ABSTRACT
Some ideas about the past, and the narratives built from them, are so pervasive that they have almost disappeared as analytical objects. These historical narratives are nevertheless powerful, structuring scholarship across a range of disciplines and activism across a range of political positions. This chapter considers some narratives about forests in South Asia, accounts with signicant contemporary implications despite claims to represent the distant past. One such sylvan tale is that all of India was once covered in forests, a primeval condition consistently degraded through time, but with an acceleration of loss following the introduction of modernity, colonialism, or Islam. All good stories contain at least an element of truth, and these are no exception. Indeed, one might argue that the power of narratives lies in both their structure and their content-they feel right and they contain some nugget of fact, comfortably conrming what we thought we knew. Because taken-forgranted environmental narratives come to be so on the basis of both evidence and form, I undertake the somewhat perilous business of considering both.
