Chipko was not just a handful of famous leaders or a simple story of villagers hugging trees. In Ramachandra Guha’s account of Shekhar Pathak’s book, it emerges as a varied, locally rooted movement shaped by ordinary people, forest livelihoods and a longer history of resistance in Uttarakhand.
What Pathak means by a people’s history
In a 2020 essay for Scroll.in, historian Ramachandra Guha describes Pathak’s book as “the first comprehensive history of the Chipko movement.” His point is not that earlier writing never mentioned local participants, but that public portrayals often centered a few prominent figures and reduced a complex regional movement to a familiar tree-hugging parable.
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Pathak instead reconstructs particular protests in their local settings: who took part, what forests and livelihoods were at stake, and what slogans and posters people used. The account gives space to women, men and children, as well as to organizers less widely known beyond the region. Guha names Shishupal Singh Kunwar, Hayat Singh, Dhoom Singh Negi and folk poet Ghanshyam Sailani alongside better-known figures Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna.
Pathak’s firsthand connection helps explain this approach. In a Hindustan Times interview, he said: “As a participant in the Chipko movement and an inhabitant of the Chipko region, I felt that what I had been reading in some books and magazines was very different from what really happened or was happening.”
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How the movement unfolded in Guha’s account
Guha locates the first action in Mandal village, in Chamoli district, in spring 1973. Villagers opposed the felling of ash trees for the sports goods company Symonds. They organized through the Dashauli Gram Swarajya Mandal, with inspiration from Chandi Prasad Bhatt. Guha describes about a dozen further actions in other parts of Uttarakhand, where peasants threatened to embrace trees marked for contractors to prevent them from being felled. That figure is his approximate count of actions covered, not a definitive tally of every Chipko protest.
Placing these episodes in their settings matters because the stakes were not only symbolic. The book connects forest use to local economies and political choices over who could work with, benefit from, or control forests. Pathak’s interview captured that relationship in its headline: “Ecology and economy are connected.”
More than one political tradition
Chipko is often presented principally through a Gandhian lens. Guha’s account complicates that emphasis: it also acknowledges activists associated with the Communist Party of India and radical student leaders. This does not erase the role of Gandhian practice; it shows why treating the movement as the expression of a single ideology misses part of its political landscape.
Pathak also places Chipko within a longer tradition of forest resistance, rather than treating it as an isolated episode. The New India Foundation’s book description similarly highlights the movement’s local politics, labor disputes and earlier resistance. The result is a history concerned with continuity as well as the individual protests that made Chipko visible.
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Guha says Pathak draws on government documents, pamphlets, personal letters, local newspapers, oral histories, interviews and field research. The New India Foundation notes that Pathak walked Himalayan villages connected to the events over four decades. Together, these sources allow the book to move beyond a retrospective legend and attend to how participants and local records describe the movement.
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The Hindi original appeared in November 2019 as Hari Bhari Umeed: Chipko Andolan aur Anya Janglat Pratirodho ki Parampara, according to Guha. The English edition, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, was translated by Manisha Chaudhry. Guha says he edited and somewhat restructured the Hindi original for the English version.
| Edition | Title | Publication details |
|---|---|---|
| Hindi original | Hari Bhari Umeed: Chipko Andolan aur Anya Janglat Pratirodho ki Parampara | Published November 2019, as reported by Guha. |
| English translation | The Chipko Movement: A People’s History | Translated by Manisha Chaudhry; Permanent Black; 2021; ISBN 978-81-7824-555-3, according to the New India Foundation listing. |
The Taylor & Francis review listing gives the Permanent Black 2021 edition as 371 pages and ₹895; that is a listing detail, not a current retail price. See the review listing. Current stock and pricing are not established by these sources.
Why this account changes the familiar story
Pathak’s history shifts the center of attention from a small cast of celebrated leaders to the people and places that made the movement. By tracing specific actions, showing the mix of political traditions involved and connecting Chipko to earlier forest struggles, it offers a more grounded way to understand what happened—and why forest protection was inseparable from local life.
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