Every time historian Ramachandra Guha publishes a book, the first question that his readers ask is whether the book is on political, environmental or cricketing history. He is back to environmental history with his latest book – Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism. Through the lives and works of 10 individuals, who would not have called themselves environmentalists since the word is of recent coinage, Guha extends the frontiers of understanding on Indian environmentalism to decades before the Chipko movement. This is the period when the Indian nation was transitioning out of colonial rule, and was attempting to modernise and industrialise.

Interestingly, five out of the 10 biographed in Speaking with Nature… are not Indians — town planner Patrick Geddes; botanists Albert and Gabrielle Howard; Gandhian Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn); and anthropologist Verrier Elwin. “They all worked in India and they all worked with Indians,” responds Guha in this interview with Mongabay India. “The argument here is that Indian nationalism was never xenophobic. Our tradition is that we are grounded where we are and yet we are happy to learn from different currents.”

Guha goes on to talk about why the lives of these 10 are relevant today, even though the time period in which they worked is different from what it is today. He argues that though these early thinkers and doers cannot provide explicit solutions to the problems of today, they can provide a philosophical approach to thinking through these issues.

Ramachandra Guha started his career studying and writing about India’s environmental history. His first book, The Unquiet Woods, was an adaptation of his PhD thesis on the Chipko movement of the Garhwal Himalayas from the 1970s, when peasant women hugged their trees to prevent them from being felled for commercial interests. In 1993 and 1995, he co-authored with ecologist Madhav Gadgil two books – This Fissured Land, and Ecology and Equity – which have become textbook-like reference material for anybody in the environmental field in India. In the year 2000, he contextualised the Indian environmental movement within the global movement with his book Environmentalism: A Global History. Along with these environmental books, he was also writing popular books on cricketing history. The book that made Guha a household name was published in 2007. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy was a reader’s delight and made Indian history accessible to the larger public.

In this interview, Guha talks about how his deep dive into political history changed his approach to environmental history. He also talks about his next project, and gives a short masterclass on how to strengthen the skill of writing.