Can the poor people of India think about environmental conservation, or is it just an intellectual exercise of the Euro-American agencies? This is exactly what Ramachandra Guha has uncovered in his latest book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism. Guha talked about his book and about the journey of pre-independent India at Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, 2025, in Allen Park. Published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2024, this is the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world.

Guha had come to Kolkata for the first time forty years ago to study in the department of sociology at IIM Kolkata. In his new book, Guha aims to show and advocate that India had thinkers, inside and out, who were aware of environmentalism before the climate change banners had even been conceived. This book profiles 10 such “thinkers who in different ways spoke insightfully about humans and nature,” he says. Guha, in the preface of the book, writes, “This was precisely the question that the individuals profiled in this book were asking a century previously, before human-induced climate change became a topic of discussion.”

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In his talk he mentioned how colonialism had changed the whole thinking milieu of nature and environmentalism: “It was made possible only after the subcontinent came under the control of British imperialists. Colonial rule constituted an ecological watershed, in that it brought with it new technologies of controlling, manipulating, reshaping and destroying nature.” Anyone who has read history knows about the mechanisms of colonialism and the exploitations of India and how the British drained the country’s capital and made profits of their own; this book delves deeper into the more everlasting affectations of a newly independent nation. “It was not only a system of political domination but also of economic exploitation,” remarked Guha.

The seeds of this book were sown during the pandemic, as Guha said, “I was bored like everyone else and started going through my cupboards and almirah and found eminent figures in history who were predecessors to the Chipko Movement in India.” The environmental conscience in India gained grain after Chipko because for the first time the nation saw that even we could protect our nature and it was a role for the outsiders. Guha said, “It was even more important for India to realise its environmental health because we had a colonial past of exploitation and no colonies of our own from where we could replenish our resources. So during the pandemic I understood that I could write…what I call the prehistory of Indian environmentalism.” He highlights some thinkers and writers from his book of 10 personas “who insightfully and often presently talk about human relations with nature”.

Rabindranath Tagore: The myriad-minded environmentalist

Guha said, “The first thinker is known for many things but hasn’t been recognised as an environmentalist per se. Because I argue there were at least four dimensions to Tagore’s environmentalism.” He went on to point out the aesthetic dimension, which is very well known to the Bengali readers, and the readers are habituated with the aesthetic style of Tagore and his ‘Nature’. There was also the educational dimension of Tagore. Today in 2024, students in educational institutions are learning environmental studies and are being encouraged to raise awareness, whereas Tagore 100 years ago had already written about the environmental studies and the relationship of man with nature in his pedagogy, both in school, Pathabhavan and in Sriniketan. “Not just classes in the open but also excursions into the fields show us how he conceived the campus, you know how he himself designed what kind of trees and plants would be nurtured there at different times of the year according to seasons,” said Guha. The book provides epistolary evidence of Tagore talking through letters and essays. Guha studiously records the great poet in his alternate light of natural consciousness, way before climate change was an intellectual niche for the powerful.

Moving to the third dimension, which Guha thinks is “even lesser known,” is the political dimension. “Western colonialism is worldwide recognised today as a system of political domination. The white man coming from England to dominate us brown Indians. It is also widely recognised as a system of economic domination. British mercantile industries destroyed Indian industries, including in Bengal, and sent back raw materials to England and brought back finished goods to capitalise their own economy. But Tagore was the first to demonstrate that colonialism was also a system of ecological exploitation.”

To quote Tagore, “Before this political civilisation opened its hungry jaws wide enough to gulp down great continents of the earth, we had wars and changes of monarchy but never such a fearful and hopeless feeding of nations upon nations, such huge portions of the earth turning into minced meat.” The book holds a lens into the history of alternate discourses running amok in the mainstream narrative of a colonial country.

M Krishnan and Indian Wildlife

M Krishnan was born in Madras in 1912 and was a naturalist, a wildlife writer and a photographer. A fascinating character who never held a job and was sustained economically by Calcutta. His sole income came from a column he wrote in The Statesman called “Country Notebook”. “The Delhi edition of The Statesman used to come to my home in Dehradun. And my father subscribed to The Statesman for one reason. He said it has the fewest grammatical mistakes and the fewest misprints. So I grew up reading Krishnan,” proclaimed Guha. Krishnan’s column appeared every alternate Saturday. “He wrote these columns; he was obscure because in those days you did not have publishing houses to collect his columns. After he died, his family asked me to do a curated anthology of his writings. And I spent six months collecting everything the family gave me in photocopies. And I spend six months going through 2,000 articles and choosing 80,” informed Guha. This book pays the needed tribute to Krishnan, which had been long overdue.

Guha said, “Even if climate change did not exist, India would be a disaster zone. 16 out of the 20 most air-polluted cities in the world are in Northern and Western India. Our rivers are biologically dead; historically our cities were sited on rivers, like Kolkata on the Hooghly, Delhi on the Jamuna, and Patna on the Ganga. Through the reckless exploitation of groundwater, we have depleted the reservoirs; farmers are finding that their wells are running dry; even in places like Punjab, the farmers are finding no water to irrigate their lands. And no Indian government has paid adequate attention to this. India is an environmental disaster zone because both UPA and NDA regimes, as well as state governments, have followed an extremely reckless and destructive path of economic growth. So-called economic growth. One of the greatest threats to India today is the devastation of the natural environment.” The book stands as a bible for the future of Indian environmental activism and portrays that white-skinned “superior” men did not have to think for us about our nature; we had thinkers, activists and philosophers—real people who contemplated the problems of modern India 100 years back.

Spotlight

Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism

By Ramachandra Guha

Fourth Estate, 2024

408 pages, Rs 799/-