Western patriarchy which surrenders feminine principles is the new development project in India. Do you agree with this view? Why? (2018)
The proposition is Vandana Shiva’s, from Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1988). Her claim is that post-colonial development imported a Western, masculinist model of progress that treats nature as inert matter and women’s subsistence labour as non-production, and thereby ruptured the feminine principle. I agree with the diagnosis of displacement and reject the essentialism in which it is wrapped.
Shiva’s argument: development as maldevelopment
- In Indian cosmology Prakriti is nature as a living, self-generating force — the active feminine principle. Shiva argues that a reductionist science, born of the European scientific revolution, replaced this with nature as dead, fragmentable resource, so that violence against nature and against women issues from one epistemology.
- Colonialism began the rupture, converting forests into timber revenue and commons into state property; development after 1947 continued by the same logic. Hence maldevelopment: growth of commodity production purchased by destroying subsistence production.
- The cost falls on women because they were the primary producers of the subsistence economy — they knew the forest as fodder, fuel, fruit and medicine, and they held the seed. Commercial forestry, monoculture and the Green Revolution rendered that knowledge worthless and converted the producer into a dependant.
- Her illustrations: Chipko (from 1973 in Chamoli, Gaura Devi leading the women of Reni in 1974); seed sovereignty and the Navdanya network against patented seed; the Narmada displacement, where compensation computed on titled land passed women over; the enclosure of water commons.
What survives the test
The displacement thesis is empirically strong. Women’s work in Indian agriculture did not disappear; it was devalued. PLFS 2021-22 placed 62.9 per cent of women workers in agriculture against 38.1 per cent of men — the feminisation of agriculture — while the Agriculture Census 2015-16 records only 13.96 per cent of operational holdings in women’s names. Women farm; men own. That gap is what a development model indifferent to subsistence producers would generate.
Why the framing must nonetheless be rejected
- Bina Agarwal, in ‘The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India’ (Feminist Studies, 1992), makes the decisive objection. Shiva’s women form a unitary category — “Third World women” — which erases the caste, class and property differences deciding which women lose what. A landless Dalit woman and a landholding dominant-caste woman do not stand in one relation to the forest.
- Shiva argues from ideology, from the symbolic value of Prakriti, rather than from material relations to land and labour. Agarwal’s feminist environmentalism instead grounds women’s environmental engagement in the gendered division of labour: women fetch fuel, fodder and water, so deforestation lengthens their working day. Interest, not essence.
- The account romanticises a pre-colonial order already containing caste, untouchability and brahmanical patriarchy. If the feminine principle was then intact, women’s condition within it is hard to explain.
- Meera Nanda adds that the anti-science turn surrenders an emancipatory resource to nativism; and the Green Revolution, whatever its ecological and distributive costs, ended dependence on food imports. Ramachandra Guha (The Unquiet Woods, 1989) reads Chipko itself as a peasant subsistence struggle in a Himalayan tradition of resistance to state forestry, not an ecofeminist one.
Conclusion
Agreed in part, with a correction. Indian development has indeed devalued subsistence, separated women from productive resources and counted only what is sold; Shiva saw that before almost anyone. But it is not the surrender of a feminine principle. It is the appropriation of land, water and seed from those holding the weakest claims, and women lose because their claims are weakest, not because they are women. Agarwal’s material reading explains the same evidence without essentialism, and names the remedy: land titles, forest rights and the counting of unpaid work.