Krishna didn't give a dam

This is the most recent contribution to the series Religions of the World and Ecology, based on conferences convened between 1996 and 1998 under the aegis of the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions. It suffers from the limitations of all publications based on conference proceedings, and is uneven in quality, but there are some excellent contributions by North American and a few Indian scholars.

Hinduism and Ecology is divided into five sections. The first considers historical understandings of the natural world. Mary McGee offers a careful analysis of Mauryan environmental policies as described in Kautilya's Arthasastra , comparing them with those of the modern Indian state. O. P. Dwivedi adds little to what he has published elsewhere; his exposition of texts, though erudite, lacks historical depth. Anil Agarwal presents a pessimistic assessment of the potential of Hindu values to improve the state of the environment in polluted cities such as Delhi. K. L. Seshagiri Rao offers an ecological perspective on the five elements of the classical Hindu tradition, but spells the first of these ( akasa or "space") consistently incorrectly with the wrong diacritical mark on the "s".

The second, shorter, section contains two evaluations of Gandhian philosophy from the perspective of ecology, and the third considers forests in various classical texts and the epics. David Lee, a botanist at Florida International University, sets out the natural history of the Ramayana in fascinating detail, contrasting the botanical wealth of the Hindu scriptures with the relative poverty of the Judaeo-Christian Bible (956 species in the former, which is admittedly more voluminous, compared with 110 in the latter). He also suggests ways in which the Ramayana can be (and is being) used to highlight environmental issues at a popular level. (This would also apply to southeast Asia, where the epic is frequently performed before large audiences and in schools.) The other major Hindu epic, the Mahabharata , is evaluated by Philip Lutgendorf, who acknowledges that not all Hindu deities are models of ecological propriety. He summarises Agni's voraciously cruel appetite for the needless destruction of fauna and flora as follows: "But Agni doesn't simply desire wood and land; he wants 'the fat of the living', and so (Krishna) and his friend cheerfully use their warrior prowess to seal off the perimeters of the forest, conduct a 'vast massacre' of its fleeing creatures, and hurl their bodies back into the flamesI Meanwhile, the poet indulges in a grisly and detailed description of the creatures' panic, their attempts at flight, and their cries of agony as their eyes, wings, fat, and marrow catch fire, transforming them into 'living torches', while 'the huge flames of the happy Fire jumped up to the sky'." The Hindu distinction between primary and secondary scripture ( sruti , ie "declared", and smrti , ie "remembered") makes this kind of episode less of a moral problem for Hindus than it would be for Muslims, Jews and Christians, but it is an embarrassment; and it is good that Lutgendorf honestly acknowledges this.

These three historical sections as a whole would have been clearer and better focused had they been presented with more attention given to the chronology and social context of the texts. Thus, Laurie L. Patton could have gone further in elaborating the story in the Satapatha Brahmana of the sacrificial fire that "rolled eastward to the boundary river of Videha in eastern India, purifying as it rolled along". Had she done so, she might have explained that this reflects the migration of Aryan cultivators into the Gangetic plains, burning the forests as they moved. There is nothing unecological about burning forests in moderation; what is objectionable in the previous episode from the Mahabharata is the wanton manner in which the Lord Krishna, elsewhere a sublimely pastoral person, and his friend, Arjuna, fling the escaping wildlife back into the flames, laughing and joking as they do so.

Granted that it is difficult for a variety of contributors to such a large volume to each provide a relevant historical framework, the book might have benefited from an appendix giving some approximate dates instead of the table by Harry Blair that is included as appendix I. But even this would not take into account the shifts in meaning of terminology and the functions of gods that have occurred over a period of time. The lack of attention given to this issue is by no means unique to these commentators on the Hindu tradition.

In the same section, Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Pramod Parajuli offer a well-researched critique of "sacred groves", which precede Vedism and transcend the Hindu/ Buddhist, Aryan/non-Aryan divides, and Ann Grodzins Gold presents an informative account of the conservationist values and motivations of a minor ruler in Rajasthan during the first half of the last century.

The final part of the book considers the question: can Hindu text and ritual practice help develop environmental conscience? George A. James analyses the Chipko movement, rightly giving the credit for its leadership to Chandi Prasad Bhatt rather than to Sunderlal Bahuguna, who has tended to muscle in on Bhatt's early success. It would have been useful if some mention could also have been made here of the work of Anna Hazare in Maharashtra. The section also includes two interesting contributions by Vijaya Nagarajan and Madhu Khanna.

The penultimate section, "Flowing sacrality and risking profanity", is the most disappointing. First of all, if we are going to have diacritical marks on the Yamuna and Ganga rivers, then we should also have them on the Narmada. More seriously, the entire section is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to use the Hindu veneration of rivers as a covert environmentalist attack on the Narmada dam project. Granted that the dam is controversial, and might with the value of hindsight have been planned differently using a series of smaller constructions, the fact remains that ordinary, largely poor, people both need and deserve electricity. The dam will also make it possible to irrigate large areas of land that are arid. No attention is paid by any of the contributors in this section of the book to these positive reasons for constructing the dam, which has recently been given the go-ahead by the Indian government. However, in spite of such shortcomings, the book as a whole is a major contribution to an important and expanding academic area, and it will be much appreciated by university audiences.

David L. Gosling was formerly Spalding fellow in religions, Clare Hall, Cambridge.