Amita Baviskar is among the most influential Indian sociologists working on the environment, and her contribution has been to insist that ecological conflict is always a conflict about culture, livelihood and power rather than about nature in the abstract. Her research runs from the adivasi villages of the Narmada valley to the streets and parks of Delhi, and in both settings she asks the same question: whose vision of the environment gets to count as legitimate, and who pays for it.
Two contributions are examinable in their own right. Her first book demonstrated that tribal resistance to a large dam grew out of the defence of land, forest and identity rather than out of the ecological philosophy attributed to it by urban supporters. Her later work on cities produced the concept of bourgeois environmentalism, which names the process by which middle-class concerns with greenery, cleanliness and order become the justification for evicting the poor.
Life and intellectual formation
Baviskar took her doctorate at Cornell University and spent much of her career at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi before moving to Ashoka University, where she teaches sociology and environmental studies. Her formation sits at the meeting point of three literatures: political ecology, which reads environmental change as the outcome of unequal power over resources; social anthropology, with its demand for sustained fieldwork in a single place; and the Indian debate on development, displacement and social movements that took shape in the 1980s around the Narmada projects.
Her method is ethnographic in a particular way: she works in the field long enough to learn how people describe their own situation, then sets those accounts against the categories used by activists, planners, judges and journalists. The gap between the two is where her analysis operates.
In the Belly of the River
In the Belly of the River (1995) is based on extended fieldwork among the Bhilala adivasis of the Narmada valley in what is now Madhya Pradesh, in villages faced with submergence by the Sardar Sarovar and related projects. The book reconstructs a history in which the Bhilalas were already the losers of an earlier round of state expansion: colonial and post-colonial forest law had criminalised their cultivation on hill slopes, converted customary rights into encroachment, and made them dependent on forest officials and moneylenders. The dam was thus not the first assault but the culminating one.
Her central argument concerns the grounds of resistance. The Narmada Bachao Andolan was represented to the wider world as an ecological movement speaking for sustainability and against the destruction of a river, and this framing gave it national and international standing. But the Bhilalas she lived with opposed submergence because it would take their fields, their forest access and the territory in which their gods, ancestors and kinship were located. Their idiom was one of livelihood, dignity and place, not of environmentalism as urban activists understood it; nor were they, she insists, ecological innocents living in harmony with nature — they cleared forest, ploughed slopes and pursued their advantage as cultivators do.
Two implications follow. First, the environmentalism of the poor rests on material dependence on a resource base, not on a philosophy of nature, which makes it both sharper and less negotiable than the environmentalism of the middle class. Second, alliances between adivasi communities and urban activists involve translation, and translation involves loss: the demand that is legible in Delhi or Washington is not always the demand that was made in the valley. Baviskar also attends unflinchingly to internal differentiation — between adivasi and caste-Hindu villagers, between the better-off and the poor within villages, and between men and women, whose interests the movement did not automatically represent.
The cultural politics of nature
Across her essays and the volume Waterscapes (2007), Baviskar develops the theme that natural resources are simultaneously material things and cultural objects. Water is drinking water, irrigation, a sacred river, a sanitation problem and an investment opportunity, and each of these definitions carries a different distribution of entitlement. Conflicts over rivers, forests and land are therefore struggles over classification: whether a stretch of forest is a watershed, a revenue wasteland, a wildlife sanctuary or a homeland determines who may use it and who becomes a trespasser.
This position separates her from two neighbouring approaches. It is more sceptical than the ecofeminist argument that subsistence communities and women possess an inherently conservationist relation to nature, and it is less structural than accounts that reduce environmental conflict to the logic of capital. Her emphasis falls on the contested meanings through which state power and popular claims are actually exercised.
Bourgeois environmentalism
The concept for which she is best known emerged from research on Delhi and is set out in her 2003 essay on space, power and identity and in the essay on cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws in Elite and Everyman (2011). Bourgeois environmentalism describes a form of urban environmental politics driven by the middle class in which aesthetic and health concerns — clean air, green parks, uncongested roads, scenic riverfronts, an orderly and beautiful city — are pursued through the removal of the poor whose homes and work are recoded as pollution, encroachment and nuisance.
Its mechanisms are institutional rather than merely attitudinal. Residents' welfare associations, professional associations and citizens' groups petition courts; public interest litigation, originally devised as an instrument for the disadvantaged, becomes the means by which slums are demolished and small polluting industries closed; environmental regulation and city beautification projects, especially those tied to global events and world-class-city ambitions, supply the legal language. The consequences are asymmetrical: the closure of industry destroys workers' livelihoods while leaving middle-class consumption untouched; the cycle-rickshaw, a non-polluting vehicle, is restricted as an obstruction to cars; slum settlements are cleared for parks while unauthorised middle-class construction is regularised. Baviskar's point is not that pollution is imaginary but that the costs of remedying it are loaded onto those least responsible for it, and that the vocabulary of environmentalism confers moral authority on what is in substance a claim to space.
Uncivil City
Uncivil City (2020) gathers this Delhi research into a sustained argument about ecology, equity and the urban commons. The city is read through its resources and their contested uses — water, air, land, waste, the Yamuna floodplain, parks and streets — and through the encounters between those who claim the city as citizens entitled to a certain quality of life and those whose labour makes that quality of life possible while their own claims are treated as illegitimate. The book extends the analysis to the everyday work of sanitation and waste, where caste and class overlap directly. Its title carries the thesis: the discourse of civility and order is itself a mechanism of exclusion.
Criticisms
Baviskar's work has attracted serious engagement rather than dismissal, but several criticisms recur. Activist readers of In the Belly of the River, sympathetic to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, felt that separating adivasi livelihood claims from the movement's ecological framing risked weakening a struggle that needed national allies, and that a scholar's insistence on complexity can be politically costly. Others have argued that the emphasis on cultural meaning and local specificity leaves the political economy of capital accumulation, land markets and state finance underdeveloped, and that displacement requires the kind of aggregate analysis found in Walter Fernandes rather than ethnography alone.
The concept of bourgeois environmentalism has been questioned on two grounds: that middle class covers a heterogeneous set of groups with divergent interests, so a single class logic may be too neat; and that treating middle-class environmental activism principally as exclusion can understate the genuine public-health gains, such as improvements in Delhi's air from vehicle regulation, that also benefited the poor. Ethnographers have raised the familiar question of generalisation — how far findings from the Bhilala villages or from Delhi travel to other regions and smaller cities.
Legacy
Her influence is visible in three bodies of work. In the sociology of environmental movements she has helped establish that Indian environmentalism is plural, with the environmentalism of the poor, the conservation lobby and the middle-class urban lobby pursuing incompatible ends — a position that complements Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil's account of ecosystem people and omnivores. In urban sociology, bourgeois environmentalism has become standard vocabulary for analysing evictions, beautification drives and judicial activism. And in the study of the Indian middle class, Elite and Everyman, edited with Raka Ray, placed cultural practice and everyday claims-making at the centre of the analysis. Her wider methodological legacy is a caution against reading movements through the categories their most articulate supporters supply.
For the UPSC answer
Baviskar is the sharpest authority to cite when a question on displacement or environmental movements needs precision rather than sentiment. On the Narmada, state her finding that Bhilala opposition rested on land, forest and identity rather than on the ecological philosophy of urban activists, and use it to complicate the claim that adivasi communities are natural conservationists. On cities, define bourgeois environmentalism in one sentence and then name its mechanisms — residents' associations, public interest litigation, beautification and world-class-city projects — with the cycle-rickshaw and slum demolition as illustrations. She pairs efficiently with Guha and Gadgil on varieties of Indian environmentalism, with Walter Fernandes on the scale of displacement, and against Vandana Shiva's ecofeminism, whose assumptions she implicitly questions. Add the criticism that her cultural emphasis underplays political economy, and the answer becomes an evaluation.
References & further reading
- Baviskar, Amita (1995). In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Baviskar, Amita (2003). Between violence and desire: space, power and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal, 55(1), 89–98.
- Baviskar, Amita (ed.) (2007). Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
- Baviskar, Amita and Ray, Raka (eds) (2011). Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. New Delhi: Routledge.
- Baviskar, Amita (2011). Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws: bourgeois environmentalists and the battle for Delhi's streets. In A. Baviskar and R. Ray (eds), Elite and Everyman. New Delhi: Routledge.
- Baviskar, Amita (2020). Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi. New Delhi: Sage.