The Dooars Movement : Radical Politics and Environment in Bengal

The book aims to delineate a forgotten eco-political history of a forest movement in the Dooars region of Bengal. The movement, started prior to "Chipko", and is continuing even today with episodic resistances in different form, leadership and momentum. Despite periodical differences in many aspects the movement is thoroughly consistent in its radical character and its focus against inclusive ecological exploitation of the forest people in Dooars. The movement does not merely contest the Chipko's position as the first recorded exposure of Indian environmentalism in the post-colonial era but it claims that understanding grassroots environmentalism through the prism of Chipko's paradigm i.e. "environmentalism of the poor" is not at all exhaustive in Indian context rather there exists different trends including environmentalism against exploitative ecological governance which needs to be paid attention. This paradigm talk less about "ecological distribution conflict" and focus much upon the political ecology of inclusive exploitation in the realm of natural resource governance as one of the major sources of grassroots environmentalism in India. Perhaps, the Dooars movement might contribute to a different understanding of Indian environmentalism as well as problematic of natural resource governance in the subcontinent by its own merit.