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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