A Man to Match His Mountains, from the Introduction to The Chipko Movement by Shekhar Pathak

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 U.P. 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 o...