Gandhi and Ecological Marxists: A Study of Silent Valley Movement
By Sasikala A.S.
Abstract
The environmental concern was minimal at the time of Gandhi, but
his ideas on Village Swaraj,
decentralization, Swadeshi, Sarvodya etc made him an advocate of
environmentalism. He is often considered as a man with deep ecological view.
The ideas of Gandhi have been widely used by different streams of environmental
philosophy like green, deep ecology, etc and different environmental movements
across the globe. An eminent environmental thinker Ramachandra Guha identified
three distinct strands in Indian Environmentalism, the Crusading Gandhians,
Appropriate Technologists and Ecological Marxists. He observed that, unlike the
third one, the first two strands rely heavily on Gandhi. The purpose of this
paper is to identify the Gandhian elements used by the Ecological Marxists in
India. The Silent Valley Movement from Kerala is taken as a case study to
analyze how ecological Marxists resort to Gandhian techniques to fight against
environmental injustice. The role of Kerala
Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP),
a People’s Science Movement (PSM) from Kerala with a Marxist background is
studied to understand different strategies they used in the movement. It is
observed that the methodologies adopted throughout the movement are inspired by
Gandhian methods as previously used by other environmental movements like
Chipko. The paper concludes that, like the Crusading Gandhians and Alternate
Technologists, the Ecological Marxists also adopted the Gandhian strategies to
work for ecological stability.
