Terrestrial Environments and their Histories in Modern India

An International Conference at Yale � May 1 & 2, 2009

Room 105, Anthropology Department, 10 Sachem Street

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Over the last two decades contemporary 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 revived debates on food security and threatened small farms.  The reproduction of the Indian farm economy is in question, as distressed farmers cope with volatile commodity prices, soil depletion, water scarcities, and organized violence. The multiplication of joint forest management schemes and protected areas seemed to knit conservation bureaucracies and poor people into more complex relations of regulation and thwarted expectation, culminating in the Tiger Task Force, 2005, on the one hand, and the new Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, on the other. Resulting and escalated conflicts have hardened political stances.

Such contemporary crises and polarizations have to be understood in the light of environmental processes affecting land, biota and fauna in the twentieth century. And these processes were surely shaped by industrial and agricultural development as they concentrated crops, people, and pollutants in particular landscapes even as they transported humans, animals, and materials across others. And all this occurred, further, in the context of a burgeoning Indian democracy marked by the rise of regional and identity-based political parties, reconstituted federal relations between central and state governments, and the spread of environmental values through an increasingly wealthy and strident urban middle class that demanded a natural heritage consonant with its social and material aspirations. 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. These present and future challenges are best understood against the backdrop of past legacies.

At this conference we will examine, in particular, the entangled relationship between environmental issues, conservation science, democratic institutions, and macro-economic processes, in India. A series of papers will take up conflicts between livelihoods in land and conservation of land; human-animal relations in parks and elsewhere; and the ways in which these relations, in modern times, have been prefigured in a longer pre-colonial and colonial history of environmental and political processes delineating the contours of farm, forest, pasture, and wilderness in India’s river valleys, plateaus, and sub-montane regions. Along the way we are interested in exploring the impacts of mobility and settlement, science and technology, ideas of rights and justice, and values of nature love and conservation, as they 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.