Ramachandra Guha on the Origins of Indian Environmentalism

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan. Today my guest is environmental scholar, historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha. He is the author of a number of books, including a two-volume biography of Gandhi and the award-winning book “India After Gandhi.”

Ram, thank you for coming again on the show. It is such a pleasure to have you here.

RAM GUHA: Thanks, Shruti.

Speaking with Nature

RAJAGOPALAN: I love the book. I think you won’t be surprised by that because I actually love your older environmentalism work. Just to set some context for our listeners, especially the younger listeners who know you more as a historian and biographer than as an environmental anthropologist and historian, what I really love about the book is, we think about environmental problems as global problems which require some kind of solution that’s hatched in the developed world. Then those “best practices” are exported to India, right, or to Africa and various other communities around the world?

One, there are many problems with that, which most people are aware of. The second part of it is that there is an erasure of the kind of environmentalism that is bottom up, that is highly contextual to the communities in question, and which have this very deep knowledge, on-the-ground knowledge of the fragility of the local ecosystem, and also the fragility of the political and social and economic relations at play, which completely disappears in this import and export of best practices.

This is, I feel, so timely and in such strong contrast to what is happening in the climate change environmentalism conversation in the rest of the world, especially in America, where I live.

GUHA: First of all, the approach you’re talking about, which is bottom up, which looks at social action in a very grounded way in the context of a local political economy, a local ecological configuration, and so on, this originates in my early work. Of course, this book is intellectual history. I try and locate each of these thinkers in particular context and particular landscapes and particular social structures. But I started as a sociologist originally, then I became a historian of grassroots protests against deforestation in the Himalaya.

At that stage, my main work was in what is now Uttarakhand, in the valley of the Ganga, the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, the two tributaries of the Ganga and the Persian communities there, and the relationship in the forest, and how they were disrupted by over exploitation by commercial loggers. I had a secondary base in Karnataka, where there was a very interesting movement to recover common lands. Of course, it’s a very different landscape. It’s tucked in, it’s more arid, it’s more flat, but common lands, particularly pasture and water were crucial to agriculture, and those had been eroded and community systems had broken down, and the state was disrupting them.

Then, a third reference point, which was the Kerala fisherfolk struggle, which looked at the depletion of fish stocks due to overexploitation by trawling, which affected local artisanal fisherfolk. Then, of course, there were the anti-dam movements, which came later, like the Narmada Andolan and so on. That is the context in which I became an environmental scholar. I always looked at it from a more contextual grassroots, bottom-up perspective.

Of course, also challenging the notion that a country has to be rich to be green. That it’s only when you develop economically, you develop to advanced middle class that you could reflect and think aesthetically about protecting nature. Here, I argued in the past, and I argue in this book, that there’s a different environmentalism, which I call livelihood environmentalism. Now, having said all of this, I don’t want to discount the climate crisis.

RAJAGOPALAN: Of course.

GUHA: That is vital and crucial, and it is existential, and it is hugely unpredictable. You can see the enormous variability and the rainfall patterns in India in my own lifetime, and how they changed, and the places I know. I wanted to show that this is a different way of looking at our environmental crisis. It didn’t seem to get the kind of attention it once got even in India. 

In India, the 1980s when I was starting, there was a very vigorous active environmental debate, which looked at how do you manage your forest, how do you manage your grasslands, how do you restore local systems of water management? All of that was already a very important aspect of the environmental debate. Climate change has taken over everything and marginalized all these other concerns.

RAJAGOPALAN: One way I would juxtapose it is climate change is an issue of global commons problems, whereas India’s also drowning in local’s common pool resources and managing the commons problems. We’re choking on our own pollution. Our waters, our rivers are in hazardous waste level toxicity and so on. While we need to solve the global problem, that won’t automatically lend itself to solve the local’s commons problems for which we need not just one movement like the Chipko Movement. We need hundreds across India in every district, in every panchayat, in every gram, we need all these things to get reconfigured. At least, that’s how I interpret your work and also this set of biographies. If I had to draw the meta lesson from that, that’s what I get out of it.

GUHA: Very much so. In the epilogue, I say something like this, I say, that even if there was no climate change, India would be an environmental disaster zone.

RAJAGOPALAN: It is.

GUHA: India today. If you look at the problem of air pollution in our cities, across northern and western India. It’s not just Delhi, the so-called national media may focus on Delhi in the months of October and November, but it’s all across northern and western India. This has got nothing to do with climate change. If you look at the death of our rivers, which you mentioned, it’s got nothing to do with climate change. If you look at the chemical contamination of the soil due to excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, nothing to do with climate change. If you look at the depletion of groundwater aquifers, nothing to do with climate change. If you look at the invasion of our biodiverse, natural forests by exotic weeds, nothing to do with climate change.

Two things. First, these four or five major environmental problems that have occurred independently of climate change due to mismanagement, corruption, greed, and so on, insensitivity, collectively affect the lives, livelihoods, and health of maybe 500 million Indians, at a conservative estimate. Secondly, climate change intensifies the problem.

Particularly areas like the western Ghats and the Himalaya where you have fragile ecosystems, where you have unregulated mining, bad road building, excessive expansion of tourist resorts, the ecology is fragile, and then you have a unexpected weather event and you have the kind of catastrophe which you’ve had in Kerala several times over the last decade. 

One last thing, I’d say, our political class, and regardless of which political party is in power at the state or the central level, fights the climate crisis as an easy way to deflect attention from these other local complicated environmental problems. They say, “No, it’s a climate issue, and the West should finance our transition. They’re not doing it. It’s all neocolonial hypocrisy.” It’s a clever and cunning way of deflecting attention from all these domestic problems, which have got nothing to do with neocolonialism or the West or multinationals or anything else.

Unquiet Woods

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s why I actually like going back this long in history because, in some sense, some of the conversations we are talking about happened 100 years ago, some even more than 100 years ago. Let me back up, actually. I want to start with The Unquiet Woods, which is your book from the late ’80s. This is about the Chipko Movement, and I was reading it again for this conversation. I’d read it a while ago, and my first reading of it, because you are such a well-known Gandhi scholar, I always thought of Chipko Movement as this Gandhian movement, and then it becomes very easy to connect the dots of your other work with that.

When I was looking at it again, in the context of reading this book, Speaking with Nature, I realized that what you’re actually pointing out is, or at least as a matter of emphasis, is not just about the moral question and civil disobedience and standing up to the establishment of power. This was really a question of overcentralization, which has been a theme in India since the colonial government, since the East India Company till today. What you’re really telling us is, yes, these decisions need to be taken, but the question is by whom? That’s how I read Unquiet Woods when I read it again. Now, is that a good way of thinking about your scholarship from that time?

GUHA: Very much. The argument of The Unquiet Woods is that Chipko was primarily a peasant movement in defense of local community, and only secondarily an environmental movement or a feminist movement, or a Gandhian movement, or all the other labels that had been attached to it. It was the colonial state’s dispossession of the local community and taking away their common property resources, which, of course, caused economic hardship because the forests were crucial for fuel, for fodder, for water retention, for medicinal plants, for food in times of scarcity and famine.

Also, a cultural and social dislocation because of what the forest meant to them in terms of their way of life. You’re absolutely right; that was my argument about Chipko. That would also be my argument about the Kerala fisherfolk struggle, anti-mining conflict protests that were happening in Orissa in the 1980s, and so on. Very much so. It’s not that Gandhianism is absent, but it’s an overlay. It’s an overlay. It’s the patina on top. It’s not the core or the essence.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s also the means towards what is actually going on, which is that we need to be the people who determine our own destiny from how the garbage gets picked up, to how the river gets used, to grazing rights, to mining rights, to everything, right?

GUHA: Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Again, the reason I like going back this long in history is there really isn’t a very clean structural break. When I think about India from 1850s until 2025, whether it’s the colonial nationalization of forests in 1860 and just overnight dispossession of community rights, whether it is the systematic plunder for the war effort, for the railways effort, for industrializing Britain, there’s that thing going on. And then we have the Indian government, which takes over pretty much the exact same infrastructure, never changes the laws. In fact, constitutionalizes the same terrible laws, and it’s an overarching central plan state.

Then we come to the liberalization moment where after ’91, in ’93/’94, one hopes that there is going to be decentralization through the 73rd, 74th Amendment. People who are in local government will finally get to decide their community rights, property rights, and so on. That also never quite happens because we botched that up. Whether it is state, whether it is market, whether it’s the colonial state, whether it’s the Indian state, no matter what’s going on, it seems to me that the overarching problem is one of centralization versus local decision-making by the local stakeholders. Am I drawing too clear and broad an arc, or is this the right way to interpret all of the environmental work you’ve done?

GUHA: This is certainly a very accurate and plausible way of representing the whole process. I’ll just add a couple of things. One is that, after 1947, when India became independent, many things changed. We had universal adult franchise. We had a constitution. Women and Dalits, at least, in theory, had equal rights under law. Natural resource management did not change insofar as the state, as you pointed out, maintained total and exclusive control.

What it did, in the first phase of India’s economic development after independence, was to massively subsidize natural resources, not recognizing that this was not just socially unjust, but ecologically disastrous. There’s a case study done by a student of professor Madhav Gadgil many years ago about the subsidizing of bamboo, which was from the state forest, from the forest owned by the state, was given to a private paper mill, this was in the ’60s and the ’70s, at 1 rupee a ton when the basket weaver had to buy it at 2,000 rupee a ton in the open market. It’s socially unjust and ecologically disastrous because you’re so undervaluing the resource, you’re encouraging overexploitation.

The second thing I’d say is, in many ways, the liberalization took place from the ’90s onwards was necessary. We had to dismantle the License Permit quota raj, unleashed a wave of innovation, entrepreneurship, which has had many beneficial outcomes: decline in mass poverty, surge in, as I said, entrepreneurship, stability in our foreign exchange reserves, which was not there when I was growing up. We were really desperately scarce in foreign exchange.

One area in which we still needed to have laws and regulations, and also local participation, was natural resource management. Mining is a very good example. There’s been a surge in mining in the 1990s, particularly coal, but also aluminum and magnesite and other resources, where large stacks of land had been given over to private corporations. Now, a lot of this is in Adivasi areas.

Actually, a part of the 73rd Amendment, which you mentioned, which is panchayat raj, what could also enable provisions in the Fifth and Sixth Schedule to say, “Let the local community decide—do they want a mine, what kind of stake can you give them, both a decision-making stake and even possibly a financial stake.” Actually, imaginatively interpreted, our constitution allows this. Instead of just a straight deal between the politician in power and the mining baron.

RAJAGOPALAN: There could be equity partnership.

GUHA: Actually, no state has really empowered panchayats. You have elections, but they have no financial powers, they have no distributary powers, they have no decision-making powers. What they did, by the way, there was a brief period in Karnataka in the late ’80s and early ’90s under the Janata government—since your podcast ranges very widely over many things, at this stage, I’d like to say something about a very important distinction in Indian politics, which is missed by most observers of Indian politics. The distinction between the socialist trend and the communist trend. Now, Indian communists believed in centralization, but Indian socialists actually believed in decentralization.

RAJAGOPALAN: Many of them.

GUHA: Jayaprakash Narayan and people. This Janata government that was in power in Karnataka in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it had a visionary panchayat raj minister called Abdul Nazir Sab, who died young, was passionate about decentralization. Again, studies in India, late ’80s and early ’90s, show that when it came to water, grasslands, and other resources, they were much better managed in those few years when the Janata government was in power. Janata government lost power, the Congress came back and recentralized. 

The impetus for recentralization comes from three distinct groups who have convergent interests. One is politicians, the second is the mining and infrastructure companies with whom they strike deals, and the third is the bureaucracy, which is a very important centralizing force, which does not want to decentralize. The DM or the secretary does not want to give power to the panchayat, or the mandal, or the nagar palika committee.

RAJAGOPALAN: Let me add a fourth to that. It’s also the international community because they’d rather deal with one person and get clearances right at the top than deal with a federal system where there are multiple stakeholders and so on.

GUHA: You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. Now, that moment is lost, where you had still elements of that socialist tradition. Democratic socialist, decentralized socialist tradition inspired partly by Gandhi. Actually, some of this actually came from Gandhi, their reading of Gandhi.

RAJAGOPALAN: On the socialist part, I’ll tell you the discomfort I have with the socialist environmentalism. You’re absolutely right, communists is heavily centralized. There is a strand of socialism, especially the Nehruvian socialism, which is heavily centralized. There’s of course, Gandhian socialism and especially the Jayaprakash Narayan and Lohia, that side, which is much more decentralized.

Having said that, even Indian socialists have a great discomfort with the lack of uniformity that decentralization brings with it. If you’re truly decentralized, then different communities are going to choose differently. Some tribals will choose to modernize. They do want to be part of the global economic system. Some tribals prefer to be more conservative, they like their old styles of livelihood. Different communities will choose differently, and the power structures of those local communities are going to lead to different outcomes.

The moment something like that happens, the Indian socialists become nervous, and then they want more centralization. It’s decentralization for the stuff we like, but when we don’t like it, we want the higher power that be to come and intervene. By the way, I’m not saying that this is juxtaposed with capitalists or anyone else. This is just the Indian middle class. This is just how we operate. As long as we like the outcomes, we’d like people to make their own decisions; the moment we think they’re going wrong, a paternalist centralizing force must clamp down.

GUHA: Absolutely. I agree.

RAJAGOPALAN: No defense of socialists from you, Ram. You’re disappointing me.

GUHA: Well, the thing is, the socialists, they were a very interesting group. Again, this is diverting slightly from my book, but I think it’s interesting. Apart from decentralizing, there were two or three other interesting aspects of the socialist tradition. One is they were very women friendly. There were more active women in the socialist movement. You know, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Pramila Dandavate, Mrinal Gore, and so on and so forth. They’re either the communist or the progressive.

The other, they were very interested in cooperatives, which is, again, a very interesting economic and social reform with huge possibilities in the Indian context. Finally, they had an aesthetic side. Art, theater, music, all of these were very important to them. The problem with the Indian socialists was they were also very divided, very fractious, very polemical, and they kept on fighting with each other, and so on. I mourn their loss because, I think, they gave quite a lot to Indian politics and culture more broadly. That tradition has just vanished.

We still have elements of the communists, we have, of course, Hindutva, we still have the Congress in whatever attenuated form, but the socialists have gone. Broadly, I would mourn their loss for all the problems that you talked about.

RAJAGOPALAN: I would mourn the loss of one particular strand of socialists, which is Jayaprakash Narayan. Of course, there were others who came later, like B. D. Sharma and others. That is the strand which, I think, has just completely disappeared, the people who lived and worked with the local community.

GUHA: You see because also, Shruti, they were instinctive environmentalists, unlike the communists who thought the state and the communist manifesto could conquer all natural environmental obstacles, or the free market economists who thought the market would solve everything, or the Nehruvians who were possessed of a kind of technological arrogance and hubris. The limits of human ambition, greed, the need to respect the boundaries in which you live, not just the social and cultural, but also the environmental boundaries, that you would find was there among the socialists.

Patrick Geddes and J. C. Kumarappa

RAJAGOPALAN: Definitely. Now, I want to come back to the book very specifically. There’s almost a false tradeoff that is set up in modern discussion between development and environmentalism, economic development more specifically. Like you mentioned in your earlier comments, this is a little bit of a weasel way out that politicians and bureaucrats like to set it up as this, “Oh, we have to develop before we think about the environment. Let the West subsidize these problems,” sort of thing.

One very nice juxtaposition that you have is between people who do care about development like, say, Patrick Geddes. There are people who are a little bit more conservative, and who, in modern terms, you may almost call degrowthers like, say, J. C. Kumarappa, right?

GUHA: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to talk about these two individuals. To me, Patrick Geddes seems so prescient, so relevant in modern times, just understands, instinctively, that urbanization and getting out of poverty traps is going to be the most important thing for most people and what they wish for in their life. Can you discuss these two individuals and maybe bring out this distinction between sometimes we romanticize poverty and local communities a little too much and maybe we need to think about environmentalism a little bit more like Geddes?

GUHA: Yes. Those two individuals that you picked from my book, to talk a little bit about them, so J. C. Kumarappa is taking absolutely literally Gandhi’s statement, “India lives in her villages.” He says, “India lives in her villages, and India will continue to live in her villages,” which is a statement of object. He thinks that’s how it will happen. Of course, there’s also moral salience that India must live in our villages.

How do we make these villages more self-sustaining, more responsible in their stewardship of water, forests, pastures, soil? Even the nonagricultural needs, how do we meet through the renewal and revival of village industry, whether it be tanning, carpentry, weaving, rearing silkworms, making honey, and so on and so forth. That is the kind of Kumarappa vision. Geddes is saying, “India lives in her villages, but India also lives in her cities, and whether you like it or not, it’s going to live more and more in her cities.”

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

GUHA: Of course, we are also ancient in the urban civilization. Geddes was fascinated, for example, which I don’t talk about in the book because of the shortage of space, but he was also fascinated by some of our ancient temple cities like Thanjavur. He’s more interested in the modern city as a node of economic growth that attracts migrants. He knows that Bombay, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Lahore, Dhaka, Colombo, these are all cities about which is known will grow.

Yet, they must grow, in a way, in which they provide spaces for recreation, for nature-loving where crucial resources like water and energy are managed sustainably, where there’s some element of social equity, and also where the rights of women are protected. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of his work is that he looks at technical innovations that reduce the burden on women like pulleys in wells that make drawing water easier and so on.

These are, in a sense, though they appear to be contradictory perspectives, I think they are different. Notwithstanding Kumarappa’s excessive idealism, he too is giving us a legacy which is not entirely irrelevant in India today, where still more than half of the population still lives in villages. Geddes is a true visionary. If you look at his approach, also, it’s absolutely interdisciplinary and his vision of urban planning is quite different from Corbusier’s.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, absolutely.

GUHA: Of course, India chose the Corbusier way in some sense.

RAJAGOPALAN: The reason I find them distinct—this is not because I think J. C. Kumarappa is not important, I mean, he’s an absolute giant, or that his work is not relevant—it is that I do worry that some of the literature on environmentalism sometimes romanticizes tribal livelihoods and village livelihoods a little too much. Silkworm rearing is not a fun job. It’s not exactly working in a nice place and in nice settings. Some of this is backbreaking work. The tanning industry is just backbreaking work, so nobody wants to do that work.

This may be a particular critique more of the middle class than, say, Kumarappa or someone else, it’s more people who espouse those views. I feel like we have this attitude amongst middle-class environmentalists where we’re like we want to live in cities, travel in business class, write books, be part of the global economy, and watch Netflix, but they should be picking betel leaves, doing honeybee-keeping, and silk rearing. I’m very uncomfortable with that strand of environmentalism which is why Kumarappa and his followers sit a little bit more uncomfortably in my head than, say, Geddes. 

GUHA: I think an earlier book of mine that was published almost 20 years ago, halfway between Unquiet Roads and Speaking with Nature, the collection of essays called, How Much Should a Person Consume, in the last essay of that book, I talk about what I call the anthropologist utopia and the economist utopia. The anthropologist utopia is similar to what you describe: the local communities, self-sufficient, practicing the traditional culture, happy where they are. The economist utopia is essentially that there are no limits to consumption and growth. In fact, I was thinking this morning about this. Your listeners will be interested in this.

In 1972, there was this famous and controversial report of The Club of Rome called Limits to Growth. Now, it may have been excessively apocalyptic. It may have underestimated the possibilities of innovation and substitution of resources. There was a reaction to that. About the reactions to that was an article by the well-known Oxford economist, Wilfred Beckerman, where he said—I remember reading this many years ago. I should find the exact quote. I think it was in the Journal of Oxford Economic Papers. He said, “Economic growth can continue uninterrupted for 2,500 years.” These are the two kinds of utopias. 

I don’t believe in degrowth. I think some parts of the world need to degrow. Some subsections of India need to degrow, the incredibly wealthy part. Other people need more growth. They need more opportunity. In that, if you look at means of transportation, walking for a cycle is emancipation. Exchanging a cycle for a motorbike is further emancipation because it gives you more freedom to go around. Exchanging a motorbike for a car is even more liberation, except that that’s when you reach the ecological limits because not every human being can have a car. The world just can’t take it.

The question there is, how much should a person, how much should a society, how much should the community can consume? I see, in that sense, both these utopias, the anthropologist utopia, people don’t want it. Many people don’t want it anymore. Even the Adivasis don’t want it. The economist utopia is that the whole world can have the consumption lifestyle of an average American, which is what China and India and other countries are aspiring to, is just physically and ecologically and biologically unfeasible.

That’s why the epigraph to my book is Gandhi saying we, “will strip the world bare like locusts.” India might strip the world bare like locusts. I agree with you. I agree that the Gandhian tradition of austerity, restraint can be carried too far and can even be a curb on human freedom and a self-expression because it wants to freeze people in certain boxes. Let me go off on a little bit of a rant.

RAJAGOPALAN: Please do.

GUHA: I’ve often wondered about the phrase, “the American way of life,” and adjacent phrase, the “American dream.” I’ve lived several years in America and half a dozen different stretches. It seems to me that a simple definition of what is the American dream or the American way of life is, “I will do”—and I’m deliberately using the male pronoun—it is, “I will do better than my father.” What is, “I will do better than my father”? If he has one car, I will have two cars. If he has one house, I’ll have two houses, possibly also, a yacht. That is the American dream.

This American dream, that is, “I will have a more comfortable, luxurious, and by definition, more resource-intensive lifestyle than my father because my plentiful underpopulated continent and my powers of innovation, creativity, liberty, democracy, pursuit of happiness, will enable this.” Now, this is running up against ecological limits. That realization has not come and will not come easily to the majority of Americans, and certainly not to their political parties, whether democratic or Republican. The idea of restraint and limits, the Gandhians may carry it to one extent, but the Americans ignore it totally.

If Indians and the Chinese and all the other so-called less developed countries in the world are also chasing that American dream, that’s when we come to the planetary crisis we are now facing.

RAJAGOPALAN: A few things in response. I think three main things. I’m an economist, and I think the economist utopia is not this endless material consumption. I think that’s a bit of a caricature. In particular, it’s a bit of a Marxist caricature of market economy and so on.

GUHA: No, no, no, it’s not because Marxists believe in that too. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Marxists also believe in that.

GUHA: Marxists believe in that. If you read Marx, what does Marx say? There’ll be no limit to abundance.

RAJAGOPALAN: No limit to abundance. They want to redistribute it. I’ll tell you what—

GUHA: The Marxists say everyone will travel business class, not just one.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but I’ll tell you what is the economist utopia according to me. It is that all the costs are internalized and not just the benefits. I think, as an economist, that is the core principle we live by, which is, if there are environmental costs, if there are ecological costs, if there are costs on other people’s—this could be a shadow cast on someone’s field, or this could be the upstream water being polluted to go downstream, the economist core value is that costs must be internalized.

I think you’re right in that in a lot of the industrialization-led growth, especially in the last 30, 40 years, not all the costs were internalized. By the time we woke up to the fact that some of these costs of air pollution and lead exposure and dumping wasted water in common pool, even in the ocean, I think by the time that realization came, the ship had sailed a little bit. There, I don’t quibble with you, but I don’t think it’s an economist utopia to grow endlessly without internalizing costs.

GUHA: Maybe it’s the American utopia with the Chinese— 

RAJAGOPALAN: No, on the American utopia I have—

GUHA: I’ll abide by that.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, but I have a slightly different comment on the American utopia, which is I live in the United States. This is one of the most federal and decentralized countries that exists. We can’t destroy the local bird-watching area and put in a dog park or a children’s park without the entire community showing up to vote. There is a municipal bond that was floated. It was vetoed because we said, “We don’t want to lose the bird community in our neighborhood.” This is all happening in my neighborhood, okay, which is just outside of Washington, DC?

America is also extremely federal, and I’m not talking about the destruction of the Native Americans and stuff. That was many centuries ago. In modern-day America, there is a very strong local government, which has persisted for about 200 years, and people are very particular about their common-pool resources. That garbage does get picked up, and that there should be parks and there should be bird sanctuaries, and there should be lakes and pools and aquifers.

In that sense, I think the American system has a natural balance when it comes to the local common problems. Now, they may be creating global commons problems and destroying the ozone layer and dumping waste in the oceans and so on. I think America can be blamed for that. I think America’s also set a phenomenal example on how to solve local commons problems, which India must very much learn from. We need far more local government, not less.

GUHA: Also, I think America, pre-Trump, has shown how you can use science and the law—

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. That was the third point.

GUHA: —in environmental regulation. That, I would agree, yes. My counterexample to that would be, for example, climate change, American governments have been much slower than European governments, which [unintelligible 00:38:09].

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

GUHA: I agree. The ethic of, as you say, the federal system is certainly much more robust there than, certainly, say, in India.

RAJAGOPALAN: Even the national parks, America is an incredibly, ecologically, well-preserved country relative—

GUHA: Side by side. You protect nature, and outside, you drive 1,000 miles in an SUV to Yellowstone.

RAJAGOPALAN: That too.

GUHA: That contradiction is there.

RAJAGOPALAN: That contradiction is there. The third reason I think economic growth might be the only way out, and I again, want to come back to the book and connect it with the longer arc that you’ve placed. All the Malthusians were very worried that we can’t feed enough people who populate the planet. Eventually, the ecological side of the Malthusians was there will be no forest left because everything will have to be cut for farming so that we can feed people. Now, it’s economic growth and technological innovation and science and progress, which leads to, say, fertilizer use and figuring out how to grow more with less.

A very large part of the forest preservation movement was enabled because we didn’t have to keep cutting them down either for transportation reasons or industrial reasons, or just simply to feed people. We can draw that thread right from 150 years ago till today. Now, whether it’s nuclear power to propel AI as opposed to having fossil fuels, or whether it is solar power and so on, how does that fit with some of the people in the book? Because Tagore was very progress and science-oriented. He wanted environmentalism, but there, we studied cutting-edge science. His idea was to be a good scientist, you don’t just study science; you also study history, and you also study local environment, and you also study culture, and so on.

You have, of course, people like Patrick Geddes, with whom this fits fairly well. You have the Howards, with whom, again, this kind of scientific bent of mind and how progress is essentially going to get us out of this mess sits pretty well, but that’s not true of many of the others in the book. What is a good way to think about science and progress and this long arc of environmentalism? Let’s stick with pre-Chipko thinkers because that’s really where the book is located.

Science and Progress of Environmentalism

GUHA: What I wanted to show in this book was the diversity of environmental thought. Diversity in terms of how they’ve used concepts like science or even progress or slightly less comfortable to the idea of progress. What kind of domains did they work in? Did they work in the city, the village, the forest? What kind of, shall we say, intellectual framework did they adopt? Was it more literary? Was it more social scientific? Was it more scientific?

I didn’t want to draw any general conclusions. What I wanted to show was really three things. One, that there is a fairly deep history to Indian environmental thought predating Chipko by a century, firstly. That’s something I’ve demonstrated. Secondly, and this may be slightly more controversial, but I wanted to argue that insofar as there is an Indian tradition, it is more strongly oriented towards questions of social justice than, shall we say, the American traditional environmentalism. If you look at the early icons of American environmentalism, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and so on, the Indian tradition, including Tagore and Geddes and all that, are much more oriented towards questions of social justice.

The third thing I wanted to say was that, to this Indian tradition, many non-Indians have contributed. I wanted to push back against that kind of a nativism that Hindus were ancient environmentalists, Indians knew it all along, Indian Taoist were gurus, east and west. 

Fourthly, what I said earlier on that, independent of climate change, we can learn from some of these exemplars. Beyond that, these are profiles of 10 remarkable but very different and distinctive individuals. One of the interesting things, it’s now been about six months since the book came out in India, is the diversity of reactions. Some people like you find Geddes absolutely fascinating.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I find others also fascinating. I find Geddes to be relevant to current times.

GUHA: The other people, for example architects and town planners who know all about Geddes, and have never heard of Mirabehn or the Howards or Krishnan. I’d say this, I think this is, principally, a work of historical retrieval, and secondarily, an intervention in thinking about India’s present and future. Obviously, it’s inescapable. Every historian, or most historians, at least modern historians, choose a topic which they think will appeal to the present. They don’t want to write about something purely out of curiosity or their own personal interest because many of these people were new to me. I had not heard of the Howards at all. Obviously, I knew about the Gandhians. I knew about Kumarappa. 

RAJAGOPALAN: You’ve written about Mirabehn in Rebels Against the Raj, you’ve written a full-length biography of Elwin.

GUHA: The Howards were completely new to me. At first, I discovered Albert. Then one of the early readers of the manuscript told me, “I think you’ve underplayed Gabrielle. Look more about her.” I did find the fact that she was, in some ways, the more original thinker in terms of theory.

The Howards

RAJAGOPALAN: Why don’t you walk us through how you discovered them and what you found?

GUHA: How I discovered them, which I briefly mentioned in the book, is after I finished my PhD and while The Unquiet Woods was in press, I was teaching at Yale for a year. I’d never heard of the Howards. One of my students at Yale was a great admirer of Wendell Berry, who was, as you know, an American poet and an agrarian environmentalist. He urged me to read Wendell Berry’s book, The Unsettling of America. I saw a lot of this man called Albert Howard.

That struck my curiosity in how Berry had been inspired by Albert Howard to live on a farm, to use noninvasive methods, to eschew chemical fertilizers and only use organic manure and sustain himself on his farm. Then I found that this person worked in India most of his life. That led me a little bit to him and his writings and then to his wife. These were two scientists, agricultural scientists trained in Cambridge.

Albert was a little senior to Gabrielle, and he comes out to India, and then Gabrielle joins him. Because of the gender bias, she can’t get a job in the colonial establishment. Finally, he’s able to persuade people to give her a job. They worked together in the colonial agricultural service for two decades, but are disenchanted with the bureaucracy, the top-down approach, the excessive segmentation where specialists work in isolation of one another. They’re developing a kind of an ecological, holistic approach to plant science.

Then they start their own institute in Indore funded by the princess, where they develop this method of organic farming. Then, of course, Gabrielle dies and Albert comes back, and becomes a pioneer of organic farming in England, greatly admired in America. Apart from Wendell Berry, one of his, shall we say, acolytes in America is a man called Rodale who founds the Rodale Press, which has all these magazines on organic gardening and so on. It was a rather curious way of discovering, through an American student who alerted me to a book by an American poet, I learned about a scientist who worked in India. It was really rather strange but fortuitous.

RAJAGOPALAN: You know, I also love their story. Those who are not Indian and worked in India, I love their stories for different reasons. There’s almost an anti-cosmopolitan intellectual vein that’s going through India right now, and this completely rubbishes that. The bigger reason is whether it is Slade, whether it is the Howards, we’ve, in modern day, between the internet and this kind of homogenized education curricula, we’ve started borrowing these best practices and solutions from other countries.

Now, I’m alarmed that we’re also borrowing the problems from other countries. It was bad enough that we were borrowing the solutions, but we’re also borrowing the problems and not looking in our backyard. These people really demonstrated what 20, 30, 40 years of working in a particular community and learning things that are contextualized to that community can produce in terms of a more universal learning or a more universal outcome.

This idea of how do we have self-regenerating soil solutions as opposed to this crazy chemical fertilizer sort of carpet bombing we’ve had in India is a prime example of that. Our water table is not just depleted, but it’s also toxic in most places.

GUHA: Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: The kind of fertilizer consumption that we have. Actually, for me as an economist, they’re interesting because they slide right between this development versus environmental debate because they say, “You can have development, you can have better produce, better yields, but you just got to do it contextually. To do it contextually, you have to understand the local conditions, the local microclimate, the local patterns, what can grow where and so on and so forth.” I found them absolutely fascinating for that reason.

GUHA: More broadly on the Howards as representing a strand of non-Indians who did interesting and original work in India, one of the reasons this book has 10 individuals, five of whom are not Indian in terms of birth or origin, histories of environmental thought are deeply reflected by nationalism. The Americans exalt Muir and Thoreau and Leopold. The English exalt William Wordsworth and William Morris. Then you’ll have the Germans saying, “But Humboldt was before any of these guys.” 

I wanted to push back against that. Totally, was that pushing back against what you say, which is the nativism that is rampant in the Indian public discourse today, but also the kind of nationalist triumphalism which is so visible in the environmental literature. I wanted to push back against that.

RAJAGOPALAN: I like that a lot, for a second reason, which you haven’t mentioned, because it also fits with your core theme of environmentalism, which is that it is not overly centralized. There is no national problem and there is no national solution.

GUHA: There’s no national tradition. There’s no national tradition, either, yes.

Radhakamal Mukerjee

RAJAGOPALAN: Right. It has to be highly local. To continue with this, the other incredible figure in the book about whom I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing is Radhakamal Mukerjee. I’m at George Mason University. We are enormously influenced by the Elinor Ostrom tradition. In fact, I met her right after she won her Nobel prize. She spent some time here at Mason. My view of property rights is very much influenced by the Ostrom view.

When I read Radhakamal Mukerjee, it’s like there’s an Ostrom before Ostrom. One, can you tell us a little bit more about him? I mean, at least in popular culture, we know a little bit, I’ve at least heard the names of Kumarappa and Geddes and so on. Just never heard a mention of him outside of environmental circles, I imagine.

GUHA: That’s a good question. Let me try and answer it. You see, what happened was, just as there is this book which tries to show that they were environmentalists before Chipko and Narmada, Indian environmental thinkers before Chipko and Narmada, similarly, there is a tradition of Indian social science, pre-independence, that has been suppressed, forgotten, because apparently in one version, everything began in JNU. In the other version, everything began 20 years before JNU, the Delhi School of Economics. 

This tradition is something which our mutual friend, Niranjan Rajyadhaksha has also pushed back against, from a different perspective, because talking about the Bombay School of Economics. The Bombay School started 20 years before the Delhi School. Let’s be clear, the Delhi School had some outstanding economists, so the most famous were obviously Sen and Bhagwati, but there was Dharma Kumar, there was K. N. Raj—

RAJAGOPALAN: Padma Desai.

GUHA: Padma Desai, Mrinal Datta Chaudhary. And also, I would add, I should say, that along with these brilliant economists, it also had brilliant sociologists: M. N. Srinivas, André Beteille, Veena Das. Now, before the Delhi School, there was Bombay, and there was also Lucknow. Lucknow has been written about by the veteran Indian anthropologist T. N. Madan, who studied in Lucknow, and there were there were three sociologists in Lucknow: Radhakamal Mukerjee, D. P. Mukherji, who was unrelated to him, and D. N. Majumdar, who was a kind of anthropologist. Now, they were all working from the ’20s and ’30s onwards, and they were written out of the narrative of the history of Indian social science, because as I said, everything started in the Delhi School.

If you are a liberal, it started in the Delhi School. If you are a Marxist in the ’50s, if you are a Marxist, Indian social science started in J.D.U. in the 1970s. Now, I’m not being merely facetious, I think I’m also being accurate and precise in explaining why Radhakamal Mukherjee and people like him, G. S. Ghurye in Bombay, or C. N. Vakil, the economist in Bombay, were written out of the narrative. He was a very interesting man.

Again, he was trained in economics, and again, if you contrast him with all the celebrated Indian economists, including of the younger generation, like Abhijit Banerjee and so on, he’s entirely educated in India. He studies economics in Kolkata, where he encounters both Tagore and Geddes, and he meets Geddes quite early on, and was influenced by his ideas. And he moves to Lucknow, and does a PhD in Kolkata, moves to Lucknow, and becomes interested in sociology. He’s an interdisciplinary social scientist, long before these terms became fashionable. He’s talking about what economics can learn from sociology, from history, from political science, and from ecology.

Now, how he discovers ecology is not very clear to me, possibly through Geddes, because Geddes was clearly an ecologist. He then develops this ecological approach to social science. A hundred years ago, he writes an essay, “An Ecological Approach to Sociology” in the American Journal of Sociology. Then, of course, he talks, because he’s living in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and he’s traveling in the villages, he recognizes the importance of common property resources like forest, grazing, and water.

I do say in the epilogue to the book that he anticipates Ostrom, maybe not in theoretical sophistication, but in understanding the significance of common property resources in sustaining rural communities. Then so Geddes, he also gets interested in the city, and develops a regional approach, which is the city and the village in a particular ecological context. I mean, there are some problematic aspects of his worldview. He’s a patriarch. He thinks women should just produce children. All of that. 

RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t judge them by today’s norms. Let’s be honest. Nor do I judge someone’s environmentalism by their ideas outside of environmentalism. I think we have to be a little bit fair. One thing I really enjoyed about him—

GUHA: Among the reasons he’s not so well known, apart from all the reasons I’ve used, is that he was an incredibly clumsy, wordy, jargon-ridden, pro-stylist. He made it difficult for people to understand how important what he was saying was.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yet so many people who are clumsy and wordy and jargon-filled are incredibly well known, Ram, so I don’t know if that’s a plausible reason. Jokes aside, the reason I think I got so much out of that particular chapter and learning about him and from him is the theme that keeps appearing in environmentalism, especially the kind that you are talking about, which is, let’s think about this bottom up, ground up. Of course, we have to plan how we use our resources, right, both in the moment and also intertemporally, and also how it’s distributed between different stakeholders.

The question to me always as an economist is, who’s doing the planning? I think the reason he’s such an important person is hundred years before anyone else, he has a crystal clear idea of who needs to do that planning, why it is them that need to do the planning, and what is in their local context, local knowledge and local relationships with each other and with the ecology that helps them actually plan better ecological outcomes. I think that strand is completely lost. We talk about the problems and so on, but who should actually be the decision-maker is kind of disappeared from modern Indian environmental thought.

GUHA: Yes. I think possibly because he’s an economist, he engaged more with municipalities, with governments—and that he might have got from Geddes, because Geddes was always trying to influence policy, usually unwillingly , but he never gave up trying. Whereas, I think contemporary Indian environmentalists demonize the state, and they don’t want to engage with it. Whereas the state, whether you like it or not, is there. It’s a very powerful, determining entity, which can be used for good or bad or for both. One has to engage with it. Of course, one has to try and democratize it, humanize it, make it more aware of science and so on. I think Geddes was always involved in planning and Mukherjee must have got it from him.

K. M. Munshi

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m so thrilled to hear. Discovering both of them, it was just such a joy in this book for me. One person we haven’t spoken about yet and is incredibly important is K. M. Munshi. You talk about him as the Hindutva ecologist, right?

GUHA: Hindutva environmentalist

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, so environmentalists, in the list of 10 people. One, I had never quite thought of K. M. Munshi in those terms. This was a treat on that margin, though I do know that he had cabinet positions where he could influence rural development and forests and so on and so forth. What is Hindutva environmentalism? Why do you characterize him that way? What can modern Hindutva environmentalists learn from him and so on?

GUHA: Before I come to K. M. Munshi, I want to say something about how I discovered most of the people in this book.

RAJAGOPALAN: That would be wonderful.

GUHA: The means of my discovering these people is a cautionary tale for all your younger listeners. All these people were discovered by me, their writings were found by me, read by me before the internet was invented. It’s in libraries and old bookstores and pavement sellers that I found all of this. It’s not Google Scholar or—

RAJAGOPALAN: JSTOR.

GUHA: —JSTOR or whatever other fancy tools that people have nowadays. It is just through browsing in libraries, browsing in old bookstores, government repositories, looking for old out-of-print documents that I found all of these people. That’s how I found Munshi, too. I found a collection of addresses that Munshi had given, bearing the title The Gospel of the Dirty Hand, which he had given when he was minister of food and agriculture. I found it—I can’t even remember where. Possibly the second-hand bookstore in my hometown, Bangalore, where I’m speaking to you from, but it could have been Kolkata or Delhi also. Munshi and Tagore are two people in this book who are much better known for what they did apart from environmentalist. Tagore, we all know about—great poet.

RAJAGOPALAN: Mirabehn also.

GUHA: Mirabehn, because of her association with Gandhi. Munshi is more like Tagore. He was truly multifaceted. He was one of Bombay’s top lawyers.

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

GUHA: He was the best-selling Gujarati novelist of his time. He founded the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and coined the phrase Vishvaguru. Now, he was very important in Congress politics. He was a minister in the Bombay presidency. He was sent by Patel as a resident in Hyderabad to negotiate with the Nizam. As a lawyer, he also played a role in the Constituent Assembly. Now, all of this is well known.

These two years as minister for food and agriculture, with forests as one of his responsibilities, was totally forgotten, till I read for this book, and then I started looking more. Then I realized I knew vaguely. You see, Shruti, my father was a scientist in the Forest Research Institute. I knew vaguely that Munshi had come there when my father was young and inaugurated the World Forestry Congress. I knew he had started some kind of annual festival called Van Mahotsav, but I didn’t know anything more about them.

When I drew this book, then I started looking at his papers, which are in the Teen Murti Library, and other speeches and letters and essays by him. It was really quite fascinating, because here, unlike Kumarappa, unlike Mira, unlike Tagore, unlike Geddes, unlike Radhakamal Mukherjee, unlike the Howards, he was an environmentalist very briefly in his career and only after he became minister in charge of forests.

Where he found that he could leverage his deep understanding of Hindu myth and legend and storytelling with the need to plant forests, and through forests, to safeguard our water, our soil, and so on, and he brought a religious imagery to it. He said, Krishna was born in the forest, and so our ancient scriptures were composed in the forest. Our temples were traditionally in sacred groves, and that’s what I’ve tried to restore.

And like Tagore, because he was principally a writer, he could articulate his views with uncommon eloquence. I think the excerpts from his speeches I’ve quoted show that. I thought he was an interesting character, interesting precursor of a strand in contemporary Indian environmentalism, which essentially looks at the Hindu tradition for the answers to our present problem. That’s why he’s there.

RAJAGOPALAN: One question on this. Does he truly look for answers in Hindu tradition, or is he just using it to popularize it in a country where people are most familiar with their local practices and the Ganges started flowing from Shiva’s dreadlocks? This is all part of every Hindu household. Is he just using it as a means of communication, or is there something particularly Hindutva in the environmentalism itself?

GUHA: More the latter. It’s a way of attracting, striking a chord with your Hindu audience. In a sense, it’s also instrumentalizing of religious tradition for a modern secular purpose, you could say. What is interesting is it was just a brief phase in his life. He came to it very late, and then as soon as he demitted office, he lost interest in it and went back to publishing books in the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Again, in a sense, Mukherjee wrote a very social-scientific prose. Munshi and Tagore wrote a very literary prose. You can actually add some of the others are in between.

RAJAGOPALAN: In between. Munshi is even more rhetorically powerful than Tagore.

GUHA: Yes. At least when it comes to this subject. Tagore may be more rhetorically powerful for other things, about nationalism and so on. Yes, I think that’s what it is. Since this is a history of ideas, you want to also show the different ways in which people express their ideas, their thoughts, their arguments, the different registers, the different forms of expression. As I said, what this book tries to show is just the diversity of approaches that people had to the environmental predicament.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, the reason I wanted to dig into it is there is nothing different about Hindutva environmentalism; it’s talking about the same principles, that we do need to care about our forests and our rivers and our clean environment and preserve things for the future. It’s just a question of what the association is. It’s fundamentally not like some weird environmentalism. That’s what I think I’m trying to get at in this discussion.

GUHA: I think it is only in the sense that the argument is that ancient Hindus had this wisdom. We have to recover and we have to repeat.

RAJAGOPALAN: Ancient Hindus also burned down forests and did all sorts of strange things, right?

GUHA: Yes. All these recoveries of tradition are selective, whether it’s Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism. All attempts to give contemporary environmentalism a religious caste are highly selective.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but I do think it is helpful to root things contextually. Religious tradition can’t be removed from people’s daily lives or their local context beyond a point. To the extent that that is relevant, I would see—and I mean, this is a Hindu-majority country. If we’re talking about religious texts, that’s probably going to be the most obvious thing to lean into. It was just clear to me that Hindutva is not like a whole new branch of environmentalism. It’s the same thing in a different bottle and a different language maybe that can relate things better. Because we don’t call it tribal environmentalism when we root it in tribal practices. Do you know what I mean?

GUHA: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Right? We just call it local practices, then.

GUHA: I think some people would call it tribal practice.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m very offended by all of that. I don’t know why.

GUHA: Yes, but I think those terms are used.

RAJAGOPALAN: Can you retire those terms for us? You managed to decolonize the environmentalism. Can you also de-jargonize it from all these bizarre identities, Ram? Am I expecting too much from you in one book? No. 

Technological Progress and Tradeoffs

One last question that I have for you in particular is, how do you view technology in modern times? I don’t want to be Pollyanna in the way I think about the tradeoffs. There are some serious tradeoffs. If we care more and more about solar energy and battery storage in a way that we don’t rely on fossil fuel, then we are going to lean in a little bit more on mining and rare minerals and lithium mining and things that are required for these batteries. If we think more and more about using highly contextual solutions for which we may need AI to know what is best suited for a particular local farmland or a local forest, then we’re also thinking about the amount of energy that AI is going to use.

I’m a huge tech optimist, just as an individual, not just as an economist. There are some of these tradeoffs, and I’m just curious about where you lie on these tradeoffs or how do you think the future, not just the past?

GUHA: I’ll say two things, Shruti. I’ve not thought as carefully about it as I perhaps should have. On the question of science and technology, I’ll say two things: One is related to India’s environmental challenges. The second is related to how I view technology, generally. The first, I’d say, is I’m not sure. In the epilogue, I may briefly allude to it, but I don’t think I have done it more in popular talks I have given, is that in India today, say compared to 40 years ago when I started my research or 35 years ago, today we have a very large reservoir of scientific expertise in areas connected to environmental sustainability. We have outstanding soil scientists, hydrologists, energy scientists, urban planners, transport planners, conservation scientists, and so on and so forth.

Now, we have a much larger bench strength of high-quality, broadly environmental and ecological scientists than almost any other Asian or African or Latin American country. These scientists who are there in our IITs, in our IISERs, in the Institutes of Science, in some of our outstanding nongovernmental organizations in my hometown like ATREE and so on, are never consulted by government.

Our governments are knowledge-proof when it comes to ecological science and technology. If they are planning a new transport system, they won’t consult the best energy scientists who’s at the IISC. If they want to build a series of dams, they won’t consult a hydrologist. If they want to manage their national parks, they won’t consult our best wildlife scientist. Our governments are knowledge-proof. Actually, the only experts they consult are economists.

RAJAGOPALAN: Not even. They’re not listening to us, Ram.

GUHA: They’re also going to raise a question, “Are they asking the right kind of economists?” or so I thought. That, I think, is a real tragedy, because as I said, unlike any of our neighboring countries, unlike possibly even China, we have really a first-rate pool of high-quality ecological scientists whose technical expertise can help us manage our soil, our water, our forests, our public transport system, our energy planning, our town planning in a much better way. That, I think, is a crying national shame that we have these experts and our governments don’t listen to them. Again, these Indian governments, regardless of which party is in power, state or central, are, in this respect, knowledge-proof.

The other question which is a more philosophical question: How are you using technology? I did a PhD in Kolkata in sociology, and at a time when Kolkata was the world capital of intellectual Marxism. Because that’s what the Soviet Union and China were closed, but here, it was like intellectually rich and vigorous debate. The one key insight of Marx—Marx was wrong about many, many things—but there’s one key insight of his, which I think he was the first thinker to really point this out, which was to say that technology is an autonomous social actor. Technology leads to changes in society and politics and class relations, but it is an autonomous social actor. If you invent a steamship or a steam engine, you don’t know what outcomes it will produce. That is my worry about AI. I know that the motor car, I said, was liberating, but without the motor car, you would not have the climate crisis. Today, I’m deeply worried about this, and the impact this has.

It would have on just everyday life, on sociability, not just on children, on adults. I, in that sense, am not bothered. I can’t say what AI will do to the world. Marx’s insight that technology is an autonomous social actor: Once you invent the radio, it can communicate information, but it can also communicate lies and propaganda. The motor car will enhance your freedom, your ability to take holidays with your family, but it also has led to global warming and the climate crisis. That’s where I stand on technology. I’m not a boaster. I’m not a cynic or a skeptic or a luddite, but I’m not a boaster. I would say, honestly, I have been much more cautious than we have been so far.

RAJAGOPALAN: On that, I don’t want to use the word caution—I think what I care about as an economist, we need to anticipate the costs and internalize the costs better. We are constantly externalizing the costs on others.

GUHA: The thing with technology, you can’t even anticipate what the cost will be. Sometimes you can’t even anticipate what the benefits will be.

RAJAGOPALAN: Fair.

GUHA: That is my issue with autonomous—

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but there are certain costs we can anticipate that we don’t anticipate or don’t wish to anticipate, right?

GUHA: Again, to go back to the first point I made. That’s the plea I would make through the medium of your podcast. Because I’ve been in this field so long that when I started out, there were one or two ecologists in India of decent international quality. Now, there must be 100 or 200, and work on every field—

RAJAGOPALAN: Everything, yes.

GUHA: —from water, soil, urban planning and—

RAJAGOPALAN: Birds. We haven’t even spoken about wildlife and birds yet, actually.

GUHA: Yes, wildlife conservation. I wish this extraordinary deep bench strength of scientists, hugely competent, capable scientists who are involved in policymaking at all levels, the panchayat, the city, state government, the central government—environmental lawyers. We also have our environmental lawyers who several of them were so disgusted with what was happening here that they are teaching overseas, and we don’t have the benefit of their expertise.

Jayaprakash Narayan

RAJAGOPALAN: I know that I’ve asked you this when we talked about Rebels Against the Raj. There’s always a question of who you include and who you exclude and so on. Now we don’t think of Jayaprakash Narayan as an environmentalist. We know him for the grassroots movements he launched and inspired. He really took up for the little invisible person, whoever that may be, women or Adivasis or Dalits. 

GUHA: Also, Kashmiris and Nagas. Jayaprakash was the one person who talked about honorably integrating Kashmiris and Nagas from the 1950s. That is very, very timely and contemporary even today. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely. What is it about Jayaprakash Narayan that doesn’t make him an environmentalist himself, but made him so inspirational to so many others who were environmentalists? I find him a very strange, odd person.

GUHA: Jayaprakash. The great, unacknowledged pioneer of the Chipko movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, was deeply inspired by Jayaprakash Narayan.

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

GUHA: Jayaprakash Narayan’s contribution was to motivate young people to work for the poor, the vulnerable, the weak, and outside the sphere of the state. He was a pioneer of civil society activism, which is, I think, one role. Of course, also mediating between local communities in the state. As I said, I talked about Nagaland and Kashmir. 

He wouldn’t really qualify as an environmentalist per se, except that he gives us some moral and philosophical and political framework in which we can place our environmentalism, is how I would put it. One thing I’d say is that in this book there are a couple of people I know I could have included, whom I didn’t. What I regret a bit is the botanist E. K. Janaki Ammal on whom Savithri Preeta Nair has written a very good book. Perhaps I could have done a little more research on her. The other possibly, since you talked about birds, is Salim Ali.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, the ornithologist. But you have Krishnan in there.

GUHA: I have Krishnan. I could possibly had both, but eventually you have to take care. Otherwise, you’ll never finish the project and it will be unending. You have to leave loose ends so others retire.

RAJAGOPALAN: I enjoyed reading this a lot. I’ve always enjoyed reading your work on environmentalism in particular, because I feel we just don’t pay enough attention to the longer arc of India’s own history. I think the second way in which I situate the book is one is, of course, in your environmental work. 

Also, I think there’s a very nice resurgence coming together now where we are discovering our own history in a meaningful way. We know our ancient and medieval history really well. We know everything after 1920s and Congress-written history really well. It’s almost as if between 1820 and 1920, our intellectual thought disappeared. You have folks like Rahul Sagar who have written To Raise a Fallen People, and his Madhava Rao biography and so on. There’s this book.

I really also think this resurgence is very timely, long due, in fact. It is nice to learn about our own thought, whether it comes to free markets, the way he’s pointed out in To Raise a Fallen People, or our global cosmopolitanism and internationalism or whether it’s our local environmentalism. That erasure is another thing I’m very uncomfortable with. I’m very thrilled about this book for more than one reason.

GUHA: Thank you. I almost didn’t write this book.

RAJAGOPALAN: Why?

GUHA: I started in the ’80s and ’90s and then I got distracted into writing India after Gandhi and my Gandhi biographies.

RAJAGOPALAN: I won’t call that a distraction. That’s pretty solid work.

GUHA: Diversion.

RAJAGOPALAN: We’re very grateful for it.

GUHA: Diversion. I actually thought I would never get back to this. Till the pandemic happened. I was stuck in my study and my home. I went through all the notes I’d collected in the ’80s and ’90s. I realized I had 70% of the material for a book. Once the pandemic ended, I could do the remaining work and get it done. In 2016, I said in an interview, I said, “I have this material in a cupboard and I don’t think I’ll ever write it.” I’m glad I was able to come back to it.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m really happy you’ve written it. I always enjoy reading everything you write, even though we don’t agree on a lot of economics ideas. Just discovering this strain within our own intellectual thought, I think, is enormously valuable. As you always do, you write a bunch of books and then hopefully more historians and scholars come and build upon those ideas, which is always lovely.

GUHA: On that, I just make one, if I may, one last point.

RAJAGOPALAN: Please.

GUHA: One of my hopes for this book is that some of these people will get full-fledged intellectual biographies like Radhakamal.

RAJAGOPALAN: I really hope so.

GUHA: One is that there’s a really good history of Indian environmentalism from Chipko to climate change. Start in the ’70s come to today, look at the intellectual strands, the political strands, the scientific strands, the grassroots movements, the NGOs. I hope a younger scholar writes a history of Indian environmentalism, as I said, in all its different dimensions from Chipko to climate change.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I don’t like the phrase “climate change.” I’m so uncomfortable, it’s such a one-size-fits-all sort of thing that masks so many skeletons that reveals so little. I completely agree with you that the post-Chipko environmentalism is actually very interesting. One, we’re talking completely in the postcolonial world and there’s a clean split there, because about 25 years happens before liberalization and 25 years happens after liberalization.

GUHA: Absolutely, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s a very important switch there where we went from crony socialism to crony capitalism. Actually, we went from crony colonialism to crony socialism to crony capitalism.

GUHA: Environmentalism from crony-- 

RAJAGOPALAN: Socialism to crony capitalism.

GUHA: From the ’70s onwards, there are different strands. I said individuals, organizations, movements, institutions, laws, public policies, I’d love to read a book of that kind. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I wish you’d write it or inspire others to write it.

GUHA: I can’t do that. I’m too old and it needs a fresh perspective.

RAJAGOPALAN: What is your next project? Do you know yet?

GUHA: Back to Gandhi.

RAJAGOPALAN: Back to Gandhi?

GUHA: Arun Gandhi?

RAJAGOPALAN: One question on this. Why don’t we have a book on Kasturba Gandhi?

GUHA: It’s coming.

RAJAGOPALAN: Are you writing a book on Kasturba Gandhi?

GUHA: Not me, not me. Someone much better than me is writing it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Okay, so there will be a book.

GUHA: I’m editing a series of Indian lives. I’m editing a series of biographies for Harper CollinsThe wonderful young historian Aparna Kapadia who teaches at Williams and is absolutely fluent Gujarati speaker and writer.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, wonderful.

GUHA: She’s writing on Kasturba for that series.

RAJAGOPALAN: I can’t wait to read it.

GUHA: It’ll take some time. She’s got a year’s fellowship at the Cullman Center, the New York Public Library, so this year, so she’ll write it. She’s done a lot of good work. She’s got fascinating material. I think it’ll come. It’ll come in the next couple of years.

RAJAGOPALAN: The reason I mentioned this is a couple of days ago, I recorded with Rajmohan Gandhi. In his Patel biography, in Eight Lives where he talks about Iqbal, he’s going on this with Abdul Ghaffar Khan. He describes how he’s gone on this wild goose chase just to figure out a rough description of Patel’s wife or Ghaffar Khan’s wife or Iqbal’s lover. It’s like the women just don’t exist even for these people. These are women who’ve lived in recent enough time. I know people who have met these women, like my grandparents. We somehow just don’t have a clear picture of them. I was talking about that with Rajmohan Gandhi, I was wondering why we don’t have a good biography of Kasturba Gandhi. I’m thrilled to know that this is in the works.

GUHA: It’s in the works and substantial progress has been made by a very fine scholar and she’ll deliver a good book.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m very, very thrilled to hear that. Again, thank you so much for doing this, Ram. It’s always a pleasure to speak with you.

GUHA: Thank you.