The passing of Madhav Gadgil made front-page news earlier this month. The obituaries emphasised his competence, his achievements, his skill at institution building. They cited, as an example, the Institute of Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru that he founded.
Few, however, emphasised the quality of the man and the power of his imagination. One wishes the word ‘Gadgilesque’ would become a part of common language, representing a new way of looking at man and nature. In that sense, this article is a stand-in waiting for his colleagues, Raman Sukumar and Ramachandra Guha, to elaborate on his imagination.
The question one must strive to ask is, what would happen if Gadgil were to redo the Aravalli report? The Aravallis are a set of mountain ranges ranging across several northern and western states that are being requalified in a scientific report.
At first sight, it would immediately strike Gadgil that this report pretends to be a technical answer to a technical question. It seeks to specify the angle of elevation as a standard answer to all questions. So how would Gadgil respond?
One has to begin by emphasising that many of our major scientists, especially the unorthodox ones, were also critical-political theorists. For example, Meghnad Saha used the idea of energy as a unit of progress, especially of industrial development. Chemist C V Seshadri used the notion of thermodynamics to re-examine the idea of waste in democracy. Scientist, A K N Reddy, who was Gadgil’s colleague, used the idea of community and scale to understand the idea of energy. In a similar way, Gadgil used the notion of diversity to challenge the assumptions of political theory, especially as embedded in the Constitution.
Diversity was not just a concept for Gadgil, it was a metaphysics. It was a word that connoted difference, dialogue and plurality. He used the concept to challenge the Enlightenment idea of nature. Nature, in Western theory, was a mere commodity. What Gadgil did was to rework the idea of nature into a gradient of ecological imaginations.
He claimed that ecology studied the intertwined ideas of life, life-world, livelihood, lifestyle, lifecycle and life chances. There was a music to nature in Gadgil’s vocabulary. It was a gradient of scales, a rhythm in time. Diversity anchors the very idea of the democratic imagination.
The slogan ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ was incomplete. Gadgil added to the first triangle a second one—equity, diversity and justice. One had to read democracy through both lenses, otherwise the notion of right becomes truncated. What Gadgil showed was that diversity included the words ‘marginality’ and ‘minority’, and the ideas of vulnerability and erasure.
In this context, by seeking a single solution of a three-degree angle of elevation as a definition of the Aravallis, the scientific report creates a crisis of democracy. The number of hillocks that then become open to mining is stupendous. The number of livelihoods lost is a point of indifference. Diversity, as Gadgil reminded, is a word that hyphenates life, livelihood and life chances.
Gadgil would even add a third triangle. He would look at the relation between experts, interest groups and ordinary citizens. One must remember that Gadgil was an exceptional listener. He listened to voices that were marginal to the scientific discourse and added a sense of equity to Indian politics. The question one must ask is what kind of interventions, beyond the rereading of the report, would Gadgil offer.
Gadgil was both an inventive person and a creative listener. He would have suggested combining the Aravalli report with the Right to Information Act. This right includes the right to knowledge, to the context within which a decision is made. One has to, therefore, list the variety of interest groups that go into the making of a decision. For this, one has to understand how mining, rather than increasing productivity, can destroy the very identity of the Aravalli hills. The amount of hillocks already open to mining signals the beginning of this erasure.
But Madhav Gadgil would go further. Today, he might have suggested the establishment of a Knowledge Panchayat. It is an institution to combine layman's language and expert insight. A Knowledge Panchayat would capture a spectrum of insights and theories about the Aravallis. In ordinary language, the Aravalli report has to democratise knowledge and focus on diversity to sustain democracy. In a deeply technical sense, it is both one-sided and monochromatic.
Gadgil captured this insight brilliantly in his autobiography, A Walk Up The Hill: Living with People and Nature. He explained that a landscape is not a geographical contour or a geometric outline. A landscape is a collection of childhood memories and narratives, combining the ecological and aesthetic visions of a society. Mere geometry cannot count for the nature of landscape. Gadgil, thus, possesses a poetics and an ethics of nature which the Aravalli report reduces to a purely instrumental view.
Gadgil would have proposed a tacit constitution. One has to look at how ordinary people look at nature—sacred memory, storytelling and livelihood—to look at ecology. The Aravalli report is indifferent to all this. Gadgil would have proposed ecological folktales from the Aravallis as an antidote to the report.
A Gadgilesque imagination thus becomes a pedagogic remedy to the arid mentality behind the Aravalli report. But one can’t stop here. One has to understand that diversity is a word that has to be reworked into the Constitution. Diversity is not just a concept restricted to arid definitions of marginality and minority. Diversity demands a plurality of language, multiplicity of dialogues and a kind of storytelling that has to be reworked into the Constitution. Diversity is a celebration of difference.
Most government reports are protectors of uniformity. Diversity, as Gadgil said, has to be reworked with ideas of both nature and culture. Nature is not just a few mammals and trees; it includes the atmosphere, and even the bacteria and their symbiotic relation with man and other animals.
Gadgil’s eventual message is that ecology has to rework democracy to anchor the future of India. The Aravalli report is a piece of authoritarianism and illiteracy that needs to be discarded.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)