Search Results

The three characteristics of the industrial mode of resource use presented are important to a proper understanding of the ecological encounter between India and Britain. The most tangible outcome of colonialism is related to the colonizer’s global control of resources. The management and utilization of forest resources are vital in the ecological encounter between Britain and India. The Indian Forest Act of 1865 was authorized to facilitate the acquisition of those forest areas that were earmarked for railway supplies. The Indian Forest Act of 1878 was a comprehensive piece of legislation, which attempted to obliterate centuries of customary use by rural populations all over India. The strategic value of India’s forests was forcefully highlighted during the World Wars. The priorities of colonial forestry were essentially commercial in nature. Forest management was easily the most significant element in the state takeover of natural resources, which had earlier acted as a buffer for the peasant household.

The national movement had thrown up two alternative scenarios for the reconstruction of Indian economy and society. One vision was associated with Mahatma Gandhi. Whatever the anomalies in his thought and practice, it is clear that in the path of economic development eventually charted by the Indian nation, the Mahatma’s ideals were made redundant with a quite alarming rapidity. As a nationalist leader who had spent many years in British prisons, Jawaharlal Nehru’s attitude toward the West was an ambivalent one. The four stages in the industrial orientation of Indian forestry are elaborated. The continuity between colonial and post-colonial forestry regimes is most clearly manifest in the system of ownership. There is a whole complex of processes that result to resource exhaustion in the case of Indian forestry. The forestry practices introduced by the British and continued thereafter are neither scientific nor conservation-oriented.

This chapter reports a preliminary mapping of the conflicts over living resources in independent India. It starts by addressing the conflicts between the state and hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, settled cultivators, and artisans. It then explores a conflict which is the consequence not of intensive forest use but its obverse. It refers to the massive network of wildlife sanctuaries, almost all of which have been established after 1947. The integration of tribals into a capitalist system of wage labour has generated its own set of conflicts. Despite successful struggles for wage increases, tribals continue to get only an infinitesimal share of the gains from commercial forestry. The pressures of demographic expansion and ecological decline have forced many forest-dependent communities to look for alternative modes of subsistence. With respect to both the hardware and software of forest resource use, the post-colonial period is marked by change and continuity.

This chapter focuses on forests and plants that starts by tracing botanical and forestry perceptions of the Himalayas and the uses made of them by local populations, and presents historically influential forestry-related narratives of ecological change. The role of plant-hunting (especially Joseph Hooker) in colonial narratives of territorial mapping, and economic botany is discussed. It then moves on to the villagers’ perceptions of change in the claims of control and use of the forest, the various contexts of value for produce from the forest, the ways in which plant life features in mythological accounts of the genesis of the world and humans, and in the characterization of the sociality of difference between natural kinds.

Devolved forest user group organizations prompted questions about villagers’ broader power relations. They tested whether devolution of rights of forest use genuinely transferred ownership to village communities, by applying institutional pressure points, and by attending to the fissures of sovereignty. An indigenous critique of the participatory rhetoric was revealed through looking at compliance with state-required forms of bureaucracy beyond simple resource logics, to see concerns for strategic dialogue with figures of power, including tributary distribution of hunted meat. Villagers want to know and understand the terms of potential reciprocal flow between themselves and state officials. Tamang villagers themselves can mobilize a set of narratives about the state as an integral actor in village history, and paint a picture of present and past village members who have served the state: as mukhiya (headman), as people who have served in the army, and as holders of political positions in the district capital.

This chapter describes the genesis and potential of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006. It begins by tracing the historical processes by which common forested landscapes customarily used by communities for multiple functions were classified as unifunctional ‘national’ forests, both before and after independence. While the overall forest reservation process often ignored the presence, occupation and complexity of forest use by diverse forest dwelling communities in central India, extension of centralized control over forest conservation also undermined more inclusive State laws that recognize customary use rights over land and forests. The labelling of forest dwelling communities as ‘encroachers’ on their ancestral lands generated persistent conflict which reached a flashpoint due to an overzealous interpretation of Supreme Court orders. The chapter explores the FRA’s potential of restoring the citizenship rights of forest dwelling communities while also democratizing forest governance in the process.