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Colonialism and Environment in India Comparative Perspective
Jacques Pouchepadass
Although colonial rule throughout the world was accompanied and supported by exploitation of forests and environmental destruction, independence has not put a stop anywhere to these processes. Rather, the disruption of the relationship between local societies and their natural resource bases has continued in the worldwide movement towards modernisation. Instead of contrasting this situation with a mythical golden age of equilibrium betweensociety and nature, what is needed is a radical critique of capitalist expansionism, of which the colonisation of nature has been one of the major objectives. CURRENT anxieties regarding our dwin dling capital of biomass resources at the world level have brought to the fore the question of the relationship of rural societies with their forest environment. The social perception of nature has always been a central preoccupation of social anthropologists. But students of peasant societies have long considered the forest as of peripheral impor tance, probably simply because it was sit uated at the periphery of the cultivated space. Agrarian history, both western and non western, has up to now largely been a study of techniques, yields, appropriation patterns, taxation, commercialisation, social stratifi cation, peasant resistance. It has too rarely examined from a truly ecological standpoint the effects of land colonolisation, agricul tural and animal husbandry practices, hunt ing and gathering by peasants, and the func tioning and crises of agrosystems (except in the special case of famine).

The opening chapters of many books of agrarian history are geographical presentations of the areas of study which convey the impression that the natural setting of agrarian life is a time less framework of unchanging biophysical conditions. Any static conception of the relationship between human communities and their environment is of course mislead ing, as an agrosystem is usually the outcome of a long history of ecological disruptions and adaptations. As long as it functions, it necessarily remains in a state of dynamic and unstable equilibrium. In particular, the in terrelationship between agriculture and its forest ‘frontier’ is often ignored in these studies, or treated marginally. As a rule, the agrarian historian has left the forests where they were, on the distant horizon, or as dark wild patches in the midst of the humanised artificial landscape of peasant life and ac tivity. The origin of the word ‘forest’ is a late Latin word, Toresta’, most probably derived from the adverb ‘foris’, which means ‘outside’.1 In leaving the forest outside his purview, the agrarian historian in fact adopts the point of view of the state, or more accurately the point of view of his sources.

The conception of the forest by the peas ant himself was of course quite different. The accessible forest was a central element in the organisation of traditional agriculture, a sort of wooded extension of the cultivated space, often criss-crossed by pathways, and daily frequented by village people who came to graze cattle, to hunt, and to collect fuel, timber, litter, green manure, and all sorts of other vegetable produce which often con stituted important adjuncts to their diet or to theirsources of monetary income. Prompt ed by the current fears of an impendingworld ecological crisis and by the wide spread indictment of thoughtless deforesta tion, the agrarian historian is now reversing his perspective, and forest history has been developing rapidly over the last few years.My purpose here is to explore brietly the colonial phase of the history of Indian forests, and this in a comparative perspective. As everyone knows, it is in the tropical world that ecological devastation is most dramatic today. The biological wealth that is’being destroyed here is both the most abundant and the most vital to the future of the human species. And it is here that its destruction seems most difficult to control. The forests of the tropical zone entered for the first time into a phase of common history at the world scale when they were all brought under more or less simultaneous attack during the age of the capitalist expansion of Europe. The phrase ‘imperalism and the natural world’ has become paradigmatic these last few years for a new and growing range of historical problems and research. The details of Indian forest.history during this period are now being gradually unearthed from the forest records by historians.

I would like to review these data in the light of current general views on this new aspect of the history of European expansion.It is commonplace to say that, in the countries which underwent European colonisation, the colonial period normallyrepresented a very important phase from the standpoint of the destruction of the natural environment. However, let us not be overly Eurocentric here. This phase of destruction was not the first in history. The desertification of Mesopotamia, the depletion of the cedar forests of Lebanon from the time of the Phoenicians, the massive fellings in Roman North Africa, the extensive hill clearings in the Southern Maya Lowlands of Mesoamerica, the ecological decline of the classic Khmer empire, the over exploitation of forests and consequent en ergy crisis in Tdkugawa Japan, the almost complete denudation of China for agricul ture by its own peasantry, are only scattered dramatic examples of a general historical phenomenon, the gradual depletion of the world’s forest cover for the needs of agri cultural expansion and urban development. India, of course, has not been spared by this general trend’ and evidence is not lacking, for instance, on the impressive rate of forest clearance throughout the Gangetic basin during the medieval period. Also, consid ering what followed it in many countries, the colonial phase of environmental disrup tion has not everywhere been the worst. But it undeniably set in motion processes (eco nomic, demographic, social, administrative, legal) that stimulated the overuse of natural resources and have proved difficult to re verse. On the other hand, the colonial period was often marked, in the countries involved, by the inception of conservation policies, even though these policies reflected the needs of the state rather than any strong concern for the welfare of the local populations. The overall picture is thus dark, but not entirely black.

Colonial Factor in History of Environment
The historians of the 1960s waged a long war against the structuralist notion of ‘so cieties without history’ (or rather against the distinction which Levi -Strauss made betweenEconomic and Political Weekly August 19, 1995 2059cold’ and ‘hot’ societies, which was in fact misunderstood, historicity being mistaken lor history). A similar struggle might well have to be launched to combat the notion of ‘nature without history’. There is, after all, a connection between the two notions. Societies without a history, in the common erroneous interpretation of the phrase, were believed to have remained outside the mainstream of history because of their total immersion in the unchanging rhythms of a natural environment which was thought to determine them completely. While histori -482420-433148ans have rightly refused such an idea, we must also reject the idea that colonisation everywhere STUCK the first blow against natural stales of e^./’Mum which had remained IIHMV, since primordial times. The myth of primeval iiutMre is found everywhere and at all times. In Europe, mediaevalists long though! that the massive clearings of the ninth to the 12th centuries had been done at the expense, of forests which had been untouched until then, and they believed this on the basis of the me diaeval chronicles themselves. Now wherever precise archaeological enquiries have been carried out, they demonstrate that on the site of many of th’4s«’ medieval forests, there had been intensive human occupation during protohistorical or Roman times. Everywherein the tropical world, for accidental reasons such as the construction of roads, remains of very ancient (not infrequently neolithic) human occupation are found in the midst of supposedly virgin forests. Palynological and palaeobotanical studies of quaternary sediments within the dense forests of peninsular India show evidence of clearances and of the practice of agriculture from the beginning of our era It is common knowledge that the terai forests of northern India contain innumerable re mains of fortifications and shrines, of ca nals, of deserted village sites. We know, for instance, from the evidence of Chinese Huddhist pilgrims that the Gorakhpur for ests were I he site of nourishing towns before the fourth century, which lasted at least until the seventh century. In Sri Lanka, the forests of the dry zone, where by the beginning ol the colonial period only groups of hunters and shifting cultivators remained, were actually not more than five or six centuries old. They had succeeded,. after the 12th century, to a long phase of prosperous agriculture supported by a highly developed water-supply system. Vestiges of precoJombian agricultural practices arc found in the Mexican forests. Bantu expansion colonised many parts of the central African forest long before European colonisation. Historians have formed the hypothesis that the vast teak forests discovered by the Dutch in the centre and west of Java in the 17th century were the result of plantation carried out at the beginning of our era. In India.