A Brief History: Environmental Resistance in India
- Nupur Maley
- Jun 29, 2022
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 20
India's history of environmental resistance is not just a record of protests and policy battles. It is, at its core, a story about belonging, about communities whose sense of self is bound up in the land, the trees, and the living systems around them. What makes Indian environmentalism distinct from its Western counterpart is precisely this : the forest is not a backdrop. It is home, calendar, cosmology, and kin.
This has meant that environmental movements in India are rarely only about nature. They are also struggles for social justice, cultural survival, and the right to determine what development means for the people it most directly affects. The record of resistance India has accumulated over centuries reflects this complexity, ranging from grassroots agitations and folk traditions to courtroom battles and legislative change.
Roots in Resistance
The earliest act of documented environmental resistance in India dates to 1730, when 363 members of Rajasthan's Bishnoi community gave their lives to protect a grove of khejri trees. What is less often told is why.
The Bishnoi community follows 29 codified principles of living, passed down orally through generations in devotional folk songs called shabads. Among these principles are explicit prohibitions against cutting green trees and killing wildlife. For the Bishnoi, environmental ethics were never separate from spiritual life. They were embedded in song, in daily practice, in the very structure of how the community understood its place in the world. The 1730 sacrifice was an act consistent with centuries of living by those principles.
Later, during the British Raj, resistance to the commercialisation of forests between 1859 and 1863 carried echoes of similar convictions, and the struggle found its way into the broader independence movement. But it was after 1947 that environmental activism took organised shape.
(Also read: Tribal Communities: The Final Frontier)
The Post-Independence Turn
Independent India entered a period of ambitious nation-building. Multi-purpose dams, steel plants, and industrial agriculture were seen as the tools of catching up with the West. This drive for development was not without cost. Forest cover declined, water bodies were polluted, and communities, often already marginalised, were displaced from lands they had lived on for generations. Their protests went largely unheard.
The 1970s and 80s changed that. The Chipko Movement of 1973 in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district, where villagers embraced trees to prevent their felling, became the decade's most visible act of resistance. A decade later, the Appiko Movement in Karnataka's Kalase forest followed a similar approach. The 1973 Silent Valley protests in Kerala pushed back against hydroelectric projects. The Tehri Dam conflict dragged on for decades in Uttarakhand. And the Narmada Bachao Andolan, beginning in 1985, galvanised opposition to displacement on a scale India had not seen before.
In Bihar's Singhbhum district, now part of Jharkhand, the Jungle Bachao Andolan of 1982 brought the Santali and Ho communities together in opposition to a government plan to replace their Sal forests with commercial teak. For these communities, the resistance ran deeper than land rights. The Sal tree is sacred, woven into birth rituals, seasonal festivals, and the Sarna cosmology of sacred groves. Ancestor songs in the Santali tradition invoke Sal by name. To replace it with teak was not just an ecological intervention but a severing of something spiritual and storied. The movement that followed was as much a defense of a way of life as it was a protest over forest policy.
(Also Read: A Brief History: Sustainability)
The Bhopal Turning Point and After
The 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy reshaped the terms of Indian environmentalism. The explosion at the Union Carbide plant, which killed between two and four thousand people immediately and left tens of thousands with lasting health consequences, forced new questions into the mainstream: about industrial accountability, corporate power, and who bears the cost of so-called progress. The 1991 economic reforms deepened these anxieties. Liberalisation brought new extraction, new displacement, and new forms of ecological harm. Gender emerged as a significant lens during this period, with women disproportionately carrying both the burdens of environmental degradation and the work of resistance. Red-green environmentalism, linking ecological concerns to social and economic justice, found its footing here.
The Niyamgiri Case
Among the movements of the 2000s, the Niyamgiri struggle stands out for the clarity with which it shows how inseparable land, law, and cosmology can be for indigenous communities. The Dongria Kondh people of Odisha had long understood the Niyamgiri hills as the domain of Niyam Raja, a mythical god-king believed to have created the hills themselves. The Earth deity Dharani Penu, considered his consort, is worshipped across villages in the area. When UK-based mining company Vedanta Resources moved to extract bauxite from the hills in the 2000s, the Dongria Kondh not only argued for land rights. They argued that what was at stake was sacred.
In 2013, the Supreme Court of India ordered that twelve Gram Sabhas, village councils in the affected area, be given the power to determine the outcome. All twelve rejected the mining proposal, citing their religious and cultural ties to the hills. It was a rare instance of indigenous cosmology shaping a legal verdict, and a landmark moment for tribal land rights in the country. The legal battle fought by the Dongria Kondh community contributed significantly to the discourse of indigenous participation and the reassertion of local self-governance.
The Twenty-First Century
The first two decades of this century have brought new concerns to the forefront: unsustainable consumption, climate change and its uneven impacts, and the politics of who gets to define environmental harm. Global movements like Fridays for Future found resonance in India, while older ones found new life. The Chipko Movement was symbolically revived in Delhi in 2018 and in Chhattisgarh's Surajpur in 2022, where women led efforts to save the Hasdeo Aranya forest. The 2019 Aarey Forest Protests in Mumbai showed that urban communities, too, were willing to resist when green space was threatened.
Resistance as Continuity
The state has not been a passive observer of this history. It has been an active participant in the violence. Land defenders have been jailed, discredited, and killed. Forests have been cleared under the cover of environmental clearances that exist on paper and nowhere else. Communities have watched their sacred groves, their watersheds, and their ancestral hills handed over to corporations with more legal standing than the people who have lived there for generations. Global Witness documented in 2016 that India had the highest number of murdered land and environmental defenders in South Asia.
And still, they did not step aside. That is the fact that demands a reckoning.
The Bishnoi stood between soldiers and the khejri trees and sang. The Santali and Ho looked at a government plan to replace their sacred Sal with commercial teak and said: No. The Dongria Kondh faced a mining company backed by the British state and billions of dollars, walked into twelve Gram Sabhas, and said no twelve times. The dominant logic of development has always called this irrational. It has always been wrong. Choosing continuity over compensation is the clearest thinking there is. It is the knowledge that what you are being offered in exchange for your land, your forest, your cosmology, your dead, is not equivalent and never will be.
Indian environmentalism has never needed saving by outsiders. It has needed the world to stop talking over it. The movements in this archive are not relics or inspiration. They are indictments. Living arguments about what land is for, who gets to decide, and what disappears when the answer is always the same: people winning. The resistance continues because the theft continues. That is not a tragedy to mourn. That is a fight still being fought.
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