Mahesh Rangarajan - Indias Environmental History - A Reader

IndiasEnvironmental History

From Ancient Times to theColonial Period

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Indias
Environmental History

From Ancient Times to the
Colonial Period

A READER

Edited by

MAHESH RANGARAJAN AND
K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

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Copyright 2012 volume form Permanent Black
Copyright (respective years) by individual contributors for their individual contributions

eISBN 978-81-7824-439-6
for set of two volumes

e-edition:First Published 2014

ePUB Conversion: .

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests write to the publisher.

Contents

VOLUME 1

1 M.L.K. MURTY
Sheep/Goat Pastoral Cultures in the Southern Deccan:The Narrative as a Metaphor

2 V.N. MISRA
Climate, a Factor in the Rise and Fall of the IndusCivilization: Evidence from Rajasthan and Beyond

3 MAKHAN LAL
Iron Tools, Forest Clearance, and Urbanization in theGangetic Plains

4 UMESH C. CHATTOPADHYAYA
Settlement Pattern and the Spatial Organization ofSubsistence and Mortuary Practices in the MesolithicGanges Valley, North-Central India

5 ROMILA THAPAR
Perceiving the Forest: Early India

6 ALOKA PARASHER-SEN
Of Tribes, Hunters, and Barbarians: Forest Dwellers inthe Mauryan Period

7 THOMAS R. TRAUTMANN
Elephants and the Mauryas

8 DAUD ALI
Gardens in Early Indian Court Life

9 JOS GOMMANS
The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. 11001800 CE

10 SIMON DIGBY
The Supply of War-Horses

11 DIVYABHANUSINH
At the Court of the Great Mughals

12 KATHLEEN D. MORRISON
Environmental History, the Spice Trade, and the State inSouth India

13 SUMIT GUHA
Claims on the Commons: Political Power and NaturalResources in Precolonial India

14 RICHARD GROVE
The East India Company, the Australians, and theEl Nio: Colonial Scientists and Ideas about GlobalClimatic Change and Teleconnections between 1770and 1930

15 GUNNEL CEDERLF
Narratives of Rights: Codifying People and Land inEarly Nineteenth-Century Nilgiris

16 MICHAEL MANN
Forestry and Famine in the ChambalJamna Doab,18791919

VOLUME 2

1 INDU AGNIHOTRI
Ecology, Land Use, and Colonization: The CanalColonies of Punjab

2 DAVID LUDDEN
Investing in Nature around Sylhet: An Excursion intoGeographical History

3 MAHESH RANGARAJAN
The Raj and the Natural World: The Campaign againstDangerous Beasts in Colonial India, 18751925

4 DAVID ARNOLD
Disease, Resistance, and Indias Ecological Frontier,17701947

5 RICH FREEMAN
Folk Models of the Forest Environment in HighlandMalabar

6 K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
Transition Zones: Changing Landscapes and LocalAuthority in Southwest Bengal, 1880s1920s

7 ARCHANA PRASAD
The Political Ecology of Swidden Cultivation:The Survival Strategies of the Baigas in the CentralProvinces, India, 18601960

8 NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA
Pastoralists in the Colonial World

9 PAUL GREENOUGH
Bio-Ironies of the Fractured Forest: IndiasTiger Reserves

10 ANN GRODZINS GOLD AND BHOJU RAM GUJAR
Wild Pigs and Kings: Remembered Landscapes inRajasthan

11 SAJAL NAG
Bamboo, Rats, and Famine: Famine Relief andPerceptions of British Paternalism in theMizo Hills

12 DARREN C. ZOOK
Famine in the Landscape: Imagining Hunger inSouth Asian History, 18601990

13 NARPAT S. JODHA
Common Property Resources and the EnvironmentalContext: Role of Biophysical Versus Social Stresses

14 BINA AGARWAL
Gender, Environment, and Poverty Interlinks:Regional Variations and Temporal Shifts inRural India, 19711991

15 AMITA BAVISKAR
Written on the Body, Written on the Land: Violenceand Environmental Struggles in Central India

16 ROHAN DSOUZA
Damming the Mahanadi River: The Emergence ofMulti-Purpose River Valley Development in India(19431946)

17 S. RAVI RAJAN
Disaster, Development, and Governance: Reflectionson the Lessons of Bhopal

Editors Note

Small syntactical and related changes have been made to many ofthese previously published articles. Efforts were also made to fill gapsin the originals, especially relating to references.

Copyright information is provided as the first endnote to each contribution. Clearances for reproduction have been obtained from all traceable holders of copyright. Any omissions brought to the notice of the editors or publishers will be remedied in reprinted impressions.

Introduction

E ven a cursory look at the wealth of writings on Indias rich andvaried ecological past points to a pattern. Environmental historians have mostly been focused on the last two centuries, especially the period from 1858 when India came under rule of theCrown. Yet, the long preceding eras were more than a mere benchmarkagainst against which the epochal changes of the late nineteenth century of the Common Era could be set. In recent years, the wealth ofwork by archaeologists and scholars of literary texts as also work thatdraws on pictorial evidence especially from the Sultanate and Mughalperiods (the thirteenth to the early eighteenth centuries CE), has provided reason enough for a careful reassessment. It is indeed not the casethat the historiography permits a unified and coherent view but it iscertainly possible to take stock and then try to advance the outlines ofa different, more nuanced way of looking at the longue dure.

Environmental historians have often not let their work or their perspectives be informed by a wider body of writing which now exists that is implicitly ecological in its modes of enquiry as also in the implications of its findings. This Fissured Land, the pioneering work of Gadgil and Guha first published in 1992, paid significant attention to precolonial India. It also drew on an array of archaeological and literary evidence to evolve a larger framework to approach patterns of ecological change in the past. Conversely, many insights into forest frictions and water disputes, the contests over urban or rural spaces between rival claimants to water or land, animal, plant, or mineral wealth have led to a reinterrogation of source materials on early and medieval India. Yet, fruitful as these specific studies and interventions are, there is still a need to pull together a set of works that spans the spectrum. Any such selection will reproduce the gaps in the literature and also show up our own limits as editors. But it can still go a part of the way. It is with a view to setting up drawbridges over these moats that ring the fortresses that this volume brings together a wide cross-section of papers. They range from prehistoric India right to the middle of the nineteenth century CE.