Polity, Ecology and Landscape: New Writings on South Asia's Past

Studies in History

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 135-147

  Rangarajan, Mahesh ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992862323     PISSN: 02576430     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/025764300201800107     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. R. Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Western Himalaya, Delhi, 1989.
2. Its second revised edition, published in 2000, includes a comprehensive list of more recent works. M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Delhi, 1992.
3. K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Imagining the past in present politics: Colonialism and forestry in India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37: 1, 1995, pp. 3–40
4. M. Rangarajan, ‘Environmental histories of South Asia: A review essay’, Environment and History, Vol. 2: 2, 1996, pp. 129–44.
5. See the contents list of R. Grove, V. Damodaran and S. Sangwan, eds, Nature and the Orient: Essays on the Environmental History of South and South East Asia, Delhi, 1998.
6. A similar point may be made about an earlier collection, D. Arnold and R. Guha, eds, Nature, Culture, Imperialism, Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, Delhi, 1995.
7. On the eighteenth to nineteenth century evolution of the law, especially inter-provincial variations, see A. Pathak, ‘Law, strategies and ideologies: Legislating Forests in Colonial India, 1792–1882,’ Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Edinburgh, UK, 1999.
8. R. Grove, Green Imperialism, Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Delhi, 1995
9. Ecology, Climate and Empire, Delhi, 1998.
10. On the debate, see R. Guha, ‘An early environment debate: The making of the Indian Forest Act’, Indian Economic and Social History Review (hereafter IESHR) Vol. 27: 1, 1990, pp. 65–84.
11. M. Rangarajan, ‘Imperial Agendas and India's Forests: The early history of Indian forestry, 1800–78’, IESHR, Vol. 31: 2, 1994, pp. 147–67.
12. R. Grove, ‘Introduction’ in Green Imperialism.
13. An early pioneer in this respect was D. Hardiman, ‘Power in the forests: The Dangs, 1820–1940’, in D. Hardiman and D. Arnold, eds, Subaltern Studies VIII, Delhi, 1994, pp. 89–147.
14. For regional histories see M. Buchy, Teak and Arecanut: Colonial State, Forests and People in the Western Ghats, 1800–1947, Delhi and Pondicherry, 1996.
15. M. Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India's Central Provinces, 1860–1914, Delhi, 1996
16. A. Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness, Delhi, 1998.
17. Note the shift of focus in Studies in History, Vol. 14: 2, 1998 with the theme ‘Forests, Fields and Pastures’
18. Special Number of Environment and History, Vol. 2: 2, 1996, with ‘South Asia’ as the theme.
19. R. Grover, ‘Rhythms of the timber trade, Forests in the Himalayan Punjab, 1850–1925’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Virginia, USA, 1997.
20. D. Dangwal, ‘Colonial forestry, agrarian transformation in the UP hills: An agro-ecological history of the central Himalaya’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, (henceforth JNU) Delhi, 1996.
21. H. Rangan, Of Myths and Movements: Writing Chipko into Himalayan History, Delhi, 2001.
22. C. Singh, Natural Premises: Ecology and Peasant Life in the Western Himalaya, 1800–1950, Delhi, 1998.
23. S. Ravi Rajan, ‘Foresters and the politics of agro-ecology: The case of shifting cultivation and soil erosion, 1920–50’, Studies in History, Vol. 14: 2, 1998, pp. 217–36.
24. P. McManus, ‘Histories of forestry: Networks, ideas, silences’, Environment and History, Vol. 5: 2, 1999, pp. 185–208.
25. V. Saberwal, Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats and Conservation in the Western Himalaya, Delhi, 1998.
26. The pioneering piece was V. Damodaran, ‘Famine in a forest tract: Ecological change and the causes of famine in Chhotanagpur, northern India’, Environment and History, Vol. 2: 1, 1995, pp. 129–58.
27. S. Nag, ‘Bamboo, rats and famine: Famine relief and perceptions of British paternalism in the Mizo hills’, Environment and History, Vol. 5: 2, 1999, pp. 245–52.
28. B. Pati, ‘Environment and Social History, Kalahandi, 1800–1950’, Environment and History, Vol. 5: 3, 1999, pp. 345–59.
29. A. Pratap, The Hoe and the Axe: An Ethnohistory of Shifting Cultivation in Eastern India, Delhi, 2000.
30. Skaria, Hybrid Histories.
31. A. Prasad, ‘Forests and subsistence in colonial India: A study of the Central Provinces, 1830–1945’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, JNU, Delhi, 1994. Orient Longman is shortly publishing this thesis.
32. J.R. Freeman, ‘Gods, groves and the culture of nature’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 33: 2, 1999, pp. 257–302.
33. R. Jeffery, ed., The Social Construction of India's Forests, Delhi, 1998.
34. R. D'Souza, ‘The Deltaic Rivers of the Bengal Presidency: The Political Economy of “Flood Control” in Colonial Orissa’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, JNU, 1998.
35. Indu Agnihotri, ‘Ecology, land use and colonization: The canal colonies of Punjab’, IESHR, Vol. 33: 1, 1996, pp. 37–58.
36. A fine set of perceptive essays on the ecological context and processes of agriculture is A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds, Social Nature: Resources, Representations and Rule in India, Delhi, 2000.
37. Divyabhanusinh, The End of a Trail: The Cheetah in India, revised second edition, Delhi, 2001.
38. M. Rangarajan, India's Wildlife History: An Introduction, Delhi, 2001.
39. N. Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, Studies in History, Vol. 14: 2, 1998, pp. 1–2.
40. R. Jeffery and N. Sundar, eds, A New Moral Economy for India's Forests? Discourses on Community and Participation, Delhi, 1999.
41. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, pp. 91–110.
42. S. Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, p. 43.
43. This point about peasantization was first made by C.A. Bayly. See Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. II, No. 1, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 138–45.
44. Also see, A. Prasad, ‘Military conflict and forests in the Central Provinces: Gonds and Gondwana in pre-colonial history’, Environment and History, Vol. 5: 3, 1999, pp. 361–75.
45. This point was made by C.A. Bayly, see ‘Knowing the country, Empire and Information in Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27: 1 1993, pp. 3–43.
46. F. Bradley Birt (1900) quoted in Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, p. 54.
47. R. Guha, The Unquiet Woods, second edition, pp. 48–61.
48. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, pp. 227, 240.
49. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 29.
50. For instance, contrast, the ideas of E.A. Smythies, ‘Sal regeneration de novo’, Indian Forester, Vol. 66: 4, 1940, pp. 193–99
51. with his paper, ‘The Hailey national park’, Indian Forester, Vol. 62: 2, 1936, pp. 360–69.
52. On the Lushai hills, see the well-researched historical section of D. Singh, The Last Frontier: People and Forests in Mizoram, Delhi, 1998.
53. On Meghalaya see B. Malik, ‘The problem of “shifting cultivation”: Ideology, policy and institutions in the Khasi, Jaintia and Garo hills of north east India’, Unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Ecological History and Traditions held by the Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, 27 to 29 March 1998.
54. For a fine study of the complex interplay of science and policy see D. Gilmartin, ‘Scientific empire and imperial science: Colonialism and irrigation technology in the Indus Basin’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 53: 4, 1995, pp. 1127–54.
55. N. Sundar, R. Jeffrey and N. Thin, Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in India, Delhi, 2001.
56. The critical assessment of initiatives contrasts with the largely uncritical essays in M. Poffenberger and B. McGean, eds, Village Voices, Forest Choices: Joint Forest Management in India, Delhi, 1996.
57. P. Coates and W. Beinart, Environment and History, The taming of nature in the USA and South Africa, London, 1995.
58. See the contents list of the Special Issue on ‘Zimbabwe,’ Environment and History, Vol. 1: 3, 1995
59. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 26: 4, 2000. Agriculture, watersheds, game control and protection, soil erosion and livestock issues loom much larger in them than in the work on South Asia.
60. On British India, the unpublished work of S. Shresth, ‘Hunters and Protectors, British Rule and Indian Wildlife’, M.Phil Dissertation, JNU, 2000.
61. On a princely state, M. Rangarajan, ‘From princely symbol to conservation icon, A political history of the lion in India’, in M. Hasan and N. Nakazato, eds, The Unfinished Agenda: Nation-building in South Asia, Delhi, 2000, pp. 399–442, which is mostly a history of the Gir Forest, Gujarat, over a century long period.
62. A.G. Gold, ‘From Wild pigs to foreign trees: Oral histories of environmental change in Rajasthan,’ in S.T. Madsen, ed., State, Society and Environment in South Asia, London, 1999, pp. 20–59 also looks at the transition from princely to independent India.
63. K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Co-managed forests in West Bengal’, Journal of Sustainable Forestry, Vol. 7: 1, 1998, pp. 23–51.
64. For example, see J. Caruthers, Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 1995 on a South African park.
65. On Tanzania's Arusha park, see R.P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness, Struggles over livelihood and nature preservation in Africa, Berkeley, 1998.
66. A comparable Indian study of the contemporary period is S. Mahanty, ‘Actors in Paradise: negotiating actors, landscape and institutions in the Nagarahole Ecodevelopment Project, India’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 2000.
67. For shorter works on particular forests, C. Totman, The Making of Japan's Forests: The case of Akita, Honolulu, 1985
68. D. Anderson, ‘Managing the Forest: The conservation history of the Lembus, Kenya, 1904–63’, in D.M. Anderson and R.H. Grove, eds, Conservation in Africa: People, Problems, Practice, Cambridge, UK, 1987, pp. 249–68.
69. An excellent work by an anthropologist which examines the boundaries of the wild and the tame is F.J. Simoons and E.S. Simoons, A Ceremonial Ox of India: The Mithun, in Nature, Culture and History, Madison, 1968.
70. For a fine work on medieval history, there is S. Digby, War-horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A Problem of Military Supplies, Karachi, 1974.
71. S. Schama, Landscape and Memory, New York, 1995.