Teaching Workshop: Ecology and Environmental Movements in India: Assumptions, Specificities and Representations

The workshop aims to introduce students to the specificities of the Indian environmental movement, a term generally used to describe and account for the different modes of socio-political action adopted to address issues of access to livelihoods and natural resources and ecological security within the broader debate on development. We shall introduce the historical, social and cultural elements that typify the Indian environmental movement through a plurality of textual and filmic sources. Emphasis will be given to the Indian relationship between environment and humans, reflecting on the characteristics that define its distinctiveness, and distinguishing it from non-Indian variants of the environmentalist discourse. We shall see, therefore, how Indian environmentalism, on the one hand, places local communities at the centre of its reform efforts while, on the other, opposes state-sponsored environmental policies aimed at preserving and defending the biodiversity of flora and fauna regardless of—and often to the detriment to—human communities. We shall see, therefore, how the notion of the State as guardian and protector of natural resources is countered by the environmental movement with the so-called ideology of the "environmentalism of the poor", according to which the historically, socially, economically and culturally disadvantaged groups are placed at the center of ecological action and narration, that is, all those who are most directly affected by environmental degradation, configuring themselves as its first and principal victims. The presentation of some voices of contemporary Indian environmentalism (Chipko Movement; Narmada Bachao Andolan; Appiko Movement) will follow an examination of the philosophical-religious roots and precursors of the contemporary Indian environmentalist discourse. We shall then reflect on the role of two of the most influential schools of the Brahmanical speculative tradition, Sāṃkhya darśana and Vedānta darśana, in shaping the relationship between humans and the environment; on the influence exerted by Jain metaphysics and praxis on Gandhian-inspired environmental movements and, finally, on the role attributable to the Bishnoi—nowadays members of a caste, but originally born as a religious sect—as ante-litteram environmentalists and forerunners of contemporary Indian environmental movements. The introduction to the themes, socio-cultural specificities and aims of Indian environmentalism will be completed with the analysis of some case studies featuring local communities at the center of ecological dynamics and tensions.