‘Deep flaw or blind spot in Indian environmentalism is that it largely ignored cities’

Ramachandra Guha, well regarded historian, author and columnist, has environmental books among his first few. A powerful voice on public issues, history, and environmentalism, Guha’s latest book Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism was published late last year. He has taught at the Universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, served as the Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was Satish Dhawan Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science. His awards include the Leopold Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History among others.

In Mumbai to deliver the 3rd Annual Darryl D’Monte Memorial Lecture on February 22, Guha sat down for a conversation on environmentalism and cities with the Question of Cities team. “I don’t want to sound apocalyptic and dystopian, but the belief that the market and technology will always solve any resource crunch we face is running up against ecological limits,” he said, among other statements. Here are excerpts of the conversation. 

What is your broad and critical overview of the nature of Indian cities?
I have lived most of my life in cities but I am not a scholar of cities. I started as a historian of forests, then worked on environmentalism, then I wrote a book on Verrier Elwin who worked on Adivasis, then I drifted into Gandhi and democracy. I grew up in a small town, Dehradun, which was very formative for me in many ways, then studied in Delhi and Kolkata. I have lived in Bengaluru now for 30 years and I know Mumbai and Chennai fairly well. But it’s hard for me to give an overview except to say that the environmental movement in India from the 1970-80s – the iconic protest movements like the Chipko, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Kerala fisherfolk struggle, struggles against mining – have all taken place in the countryside.

These movements are quite extraordinary because of their non-violence and challenge to the dominant economic development paradigm but there’s a deep flaw or a blind spot in Indian environmentalism in that it has largely ignored the cities. Some of this may have come from Mahatma Gandhi because he famously said that India lives in her villages although, in fact, India has also historically lived in cities. It’s only now that environmentalists are grappling with these issues, cities have to be made habitable for 400-500 million Indians in them.

As a student of modern Indian history and social movements, it strikes me that there’s one perspective which is the Gandhian perspective which is hostile to city life and there’s the other view which is that cities are engines of growth and opportunity. I think both views are flawed. We are coming to realise now that we need cities. The Gandhians are mistaken in shutting their eyes to our urban life. Cities are becoming uninhabitable and are extracting excessive resources from the countryside. That’s why, in my new book, I talk about Patrick Geddes and his work in forging sustainable and habitable cities. 

In seeing cities as engines of growth, India seems to have missed out the other part of the equation – the ecology. How do you see this complicated relationship?
I would say that the environmental unsustainability of city life, both within a city and the impact and footprint outside it, is clearly very important. But there are two other aspects. There is, obviously, a question of equity within a city about access to housing, welfare, health, education, transport. Some amount of inequality is inevitable in a market economy but the question is, how much inequality can we sustain. And the third thing, where more thought needs to go in, is democracy. Are residents of a city participating in decisions made about it? Here, we seem to have lost out because the 73rd and 74th Amendments were never empowering enough. We vote, and after our vote, we don’t matter till the next election. 

But the ecological crisis may finally force some change. Look at Bengaluru, like Cape Town, where the water crisis is upon us. Historically, it was the lakes which were taken over, then it was a nearby river and a reservoir, then there were two reservoirs about 20-30 miles from the city in Hesaraghatta and Thippagondanahalli. When those were not enough, Bengaluru went to the Cauvery, which is about 50-60 miles away from where water has to be pumped 1,500 feet up the plateau to the city. Now there is talk of extracting water from the rivers of the Western Ghats.

I don’t want to sound apocalyptic and dystopian, but the belief that the market and technology will always solve any resource crunch we face is running up against ecological limits. So, though the social crisis of equity and political crisis of centralised decision-making are very much there in our cities, the ecological crisis will hit us first.

Concretisation of natural resources like water and colonising them for specific usage at a huge environmental cost, in a sense disassociating its links from the earth, should be a huge concern for us all.
Historically, contrary to what Gandhi believed, we have always been an urban civilisation. It goes back to Ayodhya, Hastinapur, then the great medieval cities of Hyderabad and Delhi, and then the colonial cities. Most of them were either sited on rivers or had large lakes. Now, apart from the concretisation you mentioned, there’s also chemical contamination of water.

There was a very fine writer on water issues, Anupam Misra, who lived in Delhi. He had an interesting observation. In the Mughal era, he said, the emperor could bathe in the nearby river. It was clean enough. What if we say, every Independence Day, that instead of hoisting the flag, the Prime Minister has a bath in a river. The Prime Minister could be of any party. That would make sure that the river is clean, wholesome, and safe. Concretisation and destruction of water matter because water is life and, historically, our cities were around rivers.

But in the political economy of how our cities are managed, unless there is effective decentralisation, it won’t matter. In Mumbai, for example, would it help having an empowered municipality? The decisions are all from Mantralaya, the chief minister. Similarly, in Bengaluru. Would effective decentralisation, the capability to raise taxes and be accountable for them, make our cities more ecologically responsible?

Decentralisation does not necessarily mean representation especially when urban planning-governance is outsourced to private consultancies and the middle and upper classes dominate the public discourse. How can social movements, human rights movements, political movements include questions of ecology and equity?
Before I come to social movements, I want to say how difficult organising social movements has become. We, of a certain generation, grew up either participating in movements or at least studying and writing about them. Young people today, in their 20s, are much better informed than we were in our 20s, they know the threat of climate change and hav
e a more interdisciplinary perspective to environment and society than we did. They certainly are as idealistic as we were. Yet, we do not find grassroots social movements led by people in their 20s-30s. 

There are two reasons for this. One, we are aware of, is that the state apparatus has become much more coercive. When we were young, we would go on a dharna and then go home. Now, the police will catch hold of you, slap a UAPA case. Every parent is scared that my kid should not go to an environmental or human rights dharna. This is a major challenge for grassroots activism. The political climate is inhospitable to collective organisation. If you look at the people incarcerated under UAPA, they are mostly young people and those who have been freed are in their 60s-70s. The state wants to intimidate parents into silencing their children.

There is a second issue and that’s the smartphone. It is, according to me, the enemy of collective organisation. There was a time when people thought that the smartphone was great for social movements, when the Tahrir Square protests happened, but I think that’s not the case. People spend all their time on the smartphone and think that if they just click on change.org, they become activists. The so-called smartphone is also an impediment to even everyday social solidarity. Earlier, we could sit in a group, chat, debate, exchange ideas. Now, in a group of six people, five are on their phones.

This sounds somewhat despairing but, as a sociologist, this is my understanding. We thought social media would be emancipating and liberating, and be a means for collective awareness, but the older methods of collective action may actually have been better. The political climate and the individualising nature of contemporary society – both are challenges we have to understand and overcome.

The market economy, one could say, disengages people not only from one another but also from issues that affect us all. In some ways, this is typified by the rise of gated communities where people do not have to engage with what’s outside their gates.
The gated community is true among the affluent classes. Collective action is important but among young people who have a conscience, I can’t find ways of connectivity and knowledge. There is no question that young people today are more aware of the environmental crisis than say the threat to minority rights but collective action is not happening. 

I am not very involved with urban governance but it strikes me that one of the ways towards better governance, at least in large cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru, is to tap into the scientific expertise that exists in them. It’s rarely consulted. For example, the IISc in Bengaluru can be consulted for designing the city’s public transport system that will be efficient and safe, carry lots of people, cost-effective and use less energy. You would expect the Chief Minister to go to the IISC but they would go to a private consultant.  

Major multinational companies are consultants to the Government of India. Corporatisation is reorganising everything in cities. There’s privatisation of cities, for example the 5,000-acre city near Navi Mumbai airport partly developed by the Adani group, the Ambanis are doing a similar project. Land, public resources, are gifted away to the private. How do you look at this complex phenomenon and how do we engage with environmentalism here?
I think ultimately it will have to be done face to face, not only on smartphones. It cannot just be listening to an expert but collective conversations, discussions and, of course, reading. Ultimately, reading is so important. The complications of the new technology are quite interesting in this regard. 

I write books. In the past, you wrote a book and you wanted reviews, maybe eight or ten serious and engaged reviews, which people would read and hopefully be intrigued to buy the book. Even if it was a bad review, there was interest in the book. Now, publishers ask you to do podcasts in which the author is basically doing a summary of the book. People listen to that 15-minute podcast and believe they know what’s in there and don’t need to buy the book.  

You have written environmental books in the past too. What did you want to convey with the title of your latest book Speaking with Nature?
I think speaking with nature is undervalued in the sense of a deep interpretation of environmental sustainability and social justice. Historically, you had people speaking for nature. If you look at environmentalism in the United States of America, which, in some ways, is a template against which I wrote this book, you have 19th century wilderness lovers – Henry David Thoreau walking in the woods alone, John Muir walking in the woods alone, communing with nature, and coming to cities saying: ‘I love nature. You destroy nature. I love nature. I speak for nature’. 

These individuals were physically courageous and took arduous trips but they separated themselves from people. For example, Muir, who was the founder of Sierra Club and instrumental in setting up national parks and wilderness reserves in California, hated Native Americans because he did not want human beings or cattle in nature as he saw it. So, they were speaking for nature, not speaking with nature. Speaking with nature means speaking with fellow human beings so that we link social concerns with environmental concerns. 

Today, in India, when I contrast the two, I also have in mind the urban affluent wilderness lovers. India has a large network of national parks. We know friends and family who will go to say the Pench reserve, gush “I saw my first tiger in the wild”, and return to cities and the same resource-intensive life. They think they are speaking for nature but, honestly, it’s a very shallow kind of environmentalism. It’s about protecting some large charismatic species without understanding how their life is related to it, how other people are living. That’s why I called my book Speaking with Nature.  

Most of the thinkers in the book like Patrick Geddes or Mira behn speak for both human beings and nature. For many years, we have talked about relationships between people, exclusion, disassociation. We must talk a more integrative language. In cities, we are not even listening to one another, forget listening to nature. It’s all so fragmented, completely fragmented. 

How can these ideas be intertwined with the cultural life in cities?
I am a writer. What people make of my work is up to them. I can only write, I can try to get my work translated into Indian languages, but beyond that every reader is responsible. My book profiles ten characters who worked in different spheres of society. For people in cities, the person most familiar might be the sociologist-ecologist-town planner Patrick Geddes. Some may find Mira behn interesting. My idea was to bring in the diversity of thought on environmentalism. 

If I was to make a rather large claim for my book, it is that I try to trace a forgotten genealogy of environmental thought. Most believe that environmental activism in India began with the Chipko movement of the 1970s. Chipko was incredibly influential and charismatic, it shaped a whole generation of activists, thinkers, and writers, but there’s a history before that. The intent was to show this forgotten genealogy from about 90-100 years ago. Their thoughts are a signpost, source of reference, inspiration. They were people going against the grain and warning us of the destructive urban-industrial model. Consider someone like Radhakamal Mukerjee who advocated an integrative approach to scholarship bringing together natural science and social science in the 1920s. It’s so relevant to cities of today. 

Cities are on a spree to build more, as a solution to the lack of housing. In the process, we are blind to the destruction of nature with salt pan lands, mangroves, lakes and rivers taken over. How can city making be made nature-based?
I wonder if there is a small silver lining in the pandemic in that it could arguably foster decentralised workplaces. In some sense, that’s happening. One thing that Patrick Geddes always thought was that clean energy would lead to dispersed small units because, in the 19th century, with coal you had large factories and everything that went with that. So, I wonder if that’s the way to look at cities and ask if people commuted less post-pandemic, is their carbon footprint less, and can it be made even less.

The elite are better off with offshore work, working from a resort in Goa and so on, disassociated from the place and people around them. This decentralisation and corporatisation exclude the poor. How do we bring nature and people back to the urban planning table?
Prescription is not really my strong suit. I can only point to some of the questions that arise from where we seem to be going. 

Could you disassociate from the floods in Bengaluru?
By a stroke of luck, I live on high ground. The flood affected some of the wealthiest parts. There is a fancy gated community called Epsilon where some of the city’s wealthiest people live; it was affected. When flooding happens, the rich may be slightly better insulated but they are not totally protected. Cities like Chennai have learned lessons from the tsunami. Chennai has better urban governance than most cities in India. That’s my anecdotal impression after visiting Chennai quite regularly. It does not have the massive extremities of wealth and poverty; it’s not a ‘Mumbai’ or ‘Delhi’. 

Cover photo: Nikeita Saraf