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 In a rather calamitous mood, I
picked up Vandana Shiva’s book and the first sentence that
caught my attention was: "The earth is rapidly dying; her
forests are dyin; her soils are dying; her waters are dying;
her air is dying." Large trees, such as the one brought
down, or forests are the containers of the vegetational wealth
of the world and are being repeatedly "bull-dozed, burnt,
ruined or submerged’. I was alarmed to read that according
to a current estimate, by the year 2050 all tropical forests
would be gone. Not only that, all the life — animals and
vegetation — thatat they support would be gone as well. We
are eliminating one species of life a day, after all.
So far,
Vandana Shiva has written books on biodiversity,
biotechnology, ecology and Third World agriculture. Being the
Director of the Research
Foundation
for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy at Dehra
Dun, it was inevitable for her writing to include issues such
as environmental destruction and current agricultural and
reproductive technologies which she is critical of. But Shiva
jettisoned an exciting career in her country’s nuclear
energy programme because she felt she had a greater calling
for building up a green attitude in her polluted nuclear
system, one that was fast subordinating a living system. Not
so long ago, under colonial rule, agriculturalists were forced
to grow cash crops in order to provide raw material for
British industry; sometimes men were sent away to work in
plantations. These political manoeuvres had an enormous effect
on agricultural practice, on traditional ways of farming and
water conservation, on forest preservation as well as in the
allied areas of medicine and even song and storytelling. Owing
to either disuse of land or the forced cultivation of
plantation crops, agricultural knowledge as it had previously
existed simply shrivelled up.
Mahasweta
Devi’s "Aranyer Adikar" (The Rights of the Forest)
about the Munda insurrection of 1899 is a telling example
which gives us the story of adivasi rebellion against the
British Raj. The British also chopped down teak and sal
indiscriminately for railway sleepers thereby upsetting the
intricate bonding between plant life and other resources like
soil and water, thus playing havoc with the forest ecosystems.
Their laws, in fact, were acts of violence against nature.
Interestingly,
Shiva links up such hostility against nature to aggression
towards women. Central to Shiva’s thesis is the connection
between women and nature. She believes women to be
conservationists, especially rural women who have attempted to
regenerate nature that is destroyed. If nature is aligned with
women, it follows that science and development are primarily
male projects: "They are the latest and most brutal
expression of a patriarchal ideology which is threatening to
annihilate nature and the entire human species."
In the 15th
and the 17th centuries, Europe saw enormous increases in
scientific revolutions. These were supposedly value-neutral
but economic development and industrial capitalism could only
lead to man’s domination over nature. What was thus far
terra mater was now mastered and subordinated. As mother earth
was marginalised, so were its women who were not seen as equal
partners in science and development. Colonialism, with its
universalist claims, followed this pattern of deprivation,
especially for women when it came to the privatisation of land
for revenue generation.
Suddenly,
women were left without the management and control of land,
water and forests, not only because their male folk were
forcibly conscripted but also because colonialism brought in
the ruin of entire ecosystems.
So, what we
call development is maldevelopment because man, who is
identified primarily with progress, does so at the cost of
subordinating both nature and women. Taking Francis Bacon as a
founding father, Shiva argues that his was not "a ‘neutral’,
‘objective’, ‘scientific’ method — itt was a
masculine mode of aggression against nature and domination
over women". "In The Masculine Birth of Time",
Bacon was determined to create "a blessed race of heroes
and supermen" who would go on to dominate the world.
Antique science had always been referred to as female —
pliant and inert.. Bacon wanted to spearhead the rise of a new
masculine science of the scientific revolution characterised
by hardness and action.
Carolyn
Merchant has well summed up Bacon’s accomplishments:
"We make by act trees and flowers to come earlier or
later than their seasons, and to come up and bear more
speedily than by their natural course they do. We make them by
act greater, much more than their nature, and their fruit
greater and sweeter and of differing taste, smell, colour and
figure from their nature." Nature was thus raped and
manipulated under the auspices of a gendered Baconian agenda
spurring on a growing capitalism.
I am reminded
of T. S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland" which establishes
an equation between women and the river landscape, both of
which have lost their primal innocence resulting from the
corruption of traditional society and the oncoming of material
culture. On the one hand, the river Thames is described as
choked with "empty bottles, sandwich papers . . .
cardboard boxes, cigarette ends" and, on the other,
Wagner’s Rhine maidens lament their loss of chastity. The
wasteland is an outcome of the spiritual inertia that came
from the two wars and their aftermath.
Here we have
a direct link between the life-destroying patriarchal business
called war and the annihilation of the life-enhancing Earth.
Fertility may be restored in the wasteland only if Mother
Earth is tempted to return from the underworld.
In such a
scenario, the Chipko movement of the 1970s in Garhwal deserves
a mention. Starting with Mira Behn, who actively worked for
planting ecologically appropriate trees, and carried forward
by Sunderlal Bahuguna, the Chipko movement took several forms
such as liquor prohibition, until in 1973 when women declared
that they would embrace trees rather than allow them to be
cut. The song "Embrace our trees/ Save them from being
felled/The property of our hills/ Save it from being
looted" is the earliest documentary source of the now
famous name, Chipko.
Women built
up such a support system among themselves that the sight of
men with axes in their hands would at once result in the
collection of a large number of women who would shout:
"This forest is our mother. Where there is a crisis of
food, we come here to collect grass and dry fruits to feed our
children. We dig out herbs and collect mushroom from this
forest. You cannot touch these trees." In effect, these
women put the life of the forests above their own. Finally
their efforts resulted in a ten-year ban on commercial
green-felling in the Alakananda catchment area.
Thus the
Chipko movement became not only an ecological movement but a
feminist movement as well.
Shiva argues
with intensity that it is women’s role to challenge
universalist claims of patriarchy with examples of diversity,
to oppose the concept of power as violence with the
alternative concept of nonviolence as power, one that raises
the female principle or prakriti to the highest living plan
— the "primordial energy" from which all
life-giving activityy gushes forth. A small example Vandana
Shiva gives is that of the daily worship of the tulsi plant in
Indian households. Although the remedial powers of this plant
have been known to ayurveda for over 3,000 years and is now
being hailed by the West for its beneficence, few realise that
tulsi symbolises Brindavan or the cosmos. By the daily ritual
of watering the plant, women constantly renew the relationship
of the home with the cosmos.
A committed activist, Shiva
argues with conviction and clarity that "the violation of
nature" is connection with "the marginalisation and
violation of women" because "women produce and
reproduce life not merely biologically, but also through their
social role in providing sustenance." "Staying
Alive" is a book that can change one’s way of seeing
the world.
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