Environmental Ethics: An Indian Perspective Prof. Vinitha Mohan
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ndian religious traditions are intertwined with equally disparate cultural, social, linguistic, philosophical, and ethical systems that have developed over a vast period. The movements of peoples, foreign interventions, and internal transformations in structures and identities have added to this diversity. There are records from incomplete archaeological findings that prove the existence of a major civilization, the Indus Valley, in a sprawling region encompassed by Punjab, the north-western parts of India, and Sind and Baluchistan in present-day Pakistan. This civilization peaked around 3000 bce, at a time when a close symbiosis between nature and people appears to have been prevalent.1 The major cities of the Indus Valley civilization, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—with their imposing brick-built civic and residential edifices, streets, and other structures, complete with baths and extensive drainage and sewer
systems—give the impression of being carefully designed. Their architecture as well as farming practices evince a structural harmony with the surroundings and the climatic conditions, which would optimally conserve natural resources, prevent deforestation, and also appease the gods, who were seen as more than personified symbols of nature. Most elements of the religious and cultural practices from the Indus Valley period and other indigenous communities continued into subsequent phases of Indian history. India’s agrarian culture, so much dependent on the forces of nature, is reflected in the repertory of hymns, the earliest of which are known as the Rig Veda. The oral tradition and the Vedas are among the oldest records of India’s ruminations on the Divine and exaltedly intoned the intimacy between the human being and nature: ‘We claim protection from the Hills, we claim protection of the Floods, of him who stands by Vishnu’s side.’ 2 Spirit of the Forest By about 500 bce the Vedas gave way to the Upanishads, which are the philosophical treatises that elevated metaphysical knowledge over the sacrificial rituals of the earlier sections. The Upanishads—also known as forest, aranyakas, treatises—are full of reverence for the natural world. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the great sage Yajnavalkya, after defeating the other Vedic scholars, puts a counter question to them: