ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the management of the grasslands of the Nilgiris in southern India in the first half of the twentieth century, aims to complicate this discourse by revealing the variety of competing interests and perspectives which shaped official policy with respect to this one area. By looking at the specific forms and content of the idealism that marked environmental concern, the chapter draws out how the tension between utility and beauty played a role in the colonial history of the provincial Indian nature state. It focuses on the conversations between colonial bureaucrats, discernible both in calls for legislating the Downs as a national park and in decisions to merely maintain the tract as a park. Tethered as it is to geography – the Nilgiris and the Madras Presidency – and period – 1930 to 1950 – these conversations reveal the extant discourse in India that attributes either strategic or environmental intent to the nature state.
