Women, Work, and ‘Development’ in Post-independent India – Part I
By Dr Sreenanti Banerjee
Introduction
This blog discusses how Indian women’s unrecognised ‘domestic’ labour, the question of environmental degradation and the economized idea of ‘development’ are integrally related, and therefore cannot be conceptualized in isolation. As the pioneering Indian activist and quantum physicist Vandana Shiva had once argued, development is what you do to yourself, something that ‘evolves from within’. [1] When you try to develop others, either through direct non-consensual means or through indirect ideological manoeuvre, that is not development, it is colonization.[2] Consequently, for Shiva, we need to remove development from its economic moorings and attach it to where it belongs, namely life and biology.
Women’s Work and the Indian Census
Indian feminist scholar of Gender Studies, Maithreyi Krishnaraj, was one of the first pioneers of welfare feminism in postcolonial India who made us aware that the national data systems are vigorously wanting in relation to the inclusion of women’s work in the Indian census.[3] National level statistics has been unable to include women, both in the capacity of being workers, as well as in the capacity of being available for work.[4] The significant amount of disagreement amongst the political and economic elite in India as to what ‘gainful economic activity’ is, especially while analysing women’s work, has been the most telling impediment towards a valid and reliable inclusion of women’s work in the census. A key question that Krishnaraj has been asking is the following: How does one account for women’s work in economies where wage work is not the dominant mode of work? She draws our attention to how in what is known as ‘societies in transition’ (i. e. economies that are largely agrarian), production for the needs of survival (popularly known as subsistence production) is often performed by the women themselves in the household, and therefore do not enter the capitalist networks of exchange. These, Krishnaraj holds, are economic activities that are unremunerated, and therefore not included in national data systems. Consequently, there are four kinds of people who are identified as ‘non-workers’, ‘non-productive’ or ‘unemployed’ by the Indian census: ‘housewives’, prisoners, ‘beggars’ and sex-workers.
Chipko Movement and the Figure of Vimla Bahuguna
It is within this context of an en masse institutional and systemic under-recognition and concomitant exploitation of women’s household labour, that one of the most crucial anti-corporate, feminist environmental movements of post-independent India, namely the Chipko movement, took shape.
Vimla Bahuguna, the woman who played a key role in this movement (along with her husband Sunderlal Bahuguna), describes it in the following way:
The forests were all being felled for commercial purposes […] for money. The women thought to themselves ‘Our lives are becoming painful.’ The wood is felled and removed from here. There isn’t enough fodder for the cows. All work is done by women: working in the fields, bringing firewood from the jungles, taking care of the children. They had to walk miles as the water had dried up. So, they said, ‘we must save our trees now. We won’t let them cut the trees.’ Then the women tied a rakhi (a thread usually used as a symbol of protection) on the trees, with the pledge to protect them. The contractors (responsible for the felling of the trees) got men from Nepal. Since the women did not let the men cut the trees during the day by hugging the trees, the contractors wanted the men to cut them during the moonlit night. So, the women stayed in the forests at night in small huts, and the moment they heard some noise made by the contractors, they would run and hug the trees. The women would then chant, ‘What gifts do forests bear, soil water and fresh air; soil water and fresh air, is the foundation of all life.’ The women encircled the trees in this way for about eight years. They led the protests saying, ‘Let the axes shine, we will stick to the trees. We will bear the beating of the sticks and the guns, but we will save the trees.’ The Chipko movement gifted the world with a new perspective on trees. If the environment is to sustain itself, it is important for the trees to live. Trees are not only essential from an economic point of view, but they are also important for the sustenance of the soil, water, and humans on earth.[5]
On being asked about what led to this unprecedented movement resisting the fateful nexus of big capital and environmental degradation, Vimla Bahuguna narrated the following anecdote:
[…] women would come to us and share their daily problems. One of the issues they were really bothered by was alcohol. The entire state was marred with this problem, and people protested against the government’s liquor policy in different parts of the state. But I wanted the women of Silyara to raise their voices. So, after days of persuading them, they collectively started campaigning with us and eventually, alcohol was banned in most areas of Tehri district.
And this incident, or rather victory, changed how women perceived themselves. Women started realising their true worth. They understood that they were not just made for doing the household and labour work but a lot more. They could change policies. And whether you believe it or not, the way women participated in anti-liquor and other small movements prepared them for Chipko.
[…] In 1974, when the women of Raini village, under Gaura Devi’s leadership, drove out the contractors and labourers who had come to cut down the trees, Chipko became a women’s movement. For the first time, the women took the lead without the men.[6]
Vimla Bahuguna, along with her husband Sundarlal Bahuguna, hugging a tree (Photo credit: The Hindu Photo Archives)
As feminist historian Kumud Sharma has pointed out, the overwhelming participation of older women in their forties and fifties in the Chipko movement suggests how the exploitative labour elderly women perform in their families and the concomitant, what she calls, ‘mystification of women’s experiences within the family’, became the driving force of crucial social movements in India.[7]This mystification, for Sharma, masked the divergence of interest between male and female members within the family in terms of the distribution and allocation of incomes and possessions, obligations and duties, rewards and control.
The Activism of Vandana Shiva and Ecofeminism in India
This unthinkable grit and courage of women in the Chipko movement drew the attention of one of the pioneers of ecofeminism in the Indian women’s movement, Vandana Shiva. Shiva, at the time, was pursuing a PhD in Quantum Physics in Canada and would save from her scholarship money to visit India during the summers and participate in, what she clearly perceived as, history in the making.[8] In a recent interview, Shiva recalls her time in the movement and mentions how while earlier she identified the forest exclusively as a bastion of tranquility and peace, the involvement with the movement taught her how the forest is predominantly about knowledge and livelihood.[9] In fact, she also goes to the extent of saying that ‘Everything I learned about building movements came from Chipko’. Shiva further argued that the key lesson that she learnt from this unprecedented welfare activism related to women’s unappreciated ‘domestic’ work in India was that the forest was not about timber, resin, or revenue, but rather about pure air (bayaar), water (paani) and soil (mitti). Shiva also contends that these women protestors, well before the earth system scientists would articulate in their disciplinary vocabulary, knew that the forests could prevent drought and flood, and therefore not only is it important to protect the forest for safeguarding their own labour, but also for the protection of the river. It was these women’s concerns with the hitherto unrecognised relationship between the exploitative domestic labour that they performed due to the non-availability of water on one hand and the felling of trees on the other, that eventually led to the formation of the Ministry of Environment and Forests in India. Shiva’s key realization, as we gather from this interview, was that some of these unlettered women knew that the unjust extraction of their labour power was integrally linked to the extraction of the forest. They taught us to think that the focus on women’s welfare in relation to their livelihood, and the focus of the Earth System Sciences on the imbricating relationship between forest and water, in other words the register of justice and the register of the planetary, are not divergent or in conflict, but, in fact, one.
However, what is also important to reckon is that while Vandana Shiva sometimes appealed to the legacy of the French mathematician Marquis de Condorcet (infamous for his imperialist and expansionist focus on female education in the ‘east’) to ground her ideas on swaraj and sovereignty, the women of the Chipko movement, especially people like Vimla Bahuguna, rejected the ‘civilizing’ politics of Condorcet (which mobilised the discourse of gender equality as an excuse for imperialist expansion) and instead appealed to the anticolonial legacy of sovereignty. It was a legacy that, as I suggested earlier, focused on developing (via sacrifice and discipline) one’s own self, instead of developing (and most crucially, in the guise of development, colonizing/ dominating) the ones in the periphery.
Women’s Welfare and the Planetary: Disjointed or Conjoined?
Finally, what is crucial to note is that the participants of the Chipko movement, more than fifty years ago, in and through their activism, unequivocally engaged in a critique of, what British Marxist philosopher Peter Osborne has recently called, a ‘non and indeed an often explicitly anti-Marxist, neo-naturalist, planetary-political, environmental problematic’.[10] This is a position which, as Osborne argues, dissociates the question of climate change-induced catastrophe from questions of justice (exploitation of women’s domestic labour, for example, on which the Chipko movement was based). The two key thinkers who, according to Osborne, have argued for this dissociation are Bruno Latour, through his idea of the ‘terrestrial’; and Dipesh Chakrabarty through his idea of ‘reverence’ for the planetary. For Latour, the ‘terrestrial’ is ‘the thin biofilm of the Critical Zone, that is, the depth of the Earth’s surface extending from the top of the canopy of vegetation through the soil to the subsurface depths at which fresh groundwater circulates.’[11] The Chipko movement showed us that the deep-seated relationship between the top of the canopy vegetation (notably, the forest) and the subsurface depth carrying groundwater cannot be fully understood without admitting how a pernicious liaison between big capital and male members of the house had actually ensured that the relationship between the forest and the water is brazenly denied. Further, as Osborne adds, while Chakrabarty argues for the need to go back to pre-capitalist faith-based notions of ‘reverence’, the Chipko movement actually showed us how this idea of reverence for pre-capitalist religious ideas of the planet can only be appreciated if one simultaneously admits and is committed to a demonstration of the bourgeois-patriarchal exploitation and unfair extraction of women’s labour in the realm of (what gets constituted as) the ‘domestic’. This attendant commitment, as the movement shows, is important. The climate challenge, for Osborne, is the biggest challenge to both techno-financial capitalism and (I would add) patriarchy; the protestors of the Chipko movement knew this in their bones and articulated both the crisis and the critique fifty years before a world-renowned Marxist philosopher (Peter Osborne) based in the ‘Global North’ will spell it out in explicit terms on the pages of the New Left Review last month.
Footnotes
[1] Rachita Vohra and Sahil Kejriwal. 2019. IDR Interviews/Dr Vandana Shiva. Available at: https://idronline.org/idr-interview-dr-vandana-shiva/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Maithreyi Krishnaraj. 1990. “Women’s Work in Indian Census: Beginnings of Change”. Economic and Political Weekly, 25(48/49), 2663–2672. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4397066. Also see, Maithreyi Krishnaraj. 2008. “Women’s Work in Indian Census: Beginnings of Change”, in Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 168-174.
[4] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a discussion with Vandana Shiva, has identified the latter group as belonging to, what Karl Marx described as, the ‘reserve army of labour’.
[5] EcoWALKthetalk. 2011. Vimla Bahuguna: Treehugger of the Chipko Movement. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX3mYHza6og&ab_channel=EcoWALKthetalk
I have mostly borrowed the translation (Hindi to English) from the subtitles. However, at certain junctures, as deemed necessary, I have also included my own translations.
[6] Jyoti Thakur. 2023. 50 Years On, Vimla Bahuguna On The Chipko Movement, Her Late Husband & Ties That Bind. Available at: https://article-14.com/post/50-years-on-vimla-bahuguna-on-the-chipko-movement-her-late-husband-ties-that-bind–63feb83abe8fe (emphasis added)
[7] Kumud Sharma. 2008. “Women in Struggle: A Case Study of the Chipko Movement”, in Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 211-217.
[8] Vohra and Kejriwal, 2019.
[9] Vohra and Kejriwal, 2019.
[10] Peter Osborne. 2024. “The Planet as Political Subject?” New Left Review, 145: 5.
[11] Ibid., 7.