Environmental Humanities as a Way Forward

ALTERNATIVE STANDPOINT Environmental Humanities as a Way Forward Ambika Aiyadurai, Trishita Shandilya Existing environmental discourses in India are examined and a possible way forward is suggested to rethink environmental issues and its pedagogical approaches in India. To that end, environmental humanities is fast emerging as an interdisciplinary framework for understanding humans’ and non-humans’ entanglements with a special emphasis towards centring the ecological epistemologies framed by various social groups who are marginalised in the rigid social structures of society. Ambika Aiyadurai ([email protected]) teaches at and Trishita Shandilya (trishita.s@ iitgn.ac.in) is research assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. 10 H ow do we perceive the country’s environmental discourse so far? Ever since India’s existence as an independent nation or even before, the notion of a nation is often defined through aspects of nature, ecology, or a sense of place. Two sets of dominant narratives of environmental discourses stand out here. First, the nation is seen as a unitary sense of place where nature is defined as an ecological reality that is universal to the citizens. Here, both the use of nature and its restriction are justified through a nationalistic pride or “ecological nationalism” (Cederlof and Sivaramakrishnan 2007). One would like to remember the eloquent writings of Mahesh Rangarajan (2009) as well as Cederlof and Sivaramakrishnan (2007) to fathom the relationships between nation and ecology. Second, beyond this fallacy of a unitary sense of nation or nationalism, there reside multiple ways of understanding nationalism within India, whereby there is a sense of affiliation to a place as a piece of land, with peoples and cultural identities. These forms of belongingness are entangled in varied notions about ecology. In this article, environmental discourses in India and the ways to re-examine our relations with our environment are reflected upon. The overwhelming and grim situation of the current ecological crises is staring at us, which is predominantly an outcome of the technocratic and extractivist model of progress. India’s development policies and the nexus of state and neo-liberal establishments have been the primary drivers of these crises. The belief that science can provide all the solutions has been criticised, and now we see a greater interest in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences. In this article, we shift our focus away august 5, 2023 from the Western science-based knowledge to bring locally embedded “indigenous epistemologies” and “humanitiesoriented sciences” to appeal for new ways of thinking about the environment and our relations with the world. However, we must also remain alert against the narratives created by the nationalist project for “unified” knowledge such as the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). As G N Devy (2023) warns us, if an ideology that nurtures the fantasy that “all knowledge” was developed in ancient India attempts to force educators to bring “Indian knowledge” to replace “Western knowledge,” it is predictably going to result in the greatest intellectual disaster known in history. Claimed as a replacement of “Western knowledge,” this so-called “decolonising” project bears the risk of appropriating the diverse knowledges of communities in India. Thus, while we acknowledge the hegemony of the Western science-based pedagogy, we must not blindly embrace the orientations of the proponents of IKS without critical questioning. Problems in Dominant Environmental Discourses For a long time, the concept of the “environment” in popular writings and in “scientific” pedagogy was to prioritise the non-human worlds. Rightfully, this popular understanding is heavily under attack as an androcentric and cartesian model of dualism (Plumwood 1993). The philosopher of science Sundar Sarukkai’s (2023) critique of natural sciences and its positivist approach to conceptualising the environment is helpful here. First, there is a complete exclusion of “humans;” second, the environment itself is considered as a physical entity to be used as a resource for utility purposes; third, to understand the environmental crisis, the emphasis was given on highly quantified scientific studies devoid of locally rooted experiences and narratives. However, over time, the idea of the environment has gradually expanded, and there have been attempts to include perspectives from the humanities in the vol lViII no 31 EPW Economic & Political Weekly ALTERNATIVE STANDPOINT popular discourse of the environment. Such attempts are rare but are taking place very slowly. The mere inclusion of the “social” in environmental research, writings, and discussions would not work well when the overarching idea of “society” is perceived as unitary and homogenous. The tendency to essentialise gender, caste, and tribal identities in defining their relations with environment has been a common fallacy in writing about the “social” in the environmental discourse. Thus, except for categorising gender and other social groups as just case studies, the dominant understanding of the environment and the idea of society continue to be androcentric and Brahminical. This has prevented the existing multiple ecological world views and perspectives of marginalised peoples (Dalits and tribals) from taking centrestage in the pedagogical definition of environment in the country’s academic, non-academic, and policy forums. The exemplary works of Mukul Sharma (2017) on the linkages between nature and caste are important to mention here. In Indian academia, this “blind spot” of the role of caste in environmental studies is gaining attention but very reluctantly (Sharma 2017; Aiyadurai and Ingole 2021). While we can celebrate the ecological connections to spirituality in Hinduism and Buddhism, for some groups, especially Dalits (or former untouchables), connections with nature are everyday ecological burdens in a marked hierarchical order, as Sharma examines. Access to space, land, and water is restricted, and nature is entwined with fear and violence. Therefore, caste and other social categories are crucial in defining our relations with nature. While it is important to acknowledge exclusionary practices, the marginalised peoples’ perceptions reveal a rich and a “thicker” notion, to borrow from Rose et al (2012), of humanity and their relations with the environment in totality, rejecting the “reductionist” and “self-contained” attitude towards this concept. There is an urgent need to challenge this problematic and monopolistic understanding of the environment. Economic & Political Weekly EPW august 5, 2023 This challenge has been taken upon itself by many scholars in the present times. Challenging this monopolistic narrative needs to be undertaken, again and again, and more firmly. Thus, our appeal is to step out of our comfortable disciplinary boundaries towards a nuanced dialogical understanding of the environment. Suggestions for an interdisciplinary approach to researching and understanding the environment are not new, as there have been similar appeals time and again (Aiyadurai et al 2023; Saberwal and Kothari 1996). Speaking from our standpoint, we are interested in studying various socialities of the human and non-human relations in the environment, and in this article, we would like to put forward our understanding of an interdisciplinary study of the environment with the help of the framework of environmental humanities. We are currently affiliated to the discipline of humanities and social sciences (HSS) in a science and technology institute, and we continue to reiterate the importance of interdisciplinary studies of environment. The presence of an HSS chapter in an engineering institute does not entirely remove the stereotypical dichotomy of “soft sciences” and “hard sciences” (Kaur 2005). In such kind of an institutional set-up, like many other natural sciencedominated educational institutes, the mainstream discussions on issues related to the environment are still devoid of the concerns of sociality. Discussions of this sort are usually dominated by hardcore science specialists with a minimal space for humanity and issues of social justice with regard to environmental issues. Scope of Environmental Humanities Recently, we initiated an environmental humanities research group (EHRG) with the vision of collaborative learning, unlearning, and relearning about various aspects of environment and society, with a special emphasis on marginalised and vulnerable populations of humans and non-humans. This article is an outcome of some of the ongoing discussions vol lViII no 31 we have been having as members of the EHRG and its various possibilities of taking environmental discourses forward. Environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary field that provides the scope of cross-disciplinary interactions centring the broader milieu of ecology and society. While there are various centres and institutions dedicated to environmental humanities in the global North, at least in India and probably in the global South too, this field is yet to gain recognition and take its rightful place in formal spaces of academic research. The central theme of environmental humanities emerges from many environmental and social science subdisciplines ranging from environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, gender studies, and Dalit and tribal studies. From the 1970s onwards, environmental humanities has gradually become the topic of discussions in academic forums in research centres, journals, and book series, which prominently cater to research in the field of environmental humanities, primarily outside of the global South. This approach of environmental humanities is yet to be developed as part of teaching programmes in different countries, especially in India. However, it is noteworthy that emerging multispecies studies in the global South have laid an important base for environmental humanities to explore as a framework and as a discipline. Environmental humanities as a platform provides the opportunity to bring various approaches to understanding the environment into the conversation. Tracing one of the inspirations from feminist methodologies, environmental humanities inhabits the scope of centring the meanings, values, and knowledge of ecology with the marginalised communities of a society. At the same time, environmental humanities inhabits the scope of decentring the dominant figure of the “human” to highlight the narratives of nonhumans, simultaneously questioning “which humans one is favouring.” By 11 ALTERNATIVE STANDPOINT acknowledging that the environmental challenges are entangled in social injustices and discriminations, and by recognising the scope of centring and decentring non-humans and humans, environmental humanities opens up space to appeal for social and environmental justice simultaneously. As Plumwood (2002) argues, we must resituate the human within the environment for redefining environmental studies, and in this article, we appeal for further reshaping and reconfiguring our knowledge of the environment by focusing upon community-centric stories, values, and meanings. Pluriverse of Interactions At our affiliated institutions, we engage with environmental humanities both formally in courses such as “politics of environment” and in the masters and PhD research on local communities’ world views with respect to the various dimensions of biodiversity conservation and climate change. We also focus on human–animal relations among marginalised communities through critical questioning and analysis of dominant discourses of conservation, caste and the environment, traditional knowledge systems and practices, etc. The uniqueness of environmental humanities comes from the fact that in this discourse, no one dominant being, neither human nor non-human, overshadows the understanding of the environment. Research in Asia’s global South by Dan Smyer Yü (2021), who is a proponent of “Himalayan environmental humanities,” argues that the practice of environmental humanities is open-ended, which always is the process of “co-shaping” and “co-becoming.” In its “ongoingness” or co-becoming, environmental humanities, from our understanding, brings to light the pluriversality of interactions between humans and non-humans, which are entangled in conflicting-cum-cooperating relations of “co-becoming.” This gives the scope of centring the relationality of different marginalised communities and ethnic groups and their life stories of rivers, animals, birds, plants, and other non-human entities in this 12 discourse. These relations are not static but are continuously shaped and re-shaped through their diverse lived experiences. Thus, pluriversal notions of human–non-human relations are alternative world views that may be new for formal pedagogy in environmental discourses, but it has been integral to indigenous communities’ world views for generations. So far, there has been a limited space for the lived and affective experiences of the herders, farmers, fish peoples, hunter-gatherers, foragers and their deep connections with their immediate surroundings to be explored in the discourses of the environment. Environmental humanities can provide the opportunity to give a legitimate space to such communities as an epistemological anchor, along with other notions of the environment. In Conclusion Looking at the future of India’s environmental discourse, the ecological crisis can be better understood through the multidisciplinary lens of both humanities and sciences by acknowledging the multiple identities, realities, and practices navigating through the environment, that were largely absent or unrecognised in the past. At this juncture, we hope that environmental humanities could be one of the ways forward for powerfully challenging this crisis-driven situation by providing the scope of solidarity of “co-becoming” and “co-learning” to acknowledge the complexities of the environment. Quoting what Yü (2021) says: “While the earth naturalises humankind, humans humanise the earth,” where he also alerts that excessive humanisation of the earth through anthropogenic practices, such as mining, have been damaging the earth. And, here we emphasise that “humanisation” of the earth can also become a form of care for environmental health. We also appeal that we see India’s environment as pluriversal, which can humanise the environment through multidisciplinary histories, practices, beliefs, epistemologies, and cultures that are attentive to the “livingness of the earth.” The emerging field of environmental humanities could august 5, 2023 be one way to re-examine our relations with the environment. References Aiyadurai, A, A Chattopadhyay and N Choksi (eds) (2023): Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Aiyadurai, A and P Ingole (2021): “Invisibility of Caste in Environmental Studies,” Indian Express, https:// indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/ invisibility-of-caste-in-environmental-studies-. Cederlof, G and K Sivaramakrishnan (eds) (2007): Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia, Seattle: University of Washington Press. 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Saberwal, V K and A Kothari (1996): “The Human Dimension in Conservation Biology Curricula in Developing Countries,” Conservation Biology, Vol 10, No 5, pp 1328–31. Sarukkai, Sundar (2023): “Greening the Frontiers of Ecology,” Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care, A Aiyadurai, A Chattopadhyay and N Choksi (eds), Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, pp vii–xii. Sharma, Mukul (2017): Caste and Nature: Dalits and India’s Environmental Politics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Yü, Dan Smyer (2021): “Situating Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas,” Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Communing, Sustainability, D Smyer Yü and E de Maaker (eds), London and New York: Routledge, pp 1–24. Note to ReadersI Dear Readers, We have made some changes to our online access policy. The full text of the content published in the Economic & Political Weekly will be available to read on the website only for paid subscribers. 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