Vikramaditya Thakur
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198098959
- eISBN:
- 9780199084999
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198098959.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The Indian subcontinent has witnessed unprecedented change in land-use pattern during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries marked by the intensification of agriculture, in turn adversely ...
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The Indian subcontinent has witnessed unprecedented change in land-use pattern during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries marked by the intensification of agriculture, in turn adversely impacting forest and water bodies. The early post-colonial period, that is 1955–75, was a crucial phase in this regard but is understudied. Hill-communities in western India took to settled agriculture marking a distinct patch of deforestation. This reconstruction of the deforestation in Mewas chieftaincies in and around the Narmada valley of present-day Maharashtra argues that the complex process was infused by external factors including political and legal elements at the institutional level spanning the colonial and the postcolonial periods respectively. Equally vital were internal factors like sociocultural and demographical changes traversing nearly a century that caused drastic transformation of the local inhabitants’ relation with the surrounding forest. The issue of formal land titles that arose as a result remains unresolved nearly four decades later.Less
The Indian subcontinent has witnessed unprecedented change in land-use pattern during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries marked by the intensification of agriculture, in turn adversely impacting forest and water bodies. The early post-colonial period, that is 1955–75, was a crucial phase in this regard but is understudied. Hill-communities in western India took to settled agriculture marking a distinct patch of deforestation. This reconstruction of the deforestation in Mewas chieftaincies in and around the Narmada valley of present-day Maharashtra argues that the complex process was infused by external factors including political and legal elements at the institutional level spanning the colonial and the postcolonial periods respectively. Equally vital were internal factors like sociocultural and demographical changes traversing nearly a century that caused drastic transformation of the local inhabitants’ relation with the surrounding forest. The issue of formal land titles that arose as a result remains unresolved nearly four decades later.
