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Ethics of Nature in Indian Environmental History: A Review Article*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2015

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Yale University, United States of America Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article considers the formation of moral and ethical worlds in India, drawing largely on cases reporting on modern times, as people interact with or imagine the landscapes in which they live. Questions of ethics, and how they are animated in practical existence through the experience of emotional ties and affective attachments to nature, near and far, have not always informed the writing of environmental history in India. In contrast, scholars in disciplines other than history have often paid attention to ethical and religious ideas about landscape and nature. This review argues that ethics of nature are developed in historical processes of community formation and identity-expression or self-making that occur in and through the imagination and experience of the natural world in religious and political action. Historical perspectives on these topics are useful and necessary, even as careful examination of how affect and worship shape attitudes to being in particular landscapes can enrich the understanding of meaningful relations to landscape and nature in environmental history. The argument is developed by a close examination of a handful of recent studies that have provided an empirical basis for this synthesis, review, and conceptual elaboration of the ethics of nature in India. The article considers the formation of ethical ideas and practical values of nature in realms of worship, natural resources management, rural development, conservation science, natural resources policy, and legal disputes relating to nature protection in India.

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 1261 - 1310
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: As I have worked on environmental law, jurisprudence, and litigation in twentieth-century India, over the last few years, I have encountered a rich vein of dispute that has focused attention on ethics and its relationship to religion and politics, as well as scientific rationality. So it was a welcome surprise when Norbert Peabody suggested a review article based on several new works on the relationship between religiosity and the environment in India. I thank him first, and foremost, for that invitation and his subsequent shepherding of this rather long and complex engagement with the literature that has left me greatly educated. Two anonymous reviewers for Modern Asian Studies were kind and perceptive, and their comments have certainly improved this article, even if they have not always altered its content or style. I am also grateful to Radhika Govindrajan and Sahana Ghosh for timely research assistance, and to Yale University for the triennial leave in autumn 2013 that allowed me to finish up the article in the midst of research travel. Sections of the argument and materials discussed here were presented to audiences at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and to the South Asia Centre, the London School of Economics and Political Science. Various interlocutors at these venues—Amita Baviskar, Chitra Joshi, Rashmi Pant, Mahesh Rangarajan, Tanika Sarkar, Mukulika Banerjee, Alpa Shah, Laura Bear, Rajeev Bhargava, Matthew Engelke, Fernande Pool, and several students at both places—helped clarify specific ideas and provided useful leads towards further reading. I alone remain responsible, however, for any errors and omissions that continue to diminish this article.

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