Thursday, January 30, 2020

Tribal Women in Chipko Movement Essay Example for Free

Tribal Women in Chipko Movement Essay The women who participated in the Chipko meetings, processions and other programmes have become aware of their potentialities and are now demanding a share in the decision-making process at the community level. Apart from Reni, the events at Dongri Paintoli village indicated a new development in the movement. On 9th February, 1980 the women of Dongri Paintoli turned out in large numbers, held a Chipko demonstration and prevented any tree-felling. Nine days later, the Government ordered the forest-felling in that area stopped, and within a month a ban on any further cutting was effected. Subsequently, women leaders in the village were defamed and asked not to attend further meetings. The women in Reni took action only because there were no men in the village around to do so. Their â€Å"action† was to ask the tree-fellers to wait until their men returned so that some discussions could take place between the two sides (of men) as equals. Women took charge of the scene only in the absence of men, but once they did take charge, they succeeded. In Dongri Paintoli, by contrast, rather than merely taking a decision in the absence of men, the women stood up against decisions made by their own men. Although they faced opposition from men, they held to their conviction. This certainly marked a major step forward in terms of women’s role in the Chipko movement. In Gopeshwar, women have now formed a cooperative of their own, the Mahila Mangal, to ensure protection of the forest around the town. Its work is carried out regularly by watchwomen, who receive regular wages. Under this supervision, the extraction of forest produce for daily necessities is accomplished in a regular manner, so as not to harm the trees. Women or men violating these rules are fined, and these fines are deposited in a common fund. Those who do not obey the rules face the punishment of having their tools confiscated. It can only be said that the cases of Reni and Dongri Paintoli and the organization of women into the Mahila Mangal at Gopeshwar are indicative of the latent potentialities in the organization and mobilization of resources by women whose consciousness has been raised. Women’s participation in Chipko movement, however limited in numbers or in its impact on the general way of life, has implications for possible changes in gender relationships in the Garhwali tribal society. Since tribal women are the gatherers of fuel, fodder and water, it is they who feel the first impact of soil erosion. Women had repeatedly challenged administrators and politicians with their slogans: â€Å"Planning without fodder, fuel and water is one-eyed planning. † Their struggle against injustice brought them into direct confrontation with the men. Gaura Devi, the famous leader, had to tolerate continuous harassment. First the contractor tried to bribe her into letting his men enter the forest. When she refused this offer, the forest department personnel threatened to call the police and arrest her. The contractor in league with some villagers composed folk songs describing the arrest of Gaura Devi and her torture in jail. Chipko women activists are being accused of getting the villagers blacklisted. The men said that since the villages were blacklisted due to the behavior of women, the young men, most of whom were in the army, would not be given employment anywhere, and the villages would not be supplied with essential commodities like salt and kerosene. Also the villages would be deprived of a motor road, electricity, hospital. The women activists are being made the villains of the piece and rumor is being used as a weapon to isolate them. Everyday the men returned home and flinged accusations at the women. This constant harassment within the family caused the women immense mental agony. According to Gayatri Devi, the success of the Chipko movement demonstrates the intellectual superiority of the women over the men in the village. In 1980s, the Chipko movement subsided, with only a small section associated with Bahuguna continuing to protest against the construction of the Tehri dam. However, part of Chipko critique thinks that government policy in the Uttar Pradesh hills was insensitive to the region’s ecological and social specificity and was driven by the concern to maximize revenues which were appropriated by a bureaucracy based in the plains, formed the core of a movement for regional autonomy. 4 This movement for a separate state raged throughout the 1980s and 1990s and was marked by a series of public protest rallies and demonstrations, some of which were violently suppressed by the state (most notably the brutal assault on women protestors at Muzaffarnagar in 1994). The state of Uttaranchal was finally carved out of the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh in 2000. The Chipko movement inspired Vandana Shiva for the development of a new theory called as ‘Ecofeminism’ which specifically explains the link between the ‘women and ecology’ which were in great demand in the market. To be clearer, Vandana Shiva’s Ecofeminist Movement brought imperialism inscribed in the colonial practices, into the centre of the Environmentalist debate. Vandana Shiva’s narratives of Chipko centre on women. She draws the village women of Garhwal into her narratives by binding them to Himalayan forests and nature, not because they are their birthright but through the ‘feminine principle’ which exists in both Women and Nature. She has presented the village women of Garhwal as exploited by colonialism and threatened by modernization and economic development. Chipko is, for Shiva, a women’s ecology movement, a resurgence of women’s power. Chipko women were in against of exploiting forest for timber because they valued forests for providing their simple subsistence; they did not care for economic gain. Forests, for them, provide soil, water and pure air. In 1977, she states, the two paradigms of forestry, one life-destroying (commerce-oriented and masculine) and the other life-enhancing (subsistence-oriented and embodying the feminine principle), clashed, following which Chipko became â€Å"explicitly an ecological and feminist movement†. Shiva asserts that Chipko women are against development, modernization, and economic rationality. According to her, they expect nothing from so called ‘development’ or from the money economy. They only wanted to preserve their autonomous control over their subsistence base, their common property resources: the land, water, forests, and hills. Chipko movement is thus very much a feminist movement. It not only has brought forth in a dramatic manner greatly increased understanding of the divergent interests of local communities and state bureaucracies in the management of local resources; it is now finding that the interests of men and women within the same community can differ greatly. As long as the Chipko movement remains sensitive to this learning process, it is bound to grow in strength. Ramchandra Guha is widely regarded as one of India’s leading environmental historians. In his well known book5 he argues that while Chipko may have involved women, adopted Gandhian non-violent strategies, and raised popular awareness towards environmental problems in the Himalayas, it is neither an environmental, nor Gandhian, nor feminist movement. He holds that, in Uttarakhand the participation of women in popular movements dates from the anti alcohol agitations led by Sarvodaya workers in the 1960s. However, despite the important role played by women, it would be simplistic to characterize Chipko as a feminist movement. In several instances, especially the early mobilizations at Mandal and at Phata, it was men who took the initiative in protecting forests. Women came to the fore in Reni, when in the contrived absence of men folk they unexpectedly came forward to thwart forest felling. In other agitations, such as Badyargarh men, women, children have all participated equally. Dongri-Paintoli is the only instance of an overt conflict between men and women over the management and control of forest resources. As such, even at level of participation Chipko can hardly be said to constitute a women’s movement. Undoubtedly, the hill women have traditionally borne an extraordinarily high share of family labour –and their participation in Chipko may be read as an outcome of the increasing difficulty with which these tasks have been accomplished in the deteriorating environment. Interestingly, Chandi Prasad Bhatt does believe that women are capable of playing a more dynamic role than the men who, in the face of growing commercialization, are apt to lose sight of the long-term interests of the village economy. On the other hand, it has been suggested that which they are the beasts of burden as viewed through the prism of an outside observer, hill women are in fact aware that they are the repository of local tradition. In the orbit of the household women often take decisions which are rarely challenged by the men. In the act of embracing the trees, therefore, they are acting not merely as women but as bearers of continuity with the past in a community threatened with fragmentation. Chipko movement as a constructive resistance to ecological struggle is played out in Nina Sibal’s Yatra: The Journey. The protagonist, Krishna Kaur, embarks on a pilgrimage for environmental justice that takes her through the area where the Chipko movement is active; there she received the secret of angwaltha from the Chipko women, their spirit of love reaching her as she walked through the Deva Bhumi of Uttarakhand and her padyatra. The novel begins with Krishna’s return to India from an activist-business trip to London: her short visit had been useful in terms of the contact she had made in the Forestry Commission and an international environmental foundation has committed funds for an important river project in the Garhwal hills. But environmental concerns are rarely mentioned by the author. The novel foregrounds gender issues in the Chipko movement. It says –â€Å"After all, at its heart, the Chipko Movement is very feminist. It consists essentially of a string of spontaneous confrontations triggered and managed by women of the region, in which none of the so-called leaders were present. In some cases they were struggling against their own men who saw their immediate economic interests tied up with the decisions of the district administration†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦..

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

John Keats techniques to evoke the readers senses Essay -- essays pape

John Keats techniques to evoke the readers senses Question: Examine various techniques a poet can use to evoke reader response to a subject in reference to two or more poems Answer: John Keats uses various techniques in his compositions to evoke a reader’s response to his theme. In Keats’s poem, â€Å"On first looking into Chapman’s Homer† depicts Keats’s emotions and feelings after being read Chapman’s Elizabethan translation of the Odyssey. To show the magnitude of his delight, Keats compares his feelings to those of many explorers, who discover the wonders of the world and universe. On first looking into Chapman’s Homer is an Italian sonnet, with 14 lines, in the classic rhyme pattern of abbaabbacdcdcd, and is written in an iambic pentametre which gives the poem a lyrical flow. The poem begins with a calm beginning, in the voice of ripe experience. â€Å"Much have I traveled in the realms of gold. And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;† The calm beginning then mounts to the excitement of the climax towards the end. â€Å"Wild surmise† which is then confirmed by the ne...

Monday, January 13, 2020

Mother’s love Essay

No language can express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother’s love. Who we are today. and who we’ll be tomorrow will be formed not by ourselves, as we would like to think, but by the people around us, namely our friends and family. Possibly the biggest influence is our mother. As a child, she taught us everything from feeding and clothing our self; Judging situations and reacting; tying our shoes; being polite and being respectful to adults. Without my mother, I know I would be lost. To me, my mother is my security blanket. No matter how bad of a day she had, he will always be there with a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear for me. Even If she’s been screamed at all day by my siblings, she will still be eager to hear me squeal over my drama-filled teenage gossip. My mother could probably run a gossip column in the weekly paper on all the gossip and trivial news she hears from me and my friends, whether it be about me, my friends, or that cute boy in my fourth-period class who smiled at me. My mom is my personal miracle. Whenever something becomes too much for me, she Is there calming me down with Just a hug, or revenung me from hyperventilating by flndlng my snowboard in the open†¦ ln the first place I checked†¦ twice. She puts up with my mood swings, my constant chatter, and my continuous requests, and still manages to run a household beautifully. And she does this all with a smile†even when no one says thank you. Mother’s Day Is not a day where every woman who has given birth should be treated special. It Is a day where every mother figure†nanny, caretaker, nurturer, grandmother, aunt, or even older cousin are recognized for the wonderful job they do in influencing us to ecome who we are today. Mothers teach us how to love, cherish, and respect who we are, and what It takes for us to become the adults we will one day be. My mother is a wonderful influence, and I can truly think of only one fault that she, and every other mother out there has: She loves me too much. She loves me so much that I sometimes resent her for not letting me make my own stupid decisions. I’m afraid that one day I will end up screaming at her to leave me alone. I know almost every teenage boy does. And I know almost every teenage boy will feel guilty afterwards, ut not know how to apologize. Well, take this chance to let your mom know that you truly are grateful for her wanting to be in your life, even if you don’t always show it. This Mother’s Day, do something special for your mom, even If it’s as small as making her breakfast in bed or cleaning your room without being asked. The gesture will be appreciated, and it will show your mom that no matter how obnoxious you can be, you will always love your Mommy and all she does for you. When you knew how to speak, what was your first word? It Is Mom. We have grown up in the arms of our mothers. e have grown up In the great love of our mothers. No one loves us Ilke our mothers; no one is willing to sacrifice everything for us like our mothers. If someone asks you â€Å"Who is the best woman in your life? † I bet you will say it is your mother. And If someone asks me Ilke that, my answer also Is my mother. With me, my mother Is the best woman in the world. No one can replace her In my heart. I admire my mother, I don’t know why she is always busy with daily chores, taking care of my family but she never say she is tired. Every day, she is the first person in my family, I OF3 oes to work, I and my siblings go to school, my mother stays home and does all the daily chores after that she does take care of home business. When my father, I and my siblings come home, there is always a delicious dinner, which is waiting for us. After the dinner, my mom washes the dishes. Sometimes, I ask her to help, but she says: â€Å"It is fine; you should go upstairs and do your homework†. Mom always wake up very early, and Mom is the last person can take a break after a busy day. I realize that without my Mom, my father, I and my siblings cannot have the clean house, the elicious meal and the clothes which always iron straight. Mom gives me and my father all her love. She loves us more than herself. Her love for us is great like the ocean, the universe and nothing can replace it. She is not only my mom; she is also my friends, my big sister, who I can share all my problems and stories in life with. When I am sad, happy or stressful, Mom is always by my side and comforts me. Sometimes, I get angry with my mom because she reminds me too much things, especially they are all things I know. Then, I realize that she Just wants me- her son to e good. Making my mother cry is the worst thing, but I did. I’m a boy, and playing games is the most favorite things to do of boys. I played games every day. Anytime, when I had free time, I played games, when I came home from school, I played games. I played until midnight; I played until I was tired and slept on my desk. My mother knew it and she always told me to stop playing and focus on studying. I said â€Å"yes† to make her feel please and then I continued to play. When you play games, you just focus on that, you forget to study, that were what happened to me. My mother idn’t know anything until my school had a parent’s conference. She was shocked when she saw my report. My grade was going down. She asked me why my grade went down, I was quiet and looked at her. It seemed like my mother knew the reason why. She was quiet, stared at me and sigh. Suddenly, I saw tears from her eyes, she cried. She told me many times that I should not play games too much, I needed to focus on studying, but I ignore her advice. When she cried, I felt so sorry and guilty. I wasnt brave enough to look at her. Then I came to her slowly, hugged her and said: â€Å"l was sorry, mom. I knew that I had made a big mistake. I felt so sorry. Mom, please forgive me. I promised that I wouldn’t do this again. I was so sorry. I made you cry. † And she hugged me tight, she whispered: â€Å"How couldn’t I forgive you? I was Just a little disappointed, but I knew, you would know how to fix your mistake, I love you. † I cried after she said that, Just a bit, but I did cry. Mom, you gave me everything but you never ask me to pay back. You are the best, the greatest woman in this world and in my heart. I love you forever. I am happy when I have you by my side to take care of e, to protect me and to give me your love. I am happy when I am your son. I told my mom that In the future. I would be a successful man in life and I can take care of myself and unlucky people. But in my mother’s eyes, I know that I am always her little son as I was. But God took her away from me; I don’t know why did God do that way? Perhaps there’s someone who will do my mom’s things for me! , I can’t stop my tears rolling down on my face when I am thinking about my mom, where are you now mom? , I know that there’s nowhere else except Heaven where my mom will be and be aiting for me coming over!. My promises to my mom are to take care myself, do care and always love my wife to-be (Ms. Hoang Anh) and live with full of responsibilities for my children, taking care of my future children is my mom’s wish and always live with meaningful life to them . 1 won’t be away because I’m a son of the greatest mom in the world so I want everybody to know that my mom’s son will be perfect reflection of my mom. Before you were conceived I wanted you, Before you were born I loved you, Before you were here an hour I would die for you, This is the miracle of Mother’s Love.