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Given the different streams through which academic research on environmental history has flowed, it is but natural that debates would arise on the topic and the first debate was on the topic that has been most focused on in Indian historiography – colonial forest policies and whether the Raj was a watershed moment in the environmental history of India or not. It is one of the key debates in the environmental history of India & it has shaped subsequent writing on the subject.

This debate has started with the book This Fissured Land which was co-authored by Dr. Madhav Gadgil and Dr. Ramachandra Guha in 1992. The main thesis was propounded in the aforementioned text which was refuted by Dr. Richard Grove in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (1994). Later this debate was carried forward in various other publications including K. Sivaramakrishnan’s Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (1999). Other publications which have carried the debate forward and synthesized the arguments include Dr. Ajay Skaria’s Hybrid Histories; Forests, Frontiers and Wilderness in Western India (1998), Dr. Ranjan Chakrabarti’s Ed., Situating Environmental History (2007) and Mahesh Rangarajan & K. Sivaramakrishnan Eds. India’s Environmental History; From Ancient Times to the Colonial Period (2V., 2012).

The main protagonists in this debate include Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha who fired the first salvo with their pathbreaking work This Fissured Land (1992) and other writings[1] which proposed the thesis that there was little or no interference with customary forest rights and practice in pre-colonial India. It was with the advent of British colonialism that there was a systematic exploitation of Indian forest resources, especially timber for shipbuilding and railways after which things went south and Indian forest cover was decimated on an unprecedented scale. 

Not only that in a chapter entitled “Conquest and Control” Drs. Gadgil and Guha have incorporated a sub-heading called “The Balance Sheet of Colonial History” which analyses the gist of the transformations the environment in India[2] had to go through under the British and in what spheres and processes.

In this chapter Drs. Gadgil and Guha have identified not only the familiar culprits – timber requirements of the Raj – as responsible for deforestation but also hunting or “shikar”[3] and the desire to shoot as many animals during a single hunt as possible. Secondly, there was an economic motive i.e., the development of tea, coffee and rubber plantations on what used to be the wilderness.

As far as the usual suspects i.e., timber exploitation for shipbuilding and railway sleepers[4] goes This Fissured Land is at its analytical and argumentative best when it holds forth on the wanton destruction of Himalayan forests in Garhwal and Kumaon where desolate treeless landscapes were created and such was the recklessness of timber-cutting that thousands of trees which were felled were never taken away to be used as they were in inaccessible locations.

Not only was this happening in the Himalayas but in South India too: “One of the most vivid descriptions of the transformation in the ecological landscape wrought by the railways is found in Cleghorn’s work, The Forests and Gardens of South India. The Melghat and North Arcot hills, formerly crowned with timber, were ‘now to a considerable degree laid bare’ by the insatiable demand of the railways.”[5]    

Ideas about forest and wildlife conservation, scientific research into it and legislation about it produced its own form of colonial control on nature which sought to make government property out of all the forests “in a single stroke”[6]. Since time immemorial the people of the subcontinent had gathered wood and other forest products subject to community restrictions. However, the Raj declared all that illegal. Interestingly the colonial forest department and its successor in independent India remains the largest landowner among all government bodies.      

The arguments about the exploitative and, it must be emphasized; disruptive ecological watershed of the Raj was contrasted in This Fissured Land with the supposedly harmonious character of human-nature relationship in the pre-colonial period. The pre-colonial period was a time, according to this argument, when endogamous caste-based groups kept to their demarcated ecological niches which balanced out human exploitation of nature and didn't let things spiral out beyond a point. Vulli Dhanaraju points out that they “romanticized”[7] human-nature interactions in the context of Indian environmental history.

To this “golden-age” theory Richard Grove has replied in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Richard Grove has questioned the Gadgil-Guha Thesis by propounding the idea that it was observation of desiccation in colonial territories controlled by them that prompted European colonial rulers to turn to conservation of nature by the establishment of scientific research facilities and botanical gardens.

Thus, according to Dr. Grove, it was genuine environmental and humanitarian concern that motivated colonial rulers. This is where the Gadgil-Guha Thesis misses the point that there were innovations and complexities in colonial rule and their response to various problems including environmental ones were just as complex and innovative. Dr. Grove has also pointed out an imbalance regarding Indian historiography on environmental history – there is an overemphasis on the post 1857 period to the neglect of what happened during the rule of the East India Company.

In his words: “Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that there is a need to question the more monolithic theories of ecological imperialism, which seem to have arisen in part out of a misunderstanding of the essentially heterogeneous and ambivalent nature of the workings of the early colonial state. Many scholars have remained unaware of the extent to which many colonial states were peculiarly open, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, to the social leverage and often radical agendas of the contemporary scientific lobby at a time of great uncertainty about the role and the long-term security of colonial rule.”[8]

Moreover, the notion that the intervention and control of the pre-colonial state was at an ideal or acceptable level and the peasant or forest-dependent people were interfered with only at a minimal extent has been questioned by Dr. Grove too. In his words there exists historical proof that “...periods of relatively rapid change did take place in pre-colonial times, particularly in connection with periods of military expansion by aspiring new state builders. Above all, very extensive early deforestation took place at a variety of dates in the Indus and Ganges River basins and in the semi-arid zones.”[9]

Thus, the points raised by Gadgil-Guha were answered ably by the Grove’s colonial-environmentalism theory[10]. If the former thesis proposed then Grove’s antithesis disposed. This debate was joined with aplomb by Ajay Skaria, Mahesh Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan among others. Their synthesis of the Gadgil-Guha and Grove theories has balanced out the debate till date.

Ajay Skaria and Mahesh Rangarajan have pointed out a discrepancy in the above debate; the simple polarities presented by two sides of the debate may be misleading and the situation was not as cut and dried as that. Ajay Skaria in Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wilderness in Western India has pointed out the fact that while desiccationist discourses did play a part in colonial forestry and conservationist initiative, it was also decidedly a part of the broader civilizing mission of colonialism in general and the Raj in particular in the Indian context. 

Dhirendra Dutt Dangwal has taken up Ajay Skaria’s cue by pointing out how the desiccationist discourse was used by the Raj as an excuse to extend their control over central Himalayan forests in what is today Uttarakhand.

Mahesh Rangarajan has opined that the desiccationist discourse had only a limited impact on colonial forestry and was only one of the many influences that shaped early Indian forestry as pursued by the Raj. Dr. Rangarajan has also pointed out the truth in Grove’s assessment of the pre-colonial state’s intervention in forests and their responsibility in deforestation in specific areas due to military matters and economic policies.

For example, there was a reward announced by the 14^th century Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad Bin Tughluq for peasants who would clear the forest for conversion into agricultural land. When the forest cover presented hurdles to military campaigns it was ruthlessly burnt or cut away by rulers like Tipu Sultan in South India and by the Sikh rulers of the Punjab in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

To be sure, there were such things as sacred groves[11] from ancient times in India and an afforestation effort in early modern history by the Talpur Mirs of Sindh in their territory in the Indus River area. However, the so-called golden age myth about pre-colonial India appears to have been effectively busted.

While Drs. Gadgil and Guha have proposed that the state intervened in only a limited way in the lives and livelihoods of peasants[12] before the colonial era, they have also contended that the village community had control over resource management. That is because life was lived on a community basis in pre-colonial times.

Dr. Grove’s counter to this is that the agenda of deforestation set in pre-colonial times was proceeding unabated and had reached significant levels even before the arrival of the British. What happened during the Raj was simply a culmination of pre-existing trends in modern times.

Dr. Rangarajan has critiqued Dr. Grove’s position on the basis that colonial rule represents not only a qualitative but also a quantitative change for communities and forests in India. This is due to the fact that the scale of state intervention and control over Indian resources and people unprecedented. On top of that the entire resources and people of the subcontinent were subject to trans-national or colonial control which involved forces beyond South Asia.

Ajay Skaria’s study of the Dang tribal region in Western India (Gujarat) bears out the truth of Rangarajan’s argument. Hitherto left to their own devices, the tribal regions were opened up to colonial exploitation remotely by colonial masters who used intermediaries to do the field-work for them.

Dr. K. Sivaramakrisnan in Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India has raised important points germane to the debate. His work contains a critique of both Gadgil-Guha and Grove. Firstly he has criticised the way in which the western or, specifically, American paradigm has been applied mechanically to the understanding of Indian environmental history.

In his words: “In making this simple separation between nature as infrastructure and society as superstructure, Guha follows a dominant strand of US environmental history which analyses nature and culture in ways that rarely examine the cultural politics of constituting the two categories.”[13]

Again, he says: “So, rather than ponder the question of a distinctive south Asian environmental history, I would argue that the Bengal case illustrates the need for less determinist and linear environmental histories of the sort that are now being written in the USA.”[14]

Therefore, following Sivaramakrishnan’s theories, we can say that there exists a nature-culture dualism in South Asian environmental historiography in addition to an ecological watershed model in context of the Raj. These are the two major preoccupations within this genre. Dr. Sivaramakrishnan holds that there is a need to think out of the box created by these paradigms.

Secondly, Dr. Sivaramakrishnan has pointed a fundamental assumption or notion that may not be helpful towards a clearer understanding of not only environmental but also general history of India and South Asia. The categories of colonizer and colonized are not as clear as they might appear as far as environmental history goes.[15] For example the landlords[16] of South-Western Bengal could be either conservationists or exploiters of the forest much to their own grief. There were similar ambivalences within peasants, bureaucrats and professional foresters.

In Dr. Sivaramakrishnan’s own words: “...the Bengal case emphasizes that changes indicated by terms like deforestation, territorialized resource control, and agricultural intensification were not linear or predictably in conformity with a single dominant pattern through most of the colonial period.”[17]

The above debate may or may not be over yet, but in our humble opinion the clinching arguments are ones offered by those proposing a synthesis of the Gadgil-Guha thesis and Grove antithesis. Both the Gadgil-Guha thesis and the Grove antithesis propose simple binaries like ‘everything changed after the British came’ and ‘nothing changed after the British came’. According to us, this may well be replaced with an alternative understanding of the topic like ‘something changed but other things may have presented a picture of continuity while the whole thing presented itself in new and more modern forms with the times’.

1) Chakrabarti, Ranjan Ed., (2007), Situating Environmental History, New Delhi, Manohar Publishers & Distributors 2) Dhanaraju, Vulli, (2017), A Textbook of Environmental History of India, Delhi, Dominant Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd., Revised Edition 3) Gadgil, Madhav and Guha, Ramachandra, (2000) The Use and Abuse of Nature incorporating This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India and Ecology and Equity, New Delhi, Oxford University Press 4) Grove, Richard, (1995), Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 5) Guha, Ramachandra, with a new preface by the author and three new critical essays by Baviskar, Amita, Martinez-Alier, Joan and Sutter, Paul, (2017) The Unquiet Woods; Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas, Ranikhet, Permanent Black, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Third Impression 6) Sivaramakrishnan, K., (1999) Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press

[1] For example, The Unquiet Woods
[2] By environment we are referring not only to the actual wilderness but to colonial forest legislation as well
[3] Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, The Use and Abuse of Nature, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, p 142
[4] At that time wooden planks were used as railway sleepers and concrete ones were developed much later
[5] Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, The Use and Abuse of Nature, Op. Cit., p 121
[6] Ranjan Chakrabarti Ed., Situating Environmental History, New Delhi, Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2007, p22
[7] Vulli Dhanaraju, A Textbook of Environmental History of India, Delhi, Dominant Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd., Revised Edition, 2017, p 67
[8] Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, USA, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p 7
[9] Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism, Op. Cit, P 386
[10] The nomenclature is ours
[11] To which Ramachandra Gadgil & Guha have devoted an entire sub-section in Ecology and Equity calling the concept older than the Buddha because he was born in one such grove in Lumbini
[12] Including, of course, forests
[13] K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999, p 14
[14] K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, Op. Cit., p 15
[15] He has based this on the Bengal context specifically
[16] Zamindars and other landowning categories
[17] K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, Op. Cit., p 3