Indian Environmentalism Research Articles

Language matters: Analysing the national environmental policy of India (2006) from an ecolinguistic discourse analytic perspective

This study aims to scrutinize the discursive practices which are as important as the practical steps when it comes to environmental management. The role of discursive practices when it comes to environmental preservation is overlooked by the practitioners. While the previous studies were focusing more on the political and ideological side of the policy taken for the study, the discursive side remained unexamined. By focusing more on the harmful discursive practices regrading environment such as anthropocentric language, phrases, usages used in the National environment policy, the study offers a fresh perspective to Indian environmentalism and policymaking regarding environment. By analyzing the environment policy under the lens of Ecolinguistic discourse analysis, the invisible disparities that are there in the policy will be made perceptible. The study also highlights the importance of incorporating Indian ecosophy (ecological philosophy) when formulating such policies, which advocates interconnectedness, interdependence and environmental stewardship. By addressing and rectifying harmful discursive usages, policymakers can contribute to enhancing environmental awareness, correcting misconceptions and fostering a deeper understanding of the interconnected relationship between humans and environment. The findings of the study remind of the need for holistic and inclusive linguistic usages and the problematic side of the existing language used in the environmental policy.

Tiger conservation, biopolitics and the future of Indian environmentalism

Tiger conservation in India has been driven for the most part by a philosophy that prioritizes the need for inviolate tiger reserves free of human beings. Such reserves, it is argued, provide much needed territory to ‘care’ for the tiger. In this paper, we examine the biopolitics of tiger conservation in India and argue that the current approach to tiger conservation amplifies the nature‐culture divide and ignores other imaginations of tiger conservation that are more cognizant of human—non‐human entanglements in protected area landscapes. The paper argues that tiger conservation has been a mix of sovereign, disciplinary and neoliberal environmentalities, all built on a certain ‘truth’ about tigers. The paper raises questions and concerns about the ‘truth’ discourse that underlies tiger conservation and also argues that tiger conservation has marginalized the environmentalism of the poor. It makes the case for more debate and discussion about tiger truths and suggests the need for a more than human approach to tiger conservation that recognizes the adverse consequences of fortress conservation as well as its limits in caring for the tiger in more than human geographies.

Digital Environmental Humanities: Scholarship and Activism in India

The advent of digital age impacted a massive transformation in the academia and dissemination of information and communication and also how human cognition takes place and such changes will only accelerate. Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that uses the methodologies of digital technological innovations to study humanities. Digital environmental humanities is a branch of digital humanities that deals with the intersections of digital arena and environmental concerns This article intends study the position of digital environmental humanities in Indian environmentalism. It also attempts to place on the Indian context of the field and trace the scholarship and activism of digital environmental humanities in India.

Environmental Thought of Other Philosopher vs. Tagore’s thought

Environmental philosophy aims to prompt an effective human response to connected problems by understanding the unquestioned beliefs and presumptions. Tagore's environmental philosophy differs from other philosophers by promoting a holistic view of the environment. Tagore's environmental thought recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and emphasizes a spiritual and conscious transformation in humans' relationship with nature. Ambedkar's ideas are crucial to the dominant discourse, which is characterized by a concern for transforming the natural world to address social issues generated. The focus of this paper is on the impact of Gandhi's, Ambedkar's, and Tagore's environmental thoughts on Indian environmentalism.

People’s Science Movement and the Missing People: Save Silent Valley Movement and the Scientisation of Environmental Debates in Kerala

Though primarily understood as New Social Movements (NSM), People’s Science Movements (PSM) in India are also a favourite theme for Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars. Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) is often projected as a pioneering reference point for studying PSMs. KSSP also figures in Environmental Social Sciences discussions because of its active involvement in the Save Silent Valley Movement (SSVM), one of India’s successful anti-dam environmental movements. While KSSP was foregrounded toabstract some attributes of PSMs by STS scholars, SSVM was one of the environmental movements epitomised to develop explanations on Indian Environmentalism. While agreeing with the PSM’s attributes conferred on KSSP, this paper questions the extent of SSVM’s commonalities with other environmental movements in the debates on Indian Environmentalism.

Environmental Law With Non-Human Features in India: Giving Legal Personhood to the Ganges

Against the wider backdrop of a global acceleration of Right of Nature (RoN) legal provisions, this article focuses on recent Indian court cases that created legal personhood for the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, to explore why and how this form of legality was created. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the article then critiques contemporary assertions that simply present the Indian judgments as infiltrations of Hindu cosmology into the legal framework, basically ‘saffronisation’ of Indian environmentalism. Deeper analysis reveals the need for interdisciplinary, historically grounded study of processes of law-making and pertinent court rulings produced in Indian environmental jurisprudence.

Bhajan on the Banks of the Ganga: Increasing Environmental Awareness via Devotional Practice

Through my personal lenses as a scholar/sevak at the Parmarth Niketan Ashram in Rishikesh, I explore the ashram’s efforts to raise environmental awareness through the performative practice of Ganga aarti. Simultaneously a religious event and an environmental rally, the daily Ganga aarti on the bank of the Ganga River represents an environmentally focused innovation upon an existing religious practice. Aside from being a devotional act of reverence to the goddess Ganga Ma, Ganga aarti at Parmarth Niketan is a self-consciously performative practice intended to draw and entertain audiences from all walks of life and from all over the globe. Ganga aarti combines the ritual practice of Ganga puja, bhajan-kirtan, guru darshan, bhakti, and sometimes bliss via the total sensorial experience. “Mobile” Ganga aarti performances in other parts of North India are often day-long events featuring impassioned lectures about the importance of the environment, a traveling puppet show in which Shiva and Ganga Ma urge the crowds not to dump rubbish in the river, classical dance performances, distribution of hats and t-shirts, and girls dressed as the swarup of various river goddesses. I argue that as religious institutions increasingly engage in pro-environment endeavors with the public support of government officials, this public performance style will become an increasingly visible and influential feature of Indian environmentalism.

Looking beyond the idyllic representations of the rural: The Konkan Railway controversy and middle-class environmentalism in India

Post-independence India has had its share of controversies around mega-infrastructure projects that have pitted environmental preservation against development concerns. This article studies the environmental controversy around one such megaproject, the Konkan Railway, employing a framework that integrates the environmental values, beliefs and behaviour of individuals and groups with a historical understanding of political economy and ecology (science). Essentialist and over-simplified environmental discourses, without scientific credibility and not based on historical facts, are often influential in policy making, especially when channelled by the middle classes. Better understanding our present concerns and guiding decisions and policies to deal with the problems we currently face, requires unmasking the romanticization of the countryside. We must replace the idyllic version of the past with a nuanced historical understanding of the interaction between nature and culture. This article also locates the controversy over the Konkan Railway within the frames used to study Indian environmentalism. The aim is to improve our understanding of the regional, ideological and cultural pluralities in environmental values, beliefs and behaviour of the middle class in India.

Religion, ‘nature’ and environmental ethics in ancient India: archaeologies of human:non-human suffering and well-being in early Buddhist and Hindu contexts

ABSTRACTThis paper assesses archaeology’s contribution to debates regarding the ecological focus of early Buddhism and Hinduism and its relevance to global environmentalism. Evidence for long-term human:non-human entanglement, and the socio-economically constructed element of ‘nature’ on which Indic culture supposedly rests, challenges post-colonial tropes of India’s utopian, ‘eco-friendly’ past, whilst also highlighting the potency of individual human:non-human epistemologies for building historically grounded models of Indian environmentalism. For early Buddhism, I mediate between two polarized views: one promoting the idea of ‘eco-dharma’ as a reflection of Buddhism’s alignment with non-violence (ahiṃsā), and the alleviation of suffering (dukkha); a second arguing that early Buddhist traditions have been misappropriated by western environmentalism. I argue that the latter view subscribes to canonical models of passive monks removed from worldly concerns, despite archaeological evidence for socially-engaged monastic landlordism from the late centuries bc. Others cite this evidence only to negate Buddhism’s eco-credentials, thereby overlooking the human:non-human entanglement theme within modern environmental discourse, while the predominant focus on non-human suffering overlooks convergences between modern and ancient ecological ethics and environmental health. Case studies include examples of Buddhist land and water management in central India, set within discussions of human v. non-human-centric frameworks of well-being and suffering, purity and pollution, and broader Indic medico-ecological epistemologies, as possible models for collective responses to environmental stress.

Grassroot Politics and Green Illusions: Exploring the Discourse on Environment, Governance and Democracy in Independent India

Environmental discourse in India has always competed in the theatre of its democracy with the help of two powerful actors-the state with its agenda of development in technocratic environmental discourse and the indigenous population represented by civil society with a democratic environmental discourse. Conflicting binaries crowd out this space-development and environment, scientific and cultural, traditional and modern and so on. This paper attempts to trace the Indian environmental consciousness giving space to any alternative or counter environmental discourse that the Indian civilisation might have experienced. The problem of western scientific perspective and its utilisation as a way of culture and a means of power from the colonial times and the privileging of science over other forms of knowledge is examined. The authors analyse the politics of environmentalism as a movement and ideology post independence, and the role of civil society whose powerful articulation of environmental causes have consistently been against the Indian state. According to this assumption, colonialism, modernity and development are exclusively responsible for the degradation and exploitation of nature, marginalising the tribal dweller, the peasant and the rural Indian. The inadequacy of the modern scientific discourse to articulate environmental conflicts has brought in grassroot movements and a powerful dialectic contests to eliminate the opposing argument. The paper concludes that a meaningful framework of Indian environmentalism can rest on a stage where science, democracy and governance have aligned their language and interests.

A History of Environmental Justice in India

Abstract Indian environmentalism has, for the most part, been about social justice. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was concerned with differential access to natural assets and ecosystem services. The Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984 raised new issues, pertaining to industrial risk and safety. This article traces the history of environmental justice from the 1970s onward. It describes the perspective of Indira Gandhi, India's Prime Minister from 1967 to 1984, and her attempts at reconciling the environment with development and economic justice; discusses the emergence of a red-green environmentalism during the 1980s and 90s; and explores Bhopal and its implications; before addressing the issues that are front and center today, in the early twenty-first century.

Revisiting the Baliraja Dam Struggle: A Study of an Environmental Movement in Maharashtra

This paper discusses a case of conflict over water resources which emanated from the issue of sand excavation in the Yerala river of Khanapur taluka of Sangli district in Maharashtra. Besides being a struggle for construction of a check dam, this movement presented an alternative practice for management of water resources for sustainable agriculture. The paper explores the processes and underlying dynamics of the Baliraja dam struggle in two villages in the taluka. It analyzes this localised struggle of farmers within the theoretical framework of Indian environmentalism, delineating the movement's ideological trends, leadership structure, and internal dynamism.

Anthropology and Environmental Debate: Reflections on Science, Resource Nationalism, and News Reporting

Anthropology and Environmental Debate: Reflections on Science, Resource Nationalism, and News Reporting

Towards an Authentic Indian Environmentalism

Despite elaborate policies and programmes to deal with them, environmental problems in India are generally worsening. In this paper it is argued that we are not adequately diagnosing these problems. There is a tendency to focus on effects, i.e. on technical definitions and solutions, rather than on causes – which are predominantly social, economic and political. In this we have followed the lead of Western environmentalism. We must first of all, therefore, question this Western perspective. Then we must attempt to articulate an authentic Indian environmentalism. To do this we must take into account the perceptions of all those people in our society who are being marginalised by ‘development’ and globalisation and their many creative responses to the environmental problems they face. This paper describes some of these responses and reflects upon them.

Indian Environmentalism and the Question of the State: Problems and Prospects for Sustainable Development

The author focuses on the problems inherent in environmentalist critiques of the Indian state, and the inability of their authors to provide a useful analytical approach for reforming state institutions engaged in environmental regulation and natural-resource management. After a review of the arguments made by leading spokespersons of Indian environmentalism, the author provides an alternative framework for understanding the different forms of state intervention in natural-resource management in colonial and postcolonial India. Three factors that have shaped dominant policy phases and strategies of state institutions engaged in resource management are highlighted: major shifts in the political and economic processes that create pressures for state intervention; competing demands on state institutions that shape the ways in which intervention occurs; and conflicts, disputes, and negotiations that redefine the exercise of state control and the forms of resource management. In focusing on the interplay of these three factors, the author illustrates the continuities and major shifts in resource-management strategies adopted by state institutions in India. The inherent weaknesses (and reactionary populism) of Indian environmental debates are discussed, together with the inability of those involved to articulate strategies for moving towards sustainable urban and regional development within the recent policy phase of deregulation and market expansion in India.

The ‘new traditionalist’ discourse of Indian environmentalism

In this article we identify ‘new traditionalism’ as the discourse that dominates the historiography of the Indian environment. We challenge the new traditionalist equation of ‘forests’ and ‘nature’, their assertion that ‘traditional’ agriculture was ecologically balanced, and was practised by self‐contained communities, and their claims that women, forest dwellers and peasants were primarily the keepers of a special conservationist ethic. We next examine the new traditionalist claim that colonialism, modernity and development were exclusively responsible for the degradation of nature in India. Finally, we examine the new traditionalist interpretations of popular politics around environmental issues, specifically the Chipko movement. We make explicit the assumptions and political implications of new traditionalism and provide an alternative reading of Indian environmental history and politics.