Staying Alive Women, Ecology And Survival in India by Vandana Shiva

Staying Alive Women, Ecology And Survival in India
Vandana Shiva Kali for Women IRs 60, 1988
Review by Vlalavika Karlekar Vandana Shiva´s impassioned plea, "…the violence to nature, which seems intrinsic to the dominant development model, is also associated with violence to women who depend on nature for drawing sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies", is not to be taken lightly.
According to Shiva, nature is equated with the feminine principle; its degradation, colonisation and ultimately its destruction, all in the name of progress, are the outcome of a male or "patriarchal" culture. In India, the new god of development with all its manifestations has resulted in women´s alienation from the land and its productive resources. An early outcome of the British colonisation was the denuding of its vast forest resources. As the collectors of minor forest produce, women and their labour were easy victims.
Relating the history of the Chipko movement of the Garhwal Himalaya, Shiva traces the involvement of women from the days of M.K. Gandhi´s associate Mira Behn onwards. In the initial years, women collaborated with men to work towards providing raw material for Gandhian sawmill cooperatives and resin factories. By the 1970s, protests had begun for right of access to local resources. In Reni, women formed vigilance groups and successfully prevented the felling of trees. In Adwani, Dungari and Badiyagarh, women tied sacred threads to branches and in some cases dared axemen to approach trees which they hugged.
Shiva believes that rural women understand best the basic principles of how to nurture and manage land and forests. She is critical of afforestation, social forestry and wasteland development projects because she believes they lead to the imposition of foreign models and encourage privatisation of common land. She questions the basis on which areas are declared wastelands and maintains that so called wastelands can be put to productive use not only through elaborate projects also but by women using simple techniques.
The Green Revolution and scientific agriculture, which substitute renewable farm input by non renewable inputs, also come in for criticism, for favouring men and machines. Women´s traditional roles are overlooked if not wiped out. Similar processes are at work with respect to access to water: deforestation, quarrying and mining lead to loss of water sources.
While Shiva says the book is an attempt to "…articulate how rural Indian women…experience and perceive ecological destruction", there is little in the form of individual perceptions here. Interviews and life histories of some women would have enlivened this otherwise well researched book. Throughout, Shiva´s commitment to women and to ecology is palpable, and a re-reading of Rajni Kothari´s incisive foreword helps place her work in perspective,
Shiva identifies the deeper meaning of feminity with nature (prakriti). Nonetheless, one has to agree with Kothari that equating all women with the nurturing, life-sustaining feminine principle tends at times to be overdone. While it is true that women are close to nature, this is not an inclusive, all encompassing relationship. Given the opportunity, access and training, they can and do achieve success in the male dominated world of the machine.
Finally, after a while, some of the jargon begins to pall — "patriarchy", "ma! development", "reductionism" and so on, sit rather heavily on one´s consciousness. In an otherwise well produced book, one misses an index and a bibliography.