Abstract
In the course of her extensive expeditions in the Kumaon hills in the late 1920s, her sojourns at various places of the Himachal hills, and constructive work in Abbottabad of Hazara (present-day Pakistan) in the late 1930s, Mira Behn came into close contact with the people, language, and culture of the Himalayan region. Her experiences in working with the diverse countryfolk and studying their capacity for sustained constructive work convinced her that a way out of industrial capitalism, colonial, and neocolonial developmentalism leading to the exploitation of nature, economy, society, and human morals could be addressed through a practical demonstration of an alternative lifestyle. Accordingly, Mira Behn decided to settle in the hill region of northern India. In fact, since her Sevagram days, indoor occupations such as khadi cloth production were something that she felt “were not a natural outlet” for her and she longed for outdoor agricultural work in the countryside, amidst farm and animals (Mira Behn 1960, 209). It was a decision, which equally grew out of her natural disposition toward the beauty of the forests and mountains of the north and her desire to serve the poor peasants by leading the peasant’s life and being in direct contact with the countryside. Spiritually too, the Himalayas were edifying as they reminded her of Beethoven: lofty, powerful, and sublime. Thus, in the Himalayan country, she felt at home (Los Angeles Times 1945, 6; PHS 1969, 8). Responding to Singh’s complaint that she was averting city life to settle in the villages, Mira Behn explained that her choice for constructive work in the rural environment was not “to cut myself off from the world which is so full of trouble and suffering. I am striving to serve it in the best way I can according to my strength and nature….my apparent seclusion…enables me to come nearer to humanity than the rush and tumble, noise and clutter of ordinary political life” (Mira Behn, letter to Prithvi Singh, September 11, 1945).
Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
– Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village [from a dairy entry by Mira Behn]
We plough the field and scatter the good seed on the land.
But then the Accountant General comes down with heavy hand.
He says the thing’s improper as headings are not there
That there will be no harvest then, he simply does not care!
But we will follow God’s laws and not these man-made rules
Which take not heed of Nature’s ways and make us look like fools.
If when we reap our harvest, the Ministers decline
To “regularize” our honest work, we’ll peacefully resign.
– Composed by Mira Behn, n.d.
As I feel it, India is being taken down the common road along which all countries are rushing to perdition; big industries, huge armies, centralization, mechanization and the rest; and along with this the old Imperial Grandeur has never been thrown off. Every time I come to New Delhi it cuts me to the heart. What connection is there between New Delhi and the Mother – Rural India? None! We won our Freedom by means of Bapu’s weapons. Why then have we so solemnly cast away Bapu’s ideas in the consolidation of that Freedom? Perhaps the answer is that those who have capacity to rule have not that faith, and those who have that faith have not capacity to rule. What a strange thing it is! And for one like me, who came from the other end of the earth to serve Bapu’s cause, it is a heart-rending tragedy.
– Mira Behn to Nehru, August 30, 1949
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Notes
- 1.
Before coming to India, Mira Behn received a sum of £500 annually from her family (her father, Admiral Edmond Slade’s Trust fund) which was reduced successively to £250 on her coming to India and to meet her sister Rhona’s growing needs. After Rhona’s death (in 1938) it was reduced further to £140 a year due to her husband, Harold Vernon’s interference as well as government reduction of interest rates owing to the Second World War. This amount, however, did not go directly to Mira Behn at that time but went into the general fund at Gandhi’s ashram for constructive work. After some misunderstandings and conflict between Gandhi and Mira Behn following her request about making this money available to her, Gandhi arranged for the transfer of Rs. 25,000 from this trust fund for her project in North India. Later, Mira Behn wanted to transfer the entire capital from England to India to invest in her projects and had written to her uncle Alexander Carr-Saunders urging him to investigate about its status. As she told him, “It seems to me, if someone has the power to reduce the capital or at least the interest which means the capital, then that person can also hand over the capital.” While she received the annuity (less than 200 Rupees a month), for some unknown reason, the capital money could not be made available to her even when she needed it in the later more financially stressful years of her life in England and Austria (Mira Behn. Letter to Alexander Carr-Saunders, September 8, 1945, Farrer Matthew. Letter to Lea Calice. November 1, 1967; Interview with Edmund Carr-Saunders, September 15, 2016).
- 2.
Howard was the founder of modern organic farming movement. He worked for 25 years as an agricultural investigator in British India, as agricultural advisor to states in Central India, and as director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore. Mira Behn had also visited his experimental base in Indore.
- 3.
The term “organic” was first used by Lord Northbourne in his book, Look to the Land, published in 1940. Northbourne borrowed the idea from Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic view of “the farm as an organism” and adopted it as a secular theme for “organic” farming in his book (Paull 2011b). It is interesting that Mira Behn combined the philosophical and practical teachings of both ideas in her farming experiments.
- 4.
The Indore Process was first described in detail in The Waste Products of Agriculture published by Howard in 1931. Howard’s Indore composting process was, in fact, a refinement of traditional Indian composting. His later book, An Agricultural Testament, published in 1943, along with his composting experiments heralded the organic farming and gardening revolution. His methods were later popularized in England, Europe, and America.
- 5.
The Grow More Food Campaign was originally initiated by the Foodgrains Policy Committee under the British Government as a policy response to the tragic Bengal famine of 1942–1943, which wiped out the lives of four million people. As a wartime effort, the campaign was done in great haste and in an unplanned manner and was focused on expanding cultivated lands, emergency irrigation works, seed distribution, etc. The interim government in September 1946 extended the campaign for another 5 years and was continued after India’s independence to boost internal production of food grains by making some drastic changes in their former agricultural policies. This implied replacing cash crops (mainly cotton) with food crops, increasing use of fertilizers, expanding canal and tube well irrigation, and supplying improved seeds. The bulk of such expansion, especially that of irrigation, happened in the United Provinces in North India. Though the land under cash crops fell, it did not translate into an appreciable increase in the area under food grains, and the campaign thus failed to leave any significant impact on the overall food grain production in the country (Maheshwari and Tandon 1959; Sherman 2013).
- 6.
Zamindars were the feudal landlords of colonial India, who held large tracts of land and control over the peasantry by taxing them. The Zamindar did not cultivate the land himself but rented it out to cultivators/landless peasants. Between 1947 and 1954, a law for the abolition of the Zamindari system was passed. However, these agrarian reform acts did not completely abolish landownership especially in the ryotwari (the system of collecting land revenues directly from the cultivators of land, started by the British) areas where the system was still in existence. There was also a third system, called the Mahalwari system, which was a modified version of the Zamindari system. All these systems worked to undermine agriculture, incur heavy indebtedness by the peasants, and attenuate local community control.
- 7.
The Terai and Bhabar are local names for gently sloping alluvial belts of land fringing the borders of the Siwalik ranges. The Terai tract is comparatively swampy and humid and the soil is fertile. The northern tract, Bhabar, is gravelly with porous and shallow soil and is less fertile.
- 8.
Nearly two decades later, anthropologist Marvin Harris (1966) had persuasively argued Mira Behn’s point emphasizing the significance of cattle in India’s agricultural economy. Harris pointed out that the Indian use of cattle is rather a product of “Darwinian pressures” rather than a direct influence of religious indoctrination against beef eating. However, Harris does acknowledge the positive-functional contributions of traditional religious ideologies, which support cattle protection and in turn sustain the agricultural economy as well as prevent energy-expensive and ecologically harmful beef industry.
- 9.
In the Grow More Food Campaign, Nehru had imported large numbers of Ferguson tractors from England in spite of objections raised owing to their high fuel cost and practical difficulties for adoption under Indian farming conditions in 1948. Following the Director General of FAO’s, Lord Boyd Orr, report in 1949, Nehru further stressed large-scale and faster chase to increase agricultural productivity by importing nitrogenous fertilizers and other farm equipment from America and England, thus setting the stage for a centralized program for large-scale mechanized agriculture (Gopal 1989, 35; 1991a, 3, 10–12; 1991b, 43).
- 10.
Mira Behn here quotes from Louis E. M. Howard’s (wife of Albert Howard) book on the work of Albert Howard (Howard 1947, 144–46).
- 11.
Lakh is a unit of the Indian numbering system and is equal to 100,000.
- 12.
Mira Behn’s initiative on the issue of sadhu reform most likely led Sivananda to establish the All-World Sadhu’s Federation in February 1947 and to organize the heterogenous body of renunciates from various religious orders for education and social uplift work (The Divine Life Society 2015, 372–73).
- 13.
Smith’s idea in Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture (1929) was brought to global attention with the emergence of global environmental consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s.
- 14.
This is a specialized form of organic farming introduced by Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s and popularized by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer in 1938. Steiner’s approach to agriculture was holistic and posed an early response in the West against the onslaught of chemical farming (Paull 2011a).
- 15.
While Carson’s Silent Spring is hailed as a scientific work, not widely known is the fact that it was “fueled, shaped, and informed” by the work of biodynamic and organic farmers who were students of Rudolf Steiner and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (Paull 2013).
- 16.
Campaigns were led by Hindu religious groups and debates held in Constituent Assembly (1946–1949) to ban cow slaughter. In the later decades, Vinoba Bhave led a significant campaign (fast unto death) pressurizing the government to pass the anti-cow slaughter bill in 1976 and again in 1979. In all these instances, Mira Behn denounced religious leaders’ demand and government’s one-sided legislation as impractical, shortsighted, and smacking too much of Hindu orthodoxy, an idea not widely shared by minorities, secularists, economists, and even all Hindus. She pointed out that coercive measures of this sort do not reflect a democratic spirit, nor the economic realities of the Indian cattle and concern for their real suffering, and/or awareness of the grim political implications of fanning communal tensions. (Mira Behn 1949e, 423; Mira Behn 1977, 154–155; Nandanath Kakkadan Raj 1979; Nair 1979; Shridharani 1952; Interview with Gertrud Anna Wirgler, May 10, 2013).
- 17.
Currently there are about 5.2 million stray cattle blocking traffic in Indian cities and herds that destroy crops in the Indian villages (Gowen 2018).
- 18.
Mira Behn (1955a, 9; 1977) argued that if the Indian cow was to be saved, she should also do some farm work. The singular identification of cows with milk and oxen/bullocks with farm work leads to the neglect of the cow when she can no longer give milk. But when the cow is treated as a serviceable work animal, she would be given equal billing with the bull and the question of her neglect or slaughter would not arise. This, as she stressed, was a practical concept brought to bear in the West with much success but singularly “shocking” for Indian farmers as most farm work on non-mechanized farms was (and still) done by bullocks.
- 19.
The Sahiwal is an indigenous breed of Zebu cattle, which originated in the dry northwestern regions of Punjab. The Sahiwals are primarily for dairy production.
- 20.
- 21.
Under the GMF Campaign, land under food crops like wheat were converted to profit-making cash crops like sugarcane. In U.P., for instance, the total area under sugarcane cultivation galloped to 1.02 million acres in 1947–1948 (Gopal 1990, 68, 71).
- 22.
The failure of the government’s GMF Campaign generated a lot of criticism all over the country and especially in the Constituent Assembly debates during this time (February 3–4, 1949). Nehru realized that the campaign had done little other than importing food grains from abroad in a vain attempt to bridge the food deficit and in promoting non-food crops like sugar (Gopal 1990, 71–72).
- 23.
Jain (2002) states that in 1953 under Nehru-Bhatnagar initiative, some 11 national laboratories were established addressing physical, chemical, biological, and engineering sciences.
- 24.
- 25.
Virbhadra is a small town in Dehradun district of present-day Uttarakhand.
- 26.
For information on Bhoodan, see Sect. 5.2.4.
- 27.
Indian measuring unit: 1 maund = 82.27 lbs.
- 28.
Yogesh Bahuguna (interview with Yogesh Bahuguna, Dehradun, March 25, 2011) informed me that giving the land to the government did not help matters either, because the latter was not interested in local cattle development for the poor peasants. Thus, soon after Mira Behn left Pashulok, the Animal Husbandry Department launched a commercialized sheep and horse breeding program on Pashulok land, following Western methods.
- 29.
Mira Behn’s article “Himalayan Lessons” (1992h) was first published in Hindustan Times, May 1951 (n.d.), and reproduced in Mira Behn: Gandhiji’s Daughter Disciple birth centenary volume in 1992.
- 30.
Guha raises this point. He credits Mira Behn (along with other Europeans, namely, Dietrich Brandis and Verrier Elwin) as one of the early crusaders of the cause of community forestry in India (see Guha 2006, 123).
- 31.
Please see the correspondence between Kumarappa and Mira Behn in J.C. Kumarappa Papers dated January 15 and 26, 1951; February 1 and August 1, 1951, and in Mira Behn Papers dated January 28, February 1, and April 12, 1951, located at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
- 32.
Gopal literally means cowherd, but it is also one of the names of the Hindu god, Lord Krishna, in his role as a cowherd.
- 33.
Nehru , though appreciative of Mira Behn’s concern, was a firm believer of “central control of forest education” and a commercial basis of forestry and could not have promoted the decentralized and democratic social forestry scheme that Mira Behn then had in mind (Nehru 1990, 80).
- 34.
Panchayat literally means assembly of five people and refers to the village self-governing body.
- 35.
Corruption charges against the bureaucratic nation state became endemic in India over the years. Parekh (1995, 45) points out that between 1956 and 1964, over 80,000 complaints were registered with the Administrative Vigilance Division in the Home Ministry. However, Nehru, though aware of the imperative for a reform of the bureaucracy, did not pay timely and adequate attention to the problem.
- 36.
- 37.
Acharya is a Sanskrit word meaning teacher or preceptor. In formal Hindi, the meaning remains the same.
- 38.
Many Gandhians like Mira Behn denied Bhave as a true successor or Gandhi on grounds that Bhave lacked the practicality and the revolutionary vision of Gandhi with regard to village economic development and social transformation (interview with Jagadish Prasad Unniyal, May 26–27, 2011; interview with Rameshwar Datt, March 28 to April 1, 2011).
- 39.
Rameshwar Datt (whom Mira Behn fondly called Brahmachari) addressed Mira Behn as “Mataji” meaning respected Mother.
- 40.
Mira Behn here addressed the crucial point that Bhave’s Bhoodan did not endorse the principles of Sarvodaya or even the language and ideals of Gandhian trusteeship in its spirit and practice. In trusteeship, the principle emphasis is on selfless service or seva rather than on dana or charity/gifts. Interestingly, in his deliberate use of words like dana or gift, Bhave failed to see the philosophical and practical value in the semantics of the Sarvodaya principle of seva or selfless service immanent in the Gandhian ideas of trusteeship. According to the latter, it is the rich landlord who should serve the society by parting with his surplus land as a moral duty rather than making charities or gifts (dana). However, propelled by lofty ideals of charities or donations, the movement could not successfully challenge ownership rights of land in favor for an egalitarian society because the rich Zamindar could now merely donate a part of his wealth and still retain his property, thus absolving himself of any moral obligation toward equitable distribution of land and its produce.
- 41.
This showcases the primary difference of views between Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan. Narayan, who also advocated Bhoodan-Gramdan, reckoned years later in his in-depth study of Gramdan in Bihar that Sulabh Gramdan “was a mistake” and which awakened him to the “need for a program of Satyagraha on a large scale” for “peaceful and constructive social revolution” which he called Sampoorna Kranti or total revolution (Narayan, 1986).
- 42.
It is worth comparing Mira Behn’s efforts to organize village society for village democracy with JP’s vision. JP had argued that redistribution of land in Bhoodan is only a step toward resolving the problem of the land in India. The real issue was to educate and organize people for the establishment of a participatory village democracy attained by the labor and cooperation of the people themselves, as Mira Behn had conceived in both Bapugram and Bapu Raj. Thus Gramdan, according to him, was only a preparation for the “necessary socio-psychological conditions for direct democracy in the village to function properly” (Prasad 2008, 10).
- 43.
By May 1952, Mira Behn had shifted her base from Pashulok to the mountains of the Garhwal hills.
- 44.
Some 55 projects were inaugurated in 27,388 villages across India marking the birthday of Gandhi, October 2, 1952 (Jain 1992, 74).
- 45.
The original idea of Mayer was to plan and develop village and urban townships on behalf of the U.P. government, and he even expressed his desire to work for large river valley projects. Following independence, the breakup of the nation into two, and the mass migration that resulted, India was faced with millions of uprooted and displaced people in desperate need of land. Nehru was keen to settle the displaced and Mayer’s offer seemed in sync with his plan to build townships in developing industrial areas, etc. (Nehru 1987, 160, 402–403; Thorner 1981, 117).
- 46.
Dey was also later appointed as the Minister of Community Development in the Union Cabinet.
- 47.
Some 55 projects were inaugurated in 27,388 villages across India marking the birthday of Gandhi, October 2, 1952 (Jain 1992, 74).
- 48.
Under the CDP, each project covered about 300 villages ranging over 400–500 square miles with a population of 30,000.
- 49.
Elsewhere (1992i, j) Mira Behn broached the topic of government officials’ dress, a question that had weighed on her mind for several years and had struggled to keep “‘coat-collar-necktie’ business” out of the Bhilangana Project, the vain prestige associated with European forms of clothing and manners. She objected to the racial prejudice of the “old slave mentality” (1992i), arguing how the lack of indigenous forms of dress, attire, and modes of living become a “fatal obstacle to natural and gracious equality” of the officials who because of this failed to mix freely and on equal terms with the people of the villages (1993).
- 50.
As recounted by Haridev, member of Kisan Ashram, who accompanied Mira Behn to the Himalayas
- 51.
In the First Five Year Plan, the agricultural extension service of the CDP had already begun establishing several artificial insemination centers. There were some 150 artificial insemination centers established under the CDP (Ramachandran 1958, 155).
- 52.
The Colombo Plan of the UN was a regional intergovernmental organization established in 1951 and was conceived at the Commonwealth Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Colombo, January 1950. The organization emerged as a cooperative venture for the economic and social development of South and Southeast Asia, which today has expanded to cover all of Asia and the Pacific. Under the Plan, experts from all over the world were invited to render service to underdeveloped nations for a period of 5 years (see The Colombo Plan. http://www.colombo-plan.org/).
- 53.
CDC was first launched in 1948 as Colonial Development Corporation by the British government to assist in agricultural development in the colonies. It was renamed the Commonwealth Development Corporation in the mid-1960s, when John Leech became its director.
- 54.
Red Sindhi is a widely popular local Zebu dairy breed that originated in the Sindh province of Pakistan.
- 55.
The Hariana cattle (a Bos indicus) breed originated in the foothill plains of Northern India
- 56.
A local breed of cattle developed at Sevagram under Gandhi’s instructions. Golovs were dual purpose, good for both milk yields and farm work (Mira Behn 1952i, 4).
- 57.
On September 27, 1949, Reginald Reynolds, another of Gandhi’s British associates and a friend of Mira Behn, visited Turner’s farm, and I speculate that Reynolds brought to Mira Behn further and firsthand information about Turner’s farm and cattle (Interview with Roger Newman Turner, September 28, 2016).
- 58.
The response of the ministry was lukewarm at best. Unconvinced by the organic approach to husbandry, Nehru opposed Mira Behn’s take on the same, “There is no harm in some fertiliser being used in addition to organic materials. There is no doubt that they [chemical fertilizers] have produced good results in various parts of the country. What the long term result is likely to be on the soil remains to seen.” He further excused himself from the trouble of having to read either Howard’s book on Farming and Gardening or respond to Turner’s journal that Mira Behn forwarded to him, because he was “terribly busy” and knew “very little about farming” (Nehru Jawaharlal. Letter to Mira Behn, March 31,1956 and February 28, 1957).
- 59.
Originally, six in-calf heifers were shipped from London, but one died on the way (Mira Behn d).
- 60.
Tharparkar (Bos indicus) is a medium-sized, indigenous dual-purpose cattle breed (milk and draft purposes), originating in the arid plains of the north-west.
- 61.
Cow vigilantes consist of group of Hindu radicals who believe that India’s laws regarding cow slaughter are inadequate and therefore take the law in their own hands by attacking people (mostly Muslims) physically or lynching them.
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Mallik, B. (2022). Off the Beaten Path: Mira Behn and Himalayan Environment and Development. In: Legends in Gandhian Social Activism: Mira Behn and Sarala Behn. Ecology and Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95431-4_5
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