Chipko Movement
The Chipko movement emerged in the early 1970s in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas. In attempting to draw attention to the difficulty of sustaining their livelihoods in the region, local communities engaged in protest by hugging trees marked for felling in state owned commercial forests. As this account spread across the country and elsewhere, Chipko was transformed into a shining symbol of grassroots activism. Ironically, as ecologists embraced the story worldwide, eco-feminists, policy makers and academics so it became increasingly disconnected from the realities that gave rise to the original protests.
Chipko now exists almost as a myth, tenuously linked to an imagined space of the Himalayas that represents the timeless realm of pristine nature and simple peasant life, a terrain that escapes history. Or, in the more prosaic language of policy makers, it is one of several ‘disturbances’ to have emerged from a mountainous region that has, since the late 1800s, been characterized as backward or isolated.
The Chipko movement is historically, philosophically and organizationally an extension of the traditional Gandhian Satyagraha. Its special significance lies in the fact that it took place in post independent India. The continuity between the pre- independence and post-independence forms of this Satyagraha has beer provided by Gandhian, including Sri Dey Suman, Mira Behn and Sarala Bhen. Sri Dey Suman was initiated into Gandhian Satyagraha at the time of the Salt Satyagraha. He died as a martyr for the cause of the Garhwall people's right to survive with dignity and freedom. Both Mira Behn and Sarala Behn were close associates of Gandhiji. They settled in the interior of the Himalayas and established ashrams. Sarala Behn settled in Kumaon, and Meera Behn lived in Garhwal till the time she left for Vienna due to ill health. Equipped with the Gandhian worldview of development based on justice and ecological stability, they contributed silently to the growth of women power and ecological consciousness in the hill area of Uttar Pradesh. The influence of these two European followers of Gandhiji on the heritage of struggle for social justice and ecological stability in the hills of Uttar Pradesh has been immense and they generated a new brand of Gandhian activist who provided the foundation for the Chipko movement. Sunder Bahuguna is prominent among the new generations of the workers deeply inspired by the Gandhian thought. Influenced by Sri Dev Suman, he joined the independence movement at the age of 13. Later, he worked with Meera Behn in Bhilanga Valley and was trained in her ecological vision.
Mira Bhen had thus identified not merely deforestation but change in species suitable to commercial forestry as the reason for ecological degradation in the Himalayas. She recognized that the leaf litter of Oak forests was the primary mechanism for water conservation in the Himalayan mountain watersheds. The Banj leaves, falling as they do, year by year, create a rich black mould in which develops a thick tangled mass of undergrowth (bushes, creepers, and grasses), which in their turn add to the leaf mould deposit and the final result is a forest in which almost all the rain water becomes absorbed. Some of it evaporates back into the air and the rest percolates slowly down, to the lower altitudes, giving out here and there beautiful sweet and cool springs. It would be difficult to imagine a more ideal shock absorber for the monsoon rains than a Banj forest.
The Chir pine produces just the opposite effect. It creates with its pine needles a smooth, dry carpet, which absorbs nothing and which at the same time prevents the development of any undergrowth worth the name. In fact, often the ground in a Chir pine forest is as bare as a desert. When the torrential rains of the monsoon beat down on these southern slopes of the Himalayas, much of the pine needle carpet gets washed away with the water and erosion invariably takes place, because these needles, being non-absorbent, create no leaf-mould, but only a little very inferior soil, which is easily washed out from the rocks and stones.
Inheriting these early lessons in ecology, Bahuguna was later able to transfer this ecological perspective to Chipko. The rapid spread of resistance in the hills of Uttar Pradesh and its success in enforcing changes in forest management was also largely due to the awareness created by folk poets like Ghanshyam Raturi, and grassroots organizational efforts of a number of people including Man Singh Rawat, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Dhoorn Singh Negi Bhatt, who later became well known for his work, became an activist at the behest of Bahuguna in 1959 when they met at a bus station in Gopeshwar where Bhatt was working as a booking clerk and Bahuguna, along with Rawat and Raturi, was waiting for a bus during an organizational trip through Gopeshwar. Having found Bhatt a promising activist, Bahuguna invited him to join them.
The Chipko movement is the contemporary expression of a continuing heritage of peaceful resistance by the people of Uttarakhand. In the post-independence period, under the coordination of Sarala Behn, the Gandhians organized themselves into the Uttarakhand Sarvodaya Mandal in 1961. The Sarvodaya movement in the sixties was organized around four major issues:
(1) The organization of women.
(2) Fight against alcohol consumption.
(3) Fight for forest rights.
(4) The establishment of local, forest based small industries.
While the fight against alcohol consumption provided the platform for the organization of women, the increasing conflict over forest produce between the local and non local industries provided the rallying point for popular protest during the studies. In 1968 the people of Garwhal renewed their resolve to fight for their forests in a memorial meeting held at Tilari on 30 May.
The platform for the organization of women was thus ready by the seventies and this decade saw the beginning of more frequent and more vocal popular protests on the rights of the people to protect and utilize local forests. In 1971 Swami Chidanandji of Rishikesh undertook a month-long march to bless the people in their struggle. The year 1972 witnessed the most widespread organized protests against commercial exploitation of Himalayan forests by outside contractors in Uttarkashi on 12 December, and in Gopeshwar on 15 December. It was during these two protest meetings that Raturi composed his famous poem describing the method of embracing the trees to save them from felling:
Embrace the trees and save them from being felled,
The property of our hills;
Save them from being looted
While the concept of saying trees from felling by embracing them is old in Indian culture, as was the case of Bishnoies, in the context of the current phase of the movement for forest rights in Uttarakhand this popular poem written in 1972 is the earliest source of the now famous name ‘Chipko’. In 1973 the tempo of the movement in the two centers Uttarkashi and Gopeshwar reached new heights. Raturi and Bhatt were the main organizers in these two places. While a meeting of the Saryodaya Mandal was in progress in Gopeshwar in April 1973, the first popular action to chase contractors away erupted spontaneously in the region, when the villagers demonstrated against the felling of ash trees in Mandal forest. Bahuguna immediately asked his colleagues to proceed on a foot march in Chamoli district following the axe men and encouraging people to oppose them wherever they went. Later in December 1973, there was a militant nonviolent demonstration in Uttarkashi in which thousands of people participated. In March 1974, twenty seven women under the leadership of Goura Devi saved a large number of trees from a contractors axe in Reni. Following this, the government was forced to abolish the private contract system of felling and in 1975 the Uttar Pradesh Forest Corporation was set up to perform this function. This was the first major’s achievement of the movement and marks the end of a phase in itself.
Bureaucratization however, cannot replace a civilizational response to the forest crisis. The ecological limits of forest extraction was hardly recognized and estimated. Ecological problems were accentuated leading to increased suffering of women who were responsible for bringing water, collecting fodder, etc. During the next five years Chipko resistance for forest protection spread to various parts of the Garhwal Himalayas. It is important to note that it was no longer the old demand for a supply of forest products for local small industries but the new demand for ecological control on forest resource extraction to ensure a supply of water and fodder that was being aired. In May 1977 Chipko activists in Henwal Valley organized themselves for future action. In June of the same year, Sarala Behn organised a meeting of all the activists in the hill areas of Uttar Pradesh, which further strengthened the movement and consolidated the resistance to commercial felling as well as excessive tapping of resin from the Chir pine trees. In Gotars forests in the Tehri range the forest ranger was transferred because of his inability to curb illegal over tapping of resin. Consciousness was so high that in the Jogidanda area of the Saklana range, the public sector corporation, Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam, was asked to regulate its resin tapping activity.
Among the numerous instances of Chipko’s successes throughout the Garhwal Himalayas in the years to follow, are those in Adwani, Amarsar and Badiyargarh. The auction of Adwani forests took place in October 1977 in Narender Nagar, the district headquarters. Bahuguna undertook a fast against the auction and appealed to the forest contractors as well as the district authorities to refrain from auctioning the forests. The auction was undertaken despite the expression of popular discontent. In the first week of December 1977, the Adwani forest was scheduled to be felled. Large groups of women led by Bachhni Devi came forward to save the forests. Interestingly, Bachhni Devi was the wife of the local village head, who was himself a contractor.Chipkos activist Dhoom Singh Negi supported the women’s struggle by undertaking a fast in the forest itself. Women tied sacred threads to the trees as a symbol of a vow of protection. Between 13 and 20 December a large number of women from fifteen villages guarded the forests while discourses on the role of forests in Indian life from ancient texts continued non-stop. It was here that the ecological slogan was born:
What do the forest bear?
Soil, Water and Pure Air!!!
The axe men withdrew only to return on 1 February 1978 with two truckloads of armed police. The plan was to encircle the forests with the help of the police in order to keep the people away during the felling operation. Even before the police could reach the area volunteers of the movement entered the forests and explained their case to the forest laborers who had been brought in from distant places. By the time the contractors arrived with the police each tree was being guarded by three volunteers who embraced the trees. The police, having been defeated in their own plan and seeing the level of awareness among the people, hastily withdrew before nightfall.
In March 1978 a new auction was planned in Narendra Nagar. A large popular demonstration was organized against it and the police arrested twenty three Chipko volunteers, including women. In December 1978 a massive felling programmes was planned by the public sector Uttar Pradesh Forest Development Corporation in the Badiyargarh region. The local people instantly informed Bahuguna who started a fast unto death at the felling site, on 9 January 1979. On the eleventh day of his fast Bahuguna was arrested in the middle of the night. This act only served to further strengthen the commitment of the people. Folk poet Ghanashyarn Raturi and priest Khima Shastri led the movement as thousands of men and women from the neighboring villages joined them in the Badiyargarh forests. The people remained in the forests and guarded the trees for eleven days, when the contractors finally withdrew. Bahuguna was released from Jail on 31 January 1979.
The cumulative impact of the sustained grassroots struggles to protect, forests was a rethinking of the forest management strategy in the hill areas. The Chipko demand for the declaration of the Himalaya forests as protection forests instead of production forests for commercial exploitation was recognized at the highest policy-making level. The late Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, after a meeting with Bahuguna, recommended a fifteen year ban on commercial green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh.
The Chipko movement emerged in the early 1970s in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas. In attempting to draw attention to the difficulty of sustaining their livelihoods in the region, local communities engaged in protest by hugging trees marked for felling in state owned commercial forests. As this account spread across the country and elsewhere, Chipko was transformed into a shining symbol of grassroots activism. Ironically, as ecologists embraced the story worldwide, eco-feminists, policy makers and academics so it became increasingly disconnected from the realities that gave rise to the original protests.
Chipko now exists almost as a myth, tenuously linked to an imagined space of the Himalayas that represents the timeless realm of pristine nature and simple peasant life, a terrain that escapes history. Or, in the more prosaic language of policy makers, it is one of several ‘disturbances’ to have emerged from a mountainous region that has, since the late 1800s, been characterized as backward or isolated.
The Chipko movement is historically, philosophically and organizationally an extension of the traditional Gandhian Satyagraha. Its special significance lies in the fact that it took place in post independent India. The continuity between the pre- independence and post-independence forms of this Satyagraha has beer provided by Gandhian, including Sri Dey Suman, Mira Behn and Sarala Bhen. Sri Dey Suman was initiated into Gandhian Satyagraha at the time of the Salt Satyagraha. He died as a martyr for the cause of the Garhwall people's right to survive with dignity and freedom. Both Mira Behn and Sarala Behn were close associates of Gandhiji. They settled in the interior of the Himalayas and established ashrams. Sarala Behn settled in Kumaon, and Meera Behn lived in Garhwal till the time she left for Vienna due to ill health. Equipped with the Gandhian worldview of development based on justice and ecological stability, they contributed silently to the growth of women power and ecological consciousness in the hill area of Uttar Pradesh. The influence of these two European followers of Gandhiji on the heritage of struggle for social justice and ecological stability in the hills of Uttar Pradesh has been immense and they generated a new brand of Gandhian activist who provided the foundation for the Chipko movement. Sunder Bahuguna is prominent among the new generations of the workers deeply inspired by the Gandhian thought. Influenced by Sri Dev Suman, he joined the independence movement at the age of 13. Later, he worked with Meera Behn in Bhilanga Valley and was trained in her ecological vision.
Mira Bhen had thus identified not merely deforestation but change in species suitable to commercial forestry as the reason for ecological degradation in the Himalayas. She recognized that the leaf litter of Oak forests was the primary mechanism for water conservation in the Himalayan mountain watersheds. The Banj leaves, falling as they do, year by year, create a rich black mould in which develops a thick tangled mass of undergrowth (bushes, creepers, and grasses), which in their turn add to the leaf mould deposit and the final result is a forest in which almost all the rain water becomes absorbed. Some of it evaporates back into the air and the rest percolates slowly down, to the lower altitudes, giving out here and there beautiful sweet and cool springs. It would be difficult to imagine a more ideal shock absorber for the monsoon rains than a Banj forest.
The Chir pine produces just the opposite effect. It creates with its pine needles a smooth, dry carpet, which absorbs nothing and which at the same time prevents the development of any undergrowth worth the name. In fact, often the ground in a Chir pine forest is as bare as a desert. When the torrential rains of the monsoon beat down on these southern slopes of the Himalayas, much of the pine needle carpet gets washed away with the water and erosion invariably takes place, because these needles, being non-absorbent, create no leaf-mould, but only a little very inferior soil, which is easily washed out from the rocks and stones.
Inheriting these early lessons in ecology, Bahuguna was later able to transfer this ecological perspective to Chipko. The rapid spread of resistance in the hills of Uttar Pradesh and its success in enforcing changes in forest management was also largely due to the awareness created by folk poets like Ghanshyam Raturi, and grassroots organizational efforts of a number of people including Man Singh Rawat, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Dhoorn Singh Negi Bhatt, who later became well known for his work, became an activist at the behest of Bahuguna in 1959 when they met at a bus station in Gopeshwar where Bhatt was working as a booking clerk and Bahuguna, along with Rawat and Raturi, was waiting for a bus during an organizational trip through Gopeshwar. Having found Bhatt a promising activist, Bahuguna invited him to join them.
The Chipko movement is the contemporary expression of a continuing heritage of peaceful resistance by the people of Uttarakhand. In the post-independence period, under the coordination of Sarala Behn, the Gandhians organized themselves into the Uttarakhand Sarvodaya Mandal in 1961. The Sarvodaya movement in the sixties was organized around four major issues:
(1) The organization of women.
(2) Fight against alcohol consumption.
(3) Fight for forest rights.
(4) The establishment of local, forest based small industries.
While the fight against alcohol consumption provided the platform for the organization of women, the increasing conflict over forest produce between the local and non local industries provided the rallying point for popular protest during the studies. In 1968 the people of Garwhal renewed their resolve to fight for their forests in a memorial meeting held at Tilari on 30 May.
The platform for the organization of women was thus ready by the seventies and this decade saw the beginning of more frequent and more vocal popular protests on the rights of the people to protect and utilize local forests. In 1971 Swami Chidanandji of Rishikesh undertook a month-long march to bless the people in their struggle. The year 1972 witnessed the most widespread organized protests against commercial exploitation of Himalayan forests by outside contractors in Uttarkashi on 12 December, and in Gopeshwar on 15 December. It was during these two protest meetings that Raturi composed his famous poem describing the method of embracing the trees to save them from felling:
Embrace the trees and save them from being felled,
The property of our hills;
Save them from being looted
While the concept of saying trees from felling by embracing them is old in Indian culture, as was the case of Bishnoies, in the context of the current phase of the movement for forest rights in Uttarakhand this popular poem written in 1972 is the earliest source of the now famous name ‘Chipko’. In 1973 the tempo of the movement in the two centers Uttarkashi and Gopeshwar reached new heights. Raturi and Bhatt were the main organizers in these two places. While a meeting of the Saryodaya Mandal was in progress in Gopeshwar in April 1973, the first popular action to chase contractors away erupted spontaneously in the region, when the villagers demonstrated against the felling of ash trees in Mandal forest. Bahuguna immediately asked his colleagues to proceed on a foot march in Chamoli district following the axe men and encouraging people to oppose them wherever they went. Later in December 1973, there was a militant nonviolent demonstration in Uttarkashi in which thousands of people participated. In March 1974, twenty seven women under the leadership of Goura Devi saved a large number of trees from a contractors axe in Reni. Following this, the government was forced to abolish the private contract system of felling and in 1975 the Uttar Pradesh Forest Corporation was set up to perform this function. This was the first major’s achievement of the movement and marks the end of a phase in itself.
Bureaucratization however, cannot replace a civilizational response to the forest crisis. The ecological limits of forest extraction was hardly recognized and estimated. Ecological problems were accentuated leading to increased suffering of women who were responsible for bringing water, collecting fodder, etc. During the next five years Chipko resistance for forest protection spread to various parts of the Garhwal Himalayas. It is important to note that it was no longer the old demand for a supply of forest products for local small industries but the new demand for ecological control on forest resource extraction to ensure a supply of water and fodder that was being aired. In May 1977 Chipko activists in Henwal Valley organized themselves for future action. In June of the same year, Sarala Behn organised a meeting of all the activists in the hill areas of Uttar Pradesh, which further strengthened the movement and consolidated the resistance to commercial felling as well as excessive tapping of resin from the Chir pine trees. In Gotars forests in the Tehri range the forest ranger was transferred because of his inability to curb illegal over tapping of resin. Consciousness was so high that in the Jogidanda area of the Saklana range, the public sector corporation, Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam, was asked to regulate its resin tapping activity.
Among the numerous instances of Chipko’s successes throughout the Garhwal Himalayas in the years to follow, are those in Adwani, Amarsar and Badiyargarh. The auction of Adwani forests took place in October 1977 in Narender Nagar, the district headquarters. Bahuguna undertook a fast against the auction and appealed to the forest contractors as well as the district authorities to refrain from auctioning the forests. The auction was undertaken despite the expression of popular discontent. In the first week of December 1977, the Adwani forest was scheduled to be felled. Large groups of women led by Bachhni Devi came forward to save the forests. Interestingly, Bachhni Devi was the wife of the local village head, who was himself a contractor.Chipkos activist Dhoom Singh Negi supported the women’s struggle by undertaking a fast in the forest itself. Women tied sacred threads to the trees as a symbol of a vow of protection. Between 13 and 20 December a large number of women from fifteen villages guarded the forests while discourses on the role of forests in Indian life from ancient texts continued non-stop. It was here that the ecological slogan was born:
What do the forest bear?
Soil, Water and Pure Air!!!
The axe men withdrew only to return on 1 February 1978 with two truckloads of armed police. The plan was to encircle the forests with the help of the police in order to keep the people away during the felling operation. Even before the police could reach the area volunteers of the movement entered the forests and explained their case to the forest laborers who had been brought in from distant places. By the time the contractors arrived with the police each tree was being guarded by three volunteers who embraced the trees. The police, having been defeated in their own plan and seeing the level of awareness among the people, hastily withdrew before nightfall.
In March 1978 a new auction was planned in Narendra Nagar. A large popular demonstration was organized against it and the police arrested twenty three Chipko volunteers, including women. In December 1978 a massive felling programmes was planned by the public sector Uttar Pradesh Forest Development Corporation in the Badiyargarh region. The local people instantly informed Bahuguna who started a fast unto death at the felling site, on 9 January 1979. On the eleventh day of his fast Bahuguna was arrested in the middle of the night. This act only served to further strengthen the commitment of the people. Folk poet Ghanashyarn Raturi and priest Khima Shastri led the movement as thousands of men and women from the neighboring villages joined them in the Badiyargarh forests. The people remained in the forests and guarded the trees for eleven days, when the contractors finally withdrew. Bahuguna was released from Jail on 31 January 1979.
The cumulative impact of the sustained grassroots struggles to protect, forests was a rethinking of the forest management strategy in the hill areas. The Chipko demand for the declaration of the Himalaya forests as protection forests instead of production forests for commercial exploitation was recognized at the highest policy-making level. The late Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, after a meeting with Bahuguna, recommended a fifteen year ban on commercial green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh.
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