The quiet fighter - RIP Anupam Mishra
The quiet fighter
by Ramachandra Guha
Rana Dasgupta ends
Capital, his fine, sometimes searing portrait of 21st century Delhi, with a
walk he took with an environmental scholar through the city’s northern reaches.
The environmentalist explained to the writer how Delhi’s water system had once
worked, based on the retention of rainwater through an intricate network of
tanks and canals. Before the British came, said the scholar, the life of Delhi
was centred around the Yamuna, with festivals and water games. However, the
capital of the Raj and of independent India treated the river merely as a sink
for its wastes. And it had built over the tanks that the more far-seeing
citizens of the earlier generations had constructed.
The Yamuna that now
flows past Delhi is biologically (as well as culturally) dead. The scholar who
took Dasgupta for a walk told him that “everyone has turned their backs on the
river in obedience to the modern city, and so it is filthy and forgotten”. He
also remarked, “If our prime minister had to immerse himself in the Yamuna
every year, it would be a lot cleaner than it is now”.
The environmentalist
who thus educated Dasgupta was named Anupam Mishra. Mishra who died of cancer
on Monday morning, aged 68, was — in the words of Gopalkrishna Gandhi — an
intellectual without a trace of snobbery, an activist who was never judgemental
about what others did or did not do. He was an altogether remarkable man, who
embodied both the best of what Indian scholarship can offer, as well as a
Gandhism that is utterly relevant to the 21st century.
That Mishra was not as
well known as he might have been — across India or abroad — was a consequence
of his choosing to stay away from the language of power and fame. He knew
English quite well, but decided to be resolutely monolingual in his own work.
There may have been three reasons for this. First, he was the son of a
celebrated Hindi poet, Bhawani Prasad Mishra, and did not want to repudiate
that legacy. Second, once he had chosen to write in Hindi, he had to wholly
immerse himself in that linguistic world to be able to communicate effectively.
Third, and perhaps the most important, since he wrote about the lifestyles and
living practices of peasants and pastoralists in northern India who themselves
spoke some variety of Hindi, it seemed more appropriate to write his own books
and essays in that language. (Apart from a TED talk which has had close to
8,00,000 viewers , Mishra’s work was done almost entirely in Hindi.
Some of his recent
writings are available at http://www.mansampark.in)
The first book of
Mishra I read (it may have been the first he wrote) was a short but extremely
insightful study of the Chipko Andolan, written in collaboration with Satyendra
Tripathi. It was published in the late 1970s, based on fieldwork in the
villages of the upper Alaknanda Valley where Chipko was born. The book paid due
attention to the efforts and vision of Chipko’s leader, Chandi Prasad Bhatt,
while also documenting the contributions of peasants, both men and women, who
were the backbone of what was to become the most
celebrated (as well as the most misunderstood) environmental movement in the non-Western world.
In the 1980s, Mishra
turned his attention to water conservation and management. He realised that
water, not oil, was the key to a sustainable future for India and the world.
(As he put it in his TED talk, water is the centre of life.) He saw the callous
treatment of water all around him, the pollution of rivers by careless city
dwellers and the reckless depletion of groundwater aquifers by farmers with
electric-powered tubewells. So, he began documenting the indigenous systems of
water harvesting that were rooted in community control and based on a careful
understanding of the local landscape.
He focused on Rajasthan,
a desert environment with negligible natural rainfall, yet with a rich and
still often extant network of wells and tanks. Based on research conducted over
many years, he published a series of books and pamphlets in Hindi, whose titles, Rajasthan ki rajat boondein and Aaj bhi khare hain talaab - suggested that
the modern man had much to learn from his predecessors, those he tended to
condemn as stupid or backward.
I knew Mishra mostly
through his work. I met him rarely, yet every encounter was either uplifting or
transformative, sometimes both. In the 1980s, I went to consult him for my own
doctoral research on the Chipko Andolan. In the 1990s, when I
was a fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), I invited Mishra
to give a talk around his book Aaj bhi khare hain talaab. The NMML, then led by
the visionary Ravinder Kumar, was at the height of its glory, the very centre
of Indian intellectual life, patronised by famous foreign scholars too. Here,
through his understated words in Hindi and his arresting slides, Mishra
delivered what was one of the most compelling talks ever heard at the NMML, its
echoes resounding in conversations in the corridors for weeks afterwards.
A decade later, I
heard Mishra speak at a meeting celebrating the work of Chandi Prasad Bhatt
where, in a mere five or six minutes, he brilliantly summed up the essence of
Bhatt’s contributions to Gandhian thought and activism. Our last meeting was a
few months ago, when I went to call on him on hearing he had cancer. He was suffering
visibly, yet spoke as softly and with as much depth as ever. With us was his
young collaborator Sopan Joshi, who has, in recent years, done much to make
Mishra’s work reach a new generation.
Asked to identify five
individuals who have contributed the most to the environmental movement in
modern India, I would name the activists Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Medha Patkar,
the scientist Madhav Gadgil, the journalist Anil Agarwal, and Anupam Mishra. Of
these five, Mishra is by far the least-known, even among the environmental
community. This is a consequence of the choices he made, personal as well as
linguistic, by stressing reconstruction rather than protest, and by writing in
Hindi rather than English.
We should remember
Anupam Mishra for his substance, for writing with such insight and sensitivity
about the resource most critical to our lives, yet one we so wantonly abuse —
water. And we should remember him for his style — no boasting, no bombast,
merely steady, solid work based on research and understanding, rather than
ideology or prejudice.
