The more things change, the more they stay the same. A new book India’s Forests, edited by environmental historians Arupjyoti Saikia and Mahesh Rangarajan, which showcases both the deep continuities in the social ecology of forests from ancient times to present day, as well as the disruptions over this period, exemplifies this truism. India’s Forests represents exciting new work, based on both archival and field research in the realm of environmental humanities that helps us better understand nature around us.
India’s Forests points to the continuities in the ways forests have been used, governed and preserved over time. For instance, Kumkum Roy’s chapter ‘People, Produce and the Political’ based on research on the Arthashastra, shows the immense value that the rulers of the day put on forests. They clearly considered nature as an intrinsic part of human society, rather than as an external realm to be managed or protected. Talking of items described in the kupya, a term associated with nature in the Arthashastra, she says: “These lists provide an incredibly vivid picture of the varied resources available from what were designated as forests, and the importance assigned to them.” A very wide range of resources are recorded to be extracted from the forests and traded, including trees with hard wood, animal skins, fragrances, reeds, and even snake venom.
India’s Forests can also be seen as a treatise of sorts on human-nature interactions which are discussed in all their complexity and diversity, unpacking many layers and forms of human habitation and use. Roy’s work indicates that forests belonged within the complex social framework of Indian society in ancient times and therefore subject to the same fissures and inequalities.
India’s Forests reimagines the forest as a lived landscape, a working space where people make a living. For instance, Mukul Sharma’s work on sacred groves in Jharkhand ‘God of the First Class’ elaborates the role of sacred groves within the local culture, ecology and economy through time. As he writes: “Historically and culturally, the dominant symbol of sacred grove has been interpreted as an environmental treasure-home, a cosmological gravitas, a religious symbol and a foundational principle of tribal population.” Yet, digging deeper, Sharma demolishes the romantic view of sacred groves as a pristine and democratic space for preserving nature, a view that is prevalent among many conservationists. For instance, his work testifies to the social discrimination linked to gender, class and caste that continue to this day, but also documents the reconstitution of the symbol of sacred grove by people in response to changing political and social needs. Such field-based studies offer important insights into the ways forests are stratified, used and perceived in different cultures across India. While much has remained the same, a lot has also changed. Climatic patterns have shown fluctuations at the scale of centuries which could transform forests to grasslands and vice versa. Humans today number more than any other vertebrate species on the planet, by several orders of magnitude, with concomitant effects on nature and natural processes. The chapters in India’s Forests help us to understand several millennia of ecological change in the Indian subcontinent. Forests are shown to be dynamic entities in the face of both natural and anthropogenic drivers, which has many lessons for present-day ecologists. The forests we see today may be a product of long-term processes like evolution and those operating at more proximal scales such as dispersal, interspecies interactions and importantly, the human imprint. Recognizing such complex signatures on the land and water could be critical to asking useful questions and even developing valid ecological models in the Anthropocene.
In another case, Divyabhanusinh’s chapter ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ shows that the large mammal populations such as of the greater one-horned rhinoceros (rhino) and the Asiatic lion have been intensely managed since the 1800s. Such species were wiped out from large parts of their ranges in India due to the advance of human settlements and trophy-hunting, particularly during colonial rule. Yet humans have also been responsible for preserving many of these species, though they are now confined to tiny parts of their historic range. As the author says:
“That very few lions survived alarmed Junagarh state during the reign of Nawab Mahabatkhanji II (1851-1882) who ordered their strict protection in 1879, and the state notified strict rules for shikar in general in the succeeding year.”
The one-horned rhino was saved from almost certain extinction, believed to have been reduced to a tiny population of 200 animals in Kaziranga, Assam by the mid-20th century. A range of active measures including strict protection, and reintroductions to Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh and Manas National Park in Assam were implemented during the 1980’s. The large numbers of post-2000 CE mammalian reintroductions, such as of wild buffalo, tigers and swamp deer, from one protected area to another is only a continuation of this approach. Whether the reintroduction of these megafaunas brought back the ‘ecological balance’ is a moot point. But in terms of ecology, one can only imagine how the local extinctions of such species from most of their historic ranges may have irreversibly spurred grasslands and forests into new novel configurations, still little understood.
To be sure, humans have always wanted control over the natural world, and eventually tailored natural ecosystems to their own political and biological needs. This fact is exemplified today by extreme forms of manipulation such as zoos, safari parks, monocultural plantations and tourism facilities that increasingly ‘corner’ nature into managed landscapes. The relatively wild spaces such as PAs, representing fragments of natural ecosystems, may not preserve the key ecological processes that keep them alive and functioning over time. The long-term view of environmental change as amply demonstrated in India’s Forests, only confirms this speculation.
India’s Forests adds a rich dimension to our current understanding of nature and ecology. The fine scale of exploration and attention to detail, will be particularly useful for environmental researchers and students. Hopefully environmental scholars will also produce a similar volume on wetlands, rivers and coastal ecosystems too, that also have long histories of diverse human interactions, ranging from worship to destruction.
Ghazala Shahabuddin teaches ecology and environmental studies at Ashoka University and studies the many facets of ecological change and biodiversity governance in Indian forests.
Saikia A. & Rangarajan M. 2026. India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History. Viking India.