From: Permanent Black
Environmentalism and the Hindu Right
Posted: 21 Nov 2011 08:27 AM PST
Mukul Sharma
Green and Saffron
Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics
This book examines contemporary environmental issues and movements in independent India on the one hand, and the development of Hindu conservative ideology and politics on the other. It includes the first thorough investigation of Anna Hazare’s movement in Maharashtra.
Mukul Sharma argues that these two social currents—environmental conservation and Hindu politics—have forged bonds which reveal the hijacking of environmentalism by conservative and retrograde worldviews. This, he says, constitutes a major aspect of hinterland political life which neither academics nor journalists have seriously analysed. Environmentalism and politics cannot be seen as separate from each other, for environmental issues are being defined in new ways by an anti-secular form of Hinduism. In turn, Hindu ideologues are gaining mileage for their ideology by espousing major environmental projects.
Anna Hazare’s impact is studied in detail through a careful field investigation of his environmental initiative in Ralegan Siddhi. Sunderlal Bahuguna’s opposition to the Tehri Dam in the Garhwal Himalaya is outlined with great anthropological subtlety. And the regeneration of Vrindavan’s urban and riverine hygiene by internationally funded NGOs is subjected to a historical scrutiny that includes an examination of how Lord Krishna has been redefined as the great god of conservation.
Sharma discusses Nazi Germany and fascist appropriations of environmentalism in Europe to contextualize Hindu conservative nationalists within a larger universe. By pinpointing the communal and authoritarian discourses within some of the new social movements, his book alters the way in which we look at everyday life in the subcontinent. For, says Sharma, at stake in this intermeshing of environmental Green and Hindu Saffron is nothing less than the way Indians understand their humanity.
Hardback / 324pp / Rs 795 / ISBN 81-7824-340-7 / World rights / December 2011
And below
MUKUL SHARMA in conversation with
K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
Mukul Sharma’s new book, GREEN AND SAFFRON: HINDU NATIONALISM AND INDIAN ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS is the first serious scholarly study of both Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi, as well as the interpenetration of environmental movements with Hindutva. To coincide with the book’s appearance, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Professor of Anthropology at Yale and a major historian of Indian environmentalism) converses with Mukul Sharma. Their conversation, below, contextualizes the book and provides insights into the author’s core interests.
How did you come to focus on the connections between religious and environmental values and the associated patterns of political mobilization in environmental movements?
Between 1990 and 2001, I happened to do at least three kinds of fieldwork, in different regions, with diverse agendas, and these led me for the first time to begin asking questions about the emerging interrelationships between religious and environmental values and a certain kind of conservative, nationalistic politics in India.
First, as a member of an environment journalists team, organized by the Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, I visited Ralegaon Siddhi village and met Anna Hazare, to write on an ideal green village and an environmental crusader. I published three positive reports on this in the Hindi newspaper Navbharat Times, I was a special correspondent with them at that time. However, uneasy memories, notes, and documents on the use of Bharat Mata, Shivaji, Vande Mataram, army rules, religious symbols, codes and conduct in the village, along with publications by the then prominent leaders of the Rastriya Swamsevak Sangh portraying the village and its leader as a model for the country, continued to haunt me.
Second, I had been covering the anti-Tehri dam movement in Garhwal for long, and in one of my visits to the dam site in the late 1990s, where Sunderlal Bahuguna was sitting on a long fast, I met a group of sadhus distributing pamphlets that anchored the religious and environmental values of Ganga not only as a pivot against the dam, but also against alleged ‘enemy’ symbols and people of the country: i.e. mosques and Muslims.
And third, when in 2000 I began working with the political foundation of the Green Party of Germany and had an opportunity to visit the country a couple of times, I found a troubled past and present regarding the relationship between the environment and certain kinds of political and religious beliefs. I also felt that environmentalists in the Green Party Foundation were reluctant to formally discuss these linkages. These experiences led me to think in a more concrete and focused fashion on the connections between religious and environmental values, and the associated patterns of political mobilization in environmental movements.
How would you respond to the assertion that books on religion and ecology, often by scholars of religion, have focused on the realms of culture and spirituality as they reflect ideas of nature or information on ecological relations in the natural world. Such scholarship takes little interest in the political realm or the politics present in cultural constructions of nature or sacred objects in nature. On the other hand, the social science of environmental politics often lacks insight into the affective and devotional dimensions through which individuals and groups may relate to nature and thereby find affinity to the natural world in the form of a religious experience. If you agree with this formulation, is it your interest to bridge this divide?
Most works on religion and ecology, in the specific context of India and Hinduism, are often banal and unidimensional. They usually explore Vedic and Brahmanic understandings of religion, and apply them to the natural world. Leave aside the political realm, they do not even have space for contesting visions of religion and environment. Let me give an example from my village Vishwaspur, in Bhagalpur district of Bihar, where there is a thakur vadi (place of God), owned and nurtured by us, a few Brahmin families, in the name of the whole village. The religious values and practices associated with this place have a robust conservationist and protectionist streak concerning the ponds, trees, and water bodies in its vicinity. However, this religious place, its fruits and ceremonies, are closed to the Dalits of the village. The ‘sacred’ trees of the complex can only be worshipped and used by the Brahmins and Thakurs. So what kind of religious and spiritual values of the environment are we talking about, and by and for whom? I have also been finding many such instances in the state of Rajasthan—where there has been much hype around religiously and culturally celebrated ponds and water bodies—in the course of my new research on Dalit environmentalism. We need to dissect the various forms and content of religion in the environmental arena so that their regressive and liberatory aspects are understood simultaneously. Howsoever, worthy the religious beliefs and practices of an individual or a group may be for the environmental world, my interest lies in seeing it through the spectrum and cross-section of caste, class, gender, justice, and equity, and not as a stand-alone point of reference. Green and Saffron reflects precisely such a politics of the environment. It explores the cultural, ethnic and sectarian dimensions of green issues in India. This also underscores the intermeshing of identity, power, and nature.
[. . .]
Read more at: http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2011/11/environmentalism-and-hindu-right.html
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