Panel Organizer:

Dr Laxman D. Satya - University of Pennsylavia, Lock Haven, USA

Abstract

From time immemorial the forest dwellers, pastoral nomads, and agriculturists had locally managed the environmental resources of the Indian Subcontinent. Their interaction had in fact defined the history of this region. Centuries of co-existence produced customary rights with physical checks and balances on resource use. This ecological system also absorbed the shock of natural calamities that the Indian subcontinent experienced from time to time.

However, the situation changed drastically during the British colonial period. For the first time, the land and environmental resources were commercialized to serve British imperial needs. The colonial agriculture and forest policies imposed restrictions on customary rights, lang use, and access to natural resources under the rubric of 'scientific management', 'conservation and preservation', etc. Consequently, for the first time in South Asia's environmental history, the interaction between forest dwellers, pastoral nomads, and agriculturists was severely ruptured. The demands of imperial railways, cash crops, and commerce put tremendous pressure on the environmental resources and the people who depended on it. Consequently, wehen calamities hit, the people had little to fall back on. Millions perished in the famines and droughts of the 19th century while the British imperialists strictly adhered to the 'laissez-faire' policy of governmental non-intervention. While the colonial forest department was particularly created to service the needs of the British imperial railways, the same failed to alleviate hunger and death. The paper will conclude with popular responses to the impact of British imperial policies and institutions.

Abdul Thaha, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Famines and Forest Policy in Hyderabad State
 
India from the 18th century onwards had experienced a series of famines recurring at very short intervals bringing untold suffering and mortality.  During famines common people used to depend on natural resources like forests for sustenance. With the introduction of land and forest policies by the British colonial administration, centuries old dependence of people on forests was disrupted.  Consequently, when calamities like famines hit the country, the people had little to fall back on natural resources like forests for sustenance. Even the princely states, which comprised one third of the Indian subcontinent, were also insensible to the needs of the people during the times of crisis, had adopted the British land and forest policies. Thus, the country as a whole experienced the disruption of centuries old harmonious relations between man and nature.
 
The Hyderabad State, then the biggest princely state, was too subject to varied degrees of famines.  Except for some passing references on famines, majority of studies on the Hyderabad state have neglected the impact of State forestry on the traditional methods of survival by the common people during famines.  The present paper examines the history and nature of famines in the Hyderabad State in the backdrop of introduction of state forestry with the British colonial influence.  It studies the traditional survival strategies of peasant and tribal communities during famines prior to the introduction of state forestry. It analyses how the state forestry had curbed people's access to natural resources like forests during famines. It examines that to what extent people depended on forests at the time of crisis and the State response to the demands of the people during famines. It concludes how state forestry made its people much more vulnerable to natural calamities like famines. 
 
Thus, the study of famines and forestry in the native states like Hyderabad would help understand the regional variations in the reconstruction of ecologically oriented Indian history.
 
Neena Rao Naropa University, Denver, USA
British Forest Policy, Construction of Railways, It's Impact and Peoples' Resistance in Colonial Maharashtra
 
It would not be an exaggeration to say that history of colonial state forestry in Maharashtra is history of social conflict; one that of struggle for sources of livelihood of the rural masses.
Traditionally, Indian society has been primarily agrarian with a very close dependence on its natural resources like forests. Not only the forest dwelling tribal communities, but the entire rural population depended on forests in several ways for the sustenance. The socio-political structure and the societal arrangements by way of various customs and traditions were flexible enough to accommodate various competing claims over these resources.
 
However, the establishment of the British Forest Department and their polices created an unprecedented impact on peoples lives in rural India. The crucial watershed in the history of British colonial forestry was undoubtedly the building of the railway network, which was both the means for creating a market for British goods as well as an outlet for the British capital as an avenue for investment. The early expansion of railways resulted into a savage assault on Indian forests.
 
Branding of the rural population as destructive, shortsighted and inefficient combined with the assumption of their so-called technological and scientific backwardness gave the British administration moral justification to undertake this process. Natural outcome of this was alienation of the local population from their traditional means of livelihood and manifestation of their misery and frustrations into several forms of resistance; such as individual protests, communal protests and open revolts. Sometimes in this resistance the rural population was also aided by the urban intellectuals and social reformers with their more sophisticated means of struggle that were familiar to the British officials. This paper will therefore analyze people's resistance in the context of colonial forest policies and institutions that threatened their survival.  The scope of this study is limited to that part of Maharashtra which was part of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency.
 
Lokesh Kodira Monnappa, Mangalore University, Mangalagangothri, India
Plantations, Forests and Indigenous Societies in colonial South Asia; Patterns of Resource Extraction and their Impact on the Nineteenth century Coorg
 
The European capitalists made a beeline to South Asia when the British gained political control over the entire region in the nineteenth century. Coffee and tea plantations were one of the major areas where these fortune-hunters invested their money and reaped rich dividends. The colonial state   created an elaborate system of resource extraction and allocation determining  the access to  ‘nature's wealth'; introduction of commercial crops, intensive forest clearance for raising mono-crops, cheap terms for European planters to buy land, attempts to integrate the  tribal and indigenous people  in to this vast  network of exploitation, ‘import' of immigrant labourers and their  settlements, linkages with the western markets for extracted resources, scant regard for  environmental and ecological issues etc., were some of the characteristic features of this unique mode of exploitation and extraction  in South Asia. The indigenous tribal and non-tribal elements were passive participants in the whole process of deforestation and depletion of natural forests and the uprooting of tribal habitats under colonial economic expansion.
 This paper deals with the emergence of the coffee plantation industry in Coorg, a hill district perched on the summits of the Western ghats and its impact on land and people. The colonial state encouraged the capitalists as well as indigenous elites by framing liberal waste land rules to grant ‘waste' lands. It ‘dereserved' or ‘disforested' vast stretches of   reserves areas, which greatly affected the tribals. Mindless destruction caused the entry of a peculiar shrub called ‘lantana' and stem diseases which destroyed hundreds of acres of coffee land. However  the mode of exploitation  and extraction   and its impact on  forests, greenery, water sources, composition of air, temperature of air and ground, humidity of air and soil,  rainfall, etc.,  made the ‘environmentalists' among the colonial administrators to re-examine  their policies towards  the plantation growth. There was a predicament as to how reconciliation should be brought about between these two diametrically opposed interests.  This paper also looks at the colonial mode of exploitation and the contradictions in its policies which were peculiar to Coorg as compared to the other parts of South Asia.