International Conference on Terrestrial Environments and Their Histories in Modern India

On May 1-2, 2009, the South Asian Studies Council will present an international conference on Terrestrial Environments and their Histories in Modern Asia. The conference will take place at the Department of Anthropology (10 Sachem Street) and participation is by invitation.

Over the last two decades India has witnessed renewed conflicts in its terrestrial environments as the boundaries of farms, forests, wild lands, and rural industrial zones are redrawn. Food crises and diminished productivity in agriculture have threatened small farms, reviving debates on food security. The future of the Indian farm economy is in question, as distressed farmers cope with volatile commodity prices, soil depletion, water scarcity, and organized violence. The proliferation of joint forest management schemes and protected areas has entangled conservation bureaucracies and poor people in complex relations of regulation and thwarted expectation. The confusing nature of environmental politics can be seen in the dichotomy between the 2005 Tiger Task Force and 2006 Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. The escalated conflicts have hardened political stances.

Such contemporary crises and polarizations must be understood in light of environmental processes that affect land, biota and fauna. These processes have been shaped by industrial and agricultural development as they concentrated crops, people, and pollutants in particular landscapes while transporting humans, animals, and materials across others. All of this has occurred amidst great political change in the burgeoning Indian democracy. The past few decades have seen the rise of regional and identity-based political parties, reconstituted federal relations between central and state governments, and an increasingly wealthy and strident urban middle class that has adopted environmental values.

The conference will examine the entangled relationship between environmental issues, conservation science, democratic institutions, and macroeconomic processes in India. A series of papers will examine conflicts between livelihoods in land and conservation of land, human-animal relations, and how these relations have been prefigured in a longer pre-colonial and colonial history of environmental and political processes. Along the way the conference will explore the impacts of mobility and settlement, science and technology, ideas of rights and justice, and values of conservation. These factors took shape in colonial empire, worked their way into social democracy, and remain embedded in the tension between enterprise and entitlement that seems to be at the heart of liberalizing India. Given its ecological diversity and population, India would have mattered in any case on the global scale: this is even more so given its economic ascendancy.

The first panel of the conference, on the afternoon of May 1, will discuss Premodern States and their Agrarian Environments. This panel will be chaired by William R. Pinch, History Professor at Wesleyan University. Divyabhanusinh Chavda, an independent researcher from Jaipur, India, will present �Lions, Cheetahs and Others in the Mughal Landscape.� Chavda has published two books on cheetahs and lions in South Asia. Kathleen Morrison, Anthropology Professor at the University of Chicago, will speak on environmental history in South Asia. The discussant for the panel will be Professor Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale, whose research interest include agrarian history in medieval Europe.

The second day of the conference will open with a panel on Science, Nature, and Empire, chaired by Professor Mahesh Rangarajan of Delhi University. Brian Caton, Professor of History at Luther College, will present a paper on animal breeding in 19th century Punjab. Dan Klingensmith, History Professor at Maryville College, will discuss the relationship between nature and politics at the end of the Raj. Michael Lewis, Director of the Environmental Issues Program and Professor of History at Salisbury University, will be the discussant for the panel.

Nature and Agrarian Life will be the focus of the third panel of the conference, chaired by Yale History Professor Peter Perdue. Nandini Sundar, Sociology Professor at the Delhi University and Visiting Professor at Yale, will discuss the papers of Asmita Kabra and Arupjyoti Saikia. Kabra, also from Delhi University, will present a paper titled �Conservation-induced Displacement of Adivasis and the Challenges of Agrarian Livelihood Restoration.� Saikia, a Professor of History the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati, will discuss agrarian conflicts in colonial Assam.

The final panel of the conference, humorously titled �Animals, Officials, and Other Subalterns,� will be chaired by Nancy Jacobs, Professor of History and African Studies at Brown University. Ghazala Shahabuddin, an independent researcher currently holding Adjunct Faculty position in the School of International Service at American University, will present �The �Tiger Crisis� and the Response: Reclaiming the Wilderness in Sariska Tiger Reserver, Rajasthan,� and Meena Radhakrishna, Professor of Sociology at Delhi University, will present �The Hunter and the Hunted: Nomadic Communities and Indian Conservation Strategies.� The discussant for these two papers will be Amita Baviskar from the Institute of Economic Growth.

The workshop is sponsored by the South Asian Studies Council and generously supported by the Rustgi Family Fund for South Asian Studies, the MacMillan Center, the Stanley T. Woodward Lectureship, the Isaac H. Bromley Lectureship, and the Charles Gallaudet Trumbull Lectureship.