ABSTRACT
The historiography of environmental history has by now established the truism that British forest policies and exercises re/shaped and altered the natural environments of the countries colonized by them. Grazing and monocultural agriculture in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa necessitated the clearing of native jungles and vegetation which in course of time led to soil salination, erosion and extinction of certain flora and fauna.1 Conservation of trees of commercial value for future exploitation further resulted in deforestation and extermination of indigenous forest rights. Extending agriculture and trade infrastructure often led to draining of swamps and damming of rivers. In this context, India was no exception. The British Forest Department in India, founded in 1864 by Sir Dietrich Brandis, the first Inspector General of Forests, was an organization which had two perspectives. On one hand, it emphasized on the preservation of trees having commercial relevance for colonial use while on the other it enacted laws to curb the indigenous rights of the rural communities to hunt, graze livestock, farm and resource use in the woodlands under conservation programmes. By the end of the last decades of the nineteenth century, forests in most parts of India were under the authority of the British Forest Department which implemented various laws of conservation and exploitation with the underlying principle of generation of revenue.
