A fist clenched to the sound of music

26 March 1974. Reni village, Chamoli district. A girl comes running into Gaura Devi’s courtyard, breathless and screaming: “They’ve come to cut the forest… they’re cutting down our forest!”

The men of the village had all gone to Chamoli that day on some business. Gaura was alarmed. In their absence, responsibility for the village fell on her: she was, after all, president of the Mahila Mangal Dal, the village women’s collective. She gathered all the women and they rushed to the forest. Some fifty labourers were preparing to fell the trees. The contractor’s munshi (a general factotum), was there too, along with a few armed men.

“Look, we beg you, don’t cut our forest,” Gaura told the labourers. “How will we survive without the forest? How will our goru, our cattle, survive?”

“Start cutting!” the munshi shouted. “And you women, get out of here.”

Gaura stood her ground. “This forest is ours. You think you can do as you please because the men are away today?”

Guns were pointed at the women. Gaura was fired up. “Come on,” she told the women, “let’s each of us do an angwaltha (tight embrace, in the local Garhwali) around a tree… and let’s see how they cut them now!”

Whichever tree the labourers approached, the women clung to it. “You’ll have to cut us down before you cut the trees.”

They were threatened, but they refused to budge. The guns were ultimately lowered. The labourers retreated. The forest survived.

This was the idea of ‘Chipko’ taking shape on the ground. Chandi Prasad Bhatt and other environmental and social activists had been travelling from village to village carrying the message of Chipko. Gaura Devi had heard them too. Now she had turned the idea into action.

28 November 1977. The forests of Kumaon were to be auctioned in Nainital. A few months earlier, some young men had created such a huge ruckus that the auction had to be postponed. This time, there was heavy police deployment. The authorities were prepared to arrest protesters, while the protesters themselves were hiding, trying to come up with another way to resist.

That morning, on the flats of Nainital, a bearded young man appeared with a hudka, the small hill drum, and began singing in Kumaoni:

'आज हिमालय तुम्हें पुकार रहा है, जागो-जागो ओ मेरे लाल! मत होने दो मेरी नीलामी, मत होने दो मुझे हलाल।'

‘Today the Himalaya calls you — awake, awake, my children! Do not let them auction me, do not let them slaughter me.’

The police and PAC (Provincial Armed Constabulary) personnel took him for a beggar. But this was the poet Girish Tiwari ‘Girda’, who had spent the night adding new verses to an old song. The song was a call to the people of the hills: save the forests, save the mountains.

Word spread through Nainital like wildfire. By the time the administration realised what was happening, people had converged on the auction hall. The opposition was so fierce that the auction had to be cancelled.

These forms of resistance could only have grown out of the lived reality of people. History bears witness to the way people’s cultural consciousness has given new voice and energy to non-violent resistance. Think of the stirring songs sung in processions, sit-ins, demonstrations during the freedom struggle. That tradition has continued to this day.

In popular movements across several states, particularly in Adivasi-majority regions, folk songs, newly composed protest songs and traditional instruments have often created such a charge that spectators, listeners, bystanders are drawn into the movement willy-nilly. Progressive outfits, their trade unions and IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association) carried songs of resistance across the country.

The songs and poetry of Faiz, Sahir, Jafri, Shailendra, Shalabh, Gorakh, Cheema and others have lent a cutting edge, a sense of urgency to many a popular movement. In protest marches, the turhi, nishan, dhol-damaama and other such folk instruments have sounded warnings to those in power. The same stream of resistance runs through street theatre, slogans and posters that awaken a consciousness of dissent.

This is essentially the path Gandhi showed, which drew strength and nourishment from the cultural consciousness of the people.

At the recent protest at Jantar Mantar, it was heartening to see Gen Z too singing protest songs to the beat of the daphli, the handheld frame drum. The posters they carried, the slogans they chanted were brimming with a heartening creative zest and inventive flair. Their movement forced the autocratic Modi government to retreat; the arrogance of power was shattered.

A state government of the very same ruling party is meanwhile trying to crush the non-violent protests of Adivasi villagers opposing the Ken-Betwa Link Project in Madhya Pradesh. The project threatens to uproot thousands of Adivasis without fair compensation, destroy forests and damage even the Panna Tiger Reserve. Protesters staged a chita andolan (pyre protest) and threatened to take their lives by jal samadhi; their struggle continues.

We saw similar methods employed during the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Thousands of Adivasis staged collective jal samadhi protests against displacement and inadequate compensation. They won some victories too, but perhaps the greatest achievement of these innovative forms of resistance was to make ordinary villagers/ Adivasis conscious of their rights and to give them the will and determination to fight for those rights till the very end.

“We have a river, and you are giving us a handpump?”

When an ordinary Adivasi woman said this to government officials, they had no answer. No urban activist could have put it quite like that. This was lived reality forging a consciousness of resistance.

“Delhi has the Yamuna too. Why don’t you build a dam across it to generate electricity? Why don’t you drown Delhi?”

Who could possibly answer a question so innocent and yet so devastating?

Another grassroots activist of the Narmada movement, Bijya Jugal Vasave, an Adivasi from Chimal Khedi in Maharashtra, once put the transformation in his own words: “We knew nothing earlier about strategies like anshan and padyatra. We had our traditional weapons, bows and arrows, to fight with. But now we have put those aside and taken Gandhi’s path of satyagraha. We have made the voice within us and our raised fist our new weapons.” What could be more powerful than a raised fist that rises with the sound of music?

Today our democracy and constitutional values are under threat. But the people possess an extraordinary repertoire of non-violent ways of resistance, rooted in their own lives, cultures and collective consciousness. However brutal or powerful a government may be, it cannot hold out indefinitely against such resistance.