PEOPLE, FORESTS AND RIVERS: ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS, DEVELOPMENT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS IN INDIA

Environmental movements in India have long occupied a central place in critiques of development, yet they continue to remain ambivalently positioned within dominant frameworks of environmental governance and economic planning. Although struggles such as the Chipko Movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan and diverse tribal mobilisations are widely recognised as iconic forms of grassroots resistance, they remain marginal to policy regimes structured around economic growth, infrastructural expansion and extractive accumulation. This article examines Indian environmental movements not merely as reactive responses to ecological degradation but as sustained critiques of the epistemological, political and ontological foundations of postcolonial development. Drawing on insights from political ecology, political ontology and critical development studies, the article analyses conflicts over forests and rivers as contested arenas where competing conceptions of nature, society and progress are articulated and negotiated. It argues that while political ecology has been effective in foregrounding dispossession, inequality and state–capital alliances, it has often privileged political- economic explanations at the expense of deeper ontological questions. Indigenous and subaltern ecological worldviews- particularly relational understandings of forests, rivers and landscapes as living entities are frequently acknowledged in existing scholarship but remain insufficiently theorised. Engaging feminist political ecology and affective approaches, the article further demonstrates how environmental movements are shaped by gendered labour, emotional attachment, memory and everyday ecological practices. In doing so, it identifies critical gaps in the literature, including the instrumentalization of indigenous knowledge, the depoliticization of environmental conflict through technocratic governance and the conflation of grassroots environmentalism with eco-nationalist narratives. The article concludes by arguing for an ecocentric and ontologically plural framework capable of capturing the ethical, cultural and political significance of environmental movements in India beyond narrowly economistic or managerial paradigms.