Beauty, Wonder, and Sustainability: Reconnecting Humans to Nature for “Durable Harmony”

Abstract

AbstractFew scholarly studies have addressed Mira Behn’s role in spreading environmental awareness in India (Guha 2006, 102–105; 1998, 73–75; Shiva 1988, 65–67). Most of these brief and selective references to her work and ideas are limited in both scope and philosophical insight. As a result, Mira Behn’s thoughts on the environment remain misunderstood. For instance, Guha (1998, 75) provides a brief analysis of her role in the sociology of forest management in the hills of Uttarakhand. He points out that her interest in nature was not instrumental but that she often reflected “a spiritual affinity with nature of a Wordsworthian kind, straight out of the European romantic tradition.” Although Mira Behn resonated with much of European romantic thought, she differs in her specifically philosophical approach to nature, humankind, science, and human progress. Guha does not elaborate on these. Guha’s account also oversimplifies her spiritual and cultural philosophy. Guha (2018) makes it plain that Mira Behn’s arguments for conserving the Himalayan environment were based primarily on economic and ecological reasons rather than cultural, a cause which was taken up by “later ecological crusaders” who expressed some special affinity with the Hindu culture. While admiring Mira Behn’s love for nature and the countryside, her Indian followers also do not fairly interpret her thoughts on the environment but do provide a contrasting picture to that of Guha. To illustrate, some portray her as a Hindu saint with little attraction for “worldly activities” and whose love for nature was essentially derived from and grounded in a Hindu religious ethic (Nayar 1992, 238; Bajaj 1992, 239; Narayan 1992, 244; Seth 1992, 258). Western religious pacifists and social reformers on the other hand see her as a Christian saint devoted to the social imperative of peacemaking comparable in devotion to Sister Clare and the women who followed Jesus (Holmes 1931; Ellsberg 2005). As dissenters from all these interpretations, there are Indian scholars who infer a certain misanthropy hidden in her thoughts on nature based on her preference for the company of birds and animals rather than that of human beings who she thought “are busy despoiling our planet” (Mehta 1977, 225; Seth 1992, 258). Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, none of these perspectives are sufficiently helpful in understanding Mira Behn’s independent agency and worldview. In fact, in response to a news article about her, she once wrote, “I always warn people who want to write anything about me, that they had much better not to do, so, as besides my outer activities, there is an inner world of the spirit which is ever evolving, of which they know little about” (1960b). The complexity of Mira Behn’s nature challenges those of us who study her to “get it right.” But isn’t it also an invitation to explore her rich inner world of spirit and how she came to reconcile her inner and outer worlds? Mira Behn’s thoughts, influences, and emotions were all part of an evolving worldview that reveals her Indian influences and transnational borrowings. She averred that her thinking on the environment developed over the course of the three phases of her life: the early youthful experiences in England, constructive work in rural India, and the time spent in rural Austria toward the end of her life (Mira Behn n.d.-a). Therefore, either relegating her love of nature to merely the cultural legacy of the Romantic tradition or to a particular religious veneration of nature does not do justice to her comprehensive philosophical worldview, in which aesthetics and spirituality play a pivotal role.