On August 13, in the ICU ward of Synergy Hospital, Dehradun, writer and activist Trepan Singh Chauhan passed away at the age of 48. But what ended that day was not only his body — wracked by motor neurone disease (MND) — but a life that had touched lakhs of people, one rooted in the best of Uttarakhand’s and India’s traditions.
I had the privilege of knowing Trepan as a colleague, comrade and friend. He was born in the village of Kepars in Tehri Garhwal district, Uttarakhand, and had a colourful childhood, running away briefly and working as a child labourer in a temple and a hotel in Meerut. But by the time he was 14, he had also started organising young people as part of the Chipko movement. After joining and leaving other groups, he and a handful of comrades founded a new organisation, Chetna Andolan, in 1994.
The organisation fought first for the right to information — holding mass public hearings — and went on to take up a whole range of issues. These included movements for forest rights and natural resource rights, including one major struggle against a destructive project in a village called Falinda, which culminated in the only agreement in Uttarakhand between a village community and dam developers that was actually implemented. During these movements, Trepan faced numerous false cases and was jailed briefly, but neither he nor the Andolan backed down. From 2009 onwards, he began organising daily wage workers in Dehradun, which led to a struggle for welfare benefits through which thousands of workers have received their rights. Alongside all this, Trepan campaigned against communal hate politics and mob violence, contested caste discrimination and untouchability, and opposed patriarchal norms in his own home area.
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In fact, it’s difficult to even summarise all the different initiatives that Trepan began, led or joined over the years. He went beyond the boundaries of what might be considered ‘traditional’ activism, becoming an accomplished writer who published poems, short stories and novels, including Yamuna , the best-known novel on the Uttarakhand movement. He started an alternative school that has now been running for 15 years. He helped found a producer company, a kind of cooperative, which will hopefully soon set up a wholly village-owned and democratically run hydel project. In 2016, he persuaded the rest of us in Chetna Andolan to go along with what we regarded as a slightly oddball plan — holding a competition for ghasiyaris (women who cut grass), both to honour their contribution to the State’s struggles, and as a way to reach rural women on the issues that mattered to them. The competitions, two of which were held, resoundingly disproved our scepticism. Over 5,000 women spread over more than 200 villages participated, and the events were front-page news across the State.
Those competitions were only one particularly striking example of Trepan’s exceptional creativity, his ability to find methods that could break through cynicism and apathy. In the process, he blew apart the lazy generalisations so often made about Indian society — about ‘traditional’ communities versus secular elites, local rootedness versus ivory-tower liberals, social activists versus mass politics. Trepan belonged to all those worlds and more. When he passed away, every Hindi media outlet in Uttarakhand carried the news, and everyone from senior police officers to reporters to writers poured out their grief on social media. It was not for nothing that Rajiv Lochan Sah, himself one of the State’s foremost intellectuals, once described Trepan as the “brain of Uttarakhand”.
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For Trepan himself, though, his work was just a reflection of a way of thinking. He called it his lekhak ki nazar , his writer’s gaze. It took me years to understand what he meant by that phrase. Trepan’s genius went beyond his expressed political views and rested on his deep, abiding understanding of people, his empathy for what drives us to fight, to love and to sacrifice. He built his life around that understanding.
Final struggle
He also brought it into his last, terrible struggle, his fight against MND. MND (better known as ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder that damages the nerves that control muscles, affecting and often over time destroying the ability to move, speak, eat or even breathe. Trepan showed the same creativity and courage in this struggle as in every other. He was aware of the overwhelming odds and he felt the terror and pain, but he always found a basis for hope. He threw himself into every medical option we could find and celebrated every tiny gain. His doctors were moved to remark, repeatedly, that they had never seen a patient fight like this.
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In 2017, both his hands now hanging limply by his sides, Trepan walked 18 kilometres to a mountain village for a discussion. As long as he could move, even when he later needed someone to hold him up, he would come to every meeting and every protest. When we obtained an eye-tracking device that made it possible for him to use a computer, within five minutes he started writing his next novel. In his final weeks, lying plugged into a ventilator in the ICU, unable to move or communicate except through his eye tracker, he still had his lekhak ki nazar . On one of my daily visits, he instantly noted the signs of despair on my face. He wrote, “ Niraash mat hona, Shankar, hameisha lad kar jeete hain, is baar bhi lad kar jeetenge ” (‘Don’t lose hope, Shankar, we’ve always fought and won, and we will this time too’).
He was wrong about that. Now it seems almost a betrayal to try to reduce that life of struggle and inspiration to a few hundred words. But Trepan believed in the power of words, in the power of writing and song, in the soaring heights people can reach if they can only see themselves. So I can only hope that these words give you a tiny glimpse of this man’s extraordinary love for humanity, and the gaping hole his passing leaves in this world.
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