ecospirit

My old friend and mentor Sunderlal Bahuguna died Friday May 21 of complications from Covid-19 at the the hospital in Rishikesh.  He was 94 years old.

I first met Sunderlal during the pilgrimage to India my wife Geeta and I made after we married, in the spring of 1974. He arrived late one day at the simple ashram in Silyara after touring neighboring villages:

Dusk had fallen and we were already well into our simple meal when Sunderlal arrived, laden with a huge backpack. He was a vigorous, ascetic man in his late forties, close-cropped greying beard and hair, kind but intense eyes. He walked huge distances talking with villagers about self-reliance (swadeshi) and claiming their rights (gram swaraj), nourishing himself on pre-cooked barley which he made into gruel and wild berries—the mountain folk call them “gooseberries”—from the Uttarakhand area. He claimed these berries held more vitamin C than any other fruit. Sunderlal’s children, two boys and a girl, aged roughly eight to twelve, slept in the bed with Vimla, while he slept on the floor, which seemed to me a tremendous act of self-denial. The ashram at Silyara was home for Vimla Bahuguna and her three children. For Sunderlal, it was a base of operations.

 When the time came for Sunderlal to walk the villages again, he turned to us. “Come with me,” he said with a smile and an outstretched hand. But we declined, for we were headed several other places on our whirlwind final tour of India before returning to the US and our householder life.  This trip included a visit in blazing hot Wardha with his mentor, Vinoba Bhave, who had been Ganhdi’s right-hand man.

In 1987, Sunderlal  received the Right Livelihood Award on behalf of the Chipko movement, a network of village women who protected the trees in their villages, often by chaining themselves to them.  They endured considerable abuse from the loggings companies.  Once the prize purse was received, Sunderlal distributed it to the head woman in each village, to be used to maintain their vigilance.  The Indian government, under Indira Gandhi, passed laws protecting trees in a wide area of Himalaya, with no trees over three thousand meters being available for felling.  This would be disastrous, both for agriculture and for conservations, since theyoung mountins have thin, rocky soil and are subject to flash flooding (one a few years ago killed thousands of people and devastated many villages and one old temple town).

 In 1996, my return to India was primarily to take up his longstanding invitation to “walk the villages” with Sunderlal.  I corresponded with him, and he invited me, noting that he didn’t know exactly where he would be, since Tehri, where he had been squatting on land usurped by the government, might be flooded before my arrival.  He had vowed to go down with the city.  But ai arrived to a town that was not flooded on June 30 as originally planned. Sunderlal and friends were able to get a stay from the Supreme Court, ruling that the Government had no right to evict the townspeople with only the coffer dam completed. But between speaking tours and politicking for the UP state elections that fall, I was only able to spend a few days with the master.  They were rich, packed with experiences and insights.

The issues we discussed during the next four days ranged widely, including SLB’s personal history, Indian politics and global economics, and the relationship between science and Vedanta. “The blueprint for survival should be based on the scientific facts of the West, but have the mystic vision of the East. Isn’t it?” Sunderlal was in unassailable territory.

 This certainly made a lot of sense to me, but my biggest question concerned the transition to a sustainable lifestyle in India. Sunderlal claimed that converting farming from annual monocultures to fruit and nut orchards was the way to feed humanity and restore the ecosphere. I was skeptical.

“How can everyone live off the land? What happens to the huge number of city dwellers here and elsewhere if we quit the industrial model?” I asked.

“The present rate of growth of the world economy cannot be sustained. Those only will survive who adopt traditional subsistent lifestyles. All others are lost,” he said.

“But I don’t understand how this jives with the Hindu belief that the aim of creation is to recognize, once it reaches human form, that it is God, merging back into the godhead. After the great die-off, maybe even extinction of the species, what happens to all those souls and the desire of creation to join the Creator once more?”

Sunderlal smiled. One man said, “It takes a very long time. Kali Yuga is the end of an era, not the end of time.”

Tenzin added, “Hungry ghosts. The Buddhists speak of this. There will be huge numbers of hungry ghosts desperately seeking bodies to incarnate in. They will circle the globe, endlessly.”

Sunderlal nodded his head in agreement. “Don’t worry about Hindu cosmology. Go back to America and tell your political and industrial leaders to get off the backs of the poor. Encourage the farmers you know to plant nut trees. It will take time. And we have no time to waste.”

Sunderlal fought the Tehri Dam for years, as well as others planned for the Himalayas.  The power generated was destined for the big cities of the Gangetic Plain, not the hill people.  Though he ultimately lost the battle in Terhri, he extracted a promise not to build any more of the dozen hydro dams the government planned for the world’s tallest and most massive mountain chain

Geeta, our son Jesse and I spent some time with Sunderlal again in 1999 and in the early 2000’s.  He made an appeal for us to move to the area, build a little house, and work for the Himalayan people.  But I had long before decided that my work was among Appalachian folk, and frankly, my life in the Southern Appalachians was too comfortable.  Geeta reluctantly let go of her fantasy to have a life in both places.  As for Jesse, he said he had never met an environmentalist who walked the talk so thoroughly. 

 Sunderlal Bahuguna will be sorely missed.