Climate Change,Ecology and Heritage: Learning to Look Within

असतो मा सद्गमय ।

तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय ।

मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय ॥

[Lead me from ignorance to enlightenment,

From darkness to light,

From death to immortality.]

The conference on climate change, ecology and heritage sustainability is a coordinated effort by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and Ahmedabad University (AU). The topic of this conference is something close to everyone’s heart. Our future can depend on it, so it is a matter of pride to be here with every one of you. I express my gratitude for the same. Last year, we signed an MoU with AU. We were trying to figure out what programmes and projects we can do together. One collaboration we have completed is a detailed documentation of the Kumbh Mela, carried out by students of this Centre Heritage Management at AU under the guidance of Professor Molly Kaushal. We have also made a film on the philosophy of Kumbh Mela. The quality of effort that Professor Molly and the IGNCA team have put into that film is commendable. It reminds us of the extraordinary heritage which the Kumbh Mela represents, on the banks of a sacred river that connects the high Himalaya with a distant ocean. Perhaps even more importantly, the Kumbh Mela is a spiritual journey for the millions who gather there. The physical journey to arrive at the Kumbh from every corner is followed by an inward journey towards whatever one seeks as truth. There may be a parallel for us to consider here today. A heritage journey that begins with a physical landscape that, like the rest of the planet, is threatened today by climate change and by all that passes these days as development, and then a need for reflection on our own responsibility for the way things are and for ways to a better future. Let me ask this conference what is it that can we do to ensure that generations to come will be able to find peace and fulfilment at the Kumbh, just as generations before them have, for thousands of years? What guidance can today’s conference give us towards such a promise we should be able to offer our children and their children? Who must act, and how? Where must change begin?

I would like to suggest that to find answers we may have to journey within ourselves. As Gandhiji told us, we have to first change ourselves and our societies if we want the world around us to change. That is not easy to do. We all try to look at the issue from outside, not from inside. I recall a doha by Kabir: ‘Bura jo dekhan main chala, bura na miliya koy. Jo dil khoja apna, mujhse bura na koi’ (I set out to find the bad, but found no one truly bad. Yet when I searched my own heart, I found no one worse than myself). So whenever we talk about sustainability, climate change and heritage conservation, we tend to blame others for all the problems that we see around us. We do not self-introspect within ourselves to identify the source from which problems arise. There is that famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi: ‘The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed’. This question of choosing between need and greed has engaged many minds—from Mahatma Gandhi to Ram Mahonar Lohia and to all the Indian social thinkers and philosophers who have been engaged in India’s post-independence era. The question was ever present among all who understood the need to strike a balance between need and greed, between living responsibly on this planet or recklessly exploiting it without any thought about others or about tomorrow. Unfortunately, our entire education system has been focused upon exterior elements, ignoring the interior elements which give us the values we apply when we make choices. In Indian philosophical thought, there is an important word that comes to the surface, one that is rarely mentioned in our education system. That word is santosh, or contentment and satisfaction. Professor Pankaj Chandra might forgive me for using this word at his university. My question to you is what chance does that word have to transform young lives when everywhere they are being pushed into surviving within a competitive society? Like everyone else, each person expects to be in competition with others. Every person wants to be ahead of the next, to be more successful than the other. This need to be ahead of everyone, this race for being the best among others—you got 90, why not 91? You got 91, why not 92? Why not come first? Why not right on top? This desire to become the first, to be a part of a competitive race—this urge for competition can suck all the essence out of a person’s life. Once the essence has been sucked out, contentment also vanishes. These days you buy something for a child and the very next moment, the child asks for something else, something different—there is never satisfaction or joy in the fact that one has got something. We are all like that child. If we look at the larger canvas, we can see that this competitiveness within us, this race to become better than others, is distorting the whole development discourse. Then what remains through this distortion of what ‘development’ should really mean is only competition, not the well-being of humans and of the Earth that shelters them. Only a rat race, only greed.

I remember when some time ago Professor Molly and I were in the Himalayas, on a trip to Badrinath Dham. The hotel in Joshimath where we stayed for two nights was destroyed in the recent landslide. In fact, the entire village was washed away. But why did this happen? What was the logic in this crazy competition, this mad construction of new hotels built by cutting fragile mountains, making space for structures without any thought as to whether the location can carry such a load, whether it can sustain such construction. I would like to suggest that the root cause is the absence of contentment or satisfaction in our entire education system. We never teach our students that a day will come when they may have to live in a society that can demand their ability to manifest their contentment, not just their ability to compete.

Alvin Toffler has written that humans will come to a point where so-called development and nature will be at logger heads, fighting with each other. That is what we see today. We are, from the perspective of nature, fighting with each other. Yesterday we came from Delhi, and it feels privileged to be in a city where one can breathe good air. Delhi feels suffocating, because there is such a storm of so-called development, which obstructs us from seeing or experiencing good sky, air, water, atmosphere. Even the sun is not clearly visible. By 5 in the evening, it starts getting dark and feels like 10 in the night. All because there is so much pollution in Delhi. Thus, we need to check this competitive race of what is called ‘development’ that is all around us.

The natural life we once knew was manifested in villages—kshetras—where nature’s way was the essence that led to a way of life that had contentment at its core. Let me narrate a small incident. When Chhattisgarh became a new state, people wanted to develop it. Everyday some new scientist would come and talk about ‘developing’ Chhattisgarh. Once, an agricultural scientist came to talk to farmers at a meeting about rice cultivation. He started by acknowledging the large amount of rice that was cultivated from that area in 3 or 4 months of the year. He told them about a new scheme that would allow them to use their fields for the whole year. After rice, they could sow chickpeas, then soybean, then coriander and so on. He was very excited about this scheme and thought that farmers would be happy hearing this and would applaud him. Unfortunately, there was no applause. The scientist was surprised. He thought, ‘I came up with such a beneficial idea for them. Why aren’t they happy about it?’ Then, one of the farmers spoke up:

Sir, you are right about my field being busy only for 3 or 4 months. But if we all do what you suggest, then who will celebrate our festivals? When will we have time to meet our relatives? How will our social relations be maintained? When will we be able to actively participate in our society? And most importantly, when will we allow our Mother Earth take rest if we keep making her work all year long?

The revelation was that the farmers had contentment, and it was this contentment that kept them moving forward at their own pace and according to their own need. But it is we who teach the farmers greed. We tell them to make their fields more productive by using fertilizers. We then find that having created increased productivity by using fertilizers, the fields are being destroyed and consumers start worrying about chemical contamination. So we witness sophisticated urban people rushing off to buy organic vegetables! Surely this is a ridiculous state of affairs. Yet it is not just a matter of ridicule. It is a situation worthy of study and thinking about alternative approaches. That is what universities are meant to do.

Of the papers which are to be presented in this conference, unfortunately, as far as I’ve seen, there are no papers related to lifestyle choices. I am open to correction, yet the change we need is all about attitudes, about behaviours related to lifestyle choices. Climate change, ecology and heritage are really about the choices we make about the way we live. So are we concerned about our lifestyles at this conference? Surely there should be at least one paper about it. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Many of us might not know that when forest people who go into the forest, none of them ever say we are going to cut trees. What they say is that we are going to collect what the trees offer. Yet whenever we make a forest a protected forest or a national reserve park, we primarily displace the very persons who are connected with that land, who know its nature, climate and geography. These persons have a connection with every inch of the land. Their lives are tied to the land. And we displace them by claiming that the very persons who know the land and protect it are the ones threatening the land! Let me again point out that forest dwellers never say, ‘I am going to cut wood’. They always say, ‘I am going to pick up wood from the forest’. Never cut wood by axe, but pick up what is on ground—wood that is dried up, discarded by the forest. That is what is selected and harvested. The axe in their hands was provided by us. We told them to go and cut wood in his forest, bringing changes into people’s lifestyles through our greed. Who will think about these lifestyle changes, and when? Again, please recall your elders saying ‘nahana-dhona’; it is never just ‘nahana’ (bath). It is always linked to ‘dhona’ (washing). Why is that so? Because the water that is left after a bath is always used to wash at least a couple clothes. Today, when we waste many litres of water in washing machines, do we ever give a thought as to how our elders translated their language into their own behaviours? Try to talk to your elders at home, and you will realize and learn how big savings begin with saving small.

Until we include the word ‘contentment’ in our curriculum, in our vocabulary, and take its essence into our character, we will continue fighting with nature. We will keep struggling with the concept of sustainability. We will keep having conferences where we will talk about sustainability, ecology and climate change, but when will we start acting towards changes in our own mentality and psychology? Such change will not come from outside. It needs to come from within ourselves. We need to feel that primary internal change, if there is to be real meaning in such conferences. We all believe in a civilized society and in developing a scientific outlook. Science tells us that the future will bring great challenges. Many of these will be about our natural resources. If there is to be a way to meet these challenges and to resolve them, that way will be by walking the path of our traditional knowledge, our societal wisdom. Our traditional knowledge systems have reiterated their solutions to contemporary challenges, having done so through generations. Yet we have remained ignorant of them. We have forgotten our own traditional knowledge. Instead we came up with new education systems, found new jargon, developed a new vocabulary. In the process, our traditional wisdom has been left far behind.

There is a need to bring back that traditional wisdom and its vocabulary. Basanti Negiji is here with us today. Why are people like Basanti ji respected and sought after today? It is because she has never left her roots. Only a few of us get a chance to go into the mountains to see what is happening there. Those who are able to visit regularly over the last few years have seen how much has changed within a very short period. Just think about those like Basanti ji, who have lived in these mountains for generations; how much they must have grieved as they watch all this happening. I have also seen the forests of Chhattisgarh getting destroyed, how at night trucks full of wood are transported out of there. For what kind of development are these natural resources being destroyed? One day I went to Korba, in Chhattisgarh. There I saw a big hill, which was not there previously. I was told that it is not a real a hill, just a huge mound made of fly ash—the fly ash that is emitted from power plants nearby. You can see another such hill just outside of Delhi, on the Karnal road. It may be higher than the Qutub Minar. This hill taller than the Qutub Minar is a hill of garbage, made by you and me. What can we do about this? What and who needs to change? These questions are bigger and more important than others. I feel we need to find answers. We need very detailed, very thorough discussion on these. There can be no better space for such reflection than places of learning like this one. It is here that our heritage of traditional wisdom and sources of new knowledge can come together towards real and lasting change.

Let me end with sharing an attempt to build a resource of indigenous knowledge which stakeholders like you can draw upon. We have made an attempt at IGNCA to develop a portal—‘Mera gaon, Meri dharohar’. Professor Molly was part of this. We are trying to map the 6.5 lakh villages of India, to find out the traditional ways of living that still exist in these villages—what are the traditional foods, the culture, the social relations, the festivals, the traditions, the rituals—and to document these. The idea is to preserve our social heritage. You will be happy to know that today that portal has 6 lakh 23 thousand villages already mapped. We have made films on some of those villages, almost 2.5 thousand films are now available on that portal. So when we want to work to address the challenges of climate change, ecology and heritage sustainability, I feel this IGNCA resource should be thought of and used. It brings the past forward, linking it to the future, in new and exciting ways. In this, we look forward to working with you. Thank you.