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341. Seeds of Insight
Ramchandra Guha with Harini Nagendra
Speakers
By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.”
In his new book, Speaking with Nature, Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and well before climate change, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context. In strikingly contemporary language, Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J. C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mira, Verrier Elwin, K. M. Munshi, and M. Krishnan wrote about the forest and the wild, soil and water, urbanisation and industrialisation. Positing the idea of what Guha calls “livelihood environmentalism” in contrast to the “full stomach environmentalism” of the affluent world, these writers, activists, and scientists played a pioneering role in shaping global conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature.
Spanning more than a century of Indian history, and decidedly transnational in reference, this book offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.
In this episode of BIC Talks, Ramchandra Guha is in conversation with Harini Nagendra. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in September 2024.
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Speakers
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha was born and raised in the Himalayan foothills. He studied in Delhi and Kolkata, and has lived for many years in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods, a landmark history of the Republic, India after Gandhi, and an authoritative two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi, each of which was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year. His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Ramachandra Guha has taught at Stanford and Oslo, held the Phillippe Roman Chair at the London School of Economics, and served as the Satish Dhawan Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science. He is currently Distinguished University Professor at Krea University. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Howard Milton Prize of the British Society for Sports History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Yale University.
Harini Nagendra
Harini Nagendra is a Professor at Azim Premji University, where she leads the School for Climate Change and Sustainability. Her research focuses on social-ecological transformations in cities and forests of South Asia. Prof. Nagendra received a 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award for her research and practice on urban commons. Her 2016 book “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” examines the implications of environmental change for cities of the global South. She is also the author of the best-selling “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series, based in 1920s colonial Bangalore.
