ABSTRACT
The 1990s marked the watershed moment of environmental history of South Asia with the seminal work of Guha and Gadgil (1989, 1992, 1995 and 1997) who for the first time contested ‘colonial forestry as progress’, as depicted in the writings of the early colonial historians. They amplified the subaltern discourse on the exploitative nature of the colonial state and its rhetoric of ‘Scientific Forestry’.1 These narratives of colonial forestry were later contested by the seminal work of Grove (1995) and his contemporary Sangwan (1996) who debated Guha and Gadgil’s central theme on imperial
environmentalism and their notion of pre-colonial ecology as ‘Golden Ageist’2. Grove’s questions have found echoes in the work of Mahesh Rangarajan, who has raised questions on whether the continuation of traditional land use would have been more effective than the company department and the post 1857 regime in curbing deforestation for timber and other arable cultivation. In fact, Grove’s pioneering work on the rise of environmentalism in South Asia Green Imperialism (1995), shows the complex nature of the early conservation policy of the British in India which Guha and Gadgil had underplayed in their construct of ‘colonial forestry’.3 The ongoing debate on whether colonialism exploited or marked the beginning of environmentalism in South Asia’s colonies, according to Swami (2003), has rather sharpened the research agenda of the subcontinent’s environmental history. He essentially argues that the disenchantment between Guha and Gadgil and Grove’s work should not be seen essentially contradictory because each highlight a very important aspect of colonial forestry in India and enables a more complex and sophisticated understanding of colonial forest conservation than is otherwise possible.4
