The Chipko movement is usually introduced as an environmental parable: Himalayan villagers hugging trees in 1973 until the axes stopped. The parable is not false, but it files the event under scenery and sentiment, and the record of what actually happened in Chamoli district between 1973 and 1981 resists that filing at every point. What the record shows is a sequence of dated, documented confrontations over an allotment register, a committee of inquiry, a central statute and a felling ban, in which villagers with no office, no vote bank and no party machine compelled the Indian state to rewrite the terms on which Himalayan forests would be governed. This article defends one claim about that sequence. The Chipko movement operates as environmental-political citizen-renegotiation: a movement of citizens who, finding the formal channels of allotment and appeal closed or rigged, renegotiated their standing as forest users by direct, disciplined, nonviolent action, and left the renegotiation written into law. A five-feature map of the movement captures its content: the Mandal confrontation of April 1973, the Tehri Garhwal current carried by Sunderlal Bahuguna, the Reni action of 26 March 1974 led by Gaura Devi, the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 with the fifteen-year felling ban that followed it, and the post-1981 trajectory through the Tehri Dam opposition to the movement’s national and global afterlife.

The Hills Before 1973: Reserved Forests, War Roads and a Flood

The forest that the villagers of Mandal defended in 1973 was not, in law, theirs. Under the Indian Forest Act of 1927, the colonial settlement of Himalayan forests had classified the great majority of the Garhwal and Kumaun woodland as reserved forest, administered by a Forest Department whose working plans treated the hills as a timber estate. Village rights survived as recorded concessions: grazing, lopping for fodder, fallen wood for fuel, a limited quota of trees for house-building and implements. The concession register, not the village, decided what a household could take. That legal architecture was the standing grievance of the hills long before anyone used the word Chipko. Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods (1989) recovers the earlier record of protest against it: the forest satyagrahas of 1916 and 1921 in Kumaun, the 1930 movement in which firing at Tilari killed protesters who had defied the forest laws of the Tehri Garhwal princely state, and a steady ledger of petitions, fines and resentments in between. The post-1947 state inherited the estate and the register intact.

The hills the movement inherited were also two jurisdictions, and the seam between them runs through the story. British Garhwal and Kumaun were administered directly under the forest law of the colonial state, the regime of reserved forests and working plans described above. Tehri Garhwal, where Bahuguna was born and where the Advani action would occur, remained a princely state until 1949, its forests the durbar’s estate, worked under the raja’s own settlement and guarded by his forest guards. The 1930 firing at Tilari, where the Tehri state’s forces shot villagers protesting the durbar’s forest settlement in the Rawain valley, belonged to that second jurisdiction, and its memory survived in Tehri Garhwal as the proof that the forest question there predated the Republic and both its parties. When the movement spread from Chamoli into Tehri after 1974 it crossed an old administrative border into a district where resistance to forest authority had a martyrology of its own, and the Sarvodaya workers who carried it there knew the names of the Tilari dead.

Two changes in the 1960s sharpened the contradiction. The first was strategic. After the border war of 1962, the 1962 war as a domestic political event drove a road-building programme across the Himalayan districts, and the roads brought the contractor economy deep into valleys that the Forest Department’s working plans had previously reached only on paper. Blasting, road debris dumped on slopes, and labour camps demanding fuel and timber made commercial extraction a visible, daily presence in villages whose own quotas stayed frozen in the concession register. The second change was commercial. Resin tapping, sawmills and outside contractors multiplied, and the department increasingly auctioned lots to firms from the plains, of which the Symonds Company of Allahabad, a manufacturer of sporting goods, was one. The villager watched the same ash and oak leave the hill on trucks while his application for a tree to make a plough waited for a signature.

The flood of July 1970 converted grievance into an argument. When the Alaknanda and its tributaries tore through Chamoli district in that monsoon, destroying bridges, buses, roads and cultivated terraces and killing, by the counts carried in movement and state accounts, more than two hundred people, the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS) made the connection that the official enquiries avoided: the bare, worked-over slopes above the river had delivered the water faster and the debris harder. Whether or not the hydrology of a single flood can be laid on logging alone, the political effect of the argument was decisive, because it gave the forest question a body count and a date. In October 1971 the Sangh’s workers demonstrated at Gopeshwar against the policies of the Forest Department. Through 1972 the marches and rallies continued and accomplished little, a failure the movement remembered when it chose direct action the following spring. The wider setting mattered too. At Stockholm in June 1972, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had addressed the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and asked whether poverty and need were not the greatest polluters, asserting a poor country’s claim to speak on environment in its own idiom. The hills were about to supply that idiom with a method.

The Working Plan Regime: How a Hillside Was Sold

To see what the Mandal crowd was actually interrupting, the machinery of a felling has to be described, because Chipko’s genius was to attack the machinery at its one exposed point. A Himalayan reserved forest was administered under a working plan, a document revised at intervals of a decade or more, which divided the forest into coupes and prescribed which coupe would be felled in which year, by what method and to what regeneration. Within that frame the divisional forest officer marked the trees of the year’s coupe, the department announced an auction or an allotment, and a contractor who won the lot acquired the right to enter with his labour, fell the marked trees and carry the timber out against royalty and transit passes. The villager appeared in this machinery at exactly two points: as a name on the concession register, entitled to his recorded quota, and as daily labour in the contractor’s gang. He appeared nowhere as a party to the decision.

The auction system had a politics of its own, and the movement’s literature is full of it. Lots were auctioned at district headquarters towns, in procedures that favoured firms with capital, depots and plains connections; the successful contractor commonly sublet the actual felling, and the man with the axe was often a hill labourer working for a wage against his own hillside. Timber moved out by the new roads to railheads and plains markets, and the royalty that returned to the hills was a fraction of the value extracted. Resin tapping from chir pine, let out on contract, scarred whole slopes of leased trees that were tapped to death in breach of the rules the department lacked the staff to enforce. Against this machinery the villager’s remedies were the petition and the record of rights, and the Mandal file shows both remedies exhausted in order: a decade of applications, an allotment cycle that preferred Allahabad, a protest at Gopeshwar in October 1971 that changed nothing, and marches through 1972 that changed nothing. The exposed point in the machinery was the coupe itself in the felling week. A contract is paper until men stand in a forest with axes, and at that moment the decision could still be reopened by the one argument the department had no form for: physical, disciplined, collective refusal at the stump.

One anomaly in the regime deserves record because the movement’s memory kept returning to it. In Kumaun, after the protests of 1921, the colonial government had conceded the van panchayat, the village forest council, and the rules framed in 1931 let elected village councils manage defined areas of civil forest for local needs. The van panchayats survived independence as functioning, if starved, institutions across Kumaun, living proof inside the same state that a forest could be governed by its village. Garhwal, where Mandal and Reni stand, had no equivalent spread of the institution, its forests held tighter in the reserved estate. The contrast sharpened the Chamoli grievance into a constitutional shape: two hill regions under one forest law, one with a recognised village institution inside it and one without, and the difference traceable not to ecology but to an administrative decision of 1931. When the Sangh demanded standing in the allotment, it was demanding, in effect, that Garhwal be given what Kumaun’s protest had extracted fifty years earlier.

The Arithmetic of the Hillside: Two Ledgers for One Forest

Underneath the politics ran an arithmetic, and the movement’s deepest argument was that the two sides kept different books. The household’s ledger was kept daily and mostly by women. A hill family’s economy drew on the forest for cooking fuel and winter heating, for fodder cut and carried for stall-fed cattle, for leaf litter swept from the forest floor and composted into the manure on which the terraced fields depended, for grazing, for timber and bamboo for house repair and implements, and for the springs that forest cover kept alive through the dry months. Every entry in that ledger was a walk, and the walks lengthened measurably as the near slopes were felled: the movement’s pamphlets and the testimony collected after Reni return again and again to the hours added to the fuel and fodder round, labour taken from the fields and the children by a forest retreating uphill. When the women of Reni and Advani defended their forests, they were defending, in the most literal bookkeeping sense, their working day.

The department’s ledger was kept annually and in rupees. It entered the forest once, at the auction: the Reni lot of over six hundred and eighty hectares recorded at Rs 4.7 lakh, the Mandal ash coupe at the price the Symonds contract implied, the resin leases at their contracted rates. Royalty and auction receipts were real money, and they flowed to the state exchequer and the plains economy, while the costs of the felling, the lengthened walks, the silted springs, the flood debris in the fields, were entered in no account the department published. The two ledgers could not be reconciled line by line, and the movement’s intellectual work was to insist that the second ledger’s silence about the first was not neutrality but a choice. Bahuguna’s slogan was, on inspection, an accounting rule: ecology is permanent economy, the standing forest pays in food, fodder, fuel, fibre and fertiliser, the five yields he enumerated, with soil and water beneath them all, and it pays every year, while the felled forest pays once. The flood of July 1970 was the hills presenting the unpaid side of the account.

Bhatt’s arithmetic differed from Bahuguna’s in a way that explains the movement’s two currents better than any ideological label. The Sangh did not propose to leave the forest untouched; it proposed to change who captured the value of its yield. Ash timber that left Chamoli as raw logs for an Allahabad racquet factory returned nothing but royalty; the same timber felled under a village allotment and worked in the Gopeshwar workshop into ploughs, handles and implements kept its margin in the hills, in wages and in tools priced for the neighbours who used them. Local processing multiplied the retained value of every tree, which is why the Sangh’s demand was never simply to stop felling but to transfer the allotment, and why Bhatt could accept a regulated working plan that Bahuguna’s prohibitionism rejected. Between the two arithmetics, the household’s and the preacher’s, the movement covered the whole ground of the later Indian forest argument: the claim of livelihood, the claim of ecology, and the discovery that in the hills the two claims were usually the same claim read at different speeds.

The Sangh at Gopeshwar: Bhatt and the Cooperative Road

The organisation that forced the issue was a small cooperative society with a workshop, not a party. Chandi Prasad Bhatt, born in 1934 at Gopeshwar, founded the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh in 1964 to build local industry on local resources: a workshop making agricultural implements, small units processing forest produce, employment that would keep hill men from migrating to the plains. The Sangh was Gandhian in discipline and Sarvodaya in lineage, and its founder’s instinct was constructive rather than confrontational. It applied each year, through the proper channel, for a modest allotment of ash trees for its implement workshop, and the annual refusal of that application became the measure of the system it worked inside. The framework this series applies to the Indian movement tradition, the movements-as-citizen-renegotiation framework, asks what a movement does when the petition has been filed and refused on schedule for a decade. The Sangh’s answer, arrived at by 1973, was that the petition would be backed by bodies placed between the axe and the tree.

Bhatt’s formation belonged to the older constructive-work tradition that the Nehruvian planned economy’s village industries settlement had half encouraged and half smothered. Khadi and village industries commissions existed; the co-operative form existed; what did not exist was a forest administration willing to treat a village society as a legitimate industrial claimant against a plains contractor. The Sangh’s significance in the Chipko record is precisely that it began as a claimant inside the rules. It wanted trees, legally allotted, for legal production. The movement that made its name began when the register answered a tenth request by giving the trees to someone else, and the lesson the Sangh drew was about citizenship rather than timber: the register had to be confronted publicly, in the forest, where its consequences fell. That is why the Mandal action of 1973 took the form it did, a crowd of villagers and Sangh workers standing in a marked forest announcing that the felling would proceed over their bodies or not at all. The tactic had a Garhwali name ready for it. Bhatt called it angalwaltha, embrace, and the discipline he demanded was satyagraha discipline: no weapons, no abuse, no retreat.

Feature One: Mandal, 24 April 1973

The first feature of the map is a date and an allotment register. For 1973 the Forest Department refused the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh its customary request for ten ash trees for the implement workshop at Gopeshwar. In the same allotment cycle the department awarded three hundred ash trees in the Mandal forest, in the upper Alaknanda valley, to the Symonds Company of Allahabad, which made tennis racquets and other sporting goods. The Sangh protested through the available channels and was refused a hearing that changed anything. In March 1973 the company’s lumbermen arrived at Gopeshwar. The Sangh, with the people of Mandal village, resolved on the response Bhatt had prepared them for: when the felling party entered the marked forest, the villagers would embrace the trees, and the axes would have to choose between wood and flesh.

On 24 April 1973 the confrontation came. About a hundred villagers and Sangh workers met the lumbermen in the Mandal forest, beating drums and shouting slogans, and made it plain that the marked ash trees would not be felled past their bodies. The contractors withdrew. The government then did the thing that converted a protest into a precedent: it cancelled the Symonds contract and allotted the trees to the Sangh. The significance of that cancellation is easily missed. The state had not yielded a principle; it had corrected an allotment, which is to say it had conceded that the register itself was the offence and that a village society’s claim outranked a plains manufacturer’s contract when citizens stood behind the claim in person. Later in 1973 the same company received an allotment near Phata, and the same drama repeated with the same ending, the felling abandoned under village pressure. By the close of 1973 the method had a travelling reputation in the Alaknanda valley and a growing file in the Forest Department, and the auctions for the following winter were being drawn up along the same river at Reni.

Why did the Mandal allotment anger the villages of Chamoli district?

The anger had a precise object. The Sangh had asked the Forest Department for ten ash trees a year for its implement workshop and been refused; the department then allotted three hundred ash trees in the Mandal forest to the Symonds Company of Allahabad for tennis racquets. The register itself was the offence.

The Mandal moment set the grammar of everything that followed. It was local and specific, a single allotment in a single forest, and its weapon was a claim about standing: the people who lived with the forest’s flood and fodder consequences were citizens with a prior claim on its produce, and they would exercise that claim physically when paper failed. Nothing in the action invoked wilderness, sacred groves or the rights of nature. The vocabulary was the vocabulary of the concession register inverted, our trees, our workshop, our valley. Analysts who later read Chipko as an eruption of ecological consciousness have to explain away its birth certificate, an industrial dispute over ten ash trees. Analysts who read it as a mere trade quarrel have to explain why the state, having corrected one allotment, faced a valley in rehearsal for the next one. The citizen-renegotiation reading starts from the document: a refusal, an award, a crowd, a cancellation, in that order.

The Tactic Takes a Name

What does the word Chipko mean?

Chipko is the Hindi word for to stick or to cling, and it names the method: villagers embracing marked trees and refusing to be separated from them, so that felling could not proceed without violence against unarmed people. Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s Garhwali word for the embrace was angalwaltha, and the Hindi name travelled on Ghanshyam Sailani’s song.

The method deserves attention as a political technology. Tree-hugging inverted the economics of coercion. A contractor’s gang could clear a forest of protesters with police help at modest cost, but it could not fell a tree wrapped in villagers without either retreating or producing an atrocity in front of witnesses, and the movement arranged witnesses as carefully as it arranged bodies. The tactic also converted the concession register’s abstract injustice into a photographable fact: the state’s timber, the contractor’s axe, and between them the citizen the register had refused. The Gandhian lineage was deliberate. Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna were both formed in the Sarvodaya tradition, and the movement’s discipline in these years, its fasts, its foot marches, its refusal of retaliation, its courting of arrest rather than confrontation, was satyagraha adapted to a forest working plan. When loggers at Reni abused the women confronting them and brandished guns, the answer recorded in every account is the same: the women held the trees and sang. The tactic’s restraint was its argument. A movement claiming to renegotiate citizenship cannot riot its way to the register; it has to make the state choose, visibly, between the contract and the citizen.

The name also marks the movement’s self-understanding as something new under an old sky. Hill people had defended trees before, and the Bishnoi sacrifice of 1730 at Khejarli, where Amrita Devi and 363 of her fellows died hugging khejri trees against a maharaja’s felling party, was remembered in the tradition. But Mandal was not a martyrdom, and nobody at Mandal died. It was a negotiation conducted with bodies, and it ended with a signature changed on a government file. That difference, between the sacrifice that shames a king and the standoff that amends a register, is the difference the citizen-renegotiation reading exists to name.

The Pamphlet War: The Movement Argues on Paper

A movement that intends to renegotiate must keep its own record, and Chipko’s paper trail is unusually rich for a campaign of hill villagers. The Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh printed pamphlets stating its claims in the plainest administrative Hindi it could command: the allotment figures, the flood argument, the demand that forest produce be processed where it grew. Bahuguna wrote incessantly, letters to editors, appeals to ministers, essays restating the standing forest’s account of itself in soil, water and fodder. The correspondence between the movement’s leaders, preserved in the Sangh’s papers at Gopeshwar and in the Bahuguna archive associated with the ashram at Silyara, shows the negotiation conducted in the intermissions of the confrontations: applications refined, committee evidence prepared, the two currents arguing with each other about ends and means in writing. Ghanshyam Sailani’s songs carried the same brief into oral circulation, so that a villager who could not read the pamphlet could sing its argument on the path to the forest.

The paper war had a strategic function that the readings of Chipko as spontaneity tend to miss. Every confrontation was preceded by a filed claim and followed by a documented demand, which meant the state could never honestly describe the movement as a riot or a rumour. When the Uttar Pradesh government appointed its committee after Reni, the movement arrived with its evidence already marshalled, its flood argument footnoted with dates and its nominees ready to sit. The archive is also why the scholarly contest over Chipko can be adjudicated at all: the allotment figures, the committee membership, the dates of bans and statutes are not matters of memory or myth, and a reading of the movement that contradicts the file can be corrected from the file. This article has relied on that discipline throughout. The five features of its map are five entries in a paper trail that begins with a refused application for ten ash trees.

Feature Three: Reni, 26 March 1974

The third feature is the movement’s most famous day, and its facts are documented to the hour. In January 1974 the Forest Department announced an auction of some two thousand five hundred trees in the Peng Murenda forest above Reni village, in Joshimath block of Chamoli district, a catchment still scarred by the 1970 flood. The lot, over six hundred and eighty hectares, went for a sum recorded at Rs 4.7 lakh. Bhatt toured the Reni villages warning that the felling would be resisted by the Mandal method. The administration and the contractors then arranged the movement’s absence. The men of Reni and the Sangh workers were summoned to Chamoli on the felling day, 26 March 1974, on the stated business of compensation payments for land taken earlier for military purposes. While the men were away, the labourers arrived by truck at the forest above the village.

How did the women of Reni stop the felling in March 1974?

The men of Reni had been called away to Chamoli on compensation business, and a girl who saw the labourers arriving ran to Gaura Devi, head of the Mahila Mangal Dal. She led twenty-seven women to the marked forest, was abused and threatened with guns, and answered by holding the trees for four days until the contractors withdrew.

Gaura Devi, then fifty years old and a widow, headed the Mahila Mangal Dal, the village women’s welfare association. Her own account of the day, carried in the movement’s record, is free of strategy. A girl ran to her with the news. She gathered the women, went up to the forest, and told the felling party what the accounts preserve as her words: the forest is our maika, our maternal home; do not destroy it. When argument failed and the labourers turned abusive, the women did what Bhatt’s workers had done at Mandal, except that no organiser was present and no rehearsal had occurred. They embraced the trees and kept an all-night vigil in the cold, and they held the forest for four days until the returning men and neighbouring villages joined them and the contractors left. Gaura Devi also refused, when Bhatt reached Reni the next day, to let him report the forest officials’ conduct, on the ground that the men had acted under orders and a complaint would cost them their livelihoods. That refusal is as much a part of the record as the embrace, and any reading of Reni has to carry both: a leader protecting the trees with her body at night and shielding her opponents’ jobs in the morning, acting throughout as a householder defending the material basis of her village’s life.

Why it was women who held Reni is a question of labour before it is a question of ideology. In the hill economy the forest’s daily yield, fuel, fodder, leaf manure, water from forest-fed springs, was collected by women on walks that lengthened with every felled slope. The men of Reni traded, migrated, served and, on 26 March 1974, sat in a government queue at Chamoli. The concession register’s injustices fell on the women’s working day, which is why the women’s association existed and why its head knew the Peng Murenda forest tree by tree. The ecofeminist reading of Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) takes this division of labour and raises it into a philosophy of the feminine principle. The record supports the division of labour completely and the philosophy only in part, and the adjudication section of this article returns to the difference. What Reni established on the day itself was institutional: an unplanned, leaderless-by-design action by twenty-seven villagers had defeated a state auction, and the state had to answer not a cooperative society with a file but a valley of villages whose women had learned the method.

The Committee and the Catchment Ban

The state’s answer to Reni is the documentary core of the citizen-renegotiation claim, because it shows the renegotiation being ratified. The Uttar Pradesh government appointed a nine-member committee of inquiry under Virendra Kumar, a botanist of the University of Delhi. Its membership is itself evidence: alongside officials sat Bhatt for the movement, Govind Singh Negi, the Communist Party of India legislator from the hills, and Govind Singh Rawat, the block pramukh of Joshimath who had stood with the Sangh at Mandal. The movement was, literally, seated inside the inquiry into its own allegations. Kumar insisted that the whole catchment, not Reni alone, be investigated, and the committee took two years over its work. Its report put the movement’s flood argument into the state’s own hand: the denudation of the upper Alaknanda slopes was dangerous, and commercial felling in the catchment had to stop. From 15 October 1977, felling in the catchment of the Alaknanda and its tributaries, nearly twelve hundred square kilometres, was banned for ten years. In 1985 the ban was extended for a further ten.

The Kumar committee was not the only inquiry the movement provoked, and the genre is worth a paragraph because it recurs wherever this movement pressed. Four official investigations into Himalayan forest management punctuate the Chipko decade: the Virendra Kumar Committee of 1974, a committee under M. S. Swaminathan in the same period, the K. N. Kaur Committee of 1980, and a second committee under Swaminathan thereafter. The state, confronted in the forest, repeatedly answered with the committee room, and the movement repeatedly accepted the translation, supplying members, evidence and patience measured in years. Each report that conceded ground did so in the state’s own technical idiom, slope, catchment, regeneration, which made the concession hard to withdraw. The committee was the ante-chamber of the statute, and the movement learned to treat it as such.

The committee route matters for the argument of this article. A movement that merely obstructs gets dispersed or bought off; a movement that renegotiates gets a committee, a report and an order with a date on it. Readers who teach the movement can present the report and the order of October 1977 through a browser-based PPT viewer without installing office software, which is how the committee’s findings usually reach a classroom. The Reni women had no representative in any legislature, and within three years their night vigil had been converted, through a chain of named institutions, into a decade-long prohibition covering a river basin. The prohibition was not total and it was not permanent, and the movement’s own ranks quarrelled over whether the catchment ban conceded too much or won too little. But the form of the outcome is the point. The Forest Department’s working plan had been overridden by a process the villagers had forced into being and then staffed. When the adjudication below weighs the three readings of Chipko, this file, the inquiry, the membership, the report, the order of October 1977, is the primary evidence each reading has to digest.

The Flood Argument: Expertise Inside a Satyagraha

The movement’s most consequential intellectual act was to make a hydrological claim and then make the state verify it. The claim, formed by the Sangh after July 1970, was that the Alaknanda disaster had been amplified by the condition of the slopes: commercial felling and road cutting in the upper catchment had stripped the cover that slowed the monsoon water, so that rain which the intact forest would have metered into the river over days arrived in hours, carrying the hillside with it. The claim was not folklore dressed as science, and it was not science dressed as folklore. It was a testable proposition about a named catchment, advanced by an organisation whose members walked the catchment daily, and it inverted the usual direction of expertise, in which the department’s working plan spoke and the village listened. After 1970 the village spoke in the department’s own vocabulary, catchment, regeneration, silt load, and demanded to be answered in it.

The Virendra Kumar Committee is where the claim was cashed. A committee chaired by a Delhi botanist, staffed with officials and required to walk the same slopes, could not dismiss the argument as sentiment, and its report’s acceptance of the felling-flood connection in the Alaknanda catchment stands as the moment the movement’s expertise entered the state’s record as finding rather than allegation. The pattern repeated at every later stage of the Chipko story. At Tehri, the opposition’s durable weapons were the appraisal file and the seismic argument. In the scholarly contest, Guha’s history is itself a work of archival expertise deployed against the department’s self-image. The citizen-renegotiation reading draws the obvious conclusion: the movement renegotiated not only the allotment register but the register of who may speak about a forest with authority, and it did so by mastering the state’s technical idiom rather than by refusing it. A parable about hugging trees would have been answered with sentiment. A catchment argument had to be answered with a ban.

Feature Two: Bahuguna, Tehri Garhwal and the Second Current

Chipko had two organisers, two idioms and, increasingly, two doctrines, and the map’s second feature is the current that flowed through Tehri Garhwal under Sunderlal Bahuguna. Bahuguna, born in 1927 at Marora village in Tehri Garhwal, came to the forests through the freedom struggle and the Sarvodaya movement, and through the anti-liquor campaigns he and his wife Vimla Bahuguna ran across the hill districts from 1965 to 1970, which organised thousands of hill women a full decade before Reni. His ashram at Silyara, the Bhuvneshwari Mahila Ashram associated with Vimla Bahuguna’s work among hill women, anchored a network of constructive workers. Where Bhatt built a cooperative and fought for allotments, Bahuguna preached protection. His slogan, ecology is permanent economy, inverted the department’s premise: the forest’s standing value, in soil, water and fodder, exceeded its felled price, and a hillside economy that ate its forests was consuming its capital and calling the meal income.

The ashram network behind Bahuguna’s current explains its reach and its durability. Vimla Bahuguna’s work at Silyara, where the Bhuvneshwari Mahila Ashram trained hill women in spinning, literacy and organisation, meant that the Tehri Garhwal current did not have to invent its village machinery in 1973. The anti-liquor campaigns of 1965 to 1970 had already taken Sarvodaya workers into hundreds of villages on an issue that touched every household, and the women who had picketed liquor shops in those years formed the connective tissue through which forest meetings were called in the 1970s. Bahuguna’s own formation ran deeper still: a teenage participant in the freedom struggle, imprisoned under the Tehri Garhwal princely state, he carried into the forest campaigns the full Gandhian repertoire and the ascetic authority that made a district officer take his fasts seriously. The current he led was therefore older than Chipko and survived its defeats, which is why the movement in Tehri Garhwal never depended on a single organisation’s file the way the Chamoli current depended on the Sangh’s.

The difference between the two men was real, documented and consequential. Bhatt’s current, organised through the Sangh, accepted regulated felling and fought for the local share: local labour, local processing, resin and timber worked in the hills for the hills, a forest economy with the villager as proprietor. Bahuguna’s current moved toward a general prohibition on green felling in the Himalaya, argued in the language of civilisational duty and ascetic witness, prosecuted through fasts and foot marches. In October and November 1974 Bahuguna walked the Askot to Arakot padayatra, some seven hundred kilometres across Uttarakhand, carrying the Chipko message village to village; he fasted for a fortnight in 1974 against forest policy and entered an auction hall at Uttarkashi to plead against the proceedings. The two currents cooperated for years and diverged over ends, and each accused the other, in the correspondence the movement preserved, of narrowing the cause: the co-operator charged the preacher with abandoning livelihoods, the preacher charged the co-operator with bargaining with the axe. The citizen-renegotiation reading does not have to choose between them, because the movement’s institutional harvest was gathered by both hands: the Sangh’s claim produced Mandal and the committee; Bahuguna’s prohibitionism produced, in time, the fifteen-year ban. But the divergence explains why Chipko could never be reduced to a single programme, and why its afterlife split into a development stream and a protection stream that still run separately in the hills.

The Women’s Organisation Before the Women’s Action

Reni’s spontaneity has a prehistory, and recovering it corrects both the romance of the leaderless uprising and the claim that the movement’s women were mobilised from nothing in a single morning. The Mahila Mangal Dal that Gaura Devi headed at Reni was one of a network of village women’s associations that Sarvodaya workers had built across the Garhwal hills through the 1960s, and the anti-liquor campaigns of 1965 to 1970 had given that network its training. Liquor was a forest question in disguise: the excise revenue of the hill districts rested on country liquor shops whose clientele was the villages’ wage-earning men, and the women’s pickets against the shops were campaigns about the household economy conducted by the people who ran it. In 1971 Sunderlal Bahuguna fasted for sixteen days against the reopening of liquor shops in the hill districts, and the campaign he served ended with five districts declared dry. The women who held those pickets learned the repertoire, the meeting, the procession, the disciplined refusal, that the forest actions would use.

Vimla Bahuguna’s institution-building at Silyara belonged to the same foundation. The ashram’s spinning, literacy and health work among hill women was slow, unphotogenic organisation of exactly the kind that decides, years later, whether a girl running down a path with news of the labourers finds a village headwoman ready to act or a village with no one to run to. Gaura Devi’s own recollection, that the Reni action was not planned and that the women came forward because the men were absent, is entirely compatible with this prehistory: the decision of 26 March 1974 was improvised in an hour, by women whose capacity to improvise together had been built over a decade. Readings of Chipko that celebrate the spontaneity and readings that celebrate the ideology both tend to skip the organisation, and the organisation is where the citizen-renegotiation was actually manufactured.

Advani 1977: The Movement Turns Inward

The hardest test of the movement’s claim came when the contractor was not a plains company but a neighbour. In 1977 the forest above Advani village in the Henvalghati of Tehri Garhwal was auctioned, and the felling contract was taken by the village’s own headman. His wife, Bachni Devi, organised the resistance. Women of Advani tied sacred threads around the marked trees as a vow of protection, kept discourses on the forest’s place in their lives running in the grove, and guarded the trees in shifts. Sunderlal Bahuguna fasted against the auction and the order stood anyway. When the axemen returned in February 1978 with armed police to hold the villagers off, the volunteers were already inside the forest, each guarded tree with its circle of people, and the police withdrew. The felling was abandoned.

Advani matters because it dissolves the easiest version of the story, the hills united against the plains. The enemy at Advani was the village’s own cash economy and its own elected headman, and the resisters were his wife and the women whose fodder walks the felling would lengthen. The movement’s other actions of those years carry the same inward turn. At Pulna in the Bhyundar valley in 1978, women confiscated the loggers’ tools and left written receipts for them, a satyagraha refinement that treated even the confrontation as a transaction between citizens. The activist Dhoom Singh Negi fasted at Advani and carried the method through the Henvalghati villages. By the count carried in the movement’s histories, more than one hundred and fifty villages were involved in Chipko actions between 1972 and 1979. What had begun as one society’s allotment dispute had become a standing technique of citizenship in the hills, available against any felling order, whoever held the contract. That is the point at which a protest becomes a renegotiation: the terms of forest use were no longer set in the department’s office alone, because any village could reopen them by occupying the forest and inviting the state to answer.

The Repertoire Widens, 1977 to 1980

Between the catchment ban of October 1977 and the statute of October 1980 the movement consolidated from a campaign into a repertoire, and the variations it developed in those years show activists reasoning about their instrument. In the Salet forest near Pipleth, as Vandana Shiva’s account records, Dhoom Singh Negi’s party applied the embrace against a contractor’s party in a confrontation that carried the method deep into the Henvalghati. In the chir pine forests, where resin tapping on contract was killing leased trees by over-tapping, protesters bandaged the wounded trunks, a symbolic first aid that named the injury precisely and photographed as well as any embrace. The Pulna women of 1978, confiscating the loggers’ tools against written receipts, refined the repertoire’s legalism: even in direct action, the movement behaved like a counter-administration, issuing documents, keeping accounts, returning property on compliance. Each variation answered a local condition, and the set of them reads like a manual for reopening a settled administrative question without ever handing the state the excuse of disorder.

The political horizon widened in the same years. The demand for a separate hill state, which would be answered only in 2000, acquired its organised vehicle with the founding of the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal in 1979, and the forest campaigns had already taught the hills the argument the statehood movement would generalise: that decisions about the hills were taken in Lucknow by men who did not live with their consequences, and that the remedy was standing, institutional and territorial at once. Chipko did not found the statehood movement, and this article claims no such parentage. It supplied the statehood argument with its proof of concept and many of its workers, and it fixed the forest at the centre of the hills’ case for self-government, where the movement’s file remains in the state’s political memory.

Feature Four: The Act of 1980 and the Fifteen-Year Ban

What did the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 change in Indian forest governance?

The Act, brought in by ordinance on 25 October 1980, reversed the direction of forest decisions. A state government had been able to de-reserve a reserved forest or divert forest land to non-forest use on its own authority; after the Act, no diversion could proceed without the prior approval of the central government.

The statute’s timing and authorship place it inside the movement’s file. The Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act of 1976 had already moved forests from the State List to the Concurrent List and written the protection of forests into the Directive Principles and the Fundamental Duties, giving the Centre the competence the 1980 Act exercised. Indira Gandhi’s government, returned to office in January 1980 with the mandate described in the post-1971 Indira mandate still shaping her party’s instincts for centralising assertion, had both the instrument and the occasion. Sunderlal Bahuguna carried the movement’s appeal to the Prime Minister in person in 1980. Her response ran on two tracks. The first was the ordinance of 25 October 1980, enacted as the Forest (Conservation) Act, which required prior central approval for de-reservation and diversion and thereby subjected every future Mandal-style allotment scandal to a second, distant signature. The second was the felling ban: a fifteen-year prohibition on commercial green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh above one thousand metres, and on steep slopes above thirty degrees, decided in 1980 and in force from 1981, so that the belt the movement had defended tree by tree was closed to the contractor altogether for a generation.

The ban’s terms repay exact reading, because they show what kind of victory it was. It was not a rights settlement. It transferred no title to the villages, enlarged no concession register, and created no village forest institution. It was a prohibition imposed from the summit of the state on the state’s own apparatus, the Prime Minister overruling her forest departments in the movement’s favour on the movement’s central demand of the decade. The citizen-renegotiation reading claims no more for it than the record shows, and the record shows this: villagers who in 1973 could not obtain ten ash trees had, by 1981, obtained a statutory veto point over forest diversion for the whole country and a fifteen-year closure of commercial felling across their region. The renegotiation was real, and it was conducted, characteristically, by a movement that held no office and won no election in the process.

The Movement in the Assembly: Party Politics Around Chipko

Chipko held no seats and endorsed no party, yet its file passed through the hands of three governments of two parties in seven years, and the passage is instructive about how a renegotiation survives changes of regime. The committee of inquiry after Reni was appointed by the Congress government of Uttar Pradesh under Chief Minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, a hill man from Pauri Garhwal who understood exactly what a valley in revolt could cost his party in the hill districts. The appointment was an act of party management as well as of inquiry: it seated the movement inside a process the government chaired, slowed the confrontation into evidence, and bought the administration two years. What the government had not bargained for was the committee’s independence under Virendra Kumar, whose insistence on investigating the whole catchment converted a device of delay into the instrument of the October 1977 order. By the time the report matured, Lucknow had changed hands: the Janata Party, swept to power in 1977 on the anti-Emergency wave, held Uttar Pradesh, and a Janata administration issued the catchment ban that a Congress-appointed committee had prepared. The movement’s settlement thus carries two parties’ signatures, a fact that protected it from the reversal that a single party’s concession might have suffered at the next election.

The opposition benches had their own presence inside the file. Govind Singh Negi, the Communist Party of India legislator from the hills who sat on the Kumar committee, represented the older left tradition of forest protest in Kumaun, the tradition of the 1921 settlement struggles, and his seat at the table joined the movement’s satyagraha to a parliamentary lineage of hill grievance. The movement’s leaders kept their distance from all of it in public. Bhatt’s Sangh refused party affiliation as a condition of its credibility in the villages and of its access to governments of either colour, and Bahuguna’s Sarvodaya formation held electoral politics at the same arm’s length. The discipline looks, in retrospect, like the movement’s shrewdest institutional choice. A Chipko branded as one party’s campaign could have been dismissed by the other’s government; a Chipko that filed its evidence, sat on the committee and let the order issue under whichever ministry held Lucknow made itself expensive for every government to refuse. The citizen-renegotiation was deliberately drafted to be signable by anyone.

The Department’s Case, Stated Whole

Evenhandedness requires the Forest Department’s case at its strongest, because the movement’s victories mean little if the other side is drawn as a cartoon. The department’s officers argued, in their working plans and in the enquiry evidence of the decade, that the reserved forest regime had itself been created to stop the ruin of the hills: the unregulated felling and grazing of the nineteenth century, the resin and timber demands of two wars, and the pressure of a growing hill population on a fixed estate. A working plan, on this account, was a conservation instrument before it was a revenue instrument, prescribing regeneration, limiting felling to the annual increment and protecting catchments the village would have grazed bare. The contractor system, the officers argued, existed because the department lacked the staff and the treasury to work the forests directly, and the auction was at least an open procedure against the alternative of discretionary permits. Concessions to villages were recorded and honoured in law; if quotas pinched, the remedy was revision of the settlement, not obstruction of a legal contract. And behind the technical case stood a fiscal one the hills could not answer alone: the plains’ industry, the railways and the defence establishment demanded Himalayan timber, and a forest policy set valley by valley would have been no policy at all.

The movement’s leaders engaged this case seriously, which is why their own documents answer it point by point. Bhatt accepted the working plan’s conservation aim and attacked its incidence: a regime that protected the forest from its neighbours while auctioning it to distant firms had inverted protection into exclusion, and the Sangh’s demand for local processing was an offer to meet the department’s regeneration goals with local labour and local interest as the guarantee. Bahuguna accepted the fiscal argument and reversed its arithmetic: the standing forest paid the state and the plains in regulated rivers, silt-free reservoirs and fodder in perpetuity, an income the felling accounts never entered, so that the cheap contract was the expensive option on any honest ledger. The committee reports of the decade show the department’s case losing on its own ground, the catchment evidence, rather than on slogans. That is the contest the citizen-renegotiation reading describes: not virtue against vice, but two accounts of the same hillside, one of which was forced, by citizens standing in the coupe, to defend itself in a forum it did not control.

The March Across the Himalaya, 1981 to 1983

Bahuguna then did the thing that converted a regional settlement into a national doctrine: he walked the length of the mountain chain with it. Between 1981 and 1983 he led a trans-Himalayan padayatra of four thousand eight hundred and seventy kilometres from Srinagar in Kashmir to Kohima in Nagaland, village to village, carrying the argument that the Himalaya was one ecological and political unit and that its felling regime had to be judged as a whole. The march was the Sarvodaya instrument scaled to a mountain range, and it completed the circuit the movement’s politics required: the grievance of Chamoli, generalised by the march into a Himalayan claim, presented to the Prime Minister, and answered, while the march was still on the road or fresh in memory, by the ban on green felling above one thousand metres. In 1987 the Chipko movement received the Right Livelihood Award, cited for its dedication to the conservation, rehabilitation and environmentally sound use of India’s natural resources, and Bhatt had received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982. The honours register the afterlife beginning: a valley’s allotment dispute had become a citation in the world’s environmental liturgy.

The march also fixed Bahuguna’s version of Chipko in the national imagination, with consequences the adjudication below must handle honestly. The preacher with the staff, the slogan about ecology and economy, the fasts and the audience with the Prime Minister: this was the Chipko the newspapers carried, and it tilted the movement’s public meaning away from the Sangh’s workshop and toward the protectionist idiom. Bhatt’s organisation continued its quieter work in the Alaknanda valley, afforestation, village industries, women’s savings cooperatives through the Sangh’s successor bodies, and his version of the Chipko inheritance, development without destruction, had the longer institutional tail in the hills themselves. The two currents’ unequal publicity is one reason the scholarly contest over Chipko has been so durable. Each reading of the movement tends to be a reading of one current, generalised.

Feature Five Opens: Tehri and the Limits of the Settlement

The fifth feature is the settlement’s stress test. The Tehri Dam, on the Bhagirathi near the town of Tehri, had been under construction from 1978, and Bahuguna made its stopping the second great cause of his life, arguing that a high dam in a seismic valley, submerging the old town of Tehri and scores of villages, repeated at giant scale the error Chipko had fought at Mandal: a decision taken over the heads of the people who would live with its consequences, justified by benefits flowing elsewhere, to the plains’ irrigation and the cities’ power. Through the 1980s and 1990s the opposition he led used the movement’s whole repertoire, fasts, marches, dharnas at the dam site, litigation, and appeals to successive prime ministers.

The fasts of the Tehri years are the longest in the movement’s record, and they are dated. In 1995 Bahuguna ended a forty-five day fast when Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao assured him of a review committee on the dam’s ecological and human costs. In 1996 he fasted for seventy-four days at Raj Ghat in Delhi, during the prime ministership of H. D. Deve Gowda, who gave a personal undertaking of review. The reviews came, the dam proceeded. The Supreme Court, in the judgment of 2003 in N. D. Jayal v. Union of India, declined to stop the project, holding that the court’s role did not extend to re-deciding the project’s wisdom on the material placed before it. The reservoir began to fill, and on 31 July 2004 Bahuguna, then seventy-seven, was finally moved from his protest hut by the rising water to accommodation at Koti above the new lake. The first generating unit was commissioned in 2006.

The project’s paper history gave the opposition documented material of the same kind the Sangh had once used at Mandal. The Tehri Hydro Development Corporation was incorporated in 1988 to execute the project, and the dam’s environmental clearance, granted in 1990, followed an appraisal process in which the official committee charged with examining the project had reported adversely on it, a sequence the movement’s published case never tired of citing: the file, read closely, showed a decision that had outrun its own evidence. The seismic question ran beside it, the valley’s place in the central Himalayan seismic gap argued by named geologists on both sides, and the rehabilitation of the displaced, the old town’s residents and the villages of the submergence zone, remained contested through every stage of construction. Bahuguna’s campaign held these three files open for two decades, which is why a project sanctioned in one political era was still being argued, signature by signature, in another.

Tehri is where the citizen-renegotiation reading earns its keep by explaining a defeat. The Mandal method depended on a specific geometry: a divisible decision, an allotment that could be cancelled, a contractor who could withdraw, a committee that could be staffed. A dam under construction inverts the geometry. The decision is indivisible, the investment sunk, the beneficiaries a national grid, and the state’s answer to fasts is the review committee that reports and is filed. The movement that had renegotiated the forest register could not renegotiate the concrete. Yet the Tehri campaign was not barren. It forced environmental appraisal, rehabilitation argument and seismic scrutiny into the permanent record of Indian dam politics, and it made Bahuguna’s question, who pays and who benefits, the unavoidable first question of every later project fight in the hills, including the ones fought long after the reservoir closed over old Tehri.

A Ministry Is Born: The State Reorganises Around the Forest

The statute of 1980 did not arrive alone, and the administrative births that accompanied it register how far the forest question had travelled from the divisional office. In November 1980 the Union government created a Department of Environment, the first central organ charged with the subject as a whole, and in 1985 the department grew into the Ministry of Environment and Forests, with a National Wastelands Development Board created the same year to address the degraded lands the forest debate had put on the map. Environmental appraisal of river valley and industrial projects, a procedure the Tehri file had already tested, hardened into routine clearance machinery through the decade. None of this was the movement’s work in the way the catchment ban was; bureaucracies grow by their own logic, and the new ministry served a government with its own reasons to centralise. But the sequence is part of the record this article maps: between 1973 and 1985 the Indian state acquired a statute, a department and then a ministry for a subject that, at Mandal, had been a line in a divisional allotment register, and it acquired them in the years when the forest question was being asked in the loudest voice by the villagers of one Himalayan district.

The Afterlife: Appiko, Statehood and the Travelling Template

In September 1983 the template crossed the subcontinent. At Salkani village in the Sirsi taluk of Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka, villagers led by Pandurang Hegde, a young activist who had spent time at the Bahugunas’ ashram in Tehri Garhwal, confronted the felling of the Kalase forest by the method they renamed in Kannada: Appiko, to embrace. On 8 September 1983 the people of the area marched into the Kalase forest and surrounded the marked trees; the agitation held for some thirty-eight days until the state government withdrew the felling order. Appiko’s slogan, Ulisu, Belesu, Balasu, save, grow, use rationally, is Bhatt’s constructive doctrine compressed into three verbs, and its spread through the Western Ghats districts, against monoculture plantations and for the mixed forest, repeated the Chamoli sequence of petition, refusal, embrace and order withdrawn. The adaptation matters for the argument. A parable does not travel with instructions; a political technology does. Appiko’s organisers took from Chipko not an image but a procedure, and applied it to a forest department and a party system entirely different from Uttar Pradesh’s.

The institutional afterlife ran in parallel. The National Forest Policy of 1988 re-stated the aims of forest management with the needs of local populations placed first in the text and a national goal of one-third of the land under forest or tree cover, language unthinkable in the working plans of 1973. The Joint Forest Management circular of 1 June 1990 invited village committees into the protection of degraded forests in partnership with the departments the movement had fought. In December 1996 the Supreme Court’s continuing orders in T. N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India took the definition of forest out of departmental discretion altogether and froze felling across whole states pending approved working plans, the juridical extreme of the centralising track the 1980 Act had opened. On 9 November 2000 the hill districts whose forests Chipko had defended became the new state of Uttaranchal, renamed Uttarakhand in 2007, and the movement took its place in the genealogy every account of the statehood demand recites: the hills had learned, across the 1970s, to act as citizens of a place rather than subjects of a register. Movements in the same tradition as the Sampoorna Kranti citizen-renegotiation framework supplied the statehood movement with its repertoire and its confidence. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006 finally wrote individual and collective forest rights into statute, a generation after Reni, addressing the title question the 1980 settlement had left untouched. Each of these outcomes has many parents, and this article claims for Chipko only what the sequence shows: it was the first, and remains the cleanest, demonstration that the forest register could be reopened from below.

The constructive half of the inheritance ran on in Chamoli itself. The Sangh and its successor body at Gopeshwar turned, after the bans, to the work its founding charter had always named first: planting. Its eco-development camps in the Alaknanda villages organised the protection and planting of broad-leaved fodder and fuel species on degraded village land, applying the movement’s arithmetic in reverse, a forest rebuilt by the labour of the households that would gather from it. The Indian school curriculum took the movement into the national classroom in its turn, the NCERT texts carrying Mandal and Reni to students who would never see the Alaknanda, so that the valley’s file became part of the Republic’s common knowledge. A movement that had begun by demanding a hearing in a divisional office ended as the standard example, cited in the state’s own textbooks, of how its citizens may address it.

What the Settlement Did Not Settle

The renegotiation’s limits are as documented as its victories, and three of them belong in any honest map. The first is title. The bans and the Act regulated felling and diversion; they did not enlarge the villager’s property in the forest, and the concession register that had provoked Mandal survived the movement that had shamed it, amended at the margins by joint management committees after 1990 rather than replaced. A villager of Chamoli in 1990 held the same formal rights in the reserved forest as her mother in 1973, in a forest harder for anyone, including her, to use legally. Critics of the settlement inside the scholarly record, and the movement’s own cooperative current in its later writings, marked the irony precisely: a movement for the village’s claim had harvested prohibitions administered from above, and protection could pinch the fodder walk as surely as the contractor had. Guha’s later assessments of the post-Chipko hills record the disillusion plainly, and the Forest Rights Act of 2006 was Parliament’s eventual admission that the title question had been deferred for a generation.

The second limit is geographical. The settlement governed the reserved forests of the Himalayan districts where the movement had stood; the contractor system, the working plan regime and the quota grievance continued across the rest of India’s forest estate with no Mandal to interrupt them, and the movements that later formed elsewhere, in the Narmada valley, in the mining districts of the peninsula, had to build their own files from the beginning, borrowing the repertoire but not the precedent. The third limit is generational. The movement’s authority rested on named persons, two organisers of opposite doctrine and a generation of village women whose names the record only partly kept, and institutions built on persons thin as they age. The Sangh’s successor bodies persisted in the Alaknanda valley, the ashram at Silyara persisted, and the repertoire persisted everywhere; the negotiating machine itself, the society with its file and its workshop, proved harder to bequeath than the tactic. A map of Chipko that omits these limits would be the romance this article has refused from its first page.

The Three Readings, Each at Its Strongest

The scholarly contest over Chipko is a contest between three named books and the readings they founded, and the stance of this article requires each to be stated as its author would wish before any of them is judged.

The environmental-history reading is Ramachandra Guha’s, in The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989). Guha, who had walked the ground and read the settlement records, placed Chipko in a centuries-long history of peasant resistance to state forest control, from the protests of 1916 and 1921 through the forest satyagraha of 1930. On his account the movement was a defence of subsistence: hill peasants whose fuel, fodder and leaf manure the commercial working plans were consuming, asserting the moral economy of the village against the revenue economy of the department. Guha’s reading has the great virtue of the archive. It explains the prehistory, it explains why the trigger was an allotment rather than a doctrine, and it restores the movement’s anonymity, its hundreds of unnamed villagers, against the cult of its two famous men. Where the reading strains is at the movement’s outcomes and self-descriptions: the actors of 1973 to 1981 spoke the language of citizenship and rights as readily as the language of subsistence, and their victories were institutional instruments, committees, statutes and bans, which a pure subsistence frame treats as epilogue.

The gender-and-ecology reading is Vandana Shiva’s, in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1988). Shiva read Chipko as a women’s movement in essence, not merely in composition: the hill women, defending the living forest that fed their households, embodied a feminine principle of sustenance and diversity against a masculinist, reductionist science of forestry that saw the forest as standing timber and the hillside as a warehouse. Her account gave Chipko its global fame and its ecofeminist lineage, and it rests on a fact no reading may discard: at Reni, at Advani, and in village after village, women were the movement’s front line, its strategists of the fodder walk, and frequently its majority. Where the reading strains is at the record of aims. The women of Reni described their own action in the idiom of the maternal home and the household’s needs, not in the idiom of a feminine metaphysic; the movement’s organisations were built and led in their founding phase by men pursuing co-operative industry; and Shiva’s critics, Bina Agarwal foremost among them in her 1992 essay on the gender and environment debate, argued that the ecofeminist frame essentialised the very women it celebrated, substituting an ideology of womanhood for the material relations, property, labour and caste, that actually governed who gathered fuel and who held title. Agarwal’s counter-proposal, a feminist environmentalism grounded in those material relations, is the strongest form of the critique, because it keeps Shiva’s fact and refuses her metaphysic.

The third account is the participant history, Thomas Weber’s Hugging the Trees: The Story of the Chipko Movement (1989), written from fieldwork in the hills in the early 1980s. Weber’s Chipko is a Gandhian movement before it is anything else: a disciplined, nonviolent campaign whose methods, fasts, marches, the guarding of trees with sacred threads at Advani, derived from satyagraha and whose actors understood themselves in that lineage. Weber supplies much of the narrative record on which the other readings draw, including the Advani women’s guard duty that he called front-line soldiering. His account strains where participant history usually strains, in its closeness to Bahuguna’s self-understanding and its relative inattention to the Sangh’s industrial claim, the Mandal register entry with which the whole sequence began.

Adjudication: What the Primary Record Decides

The disagreement is adjudicated, under this article’s charter, on the primary record: the allotment file of 1973, the committee record of 1974 to 1977, the statute of 1980, and the actors’ own recorded words. The claim defended here is that the environmental-political citizen-renegotiation reading captures what the other two framings each partially miss, because it is the only reading that follows the whole sequence, from refusal to embrace to committee to Act to ban, as a single intelligible action.

Consider what each framing does with the Mandal file. For the environmental-history reading, Mandal is a subsistence protest, one more entry in the ledger of peasant resistance. But the Sangh was not defending a subsistence practice at Mandal; it was pressing an industrial claim, ten ash trees for a workshop, through a cooperative society registered under the state’s own laws, and it won not a restoration of custom but a contract. For the gender-and-ecology reading, Mandal is an embarrassment to be passed over quickly, a male-led, industry-minded origin for a movement it wishes to found at Reni. For the citizen-renegotiation reading, Mandal is the template: citizens using the state’s own forms, then the state’s own forests, to compel the state to honour the priority of the local claim, and winning a documented reversal. The reading also handles Reni without strain. The women’s action was unplanned, materially motivated and instantly political in effect, and Gaura Devi’s refusal to see the forest officials punished is the act of a citizen negotiating a settlement, not of a priestess defending a principle or a peasant defending a custom, though both descriptions touch parts of her day.

The committee and the Act decide the rest. A subsistence movement can be suppressed or starved out; the historical record of 1916 and 1930 shows both. The Chipko sequence instead produced the Virendra Kumar Committee with the movement seated on it, a catchment ban ordered in October 1977, a central statute in October 1980 and a fifteen-year regional ban from 1981. These are the instruments of a renegotiation, and they are the movement’s own chosen currency: Bhatt filed applications, Bahuguna sought audiences, both men wanted orders, reports and signatures, not martyrdom. Read through the framework this pillar applies to all its movements, the pattern is the one the economic-policy-as-politics framework finds in a different decade and the one the foreign-policy-as-domestic-politics framework finds in another: a decision that presents itself as technical, an allotment, a rate, a treaty, is revealed by contest to be a distribution of standing, and is remade when the losers of the first distribution organise to reopen it. Chipko is the forest register’s version of that revelation, fought with the additional clarity that the losers could point to the exact page, the ten refused trees against the three hundred awarded, on which their standing had been entered as nil. The constitutional dimension runs the same way: the movement’s decade is the decade in which the Indian Constitution absorbed the environment, in the Forty-second Amendment’s duties and, in time, in the courts’ expansive reading of the right to life that the most-consequential-constitutional-moment framework tracks through the constitutional cases. Chipko supplied the Republic with the political fact those legal texts presuppose, a citizenry that treated the forest as a subject of justice.

The verdict, then, is comparative rather than annihilating. Guha is right about the prehistory and the subsistence base, and wrong only when his frame demotes the institutional harvest to aftermath. Shiva is right about the composition of the front line and the gendered distribution of the forest’s loss, and wrong when she converts composition into metaphysic and writes the Sangh’s industrial claim out of the origin. Weber is right about the method and its lineage. The citizen-renegotiation reading holds all three truths in one sequence, because it is a reading about what the movement did to the state, and the state left receipts.

One sub-contest the adjudication must settle separately is the quarrel over parentage, because it has distorted both popular memory and parts of the scholarship. The question of who founded Chipko, Bhatt or Bahuguna, is answered by the file without difficulty and by the fame with difficulty. The organisation, the tactic’s first use, the allotment dispute and the committee seat belong to Bhatt’s Chamoli record of 1964 to 1977. The doctrine of total protection, the Himalayan generalisation, the Prime Ministerial audience and the ban belong to Bahuguna’s record of 1974 to 1981. The movement was jointly authored by men who later disputed the division of credit, in correspondence that neither man’s admirers should find comfortable, and the dispute itself is evidence for the citizen-renegotiation reading: what each founder claimed, in the end, was authorship of a negotiation with the state, the one of its instruments, the other of its largest concession. Movements remembered as pure spirit do not generate property disputes over their own history. Movements that changed registers and statutes do.

The adjudication can be stated as a test, so that future readings know what would defeat this one. The environmental-history reading would prevail if the record showed the movement’s actors indifferent to institutional outcomes, content with restored custom and surprised by the statute; the file shows the opposite at every stage, applications before actions, nominees on committees, demands drafted as orders. The gender-and-ecology reading would prevail if the movement’s own documents framed its claim in the idiom of a feminine principle; the pamphlets and the recorded speeches frame it in the idiom of allotment, livelihood and citizenship, and the women of the record explain themselves as householders and villagers before they explain themselves as women. The citizen-renegotiation reading would fall if the sequence broke, if the embrace had produced no committee, the committee no order, the appeal no Act. The sequence is the argument, and the sequence is intact in the primary record from the refused application of the allotment cycle of 1973 to the ordinance of 25 October 1980.

The Counter-Case: A World Movement Passing Through?

The strongest counter to this reading must be stated fairly, because the brief of this article demands it and the evidence for it is real. Chipko’s decade was also the decade in which environment became a world subject: Stockholm in 1972, the oil shocks, the first great wave of international conservation organisation and funding, the arrival of foreign journalists and scholars in the Alaknanda valley, of whom Weber was one and the world’s press corps many. On the counter-reading, Chipko’s fame, its honours and arguably its victories were gifts of that conjuncture: a photogenic movement in a photogenic landscape, amplified by an international audience hungry for a Third World environmentalism, its local claims retrospectively dressed in a global idiom its actors did not speak. Bahuguna’s career after 1981, the march, the awards circuit, the ashram’s international visitors, fits the counter-reading comfortably.

The counter-case explains the fame and fails on the file. The Mandal confrontation of 24 April 1973 owed nothing to Stockholm; its actors were chasing ten ash trees for a workshop in a dispute that had run, in identical form, for a decade before any world conference met. The committee of 1974 was appointed by a state government embarrassed in its own assembly and press, in Hindi, over a catchment its own engineers had flagged. The 1980 Act was drafted for Indian administrative reasons, to stop state governments bartering forest land, a motive documented in its own legislative history and continuous with the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, which preceded the movement’s international celebrity entirely. The international conjuncture amplified the signal; it did not compose the message. And the final test is Appiko: the template travelled to Karnataka in 1983 through an activist who had lived in an ashram at Silyara, not through any international network, and it worked on a Karnataka forest department that had never heard of the Right Livelihood Award. What travelled was a domestic political procedure, because that is what Chipko, on the evidence, had built.

The Song and the Photograph: How the Image Travelled

The movement understood its own representation with a sophistication the parable version never credits. Ghanshyam Sailani’s Chipko song, composed in the movement’s first years and sung on the marches, did the work of a printing press in valleys where the pamphlet reached slowly: it named the tactic, mocked the contractor, and instructed the listener in the method in verse. The embrace itself was, among its other virtues, a composition, a ring of villagers around a marked tree that a single photograph could carry intact to a newspaper reader in Delhi or Stockholm, and the movement’s leaders staged their confrontations in daylight, in the open, with witnesses summoned, because the photograph was a party to the negotiation. The state could survive a petition in a file. It had more trouble surviving the picture of its police confronting women with their arms around trees, repeated in valley after valley until the image became the fact the ministry in Delhi had to answer.

The afterlife of the image confirms the diagnosis by its excesses. The Reni women, reassembled for a photograph thirty years after their vigil, became an icon detached from the Peng Murenda file that gave their action its meaning; the forty-fifth anniversary of the Mandal confrontation in 2018 was marked by a search-engine doodle seen by hundreds of millions, the embrace reduced to a logo. The icon is not false, but it is the movement with the negotiation removed, bodies without the register they were amending. This article has kept the register in view deliberately, because the distance between the icon and the file is precisely the distance between the environmental parable and the environmental-political citizen-renegotiation that the record supports. The women of Reni were not posing for the world’s conscience. They were amending an allotment, and they would have wanted the amendment remembered with the embrace.

The counter-case has a sharper, personal form that should also be answered. Indira Gandhi’s environmentalism, the argument runs, was a performance with an international gallery: the Stockholm address of 1972, the tiger diplomacy of Project Tiger in 1973, the audience granted to Bahuguna as theatre. On this reading the 1980 Act and the ban cost her little and bought her the portrait of a conservationist prime minister, and the movement was the occasion rather than the cause. The chronology in the file cuts against the theatrical reading at two points. The competence for the Act was created by the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, a measure of the Emergency years with no gallery in mind; and the committee-to-ban sequence in Uttar Pradesh ran from 1974 to 1977, through two state governments, before the Prime Minister’s audience entered the story at all. A performance may still use real instruments, and the instruments here were real, dated and durable. Whatever mixture of motives signed the orders, the orders are what the movement had demanded, in writing, for a decade.

The Five-Feature Map of the Chipko Movement

The argument of this article is summarised in the artifact it asks the reader to cite: the Five-Feature Map of the Chipko Movement, set out in the table below. Each feature is a dated moment or documented trajectory, each is named with its actors and institutions, and each produced institutional content that a reader can verify in the record: a cancelled allotment and a transferred contract, a technique and a network, a committee and a catchment ban, a statute and a fifteen-year closure, a dam campaign and a travelling template. The map’s discipline is the article’s discipline. What cannot be entered in a row, with a date and a name attached, has not been claimed.

Feature	Moment and date	Named actors and institutions	Institutional content produced
One: The Mandal confrontation	24 April 1973, Mandal forest, Chamoli district	Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Govind Singh Rawat, the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh, the Symonds Company, the Uttar Pradesh Forest Department	The Symonds contract for three hundred ash trees cancelled; the allotment transferred to the Sangh; the embrace established as a repeatable tactic
Two: The Tehri Garhwal current	1973 to 1983, across Garhwal and the Himalayan chain	Sunderlal Bahuguna, Vimla Bahuguna, the Bhuvneshwari Mahila Ashram at Silyara, the Askot to Arakot padayatra of 1974, the trans-Himalayan march of 1981 to 1983	A protection doctrine stated as ecology is permanent economy; a Himalayan-wide constituency organised by foot march; the appeal carried to the Prime Minister
Three: The Reni action	26 March 1974, Peng Murenda forest above Reni village	Gaura Devi, the twenty-seven women of the Mahila Mangal Dal, the felling contractor’s labour party	The auctioned felling defeated by an unplanned women’s vigil; the Virendra Kumar Committee appointed with movement members seated; the Alaknanda catchment felling ban ordered on 15 October 1977 for ten years
Four: The statute and the ban	25 October 1980 and from 1981	Indira Gandhi’s Union government, the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980, Sunderlal Bahuguna’s appeal of 1980	Prior central approval required for de-reservation and diversion of forest land across India; a fifteen-year ban on commercial green felling above one thousand metres in the Uttar Pradesh Himalaya
Five: The trajectory after 1981	1983 to 2006	Pandurang Hegde and the Appiko movement at Salkani, the Tehri Dam opposition, the National Forest Policy of 1988, the state of Uttarakhand formed on 9 November 2000	The tactic transplanted to the Western Ghats; environmental appraisal and rehabilitation forced into dam politics; forest policy restated with local needs first; the hill state created

Read down the final column, the map shows the movement’s exchange rate between bodies and law. Ten refused trees became a cancelled contract. One night vigil became a decade of closed catchment. A decade of closed catchment became a national statute, and the statute’s logic, that forest diversion is a public decision answerable beyond the department, ran on through the Godavarman orders and the Forest Rights Act, long after the original antagonists had left the forest. It is this exchange rate, and not the romance of the embrace, that the citizen-renegotiation reading measures. Movements in this pillar are graded by what they renegotiate, and by that measure the villagers of Chamoli, most of whose names survive only in the movement’s own pamphlets and in the correspondence of Bhatt and Bahuguna, conducted one of the most productive negotiations in the Republic’s history.

What Chipko Leaves on the Record

The movement’s founders did not agree, in the end, about what they had founded, and the disagreement between Bhatt’s cooperative current and Bahuguna’s protectionist current is itself part of the inheritance, because it posed the question every successor movement still faces: whether the forest is to be saved for the people who live in it, and partly by their labour, or from the economy altogether, as a trust held against use. The Narmada valley movement that followed Chipko in the next decade inherited the fasts, the marches and the committee fights and met, at Sardar Sarovar, the Tehri geometry of the indivisible project. The farmer movements and civic sit-ins of the Republic’s later decades inherited the repertoire in their turn. What none of them could inherit was the Mandal file’s beautiful simplicity, ten trees refused, three hundred awarded, and a crowd that made a government change the entry. Later movements have had to argue about models and projections. Chipko’s first argument could be read off a register in one sitting, which is why it remains the teaching case.

The Narmada inheritance deserves its sentences in the record, because the transfer was conscious. The activists who built the Narmada Bachao Andolan from 1985, and gave it organised form by the end of that decade, studied the Chipko file as a manual and a warning: a manual, in the fasts, the marches, the insistence on the project’s own appraisal documents, the independent review they eventually forced in the Morse Commission of 1991 to 1992 and the World Bank’s withdrawal from the Sardar Sarovar project in 1993; a warning, in the Tehri geometry, where the indivisible dam outlasted the repertoire. Medha Patkar’s movement in the valley applied the Mandal discipline, master the file, name the decision, stand in its path, to a project an order of magnitude larger, and the argument this article has made about Chipko applies to the transfer itself: what travelled down the decades was not a mood but a method of citizenship, and methods are inherited only by being used.

For the argument of this pillar, Chipko’s place is foundational in a specific sense. The movement demonstrated, earlier and more cleanly than any other in the series, that the Indian citizen’s standing is not exhausted by the vote. Between elections, in a forest above a river, twenty-seven women with no notice of the state’s intentions renegotiated the terms on which the state would treat their valley, and the state, after inquiry, signed. The integrated three-tensions framework runs through the story in its forest form: who counts as a full citizen, the contractor’s customer or the fodder-gathering householder; who governs whom, the working plan or the village that lives under it; and which past the present is continuous with, the reserved forest of 1927 or the commons the register had overwritten. Chipko answered all three in the idiom of a single embrace, and then, characteristically, went back to the office to collect the order in writing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What was the 1973 Chipko movement?

The Chipko movement was the sequence of nonviolent forest confrontations that began in Chamoli district of Uttar Pradesh, in the Alaknanda valley, in 1973 and spread across the Garhwal Himalaya over the following decade. Its first action came on 24 April 1973 at Mandal village, where villagers and workers of the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh confronted the lumbermen of the Symonds Company, which had been allotted three hundred ash trees in a forest where the Sangh’s own request for ten trees had been refused. The method, embracing marked trees so felling could not proceed without violence against the unarmed, gave the movement its Hindi name, Chipko, to cling. Its documented harvest included a cancelled contract, a catchment felling ban of 1977, the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 and a fifteen-year ban on commercial green felling.

Q: Where did the Chipko movement begin?

The movement began at Mandal village in the upper Alaknanda valley of Chamoli district, in the Garhwal Himalaya of what was then Uttar Pradesh and is Uttarakhand. The Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh was based at Gopeshwar, the district’s commercial centre, where Chandi Prasad Bhatt had founded it in 1964 as a cooperative society building village industry on local resources. The Sangh’s implement workshop stood at Gopeshwar; the contested forest stood above Mandal, and it was there, on 24 April 1973, that about a hundred villagers and Sangh workers met the Symonds Company’s lumbermen and forced the felling party to withdraw. Later in 1973 the same confrontation was repeated near Phata, and in March 1974 the movement’s defining action occurred at Reni village, higher in the same valley system.

Q: Who were the key Chipko leaders?

The movement’s organisation rested on two named currents and one famous local leadership. Chandi Prasad Bhatt, founder of the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh in 1964, organised the Chamoli actions, articulated the embrace tactic, and pressed the movement’s claims through applications, committees and correspondence, pursuing local industry on forest produce. Sunderlal Bahuguna, the Sarvodaya worker of Tehri Garhwal, carried the movement across the western Himalaya, coined its slogan that ecology is permanent economy, and pressed for a general ban on green felling through fasts, foot marches and a direct appeal to Indira Gandhi. At Reni, Gaura Devi, head of the village Mahila Mangal Dal, led the twenty-seven women of the 26 March 1974 action. Govind Singh Rawat stood with the Sangh at Mandal, and activists such as Dhoom Singh Negi carried the method through the Henvalghati villages.

Q: What is the Mandal-Gopeshwar moment 1973?

The Mandal-Gopeshwar moment is the movement’s founding confrontation of 1973, named for the Sangh’s base at Gopeshwar and the forest above Mandal village where the action occurred. The Forest Department had refused the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh ten ash trees for its agricultural implement workshop and had allotted three hundred ash trees in the Mandal forest to the Symonds Company of Allahabad, a maker of sporting goods. When the company’s lumbermen arrived, the Sangh resolved that villagers would embrace the marked trees. On 24 April 1973 about a hundred villagers and Sangh workers confronted the felling party in the forest, beating drums and shouting slogans, and the contractors withdrew. The government cancelled the Symonds contract and allotted the trees to the Sangh, converting a protest into a precedent.

Q: How did Chipko shape Indian environmental policy?

Chipko’s policy harvest is documented instrument by instrument. The Reni action of 1974 produced the Virendra Kumar Committee, on which the movement itself sat, and its report led to the order of 15 October 1977 banning commercial felling for ten years across nearly twelve hundred square kilometres of the Alaknanda catchment, a ban extended in 1985. Sunderlal Bahuguna’s appeal to Indira Gandhi was followed by the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980, which required prior central approval for de-reservation and diversion of forest land, and by a fifteen-year ban on commercial green felling above one thousand metres in the Uttar Pradesh Himalaya from 1981. The National Forest Policy of 1988 placed local needs first in its text, the Joint Forest Management circular of 1990 admitted village committees to forest protection, and the Forest Rights Act of 2006 finally addressed the question of title.

Q: What is the 1980 Forest Conservation Act link to Chipko?

The Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 is the statutory residue of the Chipko decade. It was brought into force by ordinance on 25 October 1980 under Indira Gandhi, in the same season as her government’s response to Sunderlal Bahuguna’s appeal for a Himalayan felling ban. The Act required that no state government de-reserve a reserved forest or divert forest land to a non-forest purpose without the prior approval of the central government, ending the era in which a forest department and a state cabinet could settle a valley’s fate between themselves. The competence for the Act came from the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, which had moved forests to the Concurrent List. Its link to Chipko is one of pressure and sequence: the movement had made forest diversion a national political question, and the Act was the centralising answer the question received.

Q: Who was Sundarlal Bahuguna?

Sunderlal Bahuguna (1927 to 2021) was the Sarvodaya worker who carried the Chipko movement from the Alaknanda valley to the whole Himalayan chain and into national politics. Born at Marora village in Tehri Garhwal, he was formed by the freedom struggle and by Gandhian constructive work; with his wife Vimla Bahuguna he organised hill women in the anti-liquor campaigns of 1965 to 1970 and worked from the ashram at Silyara. Within Chipko he led the Tehri Garhwal current, argued for a general prohibition on green felling, coined the slogan that ecology is permanent economy, undertook the trans-Himalayan foot march of four thousand eight hundred and seventy kilometres from Kashmir to Kohima between 1981 and 1983, and took the movement’s appeal to Indira Gandhi. His later decades were given to the opposition to the Tehri Dam.

Q: What happened at Reni village on 26 March 1974?

At Reni village in Chamoli district, the Forest Department had auctioned some two thousand five hundred trees in the Peng Murenda forest above the village. On the felling day, 26 March 1974, the men of Reni and the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh workers were away at Chamoli, called there on compensation business connected with land taken for military purposes. A girl saw the contractor’s labourers arriving and ran to Gaura Devi, head of the village Mahila Mangal Dal, who led twenty-seven women up to the forest. The women argued with the felling party, endured abuse and threats of guns, embraced the trees and kept an all-night vigil; the standoff lasted four days, reinforcements arrived from neighbouring villages, and the contractors withdrew. The action prompted the state government to appoint the Virendra Kumar Committee of inquiry.

Q: Who was Gaura Devi?

Gaura Devi was the head of the Mahila Mangal Dal, the women’s welfare association of Reni village in Chamoli district, and the leader of the most famous action of the Chipko movement. She was fifty years old and a widow when, on 26 March 1974, with the village men absent at Chamoli, she led twenty-seven women to confront the contractor’s labourers in the Peng Murenda forest, telling them, in the words the movement’s accounts preserve, that the forest was their maika, their maternal home, and must not be destroyed. The women held the trees through the night and the forest for four days. Gaura Devi’s recorded conduct after the victory is part of her significance: she asked Chandi Prasad Bhatt not to report the forest officials who had abused the women, since they had acted under orders and a complaint would cost them their livelihoods.

Q: What was the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh?

The Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh, later renamed the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal, was the cooperative society founded by Chandi Prasad Bhatt at Gopeshwar in 1964, the organisation from which the Chipko movement grew. Its purpose was constructive: to build village industry on local resources, through a workshop making agricultural implements, small processing units for forest produce, and employment that would reduce the hill economy’s dependence on migration. The Sangh worked inside the state’s own rules, applying annually to the Forest Department for a modest allotment of ash trees for its workshop. The annual refusal of that application, set against the allotment of three hundred ash trees to the Symonds Company in 1973, supplied the movement’s founding grievance. After Mandal and Reni the Sangh became the movement’s Chamoli organisation, running campaigns, correspondence and, in time, afforestation work.

Q: Who was Chandi Prasad Bhatt?

Chandi Prasad Bhatt, born in 1934 at Gopeshwar, was the founder of the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh and the organiser of the Chipko movement’s Chamoli actions. Formed in the Gandhian Sarvodaya tradition, he built the Sangh from 1964 as a cooperative making agricultural implements and processing forest produce for local employment. When the Forest Department refused the Sangh ten ash trees and allotted three hundred to the Symonds Company, Bhatt prepared the response: villagers would embrace the marked trees, a tactic he named angalwaltha in Garhwali. He led the Mandal confrontation of 24 April 1973, campaigned through the Reni inquiry, on which he sat as a member of the Virendra Kumar Committee, and represented the movement’s cooperative, livelihood-centred current against purely prohibitionist readings. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982.

Q: What did the Symonds Company contract at Mandal involve?

The Symonds Company of Allahabad, a manufacturer of sporting goods including tennis racquets, held a Forest Department allotment of three hundred ash trees in the Mandal forest of Chamoli district for 1973. The contract became the Chipko movement’s founding document because of its pairing: in the same allotment cycle, the department had refused the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh’s annual request for ten ash trees for its implement workshop at Gopeshwar. When the company’s lumbermen reached Gopeshwar in March 1973 and moved on the marked forest, about a hundred villagers and Sangh workers confronted them at Mandal on 24 April 1973 and the felling party withdrew. The government cancelled the Symonds contract and transferred the allotment to the Sangh. A second Symonds allotment near Phata later in 1973 was abandoned under the same pressure.

Q: What did the inquiry committee appointed after the Reni action recommend?

The Uttar Pradesh government answered the Reni action by appointing a nine-member committee of inquiry chaired by Virendra Kumar, a botanist of the University of Delhi, with officials sitting alongside Chandi Prasad Bhatt, the Communist legislator Govind Singh Negi and the Joshimath block pramukh Govind Singh Rawat. Kumar widened the inquiry from Reni to the whole upper Alaknanda catchment, and the committee reported after two years. Its recommendations, accepted by the state government, produced the order of 15 October 1977 banning tree felling in the catchment of the Alaknanda and its tributaries, an area of nearly twelve hundred square kilometres, for ten years; the ban was extended for a further ten years in 1985. The committee thereby converted the movement’s argument, that denuded slopes had worsened the 1970 flood, into the state’s own finding.

Q: What happened at Advani village in 1977 and 1978?

At Advani village in the Henvalghati of Tehri Garhwal, the forest above the village was auctioned in 1977 and the felling contract was taken by the village headman himself. His wife, Bachni Devi, organised the resistance: the women of Advani tied sacred threads around the marked trees as a vow of protection, maintained discourses in the grove and guarded the trees in shifts, while Sunderlal Bahuguna fasted against the auction without getting the order withdrawn. When the axemen returned in February 1978 accompanied by armed police, the movement’s volunteers were already inside the forest, each guarded tree ringed by people, and the police and contractors withdrew; the felling was abandoned. Advani demonstrated that the movement could be turned against a local contractor and a village’s own cash economy, not only against plains companies.

Q: What was Sunderlal Bahuguna’s Kashmir to Kohima padayatra?

Between 1981 and 1983 Sunderlal Bahuguna led a trans-Himalayan foot march of four thousand eight hundred and seventy kilometres from Srinagar in Kashmir to Kohima in Nagaland. The padayatra, the Sarvodaya movement’s characteristic instrument scaled to a mountain range, carried the Chipko argument village to village along the whole chain: that the Himalaya formed one ecological and political unit, that its forests were being consumed by a felling regime judged only on revenue, and that the standing forest’s yield in soil, water and fodder exceeded its felled price. The march generalised the Chamoli grievance into a Himalayan claim and formed the setting in which the fifteen-year ban on commercial green felling above one thousand metres, decided in 1980 and in force from 1981, was consolidated. Bahuguna had earlier marched from Askot to Arakot across Uttarakhand in 1974.

Q: How did the Appiko movement carry Chipko into Karnataka in 1983?

The Appiko movement began on 8 September 1983 at Salkani village in the Sirsi taluk of Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka, when villagers led by Pandurang Hegde marched into the Kalase forest and embraced the marked trees, renaming the Chamoli tactic in Kannada: Appiko, to embrace. Hegde had spent time at the Bahugunas’ ashram in Tehri Garhwal, and the transmission was personal and procedural rather than literary: petition, refusal, embrace, order withdrawn. The Salkani agitation held for some thirty-eight days until the Karnataka government withdrew the felling order. Appiko’s slogan, Ulisu, Belesu, Balasu, save, grow, use rationally, carried Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s constructive doctrine in three verbs, and the movement spread through the Western Ghats districts against the replacement of mixed forest by monoculture plantations.

Q: How does Ramachandra Guha interpret Chipko in The Unquiet Woods?

In The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989), Ramachandra Guha interprets Chipko as a peasant movement in a long history of Himalayan resistance to state forest control, continuous with the forest satyagrahas of 1916, 1921 and 1930. On Guha’s reading, the hill villagers defended a subsistence economy, their fuel, fodder and leaf manure, against a commercial forestry that treated the hills as a timber estate for plains industry, and the movement’s meaning lies in that moral economy rather than in ecological doctrine. His account explains the movement’s prehistory, its allotment trigger and its mass anonymity. Its limit, on the argument of this article, is that it treats the movement’s institutional harvest, the inquiry committee, the catchment ban and the Act of 1980, as aftermath rather than as the movement’s chosen objective.

Q: What is Vandana Shiva’s ecofeminist reading of Chipko?

In Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1988), Vandana Shiva reads Chipko as a women’s movement in essence: the hill women who gathered fuel, fodder and water defended the living, diverse forest as an expression of a feminine principle of sustenance, against a reductionist forestry science that valued the forest only as standing timber for the market. The reading gave Chipko its worldwide ecofeminist fame and rests on an undeniable record: women led the Reni action of 1974, guarded the Advani forest in 1977 and 1978, and formed the movement’s front line across the valleys. Its critics, Bina Agarwal chief among them in her 1992 essay on the gender and environment debate, accept the composition and dispute the metaphysic, arguing that women’s relation to the forest is governed by material divisions of labour and property, not by an ideology of womanhood.

Q: How did Chipko lead into the opposition to the Tehri Dam?

The Tehri Dam on the Bhagirathi, under construction from 1978, became Sunderlal Bahuguna’s second great campaign and the Chipko method’s hardest test. Bahuguna argued that the dam repeated Mandal at giant scale: a decision taken over the heads of those who would live with it, submerging old Tehri and scores of villages for benefits flowing to the plains and the cities. The opposition used the movement’s whole repertoire of fasts, marches, site dharnas and litigation. Bahuguna ended a forty-five day fast in 1995 on Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s assurance of a review committee, and fasted seventy-four days at Raj Ghat in 1996 during H. D. Deve Gowda’s prime ministership. The reviews reported, the dam proceeded, the Supreme Court declined to stop it in 2003, and the reservoir filled from 2004.

Q: What felling ban followed Bahuguna’s appeal to Indira Gandhi?

Sunderlal Bahuguna’s appeal to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1980 was followed by a fifteen-year ban on commercial green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh above one thousand metres, extending also to steep slopes above thirty degrees, decided in 1980 and in force from 1981. The ban closed the belt the movement had defended tree by tree to the contractor system for a generation. It arrived on a twin track with the Forest (Conservation) Act of October 1980, which required prior central approval for forest diversion throughout India. The ban was a prohibition, not a rights settlement: it transferred no title to the villages and enlarged no concession register. Its form, the Prime Minister overruling her own forest departments on the movement’s central demand, is the measure of what a decade of renegotiation had won.