The Chronicler of Chipko

A movement needs a cause, ideological construct(s), leaders, followers, foot soldiers, and most of all, a chronicler who can leave an authentic narrative for posterity. For at the end of the day, ‘history is fickle in what it decides to pickle!’

Chipko had a cause—trees had to be saved from felling (on which all were agreed). There were multiple worldviews—Sarvodaya, Marxist, social activism, rural livelihoods, eco-feminist, as well as the political demand for statehood for the highlanders—which often coalesced in a mass movement. Although the initial thrust came from the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandal, later Sangh (DGSS), a Gandhian institution started by Chandi Prasad Bhatt (Bhatt) as a labour cooperative and centre for making agricultural implements and value addition from forest produce, it was the direct action of Gaura Devi on 26 March 1974 that spurred the movement. This was also the year when four young men—Kunwar Prasun, Pratap Shikar, Shamsher Bisht, and the author (Shekhar Pathak)—started the Askot-Arakot padayatra, which has been repeated every ten years.

Sunder Lal Bahuguna then took up the gauntlet against the Tehri Dam, which produced electricity and water for NCR but also saw the submergence of the old Tehri town. Gopal Singh Negi, the three-term Communist legislator from Tehri, balladeers like Ghanshyam Sailani and Kunwar Prasun, foot soldiers like Murari Lal, and last but not least, a chronicler par excellence in Shekhar Pathak, have left for us not a Sarkari gazetteer but a people’s history based on oral interviews with 192 participants, copies of FIRs, memoranda submitted to various government departments from time to time, working plans of the Forest Department, pamphlets and posters, press releases and handouts, slogans and graffiti, reports in national and local newspapers—from the New Delhi-based Hindustan Times, Times of India, and Jansatta to the Uttarakhand-based Nainital Samachar and BD Dhulia’s Karmabhoomi—along with commentaries in journals like EPW, Down to Earth, and Dinman (Hindi), as well as academic writing like The Unquiet Woods by Ramachandra Guha, who was in some ways responsible for this book.

The backstory is as follows. It was in The Unquiet Woods that Guha announced that Shekhar Pathak had confessed to him that he would come out with an authentic history of the movement to set at rest ‘the many distorted versions of events and people connected with the movement.’ There was ‘a crying need for a firmly empirical and thoroughly grounded report of the movement,’ and the opportunity arose when the author got a chance to write the Hindi version of the present book under the title Hari Bahri Umeed during a fellowship year at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies at Shimla, a salubrious place for reflection and scholarship.

There could have been none better than Manisha Chaudhry, the founder editor of Pratham Books and Kali for Women, to undertake the task of producing the English translation of this remarkable book, which was also honoured with the Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay Award of the New India Foundation in 2022.

A Man to Match His Mountains

Spread over ten chapters, this thoroughly referenced and indexed book of 361 pages begins with an introduction by Ramachandra Guha: A Man to Match His Mountains. He compares Pathak, the tall and athletic man, to his short and asthmatic self, and though their childhoods were spent in starkly different ecosystems, their work and interests bound them together in a brotherly bond, resulting in remarkable scholarship.

In the first chapter, Chipko’s Homeland: A Geographical Introduction, we learn about the historical background, the rural environment, and the cultural diversity of the region now called Uttarakhand. The next two chapters reveal how different was the gaze of the EIC and the Indic tradition toward the forest. For Indians, the forest was Aranya—the setting for philosophical discourse(s); for the EIC, it was a ‘commodity’ to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This naturally led to resistance—Dhandaks—not just against the British Raj but also against the Maharaja of Tehri, who began looking at his forest wealth in the manner of his benefactors.

The fourth chapter, The First Shoots of Chipko, tells the story of the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Sangh and how Gaura Devi actually stopped contractors from felling trees on the fateful day of March 26, 1974. The next chapter, The Struggle Spreads, describes how this Garhwal-based movement expanded from Uttarkashi to Kumaon with concerted action to stop forest auctions.

Together, but not United

The sixth chapter, Chipko Unites Uttarakhand, delves into the formation of the Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini, the efforts of the Ram Naresh Yadav government to restart auctions stopped by the highlanders—HN Bahuguna and ND Tiwari—and the resistance at Nainital, Adwani, and Haldwani when the state brought in the PAC to control the agitation. Over time, the movement sprouted new branches and new contests: women versus men in Doongri Paintoli and baanj versus potato. This is covered in the seventh chapter, while the next discusses the three streams of Chipko with the apt aphorism ‘together, but not united.’ It lists the awards won by the principal adherents—Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunder Lal Bahuguna—as well as the organizations they represented. Bahuguna alienated many of his supporters by aligning with the VHP in the anti-Tehri dam protests and his refusal to accept the fallouts of ‘deep ecology’ on the lives, livelihoods, and entrepreneurship options for those living near forests.

The Living Lights of Chipko

The penultimate chapter discusses the leadership, organization, and participation of this unique social movement. It profiles, in addition to Gaura Devi, Bhatt, and Bahuguna, the lives of Kshemanand Shastri, Vidyasagar Nautiyal, Vimla Nautiyal Bahuguna, Man Singh Rawat, Ghanshyam Sailani, Govind Singh Rawat, Govind Singh Negi, Ramesh Pahadi, Rajeev Lochan Shah, Kamla Ram Nautiyal, Shamsher Singh Bisht, Kedar Singh Rawat, Sudeshna Devi, Murari Lal, Shishu Pal Singh Kunwar, Anand Singh Bisht, Dhoom Singh Negi, Vijay Jardhari, Ram Raj Badoni, Puran Chand Tiwari (PCT), Pradeep Tamta, Balam Singh Janoti, Jagat Rautela, Diwan Dhapola, Chandra Shekhar Bhatt, Shasti Dutt Joshi, Raj Bahuguna, Nirmal Joshi, Vinod Pandey, Mahendra Bisht, and Prakash Phuloria. Among the women activists were Kunti Devi, Balpi Devi, Kaushalya Devi, Geeta Devi, Pavitra Devi, Lakhma Devi, Sharadi Devi, Sauni Devi, Kanti Devi, and Bachuli Devi. Many of them were arrested, and when asked if they faced any major difficulty during their internment, they smiled and said their life outside jail was equally, if not more, gruelling!

For readers wondering why such a long list of names had to be included, one must remember that this was a people’s movement that produced many leaders, and the above is just a small sample. The last chapter is aptly called The Living Lights of Chipko, for it remains a work in progress through the campaigns of the DGSS, the Beej Bachao, Chetana, Nadi Bachao and Raksha Sutra, Maiti and Paani Rakho Andolans, the anti-mining and Baanj Abhiyan of Lakshmi Ashram, newspapers like Nainital Samachar and Aniket, the Himalayan Action and Research Centre, and the Van Panchayat Sangharsh Morcha.

Pathak ends his discourse by stating what all good historians must do – invoke the present by interpreting the past, but avoiding the hubris of trying to predict the future! This is a book that must occupy your mind space as well as your bookshelf!

The writer, a former Director of LBS National Academy of Administration, is currently a historian, policy analyst and columnist, and serves as the Festival Director of Valley of Words — a festival of arts and literature