Sunderlal Bahuguna

Sunderlal Bahuguna was the Gandhian voice of the Himalaya. He walked the Chipko message from valley to valley, coined its ecology of 'soil, water and pure air', and spent his last decades fasting against the dam that drowned his hometown of Tehri.

Born in 1927 in Maroda village near Tehri, he entered public life as a teenager in the movement against the princely state and took up Gandhian constructive work with his wife Vimla at their Silyara ashram, campaigning against untouchability and liquor before the forests claimed him.

When Chipko rose in Chamoli in 1973-74, Bahuguna became its far-walker and its philosopher. His trans-Himalaya padyatra of the early 1980s, close to five thousand kilometres on foot, and his meeting with Indira Gandhi helped win the fifteen-year ban on green felling above a thousand metres. His slogan reframed the question: asked what the forests bear, his answer was soil, water and pure air, not resin and timber.

From the late 1980s he turned to the Tehri dam, arguing that a great dam in a seismic gorge was a wound to the Bhagirathi and its people. He fasted repeatedly, once for 74 days, lived by the river in protest, and lost: the reservoir finally rose over old Tehri. He accepted the Padma Vibhushan in 2009, having refused the Padma Shri in 1981 while the trees were still falling, and died in May 2021.