Philosophy
The Koli fisherman, the farmer, the Chipko women and the Bishnoi community understood nature as kin, not inventory.
The Forests Know Their Dharma
Not far from where this newsletter is written, a few minutes along the coast, in the Worli Koliwada that sits between the sea and the city’s indifference. The Koli fisherfolk perform a ritual before the boats go out. There are offerings made to the sea. Some prayers are not petitions but acknowledgements – not give us, but we recognise what you give. There is a quality of address in the relationship between a Koli fisherman and the ocean that resists every category the modern economy offers: it is not ownership, not resource management, not sustainable extraction. It is something closer to what the philosophical tradition struggles to name, and the Koli tradition enacts without needing to name it: kinship.
The children of this community grow up knowing the tides in their bodies. They know which fish run in which season, which currents signal weather, and which silences in the water are warnings. This knowledge is not superstition and not merely practical; it is the accumulated residue of centuries of genuine relationship. And a genuine relationship, as we have been arguing, requires genuine gratitude: not the performed acknowledgement of debt, but the attentive receiving of what is actually given.
You cannot know the sea this way if you are extracting from it. Extraction does not require attention to what the sea is. It requires only knowledge of what the sea contains. Relationship requires something different: the capacity to receive the sea as something that gives, which means receiving it as something that can also withhold, that has its own rhythms and limits and claims on your behaviour. This is rta; not as an abstract cosmic principle but as a daily practice, written into the body through generations.
Now consider what is happening along Mumbai’s coastline. The coastal road projects. The luxury developments are pressing toward the waterfront. The slow, incremental, entirely legal process by which these communities are being pushed back from the shore they have inhabited for centuries. Fishing grounds narrowed. Access points blocked. The community told, in the language of development and progress, that their relationship with the sea is centuries old, ecologically sophisticated, philosophically rich and is worth less than a road that will reduce the commute of residents in glass apartments they will never enter.
This is the same structure we have been tracing, now applied not just to human communities but to the living world itself.
The Derridean aporia here takes an ecological form. The state and the market arrive with the language of giving: we are bringing development, infrastructure, opportunity, progress. The community is invited to receive these gifts. And having received them, having been incorporated into the economy of the gift, they owe gratitude, compliance, and the foreclosure of objection. Their own relationship with the sea, which was not a gift but a centuries-long practice of mutual sustaining, is reclassified as sentiment. Sentiment yields to concrete.
Go further north, into the forest. The farmer who performs a puja before the first seed goes into the ground is enacting something philosophically precise. He is not being superstitious. He is acknowledging that he is entering into a relationship where the ground is not his property but something he borrows, season by season, from a web of interdependence that includes the soil, the water, the weather, and the worms he cannot see. The harvest, if it comes, is received, not merely produced. This is Rita in practice: the recognition that you are a participant in a giving that precedes you. Then watch the river upstream get dammed. Watch the irrigation patterns that the farmer’s grandfather learned collapse. Watch the harvest fail. Watch this farmer who understood reciprocity more deeply in his morning puja than in the entire operational vocabulary of the water authority be told that water allocation is a technical matter, not a moral one. The technical vocabulary is not neutral. It is a philosophical position dressed as administration. It says: the river is a resource, not a relationship. Its value is measurable, allocable, and optimisable. The farmer’s puja is touching, perhaps, but it is not a legitimate claim.
In 1973, in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, women did something that philosophy has not yet fully absorbed. When the contractors came to fell the trees, the women of Chipko hugged them. Chipko to stick, to cling, to hold. Their bodies became the argument. They were not making a claim within the economy of the gift; they were not saying the trees were their property, or that development should be slowed for their benefit. They were making a different kind of claim entirely: this is not a resource. This is a relationship. And we are in it. Our bodies are in it. This is the Derridean impossible gift made actual by giving and receiving entirely outside the circle of exchange. The women of Chipko were not demanding anything back. They were not positioning themselves as receivers of a gift who now had claims. They were enacting a relationship so before exchange, so constitutive of who they were, that the language of gift and gratitude and debt simply did not apply. The tree was not something they had received. It was something they were consistent with.
The Bishnoi community of Rajasthan had articulated this three centuries earlier. When Amrita Devi stood between the Maharaja’s axemen and the khejri trees, she did not reach for legal argument or economic counteroffer. She said: This tree is my dharma. My relationship with it is not a preference or a sentiment; it is an obligation that constitutes me. To take my life is a smaller violence than to take this tree, because without this tree, something of what I am is already gone. This is dharmic gratitude in its philosophically fullest and politically most radical form. It is not the gratitude of the receiver who owes something back. It is the gratitude of the being who is constituted by what it has received, who cannot separate itself from the web of giving that made it and who therefore defends that web not as property but as self.
And notice the anger of these women is not the opposite of their gratitude. It is its direct expression. The ferocity of Amrita Devi’s refusal, the ferocity of the Chipko women’s embrace, the ferocity of the women of Hasdeo Arand who are fighting the coal mines in Chhattisgarh’s forests right now, this ferocity is proportional to the depth of the relationship. It is not rage at having been deprived of something owned. It is the response of a being whose constitutive relationships are being severed.
You do not fight for what you do not love. You do not love what you have not genuinely received. And you do not genuinely receive what you treat as a resource rather than a relation.