Details of Module and its Structure

Module Detail

Subject Name Sociology

Paper Name Ecology and Society

Module Name/Title Environmental History in India: Part II: Ecology and Society in Colonial India

Pre-requisites

Objectives

Keywords Scientific Forests, Veterinary Science, Colonial Modernity

Structure of Module / Syllabus of a module (Define Topic / Sub-topic of module)

Summary This module looks at environmental history in India during the colonial
times, a time period (1750-1947) that has been under much focus by
environmental historians

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof. Sujata Patel Professor, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator Himanshu Upadhyaya Asst Professor, Azim Premji University,

Bangalore
Content Writer/Author Himanshu Upadhyaya Asst Professor, Azim Premji University,
(CW) Bangalore
Content Reviewer (CR) Prof Savyasachi Professor, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi
Language Editor (LE) Prof Savyasachi Professor, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi
 In last module we discussed the mode of history writing that is called Environmental History and
examined relationship between nature and human beings in pre-colonial India. In this module we will
discuss 200 years period (1750-1947), when the sub-continent first witnessed East India Company
reconfiguring the natural resource use intensity and subsequently under the British Rule.

Rangrajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2014: 02) talks about how “the overarching perspective on
India’s environmental history sought to draw a sharp line in terms of the impact of colonial (or British
imperial) economic policies, legislation and executive measures”1. They voice an opinion that “partly due
to the context and conditions of its flowering, much of India’s environmental history – at least till the year
2000 or so – focused on forests”. They suggest that forests to an environmental historian “were and are
contested spaces, with different sets of humans crowding the stage or the forest floor, seeking to place
their imprint on the landscape in different, mutually contradictory ways”. To list a few, “the imperial ruler
and the aesthete interested in wildness as natural beauty or evidence of divine presence, the resource
gatherer or rentier, those who felled trees or trapped animals, grazed cattle or collected honey, gleaned
wood or set fire to create and cultivate swidden plots: these were conflicting, overlapping, intersecting
set of actors”.

Rangarajan and Sivaramkrishnan (2012: 05) brings under academic scrutiny “simple linear
narratives of landscape transformations in the face of growing demographic pressure or state demands
for resources and revenues”. They express surprise that “some of the most thoughtful synthetic histories”
such as Richards and Tucker (1983), Richards and Tucker (1988) and Ludden (1999) “find it difficult to
shake off such linear tendencies”. Environmental history anthologies that appeared in late 1980s mostly
brought under the spotlight, the 1870s and 1880s and after, in order to narrate the tales of “the enormity
of the shifts in landscape”. Environmental history scholars taking inspiration from Arnold and Guha (1995)
were taken in awe by “the ways in which forests, covering over half a million square km of land,” were
brought under governance “by 1904, and managed by foresters” as a magnificently unprecedented
moment. It has been argued by Rangarajan and Sivaramkrishnan (2014: 05) that “the first major
anthologies on nature and culture in the 1990s, drawing mostly on work done in the 1980s, had looked
mainly at the imperial impact on state-driven changes, or alternately at the multiple hues of the
encounters of nature, the Orient and colonialism”. They argue that anthologies that started to appear
since the mid-1990s had presented “a more nuanced treatment of the ways in which the colonial state
had engaged with varying degrees of success in making agrarian landscapes”.

We also find that environmental historians have often presented the Indian Forest Act, 1868 by
the British and their leaning towards German school of ‘scientific forestry’, as the reasons for effecting
restrictions on communities that accessed grazing in forests. They also point out at how colonial rulers
who couldn’t understand the rhythms of pastoral mobility and perceived these groups as threats of law
and order, had labeled them as Criminal and Denotified Tribes2. Irfan Habib suggests that even as the

1
They point out that “the first major anthologies on nature and culture in the 1990s, drawing mostly from the
work done in the 1980s”, had continued to remain preoccupied with “the imperial impact of state-driven changes,
or alternately at the multiple hues of the encounters of nature, the Orient, and colonialism”.
2
Such a view gets articulated in several writings within environmental history stream. For one instance of these,
see Purnendu Kavoori’s paper, ‘Environment, Development and the Crisis of Pastoral Legitimacy’, wherein he
describes how after the consolidation of the British rule, the colonial government and its policies on ‘scientific
forestry’ and organization for revenue extraction from peasants perceived pastoral mobility as a threat to law and
order and hence gave the sedentarisation process a distinct boost by applying a highly problematic social
available data don’t lead us to generate an exact forest map of the time around 1800, there is much
evidence that even in the upper Gangetic basin there were still forests. Quoting from 1837 text, Forests
in Southern Districts of AwadhI, Habib states that “such forests were situated within the agricultural zone
and generally served the neighbouring rural inhabitants, supplying them with fodder, firewood and
timber” and “similar was the case with pockets of forested country in the Peninsula where such isolated
jungle tracts bordered the cultivated zone.

Describing the fate of the Himalayan and sub-montane Terai forests, those from the north-eastern
parts and in Western Ghats as well as other dense forests in central India, Irfan Habib (2011: 131) talks
about how there arose “a brisk trade in timber that was logged by local communities and sold at
neighbouring marts”. He also refers to the practice of “floating down the logs thus obtained from the
Himalaya forests through Punjab rivers by middle men or merchants”. For environmental history centred
on forests, Irfan Habib recommends besides this Fissured Land and Nature, Culture, Imperialism; Sumit
Guha’s work, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1991, which gives a comprehensive account of
several forest connected communities from present day Maharashtra, southern Gujarat and central India.
He also underlines a work published by a colonial author William Wilson Hunter in 1897 titled, Annals of
Rural Bengal, which presents the study of Santhals in present day Jharkhand state.

Drawing upon the work of Sumit Guha (2001: 58-60), Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2012:
07) argues that “the larger landscape was the reverse of what exists today: islands of intensive cultivation
dotted a vast ocean of forest”. They propose that “on a closer look, forest as a single unified category was
in fact a mosaic of semi-natural landscapes with old growth and scrub jungle interspersed with tree-
covered savannah and secondary growth”. When the country passed under British occupation, the East
India Company’s officials framed no particular policy in regards to forests, and these were being looked
at as landscapes to be depopulated by wild animals – in the early years, company officials actually declared
rewards for hunting down the big cat – and to be cleared in order to facilitate colonization of them by
extensive cultivation. Irfan Habib (2011: 132) beings to our attention a prediction voiced by Donald Butter
that “once Awadh came fully under British control, all the minor forests would vanish there” and reminds
that this was found to be quite well founded.

Irfan Habib (2011:113) also alerts on the narrow understanding that consider ecology under
colonialism as a matter mainly of what happened to forests and its traditional users. He stress upon the
need to understand and study the colonial experience as impacting all manifestations of natural resources
and natural resource dependent lives ranging from soil, irrigation, pastoral resources, wildlife and public
health.

Next to forests, what has occupied the continued engagement from environmental history
scholarship on colonial India is riverine resources and perennial irrigation. As we discussed in first module
on environmental history, history of irrigation canals in India is a millennium old phenomenon, but canals
built during Mughal period were inundation canals that relied on monsoon floods. However, as
Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2011: 06) reminds us “canal construction on a vast scale gave British
India arguably more acreage than any other political entity on earth”. Irfan Habib (2011: 127) draws our

evolutionary yardstick that “conflated mobility with vagrancy and settlement with permanence”. See, Kavoori,
Purnendu (2005) ‘Environment, Development and the Crisis of Pastoral Legitimacy’, in Kazunobu Ikeya and Elliot
Fratkin (eds) Pastoralists and their Neighbours in Asia and Africa, Senri Ethnological Studies No 69, National
Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.
attention to late colonial period and specifically to years following 1858, when “the British government
began to show some interest in construction of canals, notably for growing crops required for export, such
as cotton and wheat, which especially needed to be watered by artificial means”. He adds that “by 1925-
’26, canal and other government-funded works served 11.8 percent of the entire net sown area of the
British India” and “of areas artificially irrigated, the canals served just over 51 percent, but wells generally
owned by peasants still accounted for nearly a quarter (24.2 percent) of the irrigated area, and tanks were
used to irrigate another 13.1 percent.

By mid-1990s, the environmental history scholarship had started to engage with the role of
perennial irrigation not merely as an input in cultivation, but as also an instrument of re-configuration of
social infrastructure through setting up of canal colonies in Punjab and Sindh 3. Environmental history
scholars also looked at how colonial experts viewed mighty rivers of eastern part of India and their
monsoonal floods and called the Koshi River, “sorrow of Bihar”. Rohan D’Souza looks at the emergence of
the idea of Multi-Purpose River Valley Development Projects in colonial Orissa4. While much of the
environmental history scholarship has also been alert to the negative impacts of perennial irrigation, such
as soil degradation, interruptions to natural drainage, giving rise to disease vectors such as malaria
spreading mosquitos5, and water logging, they appear to have ignored the impact of perennial irrigation
canals on the cattle breeding tracts. In 1907, writing about Montegomery and Sind breeds of cattle, J.
Mollison and L. French (1907:254-155) alerted:
“A vast extension of canal irrigation has taken place in neighbouring districts across the Ravi river,
and many good cows have been taken and sold by their owners into the new Chenab Canal
Colony…The breeding of Montegomery cattle is likely to suffer unless special precautions are
taken to maintain the purity of the breed, because the extraordinary prosperity of Chenab Canal
Colony across the Ravi, has diverted the attention of the nomadic “Bar” tribes to the profits
derived from agriculture when assisted by canal irrigation. It is also to be remembered that the
whole of the “Bar” tracts of the Montegomery district are destined within the next few years to
receive irrigation from the projected Lower Bari Doab Canal”6.
Similarly, presenting ‘A Note on Cattle Breeding’, W. Smith, Imperial Dairy Expert had described
to colleagues at a meeting of the Agriculture Committee of Bombay Presidency (Poona, 1927) how “the
quality of milch cattle available in India, including in Punjab, but excluding Sindh, had become much worse
than those available some 26 years ago”, when he had just arrived in British India to work with newly
opened Military Dairy Farms department. Amongst several reasons that Smith highlights in that note was
“the spread of irrigation canals”. Ten years after Smith voiced such an opinion on how extension of
irrigation with perennial canals had adversely affected the cattle breeds, N. C. Wright (1937: 60-61)
reiterated this views by stating:
“At present there is a very general impression that the introduction of irrigation rapidly leads to
the deterioration and even to the virtual extermination of good breeds of cattle. This, for example,

3
See Agnihotri, Indu (1996) ‘Ecology, Land Use, and Colonisaton: The Canal Colonies of Punjab’, Indian Economic
and Social History Review, No 33, pp. 37-58.
4
See D’Souza, Rohan (2006) Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India: 1803-
1946; Oxford University Press, Delhi.
5
See for an illustration of this, Whitcombe, Elizabeth (1995) ‘The Environmental Costs of Irrigation in British India:
Waterlogging, Salinity and Malaria’, in David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha (eds) Nature, Culture, Imperialism,
Oxford University Press, Delhi.
66
Molison, J. and L. French (1907) ‘Montegomery and Sindi Breeds’, Agricultural Journal of India, Vol II, No iii, pp.
251-256.
 is true of Sindh and of certain tracts of United Provinces. If full advantage is to be derived from
irrigation, I am convinced that farming in irrigated areas will have to be modified to allow the
inclusion of mixed farming system in which both crop and animal husbandries play their part”7.
Describing the impulse of “the mission of writing a nationalist environmental history”, and “the
clarity provided by a moral imperative”, Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2012: 08) states that this
impulse led environmental historians during the early phase to undertake the task of adding to “the record
of colonial infamy the evidence pertaining to the despoliation of nature and destruction of tribal culture
carried out by the British”. However, we need to underline fact that all colonial officers didn’t share the
High Modernism and condescending attitude towards natives. Some agriculture and animal husbandry
experts, such as James Mollison, E. J. Bruen, D. Clouston and W. Smith spoke and wrote with much
appreciation about the skills of nomadic cattle breeders. A survey that Fraser Darling penned while
heading Commonwealth Animal Genetic Bureau starts with an acknowledgement that “Throughout the
history of colonial development, and particularly in that of British colonisation, we find that settlers and
governments alike have attempted either to raise animals of the homeland in the new territories or to
improve the existing stocks and conditions to a state comparable with that of the mother country. Both
of these aims have been attended by some spectacular successes and some conspicuous failures. It would
seem that only too often has the appraising eye of the stockbreeder with his European standards of
excellence made him follow dangerous paths which a surer knowledge of the relations between
environment, structure, and function would have prevented. However, there is growing a new knowledge,
not only of animal's economic destiny, but of the varying nutritional conditions and the metabolic
responses of different animal types to these, and of the fundamental genetical knowledge lying behind
traditional breeding practices. As yet we can hardly measure the significance of the work of such men as
Rattray in West Africa and Evans Pitchard in Sudan, but their practical anthropological research must be
of considerable value”8. However, in India, as late as in 1991, Shereen Ratnagar pointed out that there
existed only a few ethnographies of the various animal-rearing groups in the country9.

These remarks by a scholar who went on, to remain not just in service of the empire being the
director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Genetics, but had his moments of conflicting viewpoints
with British imperial powers, and carved out human ecology school of academic scholarship, suggest that
environment history of colonial India must also try and make a sense of how was that experience similar
to the experience that other colonies underwent and how different was it from the experience that other
Dominions landscapes underwent in last two centuries. Similarly, Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan
(2014: 13-16) argues out a case for viewing colonial India in a larger geographical frame.

7
Wright, N. C. (1937) Report on the Development of the Cattle and Dairy Industries of India, Government of India
Press, Simla.
8
Darling, F. Fraser (1934) ‘Animal Husbandry in the British Empire’, Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, Vol 82,
No 4257, pp 816-837.
9
Madhav Gadgil had initiated some work in this direction, along with the anthropologist K. C. Malhotra, when they
published in the journal Human Ecology, a long essay titled, ‘Ecology of a Pastoral Caste: Gavil Dhangars of
Peninsular India’, in the year 1982. Also see, Ahmad, Akbar (1983) ‘Nomadism as Ideological Expression: The Case
of the Gomal Nomads’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol 17, No 1 and Balland, D. (1991) ‘Nomadism and
Politics: The Case of Afghan Nomads in the Indian subcontinent,’ Studies in History, Vol 7, No 2. It was only two
decades after the publication of that essay by Madhv Gadgil and K. C. Malhotra that we come across an edited
volume on Nomadism in South Asia by Aparna Rao and Michael J. Casimir (OUP 2003).
 It is also somewhat surprising that while environmental history writing has dwelt upon the
colonial policies on ‘scientific forestry’ and wildlife, there aren’t as many writings in the early phase of
environmental history in India, on the domestic animals and how the colonial policies on ‘scientific
livestock management’ and interventions in the field of ‘veterinary medicines’ impacting peasant lives. In
1983, while reviewing Raymond Crotty’s book titled Cattle, Economics and Development, which remains
till date an important contribution to the discipline of Livestock Economics, Schneider (1983: 226) had
argued that “the special role played by livestock and their special relation to agricultural operations in
socio economic systems throughout the Third World has been neglected long enough”. Around the same
time as environmental history was taking a shape within Indian academia, Hanumantha Rao (1988: A-142)
had very candidly admitted – although speaking to his economist colleagues, and not historians – that
“agricultural economists in India have been interested essentially in the economics of crop production
and comparatively less in livestock economics, their interest in rural ecology has been negligible”. The
national seminar where he pronounced this opinion was annual conference of Agricultural Economics in
1987, where we witness for the first time a session titled ‘Impact of Agricultural Development on Ecology
and Environment’. Even after these reminders, pastoral concerns started to articulate in environmental
history only around mid-1990s10 and it took around 15 more years, for a study of political ecology of cattle
management in colonial central India to appear in print as books and as doctoral dissertations11.

Narrating the impact of colonialism on non-human world, Rangarajan and Sivramakrishnan (2014:
22) states that “in the early years of colonial rule, the growing British demand for horses and other draught
animals as well as animals used for military purposes was mainly met by adapting available Indian
practices”. They add that “over the course of nineteenth century, the British breeding activities for horses
and cattle expanded, and it was increasingly justified in the name of scientific management and
development of veterinary medicine”. Presenting the history of a colonial institution through Government
Cattle Farm, Hissar; Caton (2013) shows how this farm was started in response to failures to breed
adequate number of horses at the Bengal Stud, and the realization that bullocks had been effective as
draught animals in India for a long time12. Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2014: 19) also reminds us
that “the curbing of nomadism, of itinerant groups in general, the crackdown on swidden cultivators, the
harsh punitive measures against the small but prominent hunting communities as they were often
labelled have been investigated in various parts of British India”.

The arrival of railways and printing press in colonial India had far reaching consequences on the
role both played in re-configuration of the relation between village and town and the same has been
captured in the writings of thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore, M. K. Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar and
several others. However, even as these thinkers critiqued the relationship between village and town,
communities in some villages on river banks threatened to get displaced due to a hydropower dam were
organizing themselves to mount an anti-displacement – and to some extent anti-dam – protest. Rajendra
Vora in his book, The World’s First Anti-Dam Movement: Mulshi Satyagrah 1920-1924, trace the

10
See for example, Bhatacharya, Neeladri (1995) ‘Pastoralists in a Colonial World’, in David Arnold and
Ramchandra Guha (eds) Nature, Culture, Imperialism; Oxford University Press, Delhi.
11
See for example, Laxman, D Satya (2004) Ecology, Colonialism and Cattle: Central India in the 19th Century,
Oxford University Press, Delhi and Caton, Brian P. (2003) ‘Settling for the State: Pastoralists and Colonial Rule in
Southwestern Punjab, 1840-1900’, PhD diss., University of Pensylvania.
12
See Caton, Brian P. (2013) Writing History of a Colonial Institution: The Case of the Government Cattle Farm,
Hissar; NMML Occasional Paper, New Series, No 38, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
emergence of what to him and Madhav Gadgil appeared to be “Narmada Bachao Andolan’s forgotten
predecessor”. Early twentieth century was also a crucible within which arose the debates from those who
were part of colonial state and administration as well as those from Indian National Congress and anti-
colonial block, about what is nature and what is development. Reflecting on those moments, Rangarajan
and Sivaramakrishnan (2014: 25) states:

“Driving by a growing and overt commitment to what David Ludden identified as India’s
Development Regime, the colonial state in the early twentieth century had come to view its
legitimacy in India as derived in good measure from its ability to promote economic development
through mastery of natural resources like forests, agricultural lands, and productive domesticated
animals. But by the start of World War II a critique was brewing within the colonial state and its
civil society of Anglophile Indians. Most often they offered documentation of failed efforts to
contain the furies of natural calamities, and reminded the state of the disasters unleashed by
badly designed landscape engineering or land utilization, be it in the form of rivers turned or soils
eroded by increased extraction of the bounties they had to offer. Figures like Albert Howard and
Wiliam Wilcox became emblems of this skepticism that combined both a critique of colonial state
policy and the attitudes to nature they expressed.”

Talking about the need to pay careful attention to continuities as well as major breaks with the
past, Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2012: 14) reminds us that in their own work, they have fluctuated
between the two. They state that “ruptures did occur as when the imperial state was in the high gear,
mainly in the last decades of the nineteenth century” and that similar experience had underwritten much
of the thinking “when India’s developmental democratic state launched social engineering on a vast scale
in the Nehruvian era”. They remind us that both these experiences “constituted major shifts with
profound ecological consequences”.

In the third module on environmental history, we would discuss those years of last century
starting from Nehru’s speech ‘Tryst with Destiny’. The last module would try to trace what contemporary
– not in the sense of our decade or the past one, but a past that was not a century away – history writing
tells us about post-colonial India’s walk along the path of Development and what implications it had for
Indian environment and well as Indian version of environmentalism. In some sense, we would come back
to revisit the emergence of this mode of history writing – environmental history – as an effort to theorise
the environmental movements of our times and trying to trace their intellectual inspirations in past.