India's Forest

We often imagine forests as still, untouched spaces. Green, silent, distant. Something we visit, admire, and leave behind. But India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History book by Arupjyoti Saikia and Mahesh Rangarajan unsettles that comfort. It shifts the lens entirely, revealing forests not as passive landscapes, but as places deeply entangled with power, history, and human lives.

Because forests, as the book insists, have never been empty.

Long before they were mapped, they were lived in woven into the everyday rhythms of communities who understood them not as resources, but as relationships. This balance, however, was fractured under colonial rule. Forests were reimagined as assets—timber for railways, land for expansion, territory to be controlled. And in that transformation, the people who belonged to these spaces were recast as outsiders within them.

What emerges is not just an environmental history, but a political one.

The book carefully traces the tension between conservation and survival—a tension that continues to define forests even today. Protection, in its institutional sense, often comes with boundaries, restrictions, and exclusions. But for those who depend on forests for their livelihood, survival cannot be separated from access. The idea of a “protected” forest begins to feel complicated, even contradictory.

And yet, within this conflict, there is resistance.

The Chipko Movement stands as a quiet but powerful reminder that environmentalism does not always come from policy or authority. Sometimes, it comes from those who have the most at stake. Villagers—especially women held onto trees, refusing to let them be cut down. Their act was not symbolic. It was intimate, immediate, and deeply political. It redefined what it meant to protect nature not by distancing humans from it, but by asserting a different kind of belonging.

What lingers after reading this book is a shift in perception.

Forests no longer feel like neutral spaces. They feel layered marked by histories of control and resistance, shaped by decisions that extend far beyond ecology. They carry the weight of everything that has been taken, protected, fought for, and remembered.

Perhaps the most striking realization is this: forests are not just about nature. They are about the ways we choose to see, use, and value the world around us. And in that sense, they are not silent at all. They are constantly speaking through the lives they sustain, the conflicts they hold, and the histories they refuse to let fade.

-Sneha

Mindset Barriers to Girls’ Education

Meeting Purpose

To read and discuss a chapter on changing mindsets for girls’ education. 

Part II - Finding Antimbala from Every Last Girl by Safeena Hussain. Brinda is the narrator, so you will find her name in the notes as you read the author’s autobiography.

Key Takeaways

• Storytelling is the most effective tool for mindset change. It must be authentic, locally relevant, and delivered by an “insider” to resonate.

• Relatable stories build trust and demonstrate value. Vikram’s personal story of his educated sister becoming an Anganwadi worker showed education as a practical “dowry” against health shocks, shifting a father’s perspective.

• Local influencers are essential for community ownership. Vijaylakshmi’s tactic of having the headmaster counter a cultural objection publicly secured community consensus and on-the-spot admissions.

Topics

The Challenge: Mindset Barriers to Girls’ Education

• The core problem is a mindset that devalues girls, not just poverty or geography.

• The goal is to change this “school of thought” to secure girls’ fundamental right to education.

Case Study 1: The Outsider’s Failure (Prachi)

• Brinda’s direct, rights-based appeal to Prachi’s mother, Sarita, failed.

• Why it failed:

  • Brinda was an “outsider” (from Mumbai) with no local rapport.

  • The approach was transactional (“talking at”), not relational (“listening to”).

  • The appeal was abstract (rights), not practical (value).

• Key finding: Prachi’s own reason for leaving school was bullying over a hearing impairment, a fact Brinda only learned by listening after the formal pitch failed.

Case Study 2: The Insider’s Success (Kirti)

• Vikram’s approach with Kirti’s father, Ram, succeeded.

• Why it succeeded:

  • Vikram was an “insider” (local, spoke the dialect) who built rapport by discussing farming.

  • He used a relatable, authentic personal story about his educated sister.

  • The story framed education as a practical “dowry” against health shocks, a value the father understood.

• Outcome: The father requested the enrollment form, a key turning point.

Case Study 3: Community-Wide Change (Village Meetings)

• Problem: A young man publicly stated that girls’ education leads to “love marriages” and “short clothes.”

• Solution: Vijaylakshmi had the headmaster, a respected local influencer, counter the objection.

  • Tactic: The headmaster confirmed that his own educated daughter was not “spoiled,” reframing school as academic learning rather than cultural values (taught at home).

  • Outcome: The community laughed, tension diffused, and the headmaster offered on-the-spot admissions.

• Problem: Parents cited household chores as the reason girls must stay home.

• Solution: Sarpanch Madhuri used a local success story.

  • Tactic: A girl who had returned to school recited the English alphabet, making her grandfather (Hitan) visibly proud.

  • Outcome: Hitan publicly committed to keeping his granddaughter in school, creating a powerful peer-pressure ally.

FATHOM AI-generated notes, E. & O. E.

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History | Environmental History of India, Ecology, Colonial Impact and Forest Communities by Arupjyoti Saikia and Mahesh Rangarajan

ABOUT THE BOOK

India’s Forests brings together essays by some of the country’s leading scholars with a fresh view of nature and history. These reappraisals of Indian forests and their many lives in past and present matter more than ever today.

Born of years of sustained reflection, the essays here view forests not as passive unchanging backdrops to the past but as living, contested spaces.

Forests were shaped and in turn deeply influenced by power, culture and society. They could mean very different things to different people who often were in contest over meaning as much as control of the space or the resource.

The volume spans from prehistory through ancient and early modern India into the present. It is also alive to the impact of the colonial era while tracing the changing fortunes of tribal and hill peoples.

They are ecological lifelines and sites of legend, memory, and scientific knowledge. Material remains and life cycles of animals and plants matter, so too do social and literary imaginations.

Forests have been continually redefined through conflict, negotiation, and care. Attentive to the changing meanings across time and place, the book asks us fundamental and unsettling questions: what are forests for?

India’s Forests will inform as well as stimulate thought for all who are concerned with the fate of forests now as much as about the country’s past.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arupjyoti Saikia is a professor of history at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He held the Agrarian Studies Programme Fellowship at Yale University, and visiting fellow positions a Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research spans across the economic, political and ecological histories of Assam. His published works include Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826 to 2000 AD (2011), The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (2019) and The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942–2000 (2023).

Mahesh Rangarajan is professor of history and environmental studies and chair of the HDFC Archives of Contemporary India at Ashoka University in Haryana. Previously, he has taught at Cornell University, University of Delhi, Krea University and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. His notable works include Fencing the Forest (1996) and Nature and Nation (2015). He has edited the Oxford Anthology of Indian Wildlife (1999) and Environmental Issues in India (2007). His co-edited works include Shifting Ground (2014) and At Nature’s Edge (2018).

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