Book Reviews : HARIPRIYA RANGAN, Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 272. AKHILESHWAR PATHAK, Laws, Strategies and Ideologies: Legislating Forests in Colonial India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 185

Abstract

The rise of environmental history in the last decades of the twentieth century opened up history writing to new themes and uncharted terrain. These included an exploration of the histories of states and polities in their relationship with natural resources on the one hand and history of movements for the rights of the people on the other. In the course of writing these histories the dominant discourses also made scathing critiques of modern development paradigms and their impact on marginalised and disadvantaged sections of the society. The resultant ideology of the ’Environmentalism of the Poor’ was done by people who were involved with existing environmental movements as activists or merely as ideologues. Today, after 15 years of the advent of environmentalism, the movements that provided it inspiration find themselves in a crisis. Little wonder then that there is now a serious attempt to re-evaluate the approaches of environmental history that popularised environmentalism as an ideology amongst Indian intelligentsia. The books under review are an attempt precisely at this task. Haripriya Rangan’s book Of Myths and Movements is an attempt to reinterpret the Chipko movement and its meaning for sustainable regional development. She writes that Chipko was a ’social movement’ that emerged nearly 25 years ago in the Garhwal Himalayas, and today ’transformed by a variety of narratives it exists