Discuss the ‘Chipko movement’ as an example of eco-feminism. (2014)
Eco-feminism, a term coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974, holds that the subordination of women and the exploitation of nature share one patriarchal logic. Chipko is its standard Indian exhibit — and whether it fits the category is among the sharpest disputes in Indian sociology.
The eco-feminist reading
Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, 1988) offers the strong version. “Development” is maldevelopment: a masculine, reductionist science that turns living forests into timber volume and subsistence producers into surplus labour. It violates prakriti, the feminine principle, and women — producers of sustenance rather than commodities — resist it first. Evidence is not lacking. At Reni on 26 March 1974, with the men drawn away to a compensation hearing, Gaura Devi led the women of the village Mahila Mangal Dal to the auctioned trees and the felling was abandoned; such Mahila Mangal Dals became the movement’s standing organisational form, opposing contracts that men often welcomed for wages.
Three grounds on which the label is contested
- Essentialism. Bina Agarwal (“The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India”, Feminist Studies, 1992) accepts that rural women resist more, and rejects the reason given. Her feminist environmentalism locates the link in the gendered division of labour and property relations: women are assigned fuel, fodder and water collection and own almost no land, so deforestation directly lengthens their working day. It is interest, not essence. She adds that Shiva homogenises “Third World women”, erasing class and caste differences in access to the commons, and that re-asserting a woman–nature affinity revives the ideology feminism exists to dismantle.
- Historical accuracy. Ramachandra Guha (The Unquiet Woods, 1989) reads Chipko as the latest episode in a long Himalayan tradition of peasant resistance to commercial state forestry reaching back to colonial forest settlements. The demand was subsistence right — fuel, fodder, small timber, local employment — not gender or wilderness. Leadership was male, and the feminist framing was largely applied later by urban interpreters.
- Conflict within the household. Where men sought contractor wages and women a standing forest, gender appears as a division of material interest, not a shared natural sympathy. An essentialist account cannot explain that conflict; a materialist one predicts it.
| Position | Why women acted | What Chipko was |
|---|---|---|
| Shiva | Feminine principle violated | A women’s ecological movement |
| Agarwal | Gendered labour and no property | A livelihood struggle, gendered in burden |
| Guha | They are the subsistence workforce | Peasant resistance to state forestry |
Verdict and contemporary bearing
Chipko is not eco-feminist in the strong, essentialist sense, but it is a decisive case for Agarwal’s feminist environmentalism. Current evidence sustains her mechanism, not Shiva’s metaphysics: the Time Use Survey 2024 records women spending 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work against 88 for men, and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 answers the diagnosis institutionally by registering titles jointly in both spouses’ names.
Conclusion
Chipko’s value to feminist sociology lies in what it disproves as much as in what it illustrates. Women’s environmental agency is real, but it is produced by an unequal allocation of work and property, not by nature. Reading it otherwise honours women while leaving intact the structure that puts the forest on their backs.