ABSTRACT
I want to begin my discussion of the Chipko movement’s resistance to deforestation in the Garhwal Himalayas with a story about one of the saplings that the Marquis of Northampton planted just north of London in 1840. The tree, a horse chestnut, was planted on an area of open space, previously used for grazing, as part of the decorative vegetation for an estate he was developing. In the Garhwal foothills of north India during this same period, the relation of villagers to their forests was beginning to change. In addition to some subsistence agriculture and cash crops, these villages had traditionally relied on local forests for grazing and for a range of products that were both used and sold. In the decades following the start of British rule in 1815, however, their access to these forests and thus the sources of their livelihood were increasingly constrained by deforestation and state regulation of forest access. This process intensified after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when massive cutting provided sleepers and fuel for the railroad expansion that would strengthen the hold of empire, and forestry codes increasingly regulated this newly relevant resource. Very often, additional restrictions on forest access and other state-imposed hardships (such as taxes or corvée labor) prompted a variety of protests that were at times quite fierce. Restrictions on village access to forests was further curtailed after independence in 1947, as the Indian state encouraged commercial forestry on behalf of the national interest and in opposition to the “destructive exploitation” carried out by locals. The 1962 Indo-China war shut down the trans-Himalayan trade on which local villagers relied and accelerated development in the area, especially of roads, hydroelectric projects, and mining. Since this construction scarcely benefited locals, and involved clearing large tracts of forest and making others accessible to commercial logging, it further impoverished households and communities, and village men increasingly sought work in the plains to the south. A series of floods and landslides in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the continued degradation of opportunities for livelihood, and an increasing disillusionment with the helpfulness of local and state authorities heightened discontent.
