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‘Speaking with Nature’ excerpt: When an Englishwoman took exception with Nehru
Summary
A close associate of Gandhi, Madeleine Slade, or Mira, understood the intimate connections between land, cattle and a healthy forest cover, writes Ramachandra Guha in his new book ‘Speaking with Nature’
In January-February 1952, India held its first general elections. The Congress won a comfortable majority, and Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a votary of rapid industrialization and mechanization, consolidated his position as prime minister. Among the minority of writers who did not share his views was his fellow former freedom-fighter, Mira [Madeleine Slade]. She wrote in private to Nehru about her disenchantment with the political and economic path free India was following.
Meanwhile, in a printed article in Harijan, Mira advocated a radical return to Gandhian principles. She outlined a charter of 18 points to this effect, these including a simplification of the government machinery, a closer association of peasants and workers in the administrative process, a new electoral system emphasizing local councils rather than a national Parliament, competed for by non-party candidates, a moratorium on development schemes such as large dams and chemical farming until their benefits and costs were properly assessed, an education system based not on Western models but on Gandhi’s template of ‘Basic Education’.
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Mira wrote of her utopian Gandhian charter that it was ‘merely an outline’. It was drafted in her new ashram in the interior hills, in a remote part of what was once the princely state of Tehri Garhwal. ‘Far away in these vast mountains,’ she wrote, ‘I have no one to consult but the Himalayan forests and Eternal Snows (for fundamentals indeed the best advisers), and naturally the points adumbrated here will undergo additions and embellishments when discussed and worked out in consultation with others….’
Among the hallmarks of Mira’s thinking was her deep appreciation of the role played by trees and forests in the economic and cultural life of rural India. Whereas most economists and agronomists focused narrowly on making the cultivated field more productive and profitable, Mira understood the intimate connections between agriculture, animal husbandry and a healthy forest cover.
As she wrote in an article published in both Harijan and the Hindustan Times: ‘Land, cattle and forests are so closely connected with one another, that we cannot interfere with one without dislocating the other two.’ This article went on to outline a scheme for the wiser and more sustainable use of land in India.
Mira was against ongoing programmes involving the large-scale colonization, and bringing under the plough, of areas the state had erroneously classified as ‘wasteland’ and ‘culturable waste’. Such areas were, she pointed out, being used presently for cattle grazing. She wrote that ‘a good deal of land ploughed up in this manner will have to be returned to the cattle and also land for forest blocks will have to be allotted as, without cattle and without trees, India would, before long, become a desert, tractors and artificial manure accelerating the process’.
Prior to Independence, Uttar Pradesh was characterized by a feudal system of landholding, with massive tracts owned by individual landlords known as zamindars. These holdings were then subdivided into tiny plots cultivated by tenants and sharecroppers.
After Independence, the Congress decided that the government would take over these lands, after paying the zamindars monetary compensation, and carve them out into small plots owned directly by those who tilled them. This policy was not without merit, except that no account was taken of the fact that zamindars also owned large patches of forest. Fearing that these too would be taken over by the state, they chose to fell all the standing trees and sell them for use as timber and firewood. The zamindars would lose the lands anyway; why not, they thought, make a profit from the standing trees before the state moved in?
The savagery with which the zamindars felled their forests moved Mira to write an eloquent plea... She cast it as a lament for the haldu tree, an indigenous deciduous species with yellow flowers often planted near temples and with a variety of medicinal and other uses. ‘The Haldu tree is no more,’ she wrote, ‘[h]e who stood guard over the little Shiva Shrines. Every day I used to honour him in my heart. Mighty of girth, with a glorious span of countless boughs, each one gracefully curved and yet conforming in the aggregate to a perfect outline. He was indeed the king of haldus, aged some 80 to 100 years….’
Mira had sent a draft of the lament to Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, then serving his brief term as the last Governor General of India, and one of the few former freedom fighters whom she felt had not entirely betrayed their shared Gandhian heritage. Rajaji (as he was known) was a politician with a literary sensibility, and Mira had in the past asked him to edit her drafts. This time he didn’t, mischievously remarking: ‘You will feel thankful no doubt that I did not, zamindar-like, bring my axe on any of its branches.’ ...
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The Englishwoman’s profound understanding of the place of forests in Indian life was perhaps best expressed in an article she published in the Hindustan Times in the summer of 1950. This was prompted by the rising concern about the growing incidence of floods in the Himalaya.
Some had attributed this to deforestation in the upper catchment of the hill rivers; nuancing this interpretation, Mira pointed out that the cause was not deforestation per se, but a relatively recent change in the species composition of the Himalayan forests. This was the replacement on the mountains’ southern slopes of Banj oak (Quercus incana) by Chil (or Chir) pine (Pinus roxburghii), a transformation of which she had become ‘painfully aware’ since coming to the hills some years ago.
To the city reader, Mira explained in some detail ‘why the Banj is so much better than the Chil pine for holding back the waters of the monsoon rains’. She wrote of how, in Banj forests, there was a dense litter of fallen leaves on the ground, as well as an undergrowth of bushes, creepers and grass. This absorbed most of the rainwater, which then slowly percolated to lower altitudes, replenishing the ‘beautiful sweet and cool springs’ for villagers to draw upon.
On the other hand, ‘the Chil pine produced just the opposite effect’, since pine forests were characterized by little undergrowth. The floor was littered with pine needles which absorbed none of the rainwater. Thus, ‘when the torrential rains of the monsoon beat down on these southern slopes of the Himalayas, much of the pine-needle carpet gets washed away with the water and erosion invariably takes place’. Mira argued that Chil pine was replacing Banj oak for two reasons: the active propagation of the pine by the Forest Department since its timber and resin were commercially valuable; and the disintegration of a spirit of community, so that individual villagers lopped off oak branches in an uncoordinated manner and without a concern for the future.
Mira urged that the Forest Department and the villagers cooperate to bring back oak at the expense of pine. For, as she remarked, ‘the Banj [oak] forests are the very centre of nature’s economic cycle on the southern slopes of the Himalaya. To destroy them is to cut out the heart and thus bring death to the whole structure.’ Her article ended with this heartfelt plea: ‘The forests of the Himalaya are the Guardians of the Northern Plains, which, in their turn, are the Granary of India. Surely such guardians deserve the utmost care and attention that the Government can give them.’
Edited excerpt from Speaking with Nature, by Ramachandra Guha, published with permission from HarperCollins India.
