![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article will follow the field of South Asian environmental history from its insular beginnings in the 1980s and 1990s, through its initial contact with other fields, to its current integration into the heart of contemporary South Asian historiography. It will argue that 1999 represented a turning point in the field. Three works published that year – S. Sivaramakrishnan’s Modern Forests, Sumit Guha’s Environment and Ethnicity in India, and Ajay Skaria’s Hybrid Histories – reached out from environmental history to incorporate a diverse range of theoretical and methodological influences. Since then, environmental historians have become more geographically and intellectually eclectic, just as historians from other fields have begun to borrow and incorporate environmental optics into other historical work. This new work, both that which takes the environment as the central focus of analysis, and that which draws on environmental optics in writing other histories, highlights the breakdown of an epistemology in which the environment was only visible or important in a limited range of social geographies. Through this process of integration, environmental historians have also begun to re-incorporate the environmentalist ethic which in many ways propelled the field’s beginnings, but which was eclipsed by the intellectual imperative to complicate the simplistic blame-narratives of many early environmental and anti-colonial histories.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professors Julia Stephens, Rohit De, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Alan Mikhail for their feedback and suggestions.
Books reviewed in this article
Hybrid histories: forests, frontiers, and wildness in Western India, by Ajay Skaria, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999, xxiv + 324 pp., ISBN 9780195643107, out of print.
Environment and ethnicity in India, 1200–1991, by Sumit Guha, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999, xvi + 217 pp., $54.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780528707
Modern forests: statemaking and environmental change in colonial Eastern India, by K. Sivaramakrishnan, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999, xxvii + 341 pp., $27.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780804745567
The Bengal delta: ecology, state, and social change, 1840–1943, by Iftekhar Iqbal, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 288 pp., $120.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780230231832
Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the bounds of an Indian Ocean colony, by Sujit Sivasundaram, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, ix + 369 pp., $45.00 clothbound, ISBN 9780226038223
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants, by Sunit S. Amrith, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013, 353 pp., $29.95 hardcover, ISBN 9780674724839
Notes
1. Cronon and Worster were two of the founders and most prominent figures in the American environmental history movement, writing important works, primarily on the American West, in the 1980s and 1990s. Worster’s works include Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), and The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Cronon’s works include Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991).
2. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Science, Environment and Empire History’, p. 42, citing MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’, 377.
3. They begin with geologic history and the neolithic revolution. Guha and Gadgil, This Fissured Land.
4. Guha and Gadgil, This Fissured Land, 3–4, 73, 116, 143–44, 214.
5. McNeill, Environmental History, 17.
6. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Forests and the Environmental’, 305–6.
7. Baviskar, In the Belly of the River, vii.
8. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Forests and Environmental History’, 309, 318.
9. McNeill, Environmental History, 19.
10. Skaria, Hybrid Histories, ix, xi.
11. Ibid., 13–16.
12. Ibid., 13.
13. Ibid., 36–37.
14. Ibid., 40.
15. Ibid., 48.
16. Ibid., 133, 135, 148.
17. Ibid., 163.
18. Ibid., 183, 187.
19. Ibid., 206, 225.
20. Ibid., 57.
21. Ibid., 273.
22. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Science, Environment, and Empire History’, 58.
23. Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 130.
24. Ibid., 1.
25. Ibid., 30.
26. Ibid., 80.
27. Ibid., 88.
28. Ibid., 102.
29. Ibid., 200.
30. Ibid., 163, 200.
31. Ibid., 201.
32. Ibid., 143.
33. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, 277–79.
34. Ibid., 278–79.
35. Ibid., 35–37.
36. Ibid., 61.
37. Ibid., 5, 14.
38. Ibid., 131.
39. Ibid., 145, 151, 173.
40. Ibid., 243, 245.
41. Ibid., 282.
42. Ibid., 13–14.
43. Ibid., xv, 2, 13.
44. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Forests and Environmental History’, 300.
45. Iqbal, The Bengal Delta, 1.
46. Ibid., 1, 4.
47. Ibid., 5.
48. Ibid., 16.
49. Ibid., 12–13.
50. Ibid., 18, 23.
51. Ibid., 28–30.
52. Ibid., 37–8.
53. Ibid., 67–8.
54. Ibid., 88–89.
55. Ibid., 92–116.
56. Ibid., 184.
57. Sivasundaram, Islanded, 14–15.
58. Ibid., 20–1.
59. Ibid., 13, 25.
60. Ibid., 79–81.
61. Ibid., 97.
62. Ibid., 184, 193–94.
63. Ibid., 194–95, 207.
64. Ibid., 212.
65. Ibid., 223.
66. Ibid., 239–40, 243.
67. Ibid., 97.
68. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, 1, 3.
69. Ibid., 30–31.
70. Ibid., 50, 54–5, 58.
71. Ibid., 105.
72. Ibid., 112, 114, 118.
73. Ibid., 121.
74. Ibid., 157.
75. Ibid., 129.
76. Ibid., 251–52, 254.
77. Ibid., 274.