‘The real Chipko’: How Shekhar Pathak wrote the first exhaustive, people’s history of the movement
Pathak’s new book focuses on the ordinary, often unlettered, men, women and children who shaped the forest rights struggle. Dec 27, 2020 · 06:30 am
I first came across Shekhar Pathak’s name in the files of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow. The year was 1983, and I was working on a dissertation on the social history of forests in the Uttarakhand Himalaya. In those days the UP State Archives were well run; the files one ordered came to one’s desk fairly quickly, and with all their pages intact. On the inside back cover of each file was a list of all the scholars who had seen that particular document before. Studying the records of the Forest Department and the General Administration, I found that in some cases I was the first person to have ordered a particular file, but in most cases the second. The person who had got to these records before me was a cert