The forest region of the Himalayas has long been ecological survival, labour, cultural memories, and values of generations. An area of whole regions make spiritual identity of green revolution and sacrifices of peoples, the communities of Himalayan are became embodied resistance and also knowns as Indigenous ecological Knowledge This paper Neo-Chipko Activism: Literary Eco-Feminism and Eco-Resistance - From Reni to Rishikesh: Echoes of the Chipko Movement and Literary Representations of Himalayan Eco-Resistance traces a genealogy of Himalayan eco-resistance that begins in 1974 with the tree-hugging protest of twenty-seven women from the village of Reni, led by Gaura Devi, who physically embraced trees to prevent their being cut down and ends with the recent Neo-Chipko protests around Rishikesh, where citizens and environmental groups have similarly adopted the motif of the tree hug as a way to fight off deforestation, the building of new hydroelectric plants, and the incursion of Rishikesh as a commercial and pilgrimage destination.

In this paper, the author argues that these two episodes in the long history of Himalayan environmentalism should be understood as part of the same process, one that draws on a particular feminist and ecological grammar of embodied resistance, one that insists on the conflation of women’s bodies, the forests, and the livelihoods of the region.

This paper Illustrated into both movements within in longer historical event, the Chipko Movement and recently neo- chipko2.0. It pays particular attention to the literary afterlife of the movement: How might fiction, memoir, and folk narrative by Himalayan and Himalayan-adjacent writers encode and reencode the themes of the Chipko movement? What might the recovered stories of this region’s eco-resistance reveal about the ways in which “Chipko” itself has been naturalised as a discourse, a set of symbolic and material practices?

In foregrounding the connections between activist practices and literary representation, and by pursuing these connections across different media and texts, this paper contends that Himalayan eco-resistance is best understood as a compound cultural practice.

This paper ultimately proposes “Neo-Chipko” as a conceptually useful category for thinking about militancy, gendered ecological knowledge, and literary representation in tandem.