Mukul Sharma - Green and Saffron : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics

Green and Saffron : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Green and Saffron : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...65

Green and Saffron

For our entire range of books please use search strings " Orient BlackSwan ", " Universities Press India " and " Permanent Black " in store.

The Indian Century

General Editors
R AMACHANDRA G UHA AND S UNIL K HILNANI

David Hardiman
Gandhi in His Time and Ours

Christophe Jaffrelot
Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability

Harish Damodaran
Indias New Capitalists

Vasanthi Srinivasan
Gandhis Conscience Keeper

Rajendra Vora
The Worlds First Anti-Dam Movement

Srinath Raghavan
War and Peace in Modern India

Irfan Ahmad
Islamism and Democracy in India

Mukul Sharma
Green and Saffron

Green and Saffron

Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics

M UKUL S HARMA

Green and Saffron

Published by
PERMANENT BLACK
Himalayana, Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt,
Ranikhet 263645

Distributed by
Orient Blackswan Private Limited

Registered Office
3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029 (Telangana), INDIA
e-mail:

Other Offices
Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh
Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur
Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna

Copyright 2012 M UKUL S HARMA

eISBN 978-81-7824-589-8

e-edition: First Published 2020

ePUB Conversion: .

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher at .

for
Charu and Ishaan

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS

Series Editors Preface

S ince the birth of the Chipko Andolan in the Garhwal Himalaya in 1973, Indias many regions have experienced an array of environmental movements. These campaigns have been led and energised by peasants, tribals, fisherfolk, pastoralists, and middle-class professionals. They have variously focused on water, air, forests, energy, and wildlife. Some have been Gandhi-style satyagrahas against projects and policies that destroy nature and rural livelihoods. Others have followed an alternative, and equally Gandhian, tradition of constructive work, seeking to restore or revegetate ravaged landscapes.

The Indian environmental movement was born in the 1970s; environmental scholarship in India started in the 1980s. Inspired and intrigued by these movements, historians and social scientists have since produced books and articles examining their social bases, ideologies, strategies of protest, and styles of leadership.

In its depth and range, the scholarship on Indian environmentalism is impressive. But, as Mukul Sharma shows in this strikingly original book, it has suffered from two conceptual blindspots. Environmental scholars, both desi and videshi , have ignored those crucial realms of social life in Indiaparty politics and religion.

It is worth speculating on these silences. The first may be related to the self-definition of environmentalists themselves. Some Greens like to say they are neither Left nor Rightbut in front. In India, at any rate, they have stayed clear of the formal, constitutional, democratic process, neither seeking to fight elections nor to influence the outcome of elections. Environmentalists have seen themselves as above the messy, contaminated, and corrupt world of party politics.

Unfortunately, many scholars have accepted this self-presentation of environmentalism as beyond party politics. Therefore, they have failed to analyse the links, rarely explicit and sometimes unconscious, between movements of environmental protest and particular political parties. At the same time, their own secular and scientific orientation has inhibited most scholars from examining the religious presuppositions of many programmes of environmental action.

Mukul Sharmas Green and Saffron is the first work of scholarship to examine, in any depth or detail, the relations between environmentalism and faith-based traditions on the one hand, and between environmentalism and party politics on the other. It does so with immense subtlety and sensitivity. This book marries the field orientation of the investigative reporter that Sharma once was with the analytical sharpness of the scholar that he has now become.

Mukul Sharmas principal case studies in this book come from the Deccan Plateau, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the Uttarakhand Himalaya. He is deeply attentive to regional ecologies, to the specific forms of livelihood in these three very different parts of India. He is sensitive to social diversity, and to how caste, gender, and political authority manifest themselves in these three regions. Finally, he is also attentive to language, to the rhetoric and symbols used by social movements to justify or explain their strategies and goals.

The research underlying these case studies is impressively thorough. Sharma uses books, articles, pamphlets, posters, newspaper reports, even cartoons. Where necessary, he uses material from interviews in the field as well. His formidable command of Hindi is evident from the range of sources he draws upon; few works of environmental history in India have so extensively used materials in a language other than English.

This deep research is then deployed to demonstrate the pervasive influence of Hinduism on three environmental campaigns. Sharma shows how religion shapes and structures social action, how it motivates people to act in certain ways and inhibits other paths of action. There is a noticeable overlap, in the cases investigated here, between green and saffron, between the desire to protect or renew nature and the projection, for political purposes, of a particular religion or religious ideology. This juxtaposition is sometimes unconscious or unacknowledged (as with the rhetoric of the Chipko leader Sunderlal Bahuguna), at other times tacit or understated (as with the Vrindavan afforestation project or the village renewal scheme of Anna Hazare). But there are also times when the juxtaposition is deliberate and calculated, as when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) enter existing environmental campaigns in order to inject them with their ideology of Hindutva.

From Sharmas account, it is clear that this interpenetration of Hinduism and environmentalism occurs both at the conceptual and programmatic levels. There is an overlap at the level of rhetoric thus, purity and pollution are key categories in both saffron and green thought. But Hindu ideas and images have also more concretely penetrated environmental campaigns. For example, the Vrindavan project presents (or rather invents) Lord Krishna as a crusader for the environment. Again, when the VHP joined hands with the movement to stop the Tehri dam, it brought with it wild imaginings and paranoia about what the dam would do to the culture and civilization of the Hindus. Its rhetoric, writes Sharma, suggested that the Himalaya and Gangas landscapes are haunted not only by an aggressive China but also by a Muslim Pakistan, a communist Russia, and a conspiring West who make war against Hindu Bharat and its culture.

Next page

1234567...65

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Green and Saffron : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics»

Look at similar books to Green and Saffron : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Dinesh C. Sharma

Indian Innovation, Not Jugaad - 100 Ideas that Transformed India

Thomas Blom Hansen

The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India

Arvind Rajagopal

Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India

Rohit Chopra

The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media

Mukul Kesavan

The Ugliness of the Indian Male and other Propositions

Sharma

Restart: the last chance for the indian economy

Sharma

Hindutva: exploring the idea of Hindu nationalism

Jaffrelot

Hindu nationalism: a reader

Dasgupta Koushiki

Electoral Politics and Hindu Nationalism in India

Ruchir Sharma

Democracy on the Road

Swapan Dasgupta

Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right

Mukul

Gita Press and the making of Hindu India

Discussion, reviews of the book Green and Saffron : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.