biography, but I always kept an eye out for unusual, interesting, pioneering environmentalists.

This was a field that had been well explored in the West, especially in America; people knew about the iconic trinity of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold—and of course, a little later, Rachel Carson. But here were Indian thinkers and sometimes European thinkers working in India who are saying interesting, unusual, prescient things about human attitudes and relationships to nature.

I crafted this book around ten thinkers who spoke about the forest, the wild, water conservation, sustainable agriculture, sustainable urban planning, and technology. These ten thinkers provide a kind of history of environmental thinking in India. But, as I argue in the preface, though the book is set in India, it has wider, global ramifications.

India is a very large, diverse country. Its social, political, environmental problems are quite similar to those that are manifest in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and so on, and hence these thinkers have something to say to people from other countries as well.

LA: In the introduction, you mentioned that it was difficult to include women in this book due to the social realities of Indian society at the time. How do you think through acknowledging absences without recreating them, whether it be gender, caste, or religion?

RG: One has to be aware of that. Sometimes the choices are hard.

Women and Dalits, the low caste, were just becoming active politically in the period I’m writing about—the 1920s and 1930s. They were organizing for greater representation, for voting rights, but, because of the historic disadvantages Dalits and women had faced, they weren’t in universities getting Ph.D.s, becoming scholars, professors, journalists, editors. They weren’t public intellectuals. So, the two women in my book are both Europeans who lived in India.

So, you acknowledge it. But you also place it in historical context: That’s how it was.

Some male thinkers were sensitive to gender. Patrick Geddes, the town planner, was sensitive to the rights and needs of women. So was one of the Gandhians, Kumarappa. But, some were not. [Radhakamal] Mukerjee was an incredibly interesting, truly interdisciplinary, thinker, but he thought that women’s place was just in the home. So, you have to point that out too.

Historians have to deal with what they have, the reality as it is, and then acknowledge the limitations of their choices.

LA: You talk about livelihood environmentalism in this book a lot, and I’m curious about the false binary you mention of the non-human versus the human and the construction of nature.

RG: I wouldn’t say false; it’s an exaggerated binary. I used to think it’s a false binary. The older I get, I don’t think it’s a false binary, but a misleading and exaggerated binary.

Clearly, non-human species have a right to exist for aesthetic and ethical reasons. But the attempts to protect them should not be at the cost of the less vulnerable sections of our own human society. Too often in conservation crusades that are led by powerful, wealthy people (usually men, often scientists), the interests of the poor and the vulnerable get ignored.

At the same time there are a whole host of environmental problems that are not concerned with the protection of non-human species: the quality of water, of air, of soil, the sustainability of current forms of transport, of housing. Now, all of this requires a much more nuanced approach, and a much more sociologically sensitive approach than was common among Western environmentalists until very recently.

Protecting wilderness and saving endangered species is a limiting perspective. It is one valuable element of the whole picture, but only one.

LA: In my own work, I think a lot about the legacies of imperialism on environmental governance in South Asia. I’m curious how you think that works. I know a lot of the people you write about, for example, are European. But also, a lot of them are trained by imperial institutions. How do you feel about these knowledge politics?

RG: First of all, I do not have a black and white picture of colonialism. Colonialism was a system of political and economic domination. Tagore was the first to show that imperialism was also a system of ecological exploitation, and I argue that in my book. It had a dark side, but it also had an emancipatory side.

Because South Asian societies were tradition-bound, they were ossified. They practiced enormous caste and gender discrimination. They hadn’t opened their minds to the world. They weren’t really intellectually creative. The Scientific Revolution (which took place in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) largely bypassed South Asia. So inadvertently, colonialism also had this liberating impact. You could argue that there was more darkness than light. I may accept that, but that it was all evil and awful—not at all.

The second answer to that question would be that the white people in my book are in some ways dissenters. They are like men who challenge patriarchy or Brahmins who challenge caste discrimination. All of them were dissenters. They were White people who were empathetic to the people living in the Indian subcontinent and their struggles.

I’ve always had a much more nuanced position on colonialism. That comes from Gandhi, who was willing to see the good in anyone regardless of their caste, their gender, their religion, their race. So, while recognizing that colonialism was a system of economic, political, and ecological domination, it has still opened these spaces for people to challenge it, sometimes by incorporating Western ideas of liberty and equality.

LA: What do you think is the most important thing for readers to take away from this work?

RG: I think the two important things to take away from the work is that the environmental crisis is more serious in a country like India than in the West because we have higher population densities, because tropical ecologies are more fragile, and because we have a history of colonial exploitation and an inability to acquire colonies of our own (to go forage for natural resources to sustain our economic growth elsewhere).

The second takeaway is that there is this deep interpenetration of society and nature. You must always be cognizant of questions of social justice even when you’re concerned about the protection of nature. With climate change looming, we have to rethink current models of economic growth. Conventional measures like the GDP to measure the wealth or progress of a society are hugely problematic. We have to rethink the whole way we approach the question of how to make humans safe, secure, and content.

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Featured Image: Rabindranath Tagore (center), polymath and key figure of the Bengali Renaissance, is one of the ten thinkers that Guha follows in Speaking With Nature. Unknown photographer, 1925.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Ramachandra Guha is a Distinguished University Professor at Krea University. He has previously taught at Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. His books include The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007), and a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Before India, 2014, and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 2018, both published by Knopf). His most recent book is Speaking with Nature (Yale University Press, 2024). His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. Website. Contact.

Laleh Ahmad is a multi-disciplinary reader and writer from Karachi, Pakistan. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison researching urban floodscapes and the quest for control over water in Karachi. Contact.