Forests and the environmental history of modern India

Abstract

This essay explores how the definition and management of boundaries between wildness and civility in Indian society and the relation of ideas of nature to different aspects of social life – labour, aesthetics, politics, commerce, or agriculture – are interconnected historical processes that inform environmental history. Admittedly written from the vantage point of forest history, the domain of environmental history in which the most robust body of scholarly debate exists in India, the essay uses this rich literature to ask questions that newer and emerging environmental histories of India, especially as they deal with questions of water, air, industry, and climate change, may find generative for their own development.

Keywords:

• India
• environmental history
• forests
• agriculture
• water
• climate change
• nature

Notes

I began this essay at the invitation of the late John Richards and Kenneth Pomeranz, who, along with Anne Osborne and others, provided rigorous commentary when it was discussed at the University of California, Irvine, at the conference ‘China and India: Towards the Twentieth Century in Asia’, they had organised in May 2006. It has benefited from further discussion when presented at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, in February 2008, where I am particularly grateful for the comments of Vazira Zamindar, Nancy Jacobs, Karl Jacoby, and Lina Fruzzetti. A version of this essay was also presented as the The Shiva and Ram Avtar Tewari Memorial Lecture, Indian Studies Program, Indiana University, in April 2008. Sumit Ganguly, Prakash Kashwan, and others at Bloomington added another layer of incisive criticism that has benefited the revision of this work for publication. Along the way my ideas have been sharpened and clarified in dialogue with many colleagues, but I should specially thank David Ludden and Mahesh Rangarajan. Radhika Govindrajan provided research assistance for which I shall remain grateful. Jun Borras provided editorial guidance that was gracious and prompt. Such synthetic work learns immensely from the scholarship of others, but I, alone, remain responsible for errors, omissions and flaws.

I would like to dedicate this piece to the memory of John F. Richards who blazed a trail into the woods of long duree comparative and world environmental history and always encouraged my halting entry onto this path.

¹I refer here to the collection of essays in Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan (2000).

²See Eaton's (1993, 209) account drawn from the narrative of a European traveller. Just as fakirs did in Bengal, holy men mediated relations for villagers and forest dwellers in south India as well. See Bayly (1991, 121).

³Lac is the hardened resin, secreted by the tiny lac insect belonging to a bug family. The widely known Indian lac insect is Kerria lac Kerr (Tachardiidae: Homoptera). Lac insects settle closely on the twigs of certain host trees, suck the plant sap and grow, all the while secreting lac resin from their bodies. Since the insects are closely spaced on the twigs, the resin forms continuous encrustations over the twigs of the host trees. These insects thrive only on certain trees, which are called host trees. In India, the major host trees are kusum (Scheleichera oleosa), palas (Butea monosperma) and ber (Zizyphus mauritiana). Lac encrustations are removed from the twigs of host plants by scraping. The raw lac thus obtained is known as scraped lac or simply sticklac, which is further crushed into small grains, sieved, washed and dried. This semi-refined product, called seedlac, is further refined by a system of hot melting, filtration and stretching into thin sheets which are subsequently broken into brittle flakes called shellac. Alternatively the purified lac resin can be in the form of circular discs called button lac. This substance is used in cosmetics, food processing and adhesives, and remains a major Indian export for such manufacturing industries.

⁴Such linear tendencies are hard to escape in even some of the most thoughtful synthetic histories. See, for instance, Richards and Tucker (1983, 1988) and Ludden (1999).

⁵For other, older, estimates, see Moosvi (1987, 42, 45). Also see Habib (1983).

⁶For Rajasthan see Singh (1990) and, for Gujarat see Khan (1997).

⁷An excellent introduction to these debates may be found in Alavi (2002).

⁸See various essays in Stein and Subrahmanyam (1996).

⁹Ludden echoes the ‘portfolio capitalist’ idea, and gives it a spatial logic, in his description of jagirs that combined manufacturing, farming, commodity trade, and war finance. See also the important work of Parthasarthi (2001) and Stephen (1997).

¹⁰A good example of this process is provided by Bhargava (1999). For the larger argument, see Bhattacharya (1992).

¹¹This aspect of Greenough's commentary has stood the test of time, and remains relevant, as several authors, in several disciplines, have commented as well on the particular decline and fall narrative that informs the historical sense and context present in a wide range of scholarly and policy analysis.

¹²Arguably, the increasing scholarly and policy attention paid to parks and wildlife conservation, since the 1990s, has rectified this lacuna and there is now a rich body of work on wild animals and their fate in India in colonial times and beyond.

¹³See, for instance, Bhattacharya (1992) and Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan (2000).

¹⁴For early periods see Digby (1971) and Trautmann (1982).

¹⁵The literature on this topic, again, is considerable and within it there is a robust debate on how exactly such policies proceeded and how they affected various groups, unevenly, among those who lived by shifting cultivation, hunting, gathering, and pastoralism. Several essays in Grove et al. (1998), some essays in Arnold and Guha (1995), and yet others in Cederlof and Sivaramakrishnan (2006), among others, provide cases and arguments from all over India.

¹⁶National Archives of India, New Delhi, India, Foreign Dep., Internal A, June 1888, nos. 121–37, ‘Memorial from HH the Gaekwar of Baroda regarding the Gheer boundary case’: Appendix 26, p. 87: Col. Lang to the Vahiwatdar of Amreli, Baroda Gir, 20 Dec. 1848. Cited in M. Rangarajan, ‘Environment, Ecology and Colonial India: Departures and Beginnings’. Unpublished paper, October 2005, p. 5.

¹⁷On the Kaveri, David Ludden (1979).

¹⁸For more on this, see Arnold (2006), Grove (1995), and Sivaramakrishnan (1999).

¹⁹See, among others, Edney (1997), Arnold (2000), Kumar (1995), and Grove (1997).

²⁰See Prabhakaran (2004). The success of the first Silent Valley movement was an inspiration to Indian environmental movements in the 1970s.

²¹Here one can observe the salutary influence of seminal writings like Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest (2001); and engagement with current debates on post-socialist societies and their natural resource management, captured well in Conservation and Society, special issue: ‘Property, Land and Forests in Post-socialist Societies’, 2(1), 2004.

²²It is heartening to note that they are being produced, and not a moment too soon. A fine example is Pamela McElwee (2003).

²³See, for instance, Thomas Homer-Dixon (1999, 12). He provides one illustrative statement among many.

²⁴The elaborate provisions worked out for sal are a good example. No sal could be cut without the proprietor's permission. Sal of girth 9–18 inches could be cut by raiyats for domestic purposes, trees of girth 18–24 inches could only be cut for the proprietor's use, and sal of girth greater than 24 inches was the absolute property of the proprietor (McPherson 1911, 114–15).

²⁵For a similar situation in Ranchi see Reid (1912b).

²⁶no. 163W dated 20 July 1899, W.B. Thompson DC Singhbhum to Commr Chotanagpur, quoted in Reid (1912a, 52).

²⁷Samaddar (1992, 95–6) provides clear evidence of the Jamboni Raj increasing khas holdings during 1910–30, by winning several civil suits about bastu tax, extinguishing wastelands and jungle rights of mandals and raiyats in Jamboni.

²⁸This kind of argument is found in treatments of adivasi revolts as arising from the sudden disruption of their egalitarian and nature friendly lifestyles by colonial rule. For example, based on slender evidence, such a case is built by Dasgupta (1985, 104). A critique of such approaches even within the Subaltern Studies tradition may be found in research on western India, by Skaria (1999).

²⁹See Jamieson (1918, 131–2), which describes the process by which mauzawar survey became possible in western Midnapore due to the spread of settlement between 1875 and 1915, leading to the creation of 1,608 villages during the operation.

³⁰My argument about simplification and its relationship to modern state formation in forest areas is developed in conversation with James Scott and his ideas of state simplification seeking legible landscapes for management. See Scott (1998).

³¹Based on ‘The Deltaic Rivers of the Bengal Presidency: the political economy of flood control in colonial Orissa’, unpublished PhD thesis, New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1998.