Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia.

• Author: ROCHER, ROSANE
• Position: Review

Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia. Edited by DAVID ARNOLD and RAMACHANDRA GUHA. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995; paperback edition, 1996. Pp. xi + 376. Rs 200.

Environmental history is a new field of enquiry in the South Asian domain. These proceedings of a conference on "South Asia's Changing Environment" convened by the volume's two editors in Bellagio, Italy, in 1992, are sure to give it a boost. They go far beyond the history of agriculture and irrigation and peasant history fostered by the Subaltern Group and others, to take an encompassing look at a broad spectrum of ecological issues. Between an initial chapter on the negotiations between forest dwellers and pastoralists within the agrarian society that was the backbone of Mughal India and a final chapter that high-lights contemporary community empowerment in the management of forests in the Jungle Mahals of West Bengal, nine essays focus on the relations between the state and an array of local communities, and their contested resources in the colonial period. As might be expected, the list of the capitalist colonial state's sins is long: pushing cultivation, particularly in the form of plantations, deeper a nd deeper into jungle areas and arrogating to itself the rights to what remained of cattle-grazing and forest land; criminalizing nomadic pastoralism and suppressing shifting cultivation, and considering settled agriculturalism the hallmark of...