“Revisiting Chipko: A Timely Reminder of Nature’s Guardians and the Need for Conservation”

At a time when the entire world has overcome the scary Covid pandemic and people are once again realising the importance of nature and Mother Earth, a highly readable book underlining the importance of trees, rivers and mountains has hit the market. It came soon after the pandemic but I could not lay my hands on it until recently. This is the first authoritative account, in English, of the famous Chipko movement.

The people’s campaign that began in the hilly region of what is now officially known as the Uttarakhand State, marks completion of 50 years of the movement that was launched with the help of the local Communist party workers and those who believed in Gandhian philosophy. Without compromising on their respective ideologies in the seventies, they came together to save forests of the then vast state of Uttar Pradesh But many believe there is a need for another ‘Chipko Andolan’ when Indian trees are being chopped down mercilessly for development across India. And there is no Bahuguna or Chandi Prasad Bhatt or Gaura Devi to raise strong voice against wanton tree felling.

Well, from all accounts, the Chipko movement is considered to be the first mass movement of people to save ecology of their surroundings in the difficult terrain of Uttarakhand. Though the state came into being in the year 2000, the book has some references that point to the fact that demand for a separate smaller state for their region, was being raised from time to time since many years before.

Author Shekhar Pathak is a pahadi scholar who knows the area by the inch. A researcher and an author, he is respected for his immense field knowledge of the Himalayan state and its history, geography, topography and ecology like no one else.

In his introduction ‘A Man to Match His Mountains’, well-known author and environment researcher Ramchandra Guha says: ‘Shekhar and his three companions walked across the entire breadth of the Uttarakhand Himalaya. The march began on 25 May (1974) in Askot, in eastern Kumaon, abutting the Nepal border. Through the summer of 1974 the four young men walked westwards, crossing pastures, forests, fields, streams, rivers and high mountain passes. They stopped each night in a different hamlet, where they acquainted themselves with the opinions (and problems) of their fellow Uttarakhandis. Their seven-week, 750-km-long march ended in mid-July, just before the monsoon broke. Their last stop was the village of Arakot, at the western edge of Garhwal, abutting Himachal Pradesh’, tells Guha.

This introduction sufficiently gives the rich background of the author who was not comfortable just with his job of teaching history in a college in Kumaon, Nainital. The Askot-Arakot march was not a standalone yatra taken out in 1974 by Pathak but he had undertaken such marches many times to understand the hill region and the later-day marches had many more people joining him.

Pathak has done a commendable job by bringing the entire history of the ‘Chipko’ Andolan before the readers and has enlisted all names of small and big workers with their organisations and of works done to prevent felling of trees and ending the vice-like grip of contractors who would cut pine trees for railway sleepers in large numbers.

Chipko had come to be known mainly due to Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt. This book not only traces smaller contributions but gives due credit to them all and also, hints slightly at the difference that cropped up between Bahuguna and Bhatt.

Guha in his introduction highlights a good point saying: Till Chipko, environmentalism was identified with rich countries and the middle class. Peasants, it was felt, lacked the knowledge and understanding of ecological processes and India itself was too poor to be green. Chipko punctured a major hole in this conventional wisdom; it was striking manifestation of the “environmentalism of the poor” he says.

The important thing one gets to know from this book is the greater details of the hilly terrain, its culture, why the ecology is fragile and needs protection, and how it all began while modestly concluding the achievements of the campaign.

Environment protection has become a significant movement in the past 20-25 years all over the world and in India. But it was the small group of Uttarakhandis who woke up much earlier and challenged the government policies which were anti-forests and anti-mountain ecology.

The book does not give any proof that the author was ever a part of the Chipko movement. He has written this book based mainly on his research from Government archives from Lucknow, old Hindi papers and his interviews with those who were involved in direct actions on the field. Pathak had founded Pahar (The Mountain) an acronym for Peoples Association for Himalaya Area Research. ‘So many distorted versions of events and people connected with the movement have been appearing around us, and there seemed such a proliferation of erroneous and half-baked conclusions and misinterpretations because of the distance of scholars from the realities of the field, that the crying need for a firmly empirical and thoroughly grounded record of the movement was inescapable’, wrote the author who had written a much more lengthy book on the topic in Hindi in 2019.

Connecting with history of how it all began, the author gives references of colonial era and how the British plundered the forested areas and also how forest felling continued well after India’s independence while talking of the historical high points of the Kumaon (Pithoragarh, Almora, Champawat, Bageshwar, Nainital and Udham Singh Nagar) and Garhwal (Chamoli, Rudraprayag, Pauri, Tehri, Uttarkashi, Dehradun and Haridwar). The 13-district small state is nestled in the middle of the extended Himalaya; the Kali River marks its boundary in the east. The state has everything that nature offers in abundance — water (many river systems flow from here), wildlife, forest, medicinal plants, mountains, birds and butterflies. With human life heavily dependent on forest produce (resin) and economy revolving around small scale agriculture, poultry, cattle and fish, it was imperative that the backward region be saved and grown.

The activists of Chipko always wanted to save tress and forests at any cost and quietly. We perhaps need Chipko II in the new times that are chasing development mindlessly, given the ever-rising population.

The people’s campaign that began in the hilly region of what is now officially known as the Uttarakhand state, marks completion of 50 years of the movement that was launched with the help of the local Communist party workers and those who believed in Gandhian philosophy. Without compromising on their respective ideologies in the seventies, they came together to save forests of the then vast state of Uttar Pradesh