Dr Sebastian Joseph presented a paper on ’Historiographical Engagements in India: A Symposium in Honour of Professor RS Sharma’ held from January 27th to 29th at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi titled HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL FORESTRY IN INDIA. Following is the abstract of his paper.
Colonial Indian forest historiography is a contested terrain, wherein the major arguments revolve round the ecological destruction happened during the British period and also over the claims of ecological prudence existed in the pre colonial times. As seen in other areas of Indian historiography, the debate was initiated by the Imperial administrative historians, who were top forest officials in British India, who on their part took a position that pre colonial and early colonial India witnessed ecological profligacy and things were set right by the British government after 1858.For the imperial forester/historian Pax sylvan was coterminous with Pax Britannica. Response from the Indian historians came late and it was only in the late 1970’s that they started challenging the earlier versions of the colonial administrative historians and this was mooted by the then ongoing debate over the new forest legislations set in motion by the independent Indian government, which reflected in it strong inheritance from the colonial forest policy. The major hypothetical argument, that colonialism was a watershed in the ecological history of the nation emerged during this time and remained as an anchoring sheet for many Indian forest (environmental) historians.
Cotextually, the Gadgil-Guha thesis, that there existed a harmony between the human and the non human world in the pre colonial days was not very well appreciated by the forest historians in India. They argued that forest destruction was there even in the pre colonial days, but its degree reached amazing heights in the colonial times owing to political and economic reasons. What was implicated in their arguments was that the colonial state was too repressive and alienated people’s right over the forests to a far greater degree than the earlier states who maintained a sort of symbiotic relationship with those communities dependant on forest resources. The response from the Indian historians, have not gone uncontested, and this time, the challenge is from a band of neo imperialist historians, who try to project the conservationist nature of the colonial rule in their writings, restricting their field of study to the early colonial administration. Regional forest histories are also emerging these days as the type of forests and the nature of human relationship with the natural forest eco system vary from place to place. Attempts were made by historians in presenting forest satyagrahas s as an integral part of a main stream Gandhian programme of civil disobedience. Indian forest historiography in all these respects enables a windowing into the country’s environmental history and it continues without question the real growth area of Indian environmental history.
