Salt Satyagraha to the Chipko Movement: Ecofeminist Readings of Women’s Mobilization on Resource Politics in India

Ecofeminism, a significant development in the field of Political theory since the 1970s, offers a fresh and unique vantage point for re-evaluating certain events in the colonial past of India and offers a premise on which the engagement of women with politics can be increased. This paper seeks to retrospectively examine the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 as not just an anti-colonial movement but also as a nascent ecofeminist assertion as it involved large-scale female participation to resist capitalist patriarchy encapsulated by colonialism and its tendency of privatization and monopolization of natural resources like salt. The Salt Satyagraha has then been compared and contrasted with the Chipko Movement of 1973 to bring forth their shared ecofeminist underpinnings and key divergences. Finally, this paper makes a case for revisiting the ideals of ecofeminism for increasing the participation of Indian women in the political processes, particularly by positioning women as natural advocates and leaders for fair resource management and challenging the cultural barriers that inhibit women’s political agency.