|
|
Modern forests: statemaking and environmental change in colonial eastern India
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 1999 |
| Authors | Sivaramakrishnan, K, |
| Journal Title | Modern forests: statemaking and environmental change in colonial eastern India. |
| Pagination | xxvii + 341 |
| Key Words | history; forestry; forest management; forest administration; colonialism; regional policy; forest policy; resource management; environmental factors; forest ecology; disturbed forests; Shorea robusta |
| Abstract | This book has been prepared from the first volume of a two-volume historical and ethnographic study on statemaking and forest management in Bengal, completed as a Ph.D. dissertation for the Department of Anthropology, Yale University (USA). It draws on extensive historical and archival research carried out in Bengal, Delhi, England, and the USA during the period June 1992-December 1994, to document and analyse the emergence of rational forest management, related administrative structures, and development regimes in the woodlands of colonial Bengal. The book covers a period of about 180 years beginning around 1767, soon after the first East India Company officials made tentative forays into the jungles to the west of Midnapore town in SW Bengal, and ends around 1947 when India became independent. The eastern Indian region has been traversed in diverse ways, and with varying degrees of comprehensiveness, to empirically sustain the main arguments offered by this book. Firstly, to show the influence of regional political and social history on environmental change and forest management in-depth studies were carried out into the local particulars of SW Bengal - an area that comprised adjoining parts of contemporary southern Bihar and western West Bengal. This forest-savannah-farmland complex is discussed as a political zone of anomaly and an environmental transition zone. Biophysical processes of environmental change imposed their own logic on resource management strategies and contingent processes of statemaking. The object is not to claim an autonomous sphere of natural agency in the physical world, but instead to suggest a dialectical relationship between patterns of human engagement with non-human environments and patterns of change in those environments as they influence social-political outcomes of human endeavour, even those of powerful agents like governments, scientists, and elites. This second objective of the book is achieved mainly through a detailed discussion of north Bengal forest management. A third purpose of the book is to examine the distinctive ways in which a contested history of sal ( Shorea robusta ) forest management emerged in the colonial period. There was an important conjuncture between the growth of modern forest science in Europe, the exigencies of establishing British empire in India, and field foresters of the Bengal Presidency struggling with the ecological consequences of changing the disturbance regimes under which sal forests originated, were established, and came to dominate particular landscapes. This part of the story takes the book most widely across eastern India and into parts of the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh). From the eastern end of Assam to the western-most foothills of the Himalaya, from the lower reaches of Nepal and Sikkim montane regions to the upper altitudes of the Gangetic valley, and all over the undulating landscape of the Chotanagpur plateau, extending into the central Indian plateau region, sal trees of differing provenance came to dominate the canopy of the forests where social-ecological and edaphic-climatic conditions were favourable. A selected bibliography and subject index are included. |
| |
|
|
