"I could not cut a tree. From where will I cut a tree when there is no tree. If there are trees, people are already cutting them."
These words of 14-year-old Nirmala, set the tone for the book on the mountain women of Himachal Pradesh, the struggles faced by them in their daily lives and their links to a rapidly degrading environment.
Portraying the deep inroads that development and 'capitalism' have made in the rural life, especially in the hill area, the author, Brenda Cranney says the human face of the environmental crisis is the fragmentation of the family, the erosion of local authority structures and cooperating institutions, as well as an increased workload for women and children. The book is the sixth in a series on the theme 'Livelihood and Environment' and part of a long-term research programme of the faculty of environmental studies in the University of Amsterdam. It reads more like a diary with personalised accounts of the women in Ichasser and Dev Nagar villages of Himachal Pradesh.
Written from a western researcher's perspective, biases were bound to creep in. Cranney, a Canadian activist and researcher from York University, begins her tale with a reflection of India's heat and dust image. "Initially the cold, the lack of privacy, the lice and flea bites were difficult to cope with, yet the people I lived with did not see these as hardships but as part of their everyday life," she says.
However, her almost 10-month-long sojourn in the villages of Himachal Pradesh saw the author identifying herself, both as a woman and as a researcher, with the local people, especially the women. So much so that by the end, she found her role changing from that at the time of her arrival in India. She became an active participant in most aspects of village life and was more a part of the family she lived with.
Cranney's research mainly focuses on the ways in which the degradation of the environment in rural India, the result of inept, inadequate and inappropriate development programmes, have impacted on poor women's productive and reproductive work, their health, their experience of family and culture and their agency. In examining the intimate details of the day-to-day lives of poor women in rural India, the data demonstrates how these lives are connected to and shaped by capitalist transformation.
On another level, however, the research also reveals that in coping with the changes brought about by unsustainable capitalist development projects, poor rural women's experience of their environment and traditional culture have been transformed and their social agencies reaffirmed. The potential for positive change that emerges from the adverse conditions under which these women live is linked not only to their strength and adaptability, but to their increasing grasp of their ability to control their lives and the spark that animates their desire for a better life, the author says.
What is unique about this book is the methodology. Through a combination of oral histories, personal interviews and participant observation, Cranney developed a way of doing research that straddles anthropology and sociology. This not only analyses and explains but also documents, describes and lends voice to a revealing story.
To lend a truly feminist perspective to her research, the author tried to rely on everyday life and lived experience. For this, she lived and worked side by side with the subjects of her study - the women of Ichasser and Dev Nagar villages. She helped them with their daily chores, ate with them at mealtimes and, tired from a long day of hard work, slept next to them at night. In doing so, she became an active participant in the research and not just an observer.
"As I discovered, there was no better way to understand the work that women in rural India do on a daily basis than by doing the tasks myself. As an insider I was able to take part in many activities that would have otherwise been observed from a distance and at a more superficial level," Cranney says of her research methodology.
Analysing the research findings, the book says an examination of the commercialisation of the forest regions of Himachal Pradesh would suggest that development there has probably been successful within the capitalist context. The exploitive nature of capitalist success, however, has had severe and adverse effects on not only the forest environment but on the hill people, especially women, living in the area. In the process of development, women's traditional social, cultural and family life has been severely disrupted and their workloads substantially increased.
At the same time, the failure of development in this region has both external and internal elements, the book notes. Some development programmes have led to the deterioration of the natural environment. The environmental crisis caused by the commercialisation of forestry has eroded the biomass-based subsistence economy with devastating repercussions for the social fabric of specific areas of Himachal Pradesh.
Gender relationships have also been affected by the ecological crisis. With men migrating to the towns to find work, the entire responsibility for the maintenance of the household thus falls on women. Women, says Cranney, have been the most affected by the current environmental crisis because of their close relationship to and dependence on the environment for their daily household needs. Because of the top-down approach - upper class/caste and patriarchal approach - in development planning, women have not been included in project development. They have not been asked what they need to be able to sustain their families.
Parts of Himachal Pradesh, the book says, have become a dual economy - based partially on remittances and partially on subsistence agriculture. And because of different agenda, men are more supportive of development projects than women are. Women are more committed to using the environment to meet their subsistence needs as they carry full responsibility for feeding and caring for the family. Men are more interested in becoming part of the money-ordered economy and have, therefore supported cash crops, such as potatoes, at the expense of the indigenous forests.
When the economy changes, the men are affected more directly than the women. But, making do with what little resources they have, women can face hardships better than men. But then, coping with the degradation of environment brought about by inappropriate and unsustainable development is the major challenge that women in Ichasser and Dev Nagar face, Cranney says.
In finding ways to cope with this problem women have had to resist traditional patriarchal and cultural expectations and move in and out of these expectations when necessary. This, the author says, can be seen in women taking on the responsibility of ploughing, becoming literate and guarding the forests.
"It is in their struggles to provide (a different life) for their children, to cope with increased workloads, to challenge the state about the condition of the environment and to prevent alcohol from their villages that women have reasserted their lives, which I feel is reflected in their ability to move in and out of traditional culture when necessary, to challenge the state and patriarchy, overtly as well as subtly," Cranney says.
The burden of deteriorating environment, the family and poverty falls disproportionately on women's shoulders but their determination to survive keeps everything going, she says. These challenges give women the strength to do what they needed to do, she adds. The dialectic of modernity and tradition can also be seen in how and when women resist, the author says noting that their resistance coexists with subservience. The women assert themselves by either adopting necessary coping mechanisms or finding direct and indirect ways to protest. They are able to assess the balance of power with the balance of long term benefits and decide if resistance is appropriate, or if other forms of protest are more likely to succeed.
And the book ends on a hopeful note, saying that in dealing with the challenges thrown up by capitalist transformation and the resulting modernisation coexisting with tradition, the women in Himachal Pradesh have developed strategies to cope with the changes and have become politically active. "Women in Himachal Pradesh do not speak with one voice but with many the voices of resistance, power, subservience, critique, determination and hope and their stories are still unfolding," it concludes.