Shifting Ground

SHIFTING GROUND

People, Mobility, and Animals in India’s Environmental Histories

Mahesh Rangarajan & K. Sivaramakrishnan

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Typeset in Minion Pro 10.5/13 by SPEX Infotech, Puducherry, India 605 005 Printed in India by … CONTENTS

Acknowledgements v i i

Contributors i x

1. Introduction: People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History 1 MAHESH RANGARAJAN AND K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN 2. Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation 39 KATHLEEN MORRISON 3. From Eminence to Near Extinction: Th e Journey of the Greater One-Horned Rhino 65 SHIBANI BOSE 4. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 88 DIVYABHANUSINH vi Contents

5. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 109 JULIE HUGHES 6 . Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents: Animal Breeding in Nineteenth-Century Punjab 132 BRIAN CATON 7. Making Room Inside Forests: Grazing and Agrarian Confl icts in Colonial Assam 155 ARUPJYOTI SAIKIA 8. Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj: Environmental Management and Political Legitimacy in Late Colonial India, 1919–47 180 DANIEL KLINGENSMITH 9. How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas: Confl icts over Animal Sacrifi ce in Uttarakhand 204 RADHIKA GOVINDRAJAN 10 . Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 228 VIKRAMADITYA THAKUR 1 1 . Th e Tiger Crisis and the Response: Reclaiming the Wilderness in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan 252 GHAZALA SHAHABUDDIN Select Bibliography 2 7 3

Index 2 9 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Th e ideas presented in this volume fi rst took shape in a meeting that we convened at Yale University in April 2009 with generous support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the South Asia Studies Council. We are grateful to Kasturi Gupta, Barbara Papacoda, and Marie Silvestri who made all the arrangements for the conference and the Department of Anthropology for provid- ing additional support, including the pleasing venue for the two days of presentations and deliberations. At that meeting the papers that were presented, some of which are now much revised and included in this book, were greatly benefi ted by comments from a variety of discussants including Amita Baviskar, Charu Gupta, Nancy Jacobs, Michael Lewis, Peter Perdue, William Pinch, and Nandini Sundar. Th e following year we resumed our discussions at a workshop organized during the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston, where work presented by Julie Hughes and Arupjyoti Saikia joined the larger group of papers that had by then begun to emerge as a viable set of essays for this volume. We are grate- ful to the American Historical Association for the fi nancial support that allowed several participants to attend the Boston workshop. Th e invigorating discussion that emerged at the workshop con- vinced us that a volume representing largely new work would indeed emerge and would well complement earlier volumes that we had viii Acknowledgements already compiled from previously published classics and seminal contributions to the fi eld of Indian environmental history. We remain thankful to the authors who have contributed to the volume and numerous energetic interlocutors who came to the named meetings and exchanged ideas with us as we revised papers and wrote our own introduction to the volume. As we prepared the book, we relied on the research support of several students at Yale University, including Radhika Govindrajan, Aniket Aga, and Sahana Ghosh. Th eir toils have brought this work to completion in a timely and polished fashion. Anonymous readers for Oxford University Press gave valuable suggestions that assisted a fi nal round of revisions. Each of us has gained in immeasurable ways from the wider moral and material support of our respective institutions but also from our colleagues, students, and staff . Mahesh would in particular like to thank the Head of Department and all members of the Department of History, University of Delhi, and the Chair, Fellows, and staff of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Sivaramakrishnan would like to place on record debts to colleagues in the departments of South Asian Studies and Anthropology at Yale. A special word of thanks also to our families and friends and especially to Geetha and Saroj (Bala).

Mahesh Rangarajan K. Sivaramakrishnan New Delhi, March 2014 New Haven, March 2014 CONTRIBUTORS

Shibani Bose has taught at Miranda House, University of Delhi, and is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of History, University of Delhi. Brian Caton is associate professor of History at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, USA. He has published extensively on the history of Punjab and the Sikh community. Divyabhanusinh is the president of WWF India, a member of the Cat Specialist Group, Species Survival Commission, World Conservation Union (IUCN), and a member of the National Board for Wildlife, Government of India. He is also the author of Th e End of a Trail: Th e Cheetah in India (1995) and Th e History of Asia’s Lions (2005), and the editor of Lions of India (2008). Radhika Govindarajan is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. Her interests lie in the fi elds of human–animal studies, environmental anthropology, religion and community, agrarian stud- ies, and the anthropology of the Himalayas. She is currently revising her Yale University sociocultural anthropology dissertation entitled ‘Beastly Intimacies: Human–Animal Relations in India’s Central Himalayas’, based on 18 months of research in Uttarakhand, as a book. x Contributors

Julie E. Hughes is assistant professor of history at Vassar College, where she also teaches courses in Environmental Studies. She is the author of Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013). Her current research interests focus on the interplay between social, political, and natural categorizations and hierarchiza- tions of people and animals in colonial South Asia. Daniel Klingensmith is professor of history at Maryville College. He is the author of ‘One Valley and a Th ousand’: Dams, Nationalism and Development (2007). He is currently working on a project on transnational environmentalisms from 1914 to 1945. Kathleen D. Morrison is the Neukom Family Professor in Anthropology and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the historical ecology of Southern Asia, especially changes in agriculture, land use, and environment in southern India. Th is work integrates paleoenvironmental analysis, archaeology, and the analysis of texts and architecture. Particular research interests include the development of elite cuisines, colonialism and imperial- ism, Holocene hunting and gathering, and the political and biological consequences of irrigation and land use transformations. Mahesh Rangarajan is director, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and former professor of modern Indian history, University of Delhi His recent books include the co-edited two- volume India’s Environmental History (2012), Environmental History as if Nature Existed (2010), and Nature without Borders (2007). He has a forthcoming book entitled Nature and Nation, Essays in Environmental History. He chaired the Elephant Task Force for the Government of India, 2010 and was member of the Forest Advisory Committee 2008–12. Arupjyoti Saikia is associate professor of history at Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He received his PhD from the University of Delhi. He has authored Forests and Ecological History of Assam (OUP, 2011) and A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900 (Routledge 2013); apart from these he has contributed articles in edited volumes and journals such as Indian Economic and Social History Review, Contributors xi

Studies in History, Indian Historical Review and Journal of Peasant Studies. A regular writer of prose in Assamese, Saikia was the recipient of the post-doctoral fellowship at the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University during 2011–12. Ghazala Shahabuddin is an independent researcher based in Delhi. She works on ecological issues at the interface of human society and biodiversity conservation in India and South Asia. She has a PhD in conservation biology from Duke University (USA) in 1998 in which she studied the ecological processes involved in but- terfl y extinction in a fragmented landscape in Venezuela. Ghazala has worked and published extensively on habitat fragmentation, bird ecology, community-based conservation, and conservation-induced displacement. She is currently working on the biology of people-man- aged landscapes in the Central Himalayas and the Aravalli Hills. In 2010, her book Conservation at the Crossroads: Science, Society and the Future of India’s Wildlife was published by Permanent Black. She was formerly on the faculty at the School of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University, Delhi. K. Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asian Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, professor of international and Area Studies, and co-director of the Program in Agrarian Studies, at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes: India’s Environmental History (2012), volumes 1 and 2; and Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability (2013). Vikramaditya Thakur is a postdoctoral fellow at the Inequality and Poverty Research Program, London School of Economics, UK. His Yale sociocultural anthropology PhD thesis entitled ‘Unsettling Modernity: Resistance and Forced Resettlement Due to a Dam in Western India’ was a study of the resettlement of villages aff ected by the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Maharashtra–Gujarat border. Introduction 1 People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History

MAHESH RANGARAJAN KALYANAKRISHNAN SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

Social Contexts of Environmental History

How our view of India’s environmental history has evolved refl ects the epochal changes in our times. Th ere have been many shift s in the intellectual milieu; the ecological landscape and its scientifi c analysis have seen dramatic change; and the wider political climate in India and the world at large since the fi rst full-length monograph on India’s environmental history was published in 1989 has altered quite sub- stantially.1 Within a year of that book’s appearance, India saw the exit of the last single-party government with a clear parliamentary major- ity at the national level. A deep-seated economic crisis led to a more explicit shift in macro-economic policy in the country. 2 In the early 1990s, still fresh from the environmental battles of the 1980s, even a reformist government did not envisage stimulating growth without environmental values being given a prominent place in the imagined path to prosperity.3 2 Shift ing Ground

Scholarship was in step with wider changes in environmental consciousness. Th e year 1989 also saw a book-length ecological study of the largest land animal in India, the Asian elephant.4 Gender- sensitive critiques also became prominent, whether they examined political economy or knowledge systems. 5 Th e same span of time, a year later to be exact, witnessed the gathering of forces for and against the dams on the Narmada, in central India, as the issue of displace- ment came to centre stage.6 Th ere was also a small shift towards (a very partial) resource-sharing regime in government forests.7 Th e 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. In common with the broad outlook of the Citizens’ Reports on the State of India’s Environment, the fi rst of which was issued in 1982, scholars sought to posit self-reliance, renewable forms of biomass, and inter- mediate technologies against a centralized, urban-oriented growth model. It is no coincidence that Th is Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India by the duo of an ecologist and a historian was pub- lished around the same time as Towards Green Villages by two inde- fatigable journalist-campaigners and writers. Such an avowal of the local and the alternative had a wider logic and appeal.8 Th e former book, a seminal work, helped to critically unpack and subject to scru- tiny custodial systems of resource use, control and management, as in forestry, agriculture, and water systems. Looking back, it is clear that the 1980s was a time of ferment in more ways than one. The growth rate moved from 3–4 per cent, dubbed as retrograde and slow by the late Professor Raj Krishna, to a healthy 5 per cent a year.9 Th e resultant pressures on the environment in geophysical, ecological, and biological terms made it imperative to ease the resource crunch. New proposed legislation to limit access to forests for tribals and other dependent peoples led to an alliance of civil rights activists, ecologists oriented to social justice, and tribal organizations, whose mood was captured well in an exceptionally well-researched pamphlet dated April 1982: ‘Defend the Rights of Tribals’, the sub heading proclaimed, ‘Oppose the Forest Bill’. Th ree years later, bowing to protests by primatologists, ecologists, and a strong popular science movement in Kerala, the Union and state gov- ernments set aside the proposed hydel power project in Silent Valley.10 Introduction 3

Yet, by the decade’s end, multipurpose dams on the Narmada valley had become the site and symbol of a major controversy, bringing together an array of forces on either side. By this stage it was evident that a diverse set of elements was at play and no two-way polarization could do justice to the unfolding events. Agro-industrial capital and a strident regional nationalism were as crucial in pushing for the dam as engineers or investors, and opponents ranged from those anxious about post-displacement uncertainty to others who questioned big dams per se.11 Similarly, crises in mega fauna conservation, as with emblematic animals like the elephant and the tiger, also showed fi s- sures and cracks of a new sort.12 Even those who agreed that they ought to be protected and secure could now not agree on how best to go about this.13 By this time, the older, broad alliance of the 1980s had come apart, with former allies favouring mutually contradictory approaches to issues as diverse as big dams, small and statist parks, and community control. 14 In recent years, the intensity of confl icts and the clamour for alter- natives have only deepened. Such divisions have grown more acute, especially in the phase from 2003 onwards that saw a higher rate of economic expansion than ever before, well over 7 per cent a year. Th e issue of a rights-based approach as opposed to easing regulations to allow for more, faster growth has been more controversial aft er the enactment of the Forest Rights Act 2006.15 Th e latter enabled both hard-won victories as on the issue of bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills, Orissa, and greater defeats as in the siting of a major steel mill in a coastal area in the same state where there were rival claims, signifi cantly by non-tribal cultivators. 16 Mega engineering projects such as the now aborted river interlinking and dams across the Himalayas, especially in the east and northeast, have also been issues of controversy, with new epicentres of contestation, as in the Brahmaputra valley.17 Th e Andaman and Nicobar islands, India’s gateway to the Moluccas and South East Asia, have been in the news with issues of tribal survival and endangered endemic bird species. 18 Conversely, fresh crises about faunal decline have led to federal level reports that sought to address livelihood issues to a greater extent than in the past. 19 Th e polarities have not vanished but median spaces have also become clearer, even if they remain fragile and on tenuous ground. 4 Shift ing Ground

Clearly, the larger picture in a more globalized India, one with expanding regimes of legally enforceable rights, is substantively at odds with the picture in the 1980s. Much of what is contained in this volume will not illuminate this shift in the environmental debates of the last three decades. But it will present new evidence and analysis on the historical processes by which people, animals, and social or physi- cal mobility had consequences for the environment and for ideas of nature, its conservation, or protection. Case studies dealing with the vast and complex period of the second millennium CE will indirectly engage the scholarly and public debate and its shift s, since the 1980s, by refl ecting on how a deeper and more subtly interpreted ecological history does inform contemporary environmental politics and beliefs. In the imperial era, there is little doubt that the resources, labour, and wealth of India were key to the rise and consolidation of Pax Britannica from the late eighteenth century and until the mid-twentieth century. One view is that Indian natural and human resources will play a similar role in the US-dominated global order, with deeply malign consequences for ecologies and cultures.20 On the other hand, pro- globalization writers see new opportunities for a resurgent Asia. 21 Ye t a wider sense of history may suggest other, more nuanced, outcomes both within and beyond India’s borders. We turn here to cases that we hope will allow the formation of just such a sense of history, driven as much by concerns with political economy and demography as it is by interpretations of culture, values, and the politics of nature. 22 One reason why this is both possible and important in India is not hard to see: this is a country with a remarkable degree of politi- cal and ecological diversity that is industrializing in a democratic frame. Hierarchies are in turmoil due to the impact of democratic transformations. It may not have always been evident at the time but the 1990s marked a major shift in Indian politics, with diverse cur- rents becoming more evident at the regional and national levels than ever before. Higher voter turnouts and a greater turnover of govern- ments at state and federal levels, the ascendancy of both Hindutva or cultural nationalism and diverse regionalisms, the assertion of once-subordinated castes, tribes, and communities, and the women’s movement—all made politics less predictable if more fascinating. Th ese shift s have taken longer for scholars to assimilate and acade- micians to study. In this new century, it is a good time to ask how Introduction 5 we ought to rethink our environmental pasts. In moving beyond the standard imperial and nationalist frames, and also in rejecting unlinear narratives of progress, the early work left a major mark. But new work is now underway that seeks a diff erent periodization of the historical past, and pays greater attention to how that past is deployed in contemporary confl icts which have been aggravated by the stress on natural assets and political fabric created by recent prosperity and vaulting aspirations among a rapidly expanding Indian middle class.23

Footprints, Hoof Prints, and After

Th e fi rst major anthologies on nature and culture in the 1990s, drawing mostly on work done in the 1980s, had looked mainly at the impe- rial impact of state-driven changes, or alternately at the multiple hues of the encounters of nature, the Orient, and colonialism. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a more nuanced treatment of the ways in which the colonial state had engaged with varying degrees of success in remaking agrarian landscapes. Th e transformations of forest, culti- vated arable land and pasture, or river front and valley fl oor were less complete than they had seemed, not only due to fi erce contestation but also due to the very complexity of ecosystems about which admin- istrators knew far less than they thought.24 Critical views of local societal contexts found them internally fi ssured, with multiple layers, not easily amenable to anthropologi- cally informed categories such as ‘shift ing cultivator’ or ‘artisan’. States were not monolithic and societies were oft en fractured from within. Th e multiple interfaces of both have been a major preoccupation of subsequent scholarship. In this iteration, it would be crucial to connect the fate of the forest or the changing views of nature and its wealth to the wider agrarian and political setting. 25 C o n t e s t i n g who ought to govern a nation-state or a region increasingly entailed debates over how to harness the waters of a river, where to site a min- ing project, and whether or not the coast, marsh, or mountain had to be transformed and by whom. 26 For now, it was clear in the way agrarian environments were sought to be reintegrated in a more holistic way, with the forest and cultivated arable land being seen in conjunction with each other. A fi eld abandoned due to high revenue or warfare that menaced 6 Shift ing Ground the cultivator and his cattle alike could be overgrown and revert to scrub or jungle. Wild animals could and do cross fences and barriers to raid crops even as villagers track them to hunt for meat or tusks, skin or claws. Itinerant animal-keepers or traders link settled culti- vated regions in river valleys across mountain or desert with wares such as salt or grain. Recent works reinforce the ecological dimen- sion of such linkages familiar to historians or anthropologists. In a fascinating paper, ecologist Renee Borges shows how tomato vines need dry twigs to be trained onto, and their incessant removal from a forest otherwise protected by custom deprives a pollinator of its breeding ground. Dung collection for sale to coff ee plantations earns dry-land farmers on the forest edge a year-round fl ow of cash, even as the domestic ungulates compete with wild ones for grazing and browsing. 27 It was such phenomena that informed the idea that those agrarian environments were better seen in terms of rules, resources, and representations. In turn, these environments and their associated institutions needed to be conceptualized at not only the national but also the regional level. 28 To recognize the fl uidity of boundaries between ecological zones and perceived land cover and landform was to acknowledge new perspectives in ecological science, notably those of disturbance, resilience, and adaptation. But we would like to argue that a corre- sponding realization led to greater attention upon the ways in which perceptual categories are imagined. To understand the ways in which nature was redefi ned it was essential to step beyond political ecology to look at cultural categories and aff ective communities as areas of contest. Not only issues of self-interest or the political economy of profi t but also questions of contested identities grew more central to the story. Ecological nationalisms need to be historically located: what seem to be rooted resistances to metropolitan encroachments may in practice be much more complex. 29 As Peter Boomgaard evocatively recounts, describing people and animals in the Malay Peninsula, animals and their landscapes were visible as artefacts of ecological processes that might merit protection or terrains to be conserved. But they also always took invisible forms as ghosts, ancestors, deities, and repositories of virtue and quality that individual and social groups claimed as their national or regional or ethnic characteristic. 30 Th is is a topic that we will see richly explored in several essays in this volume. Introduction 7

Well-grounded cultural histories of mega fauna showed a series of complex relationships and representations at work, with changing aesthetics and forms of leisure being crucial in shaping the worldview of dominant groups.31 In the fi erce and continuing contests over waters, forests, coasts, marshes, and coral reefs, there are many ways in which tradition as well as science are both divided and malleable. Given such a set of shift s, it is useful to ask how the longer-term engagements with history have also had to change. It seems the divides are not as sharp as they once seemed. It is equally evident that fl uidity and interstices matter more through long and short stretches of time. Th e contests for space, power, wealth, living, and producing meaning in the lived landscape have oft en been intense, and there is and continues to be a great diversity of outcomes and processes. It is to this aspect of the project that we now turn with greater attention to the history of Indian environments before the advent of modernity or colonial rule.

The Longer View

Despite the major insights that existing scholarship has delivered in what is already a very well-developed fi eld of Indian environmental history, it is still necessary to promote more sustained and engaged dialogue that straddles diff erent eras (such as pre-historic, ancient, medieval, and modern), all the more so because many historians and sociologists of modern India oft en view the past as a kind of tabula rasa. Excellent works such as Environment and Empire in 2007 and Imperial Encounters in 2012 accomplish much by way of tracing the complex connections of British imperialism and ecological pro- cesses. But they hardly even glance at let alone critically engage with the longer-range histories of the lands or peoples even in terms of perspective, let alone rigorous treatment.32 Partly due to the context and conditions of its fl owering, much of India’s environmental history—at least till 2000 or so—focused on the forest. Th ese were and are contested spaces, with diff erent sets of humans crowding the stage or the forest fl oor, seeking to place their imprint on the landscape in diff erent, mutually contradictory ways. Th e imperial ruler and the aesthete interested in wildness as natural beauty or evidence of divine presence, the resource gatherer 8 Shift ing Ground or rentier, those who felled trees or trapped animals, grazed cattle or collected honey, gleaned wood or set fi re to create and cultivate swidden plots: these were confl icting, overlapping, intersecting sets of actors. Th e forest could be re-natured in a host of ways; Romila Th apar’s perceptive reading of the many versions of the Sakuntalam composed over a period of more than 1,500 years, tracing the ways in which perceptions of not only the forest but also of kingly power and the ways it is projected to remote places changes over time, is a case in point.33 Similarly, the reworking of Sanskrit, Tamil, and Pali texts shows a myriad of dominated peoples and groups on the edge and in the recesses of the forest. Even as such spaces shade off into gardens, there are many diff erent sets of ambitions and actors at play. Yet, the very notion of a primeval forest needs to be critically unpacked: when, where, and how it begins to exercise such a hold on imaginations does matter. Th e extent to which the work of such elite, religious, and artistic imagination accords with interpretations of the archaeological record is also very important. At the risk of fi nding incompatible his- torical accounts that undermine the assurances woven into the fabric of historical memory, environmental history needs to advance through the quest for such concordances by recognizing the discordances that will inevitably arise. Even as recent and rich a work as Irfan and Faiz Habib’s Atlas of Ancient Indian History adheres to the view that a largely untouched forest was cleared around the sixth century BCE with the help of iron implements. Th is, despite persuasive evidence to the contrary that suggests more complex patterns of vegetation change or, for that matter, of technological transformation. 34 Kathleen Morrison’s paper is a corrective to the idea of a primeval, pristine, untouched forest being the common starting point for all human history in India. What is signifi cant is the way she marshals evidence from the Ganga basin, a place for such active historical con- troversy, along with that from the Indus river basin. In the latter case, there is a remarkable topicality to research fi ndings from the 1970s onwards: namely the role of dry spells and weak monsoons in the decline of the Harappa culture. However, the paper goes further in also examining—and discarding—the notion of a harmonious relation- ship in the Vijaynagara region, especially in the twelft h to sixteenth centuries (but set in a longer context of three millennia of continuing interaction) between residents and the forest expanse. How people Introduction 9 thought about the wild and wilderness remains important, for these conceptual and representational categories also provided the means for interpretation by which uses were expanded or limited, of diff erent kinds of non-human life. Th e discussion of varied accounts of transitions from more natural and natured landscapes to ones heavily managed and thereby denuded comes, as she notes, from a variety of perspectives. A perspective, we argue, that is insuffi ciently explored in much environmental scholar- ship, but could usefully be emphasized is that which may be described as religious ecology or sacred geography. As Diana Eck notes, wher- ever one goes in India, a living landscape of mountains, rivers, forests, and villages is linked to stories of gods and heroes. 35 Further, through complex routes and legends of pilgrimage, this landscape acquires a skein of connections that present a distinctive ecological map of land forms, nature, and their relations to each other. Tirtha mahatmya s of the Puranas, in this regard, are but one example of the ways in which orthodox Hindus have thought about the connections between geog- raphy and mythology, with consequences for environmental politics, the fate of wild animals, and so forth.36 Similarly Morrison also inspires us to argue that there is a tendency in scientifi c discourse to argue that strong systems of land and natural resource management favoured sedentary and monocrop agriculture. And to argue further that such assumptions are fl awed in several respects. One set of fl aws to have been exposed by scholarship, much of it coming from other parts of Asia, shows that swidden agriculture and various forms of small-holder cultivation were both transient on the particular plot of land as well as variegated in their crop selection and rotation, or were quite intricate and intensive. 37 Another set of fl aws relates to the broader hubris of writing on technology, more acutely present in work on modern technology, but transported eas- ily into earlier periods too, that assumes that the triumph of human endeavour in the natural world is crucially facilitated by technology. Scholarship on the history of technology in India has now exposed the uncertainties that dog the advance of particular technologies and the inability of technocracies to predict, leave alone control, the con- sequences of their policies and interventions in ecological processes. 38 As the case studies in her chapter reveal, pale ecological research increasingly shows us that even the Indo-Gangetic plain was largely 10 Shift ing Ground savannah in the period before the great kingdoms of the fi rst millennium CE. One of the most important insights we can derive from the work presented by Morrison is the value of attending to processes of urban- ization and agricultural expansion and contraction that occur with the rise and fall of empires. It is evident from the Vijaynagara case that the landscape of village settlement was altered dramatically, and this in turn aff ected waterway, woodlands, pastures, and fi elds across wide swathes of territory. Even the remoteness of forests and hills once regarded as a common assumption in geographies of India turns out to be rare, and even elusive. Th e picture that is now emerging from a combination of textual and archaeological sources suggests a more stochastic process of environmental change and related social changes in the pre-modern period. Even the most extensive empires of the periods BCE and fi rst millennium CE covered no more than small parts of what is now the full expanse of the Indian subcontinent. And even at their height they remained close to riverbanks in the valleys and grasslands in the plateaus, where cattle, sheep, and goats could roam. Large swathes of territory in between were impassable forest, and home to large mammals, ungulates, and carnivores, especially lions and tigers, cheetahs and leopards, hyenas, and wolves, that made their passage dangerous and the keeping of domestic animals a fraught enterprise. But what appeared opaque and impenetrable to the river valley civilizations was not without impact and transport made pos- sible by forest polities, tribal communities, and itinerant herders and traders. 39 Agroforestry, pastoralism, and small-scale settlement cre- ated openings in forests that may not have always been visible to all who visited or imagined them, and such extensive modes of living in the land could also overtake the more dense settlements in times of imperial decline, disease, war, and migration. In a rare case study of the distribution of particular fauna across the pre-modern landscape of India, Shibani Bose demonstrates the utility of proxy studies that can provide valuable insight into broader environmental and social processes. It is well understood that large herbivores like the rhinoceros and the elephant were more widely distributed across early India and now live in the restricted sub mon- tane and northeastern locations that are their protected habitats in the modern period. Further, she also documents not only their greater Introduction 11 dispersal across the land but also their uses for varied purposes throughout India. Th ough limited weapons constrained hunting, the use of the body parts of these large herbivores was extensive. Th is is a point that has been well established in pre-historic times, as with the use of body parts of highland fauna via long-distance trade in the lowland valleys. Shibani Bose shows interconnectedness of the fate of the rhinoceros with changing human cultures and settlement patterns till into the fi rst millennium of the Common Era. Given India has over 25,000 species of fl owering plants, 500 species of mammals, and 1,200 species of birds in about 2 per cent of the world’s land area, the long-term interactions with human societies has attracted remark- ably little by way of historically informed investigation. Even here, the focus has oft en been on big cats and on the elephant. Th e archaeological and literary evidence of another prominent mega herbivore, the greater one-horned rhinoceros, indicates a spread till very recent historic times (1600 CE) in large parts of the greater Indus basin, and a presence till well into the twentieth century in the Ganga basin. When and where it had symbolic signifi cance in high Brahmanical and Buddhist cultures are fascinating. But the material changes are equally important as they illuminate the deep impact of human-driven changes, both direct and indirect, that led to the local extinction of the greater one-horned rhinoceros in the Kathiawar peninsula in Harappan times. Such local species dying out was not entirely exceptional; even a small number of people or cattle could exert considerable pressure on faunal assemblages. Th e dying out of the Bos nomadicus indicus due to interbreeding with feral cattle is a case in point. More common was the re-naturing of plant species well beyond their natural range or the introduction of cultivars and domestic animals that were to have far-reaching ecological impact. It is fascinating to see what we can learn about the relations between settlement and habitat change with variable consequences for parti- cular species. Th us, the rhinoceros was able to coexist with Harappan traders with whom they shared lowland water features, rivers, and their subsidiary channels, but was beleaguered by farming Harappans who raised cattle and introduced competition for the grasses and marshes where the rhinoceros lost. Coins and artistic representa- tion of the rhinoceros tell us about its importance in various empires of the fi rst millennium. But as Bose notes, we should not hasten to 12 Shift ing Ground conclude that the rhinoceros became scarce in the Indo-Gangetic plains in the medieval period. Depiction of the animal is related not only to its relative abundance but also the cultural communication and merit accomplished by its prominence in coinage and art. As the elephant and the horse became more valuable in war and logistics in the second millennium, the rhinoceros may have faded from popular and elite representation of the animal world, even as it continued to roam central and north India, if in somewhat diminished numbers. It is of course ironic that the decline of the rhinoceros began with the advent of the modern weaponry available through the British in the nineteenth century by when it was no longer fancied as a delicacy in food or much widely touted for the medicinal properties of its horn or other body parts. Sport rather than sustenance or distinction ultimately combined with lethal weapons to confi ne the rhinoceros to its limited habitat in the twentieth century. Th e works of Morrison and Bose open up larger questions that can only be touched upon in passing here. How wild animal popula- tions lived or perished, or mature tree forest did or did not exist had a lot to do with how many people there were and what they did for a living. Plains and lowland areas have historically been among the fi rst to be cleared for permanent tillage. Bose’s work gains in impor- tance if placed in the wider context of changing human densities. A careful sift ing of the evidence should be a corrective to the idea that there was a ‘long stasis’ in economic and thereby ecological terms from 320 BCE to 1600 CE, the so-called Hindu Equilibrium à la Deepak Lal.40 To place things in perspective the present-day popula- tion density is about 400 to a square kilometre and was less than 80 in the nineteenth century. Of course, despite the spread of people even as Shinde’s meticulous research of the Tapti River in western India shows there were vast areas with densities as low as 0.6 to a square kilometre. Signifi cantly, the idea of a long equilibrium, though at a some- what diff erent time in the later part of the fi rst millennium of the Common Era, was advanced by Gadgil and Guha. Of this too, there is but scant evidence. Th is claim was vital for their overview as they posited a ‘major resource crunch’ around 1000 CE leading to adjustments via customary restraints on resource use. 41 Th e date did indeed mark changes, as we now know due to work on peat bogs and Introduction 13 pollen samples, possibly the onset of a dry spell due to the weakening of the monsoon. 42 Yet, the idea of a resource crunch leading on thereby to restraints on consumption via custom does not seem sustained by evidence. Useful as the idea was (just as with the Long Equilibrium), it does not stand to the test.

India in a Larger Geographic Frame

If there is little basis for a unanimous view pre-1800 CE, it is also necessary to stress that India, as it is now constituted, cannot be viewed in isolation from the larger Asian land mass or the world of the Indian Ocean in ecological or, for that matter, historical terms. It is necessary to emphasize that there were oft en zones of continuity and transition, with Central and West Asia in the west and Southeast Asia in the east. Substantive shift s were oft en due to connected ecologies and histories. Th e subcontinent was not sealed off across the ocean to the west, south, and east. Th e Th ar Desert and adjacent hot desert had long been traversed by people and animals. Th e high mountain chains to the north were part of a larger trans-Asian set of highlands with fauna and fl ora assemblages with a wider range beyond India. Historians of late have paid attention to such linkages which are a corrective to an ahistorical back projection of today’s frontiers. 43 Th e Indian Ocean was no barrier to movement, with timber for Arab dhows coming from the Malabar Coast, and the ships return- ing with fi ne-grained African ivory for much of the last 1,500 years. Scholarly work has also cast light on the introduction to central India of one of Africa’s most impressive trees: the massive baobab.44 Animals and plants hitchhiked across the sea. In the early modern period, trading ships scoured the caves of the Andamans for the elusive but highly prized delicacies: the nests of the edible island swift let and for sea slugs. Such ships, Malay, Burmese, Chinese, and European, also conducted slave raids leading to the islander’s aversion to outside con- tact. ‘Th e implacable hostility’ of peoples in many of the 200 islands in the archipelago referred to in many early modern accounts had a sound empirical reason. 45 Yet, such contact was not new. Andre Wink has argued that the sea as well as the desert have to be viewed as changing frontier societies, whose interface with the settled societies of the river valleys led to 14 Shift ing Ground both fusion and friction across the ages. Th e long-term interaction of itinerant herders, forest-reliant peoples, or coastal sea-farers with sedentary societies or peasants or townspeople was a feature of the social and economic networks that spread across the Indian Ocean. In India a very specifi c feature of these interactions, distinguishing the Indian experience from that of north-west China, Iran, Afghanistan, or Anatolia, was that the subcontinent could not support large-scale nomadic animal rearing. Of course, the shift from one form of live- lihood to another was not unilinear or complete, nor did they exist in ‘pure’ form.46 Th ere was a larger set of dramas on the shift ing borders between the wild and the sown, wherein the frontier of the uncultivated land (mature tree forest, savannah, or scrub) and the sown (short fallow by swidden, long fallow in dry lands, permanent tillage of rain-fed, well- or canal-irrigated varieties) was a fl uid one. Th e social as well as the agro-ecological borders shift ed; the landscape was like a patch- work quilt, not a grid. Th e expansion of states and their consolidation entailed the collection of revenue and rents from sedentary peas- antries and also raised the larger question of how to deal with large number of mobile peoples. Th e campaigns of Sultan Balban against the Mewatis and in the Doab were also about displacing and destroy- ing one kind of landscape and replacing it with another. Drovers of woodcutters were auxiliaries of his military forces, and along with enslaved captives, they helped set up settlements with revenue-free lands for loyalist cultivators, facilitating movement of caravans with roads and sarai s (guest houses). Th e transformation of jungle to necropolis in the areas around Qutb near Delhi in less than a century ending in the 1320s was a major accomplishment of the sultans of Delhi. Sultan Balban deployed Tabarzan or woodcutters in Mewat and in the Doab areas to clear forests, with the chronicler Ziauddin Barani writing of the suff ering infl icted on the Kathariyan or those who processed catechu. Th e latter were probably pastoralists reliant on the forest.47 Th e historian Samira Sheikh details the ways in which the emer- gence of a regional kingdom in Gujarat required close engagement with pastoralists and tribals. During 1200 to 1400, rulers got the Bhils to police mountain passes and forests even as they sent Charans with caravans to help protect them from raids. She rightly cautions Introduction 15 that ‘very little separated a chieft ain from the neighboring Bhils or Kolis who too were cultivators or pastoralists, or on the coast, were fi shing, trading or piratical communities’. It was precisely by taking control of such regions via placation or pacifi cation that the rulers forged a region into a stable political unit. Th e Charothar area (now famous for the Amul milk cooperatives) was settled with Kanbis who tilled the land but only aft er subduing the Kolis in the area.48 I t i s important to remember that the distinctions between Kanbi farm- ers and Bhil or Koli hill and forest peoples were sharpened in a later period spanning Maratha rule and then the advent of British colonial power in western India. 49 Th e separation of lands, their uses, classifi cations, and associated identities, with consequences for political and social hierarchy in Indian society is a gradual process that shows no particular easily predicted tendency to favour one group over another in any regional setting we examine. A host of contingent factors oft en determined the fate of particular families, villages, and their networks of kin, dependants, and allies. Th e ways in which particular landscapes were imagined and transformed shaped these outcomes. Th e changing etymology of the word for forest in Tamil provides a clue to the extent of elasticity in land use and shift ing cultural meanings. Two millen- nia ago the Tamil word kadu was used to describe a burning ground, an omnibus term for uncultivated lands that were counterpoised to the settled, tilled lands of the Kaveri delta. In medieval times, about eight centuries ago, it was used in much the same way rulers in the north viewed the unruly thickets of the interior, as a place of unruly folk. Kadu or the untamed space was viewed in opposition to the nadu or the civilized countryside. Th en came another shift . It was the building of tanks in the black cotton soil country in the thirteenth– fourteenth centuries of the Common Era that accompanied the southward movement of the vadagu or northern settlers into the Tamil countryside. Th e term nadu came to signify, half a millennium ago, the replacement of the kadu (dry land) by the new landscape of the water tanks, even though the literal meaning of the word in Tamil is forest.50 Such terminological shift s speak of the displacement of relatively mobile groups by settlers, at least in the core of complex agrarian states, oft en in the fertile river valleys. But this was by no means a 16 Shift ing Ground one-way street. Scholarship drawing on vernacular language sources shows a long-term set of processes of acculturation and re-invention in which the tribe–caste or the farm–forest frontier showed enormous fl uidity and fl exibility. And despite the enormous power exerted by the modern colonial state in the nineteenth century to tame and limit this frontier, such fl uidity and fl exibility remained a feature of Indian society well into the twentieth century, both at the margins of empires, and in parts of its very heartlands.

Intersecting Boundaries

That animals or people cross boundaries made by either is well known. Th e evidence is especially strong when it is not merely physi- cal boundaries that divide farm form forest that are being violated. It is as much about the norms of conduct that even animals were expected to adhere to. Tamil Sangam literature portrays bull ele- phants as highly destructive crop raiders, calling for vigilance by king and cultivator alike. 51 Many centuries later, in the Syainika Sastra , Rudra Deva of Kumaon recounted how a lion was most easily shot by a hunter sitting up over the kill of a cow. Th e hunter sat atop a machan , a platform on a tree, armed with a bow and arrow. 52 B u t it was not only substance but also symbol that could matter quite seriously.53 It is in this wider context that Divyabhanusinh’s work on the Mughals and how they viewed peoples, places, lands, and cultures through the prism of large wild animals becomes especially insight- ful. Working skilfully with art and the historical information gleaned from it, Divyabhanusinh describes the distribution of the lion as well as its appearance, as distinct from that of its African counterparts. He shows much of this can be observed in the royal art that was pro- duced when Mughal royal (or imperial) entourages travelled, hunted, and camped. Th e lion was, for Timur’s descendants, an equal of the Mughal Padshah: a locus of power that imposed order on his own world of animals. Prominent on the fl ag of the empire, it was also a large diurnal carnivore that was commonly found in its preferred habitat of open country, a vast grassland dotted with trees. Just as the lion hunted the nilgai or the black buck (both animals new to Babur) and the gazelle (which he knew much better from lands further west), Introduction 17 so did the new rulers hunt the lion. It is not merely signifi cant that there were a host of ways of doing this: from elephant back or from horses, on foot or using buff alo-borne beaters to drive the prides towards hunters waiting on elephant back. What is important is that the hunting of the lion was a mark of special bravery, a contrast to the tiger, which is rarely, almost never depicted in the paintings of the ateliers. Perhaps the two large animals symbolized and meant different things to different men and women, the lion being the emblem of empire and the tiger closer to spirit cults of the forest. Both travel and hunting were vast enterprises throughout the Mughal and early modern period, and domesticated and wild ani- mals played a crucial role in sustaining these activities. Th e more elusive tigers lasted longer in this regime, as they were less likely to be out in the open when the Mughals travelled and established temporary residence across the empire. As a result, the tiger hunt ultimately produced a more elaborate set of organizational features, from the beating of forests known to shelter them to the construc- tion of machines and other observation posts. As hunting grew more intricate in its hierarchies of achievement and royal entertainment, specifi c animals entered its domain as wild recruits; notably, the cheetah caught and trained to assist royal coursing of the blackbuck. Again an industry sprung up as royal capture of the cheetah became a major activity over time, once Akbar the great Mughal had brought it into prominence though his personal involvement. Ultimately, the partial domestication of the cheetah, and the rapid transformation of its savannah habitat, hastened its rapid decline. Th e tiger and the elephant, both of which survived longer in the thick forests that they more oft en preferred, remained abundant into the twentieth century, despite one being hunted intensively as vermin and trophy, while the other was always caught and used in war, transport, and temples. Animals in use were bound to be even more important than those that were hunted. Babur was fascinated by elephants, enormous beasts that he fi rst encountered in north India. He was fascinated by its use in warfare and the fact that it had been tamed despite its imposing size and strength. By the end of the sixteenth century, the animal was fully integrated into a vast war machine, with fi ve men to tend to each elephant. Th e older tradition of the Pil Khana or elephant stable, analyzed with deep insight by the late Simon Digby 18 Shift ing Ground for the Indo-Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, was fully taken aboard by the Mughals. 54 Unlike the elephant, the cheetah was not new to the Mughals, but it was under their auspices that the animal was kept in vast numbers to bring in fresh venison. Both the sheer number of elephants (12,000 at one stage under Jahangir) and cheetahs (1,000, no less under Akbar) indicate vast expanses of forest and grassland form where such large numbers could be drawn. Th is is in major contrast to the scene by the end of the twentieth century: forest still remains extant, especially in the hill and mountain areas, but the immense grassland has vanished. As late as 1900, possibly a third of the landscape was grassland, with a great variety depending on rainfall and soil type, the extent of the use of fi re, and the number of cattle. 55 As recently as 1600 CE, the density of people was 70 to a square kilometre and possibly only a fourth of the land was under the plough in a permanent sense. Habib’s magisterial An Atlas of the Mughal Empire has huge swathes of territory with ‘elephants’ marked on it. More seriously, there are references as in the case of the route from Kurnool to Nandyal being ‘barred to the agricultural population and inhabited by primitive gathering forest folk’. It was a similar story in the Vetavalam forest on the way to the famous fort of Jinji. 56 And this meant that not only wild animals like tigers, cheetah, and elephants were abundant and dispersed across large parts of India, forest and itinerant people, who most adeptly lived in and around these habi- tats, were also more numerous and extensively present across these landscapes. It was this landscape that British colonial offi cials, fi rst of the East India Company, and then of Victorian Empire, came to rule. For more than one hundred years they battled the landscape and these fl uid characteristics with varied success across India’s agro-ecological zones and political divisions. Th e results have come to be seen in more dramatic terms than they perhaps warrant.

Nineteenth-Century Aspirations

Th e idea of the colonial era as a sharp break drew from a powerful critique of imperial management regimes, ownership patterns, and of direct and indirect interventions in patterns of production and settlement across a swathe of sectors. Th e impress of a new and more Introduction 19 intrusive kind of power in uncultivated landscapes was combined with the intensifi ed pressures both executive and legislative on rival resource users. Th is is sharpest with reference to various forms of swidden cultivation where the length of the fallow and the extent of lands where fi res could be lit to clear the vegetation for short-cycle cultivation were curtailed sharply. In turn, historicist re-readings of canal irrigation in north India and of forestry in the Western Himalaya made scholars and citizens alike see closer connections between shift ing economic interests, specifi c bureaucratic choices, and ecological outcomes. Peasants and herders, fi shers, and Adivasis began to be viewed as actors with changing, but oft en signifi cant, land and water related skills that needed to be interrogated carefully if critically. State forests, the canal systems, and the great imperial hunts for game loomed large in early historical studies. In the next itera- tion, the regions came much more into focus and the ways in which politics intermeshed with ecological processes was foregrounded more clearly. Gender and caste, class and community had much to do with the ways in which water, animals, and land and trees were viewed: oft en there were sharp contests on how best to view them. Th e same lands that evoked plenty (due to berries, fodder, and brush- wood), could, for peasants, be a place of pain (due to great sounders of wild boars under princely protection that ravaged the crop).57 S u c h fi nely grained insight is doubly useful for it also draws attention to the complex, shift ing hierarchies among and within Indian societies, some of which were buttressed (in this case of the princes and the landed aristocracy) by the Raj. Most crucially, the focus was largely on the late colonial era and its aft ermath, with Richard Grove’s pioneer- ing work being a rare exception for delving into the early phase of the colonial era. 58 Th e 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 oft en labelled have been investigated in various parts of British India. Even a major princely state like Hyderabad embarked on schemes to settle the nomads; elsewhere, as in the Gir Hills, initial plans to settle buffalo herders did not bear fruit though they anticipated late-twentieth-century changes.59 Th e coming of railways had far- reaching impact: a fully loaded train of goods could carry more than 20 Shift ing Ground

10,000 pack bullocks. Colonial rule and associated technological revolutions in transport were one set of key factors changing attitudes to animals—wild and domesticated—pursued for draft power or the excitement and recognition provided by sport. Th e unequal relations that were established between princely states and the British Empire created its own environment for a new round of landscape changes and related identity formation, especially among the Indian aristoc- racy and the animals they pursued, hunted, captured, and displayed in their estates. Writing about these western Indian states, and their relations with land and animals, Julie Hughes shows us how new insights can be gained into human–animal relations in colonial India by paying atten- tion to animals other than the charismatic mega fauna so favoured by conservationists and historians alike. What, she asks, can the wild boar tell us about the culture, politics, and economy of human interactions with animals at the dawn of the modern period in India. Like Divyabhanusinh, she draws creatively on visual materials like paintings and drawings, in addition to other archives of wild boars and their role in the construction of status and meaning in western Indian princely states. Rajput princes and their courtiers elevated boar hunting to a regal sport and the meat of boar to a delicacy on their food tables because they admired the wild boar for its courage and vitality, not least its ability to fi ght tigers. As Hughes notes, the landscape of rug- ged hills was associated in Rajput imagination with a complementary hardiness of their boars, in contrast to wild pigs elsewhere that were stuck and collected by British hunters who had become experts in pig-sticking. Th ese conclusions allowed the Rajputs of Mewar to take special pride in their exploits with the local boar, the greater challenge and thus the accurate refl ectors of Rajput muscularity and bravery. The careful account of boar breeding and hunting provided by Hughes complicates the distinctions between wild and tame animals, for the best boars were captive and fed, not grazing in the scrubby and thorny arid lower hills of the Aravallis. Special merit, then, accrued in hunting these sturdy specimens turned loose. Yet, the arid landscape of Mewar was celebrated as the home of the best wild boars, for its recalcitrant wildness, as denoted by cacti and other plants not pleas- ing to the eye or touch and of little use to animal or human. And wild Introduction 21 boars that transgressed by mating with domestic cattle was likely to be killed quickly. Both their wildness and the safety of domestic cattle produced eff orts to regulate traffi c between farm and jangal . Hunting histories invariably look at fi erce carnivores like the lion or the tiger, or the extinct cheetah. Th e elephant, with its unique position as both wild and tame in Asian cultures, has also attracted ecological, historical, and anthropological scholarship. Yet, in the horse-borne cultures of combat, few animals were considered as diffi cult a quarry as the wild boar. Th is practice of pig-sticking was said to have evolved out of necessity for the British hunters who were badly mauled by sloth bears in the grasslands of Bengal in the early nineteenth century. Chastened by the experience, they turned their attention to the wild boars instead. But here again, there has been far less work on the one-third of the land mass that was under various princes. Hughes draws on fresh materials to sketch out a fascinating picture of northwestern Indian princely rulers for whom the pursuit of the boar was more than mere leisure. It was central to the projec- tion of their power over their subjects, and affi rmation of the martial prowess denied on the battlefi eld. Going much further, she also shows a local patriotism as in the extolling of the qualities of the boars of specifi c princely states. Read with the recent new work on princely cultures that sought to sink deeper roots via cultural projects, this is a strikingly signifi cant approach to more than just porcine hunts in the jungles of Rajputana.60 Th e Rajput princes and the changes being wrought in their animal estates may well be presented as a story of social and environmental involutions provoked by colonial rule. 61 Some changes, however, came from beyond the borders of British India: for example, the breakdown of order in Afghanistan in the 1830s led to a drying up of the horse route. Till then the north Indian plains accounted for quarter of a mil- lion horses via these routes every decade. Th is was considerably less than the numbers imported in the eighteenth century, but this time the supply would not recover. Horses remained critical for armies till well into the twentieth century. Hence the tremendous importance of horse craft for the army, for the civil service, and the landed gen- try. It was not for nothing that the Viceroy’s bodyguard, now the President’s Bodyguard, was at the time of its founding as much about substance as symbol. Brian Caton’s detailed and in-depth look at the 22 Shift ing Ground horse craft of the Raj in Punjab does more than look at animal care and its relation to changing forms of knowledge. It also shows up a key component of the larger state structure at a moment of transi- tion, away from land-based procurement from over the Central Asian routes towards a diff erent order. Capture, training, and breeding of animals were all practices known to various Indian rulers before the advent of the British in India. And 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. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British breeding activities for horse and cattle expanded, and it was increasingly justifi ed in the name of scientifi c management and the development of veterinary medicine. Experiments in breeding and the marketing of special and pure breeds had become prevalent in England by the eighteenth cen- tury, and this meant that early colonial curiosity in India was oft en directed to the existence of parallel knowledge of animal morphol- ogy, traits, and appearance that was valorized. Th e government cattle farm in Hissar was started in response to failures to breed adequate numbers of horses at the Bengal Stud, and the realization that bull- ocks had been eff ective as draught animals in India for a long time. Th e contest between the growing colonial claims around its reliance on science, and farmers taking a cautious but sceptical interest in the results of government breeding had uneven results by the end of the nineteenth century. If veterinary science seemed to triumph for the most part, breeding remained indebted to what local breeders agreed or wanted to do. And British eff orts were unreliable enough to prevent their imposition to a great degree. Th e growing convergence between ideologies of rule and development, aft er the 1880s, and the focus on agriculture as a site for improved practice and yields ensured that cattle breeding remained on the state agenda well into the twen- tieth century, even as colonial rule was increasingly distracted by its political challenges.

Twentieth-Century Discontent

In the spirit of going beyond what states and ruling elites were doing or saying about their relations with nature, especially animals, Radhika Introduction 23

Govindrajan, in a fascinating study of hill villagers in Uttarakhand, examines human–animal relations among farmers and other ordinary people in the Western Himalaya. If the modern sensibility that was fashioned could accommodate humans and wild animals or nature in the same creation, it was also shaped by religion and theologians to fi rmly place domestic animals in hierarchical and ritually regulated relations. But the separation preached was less evident in practice, and everyday relations between animals and humans were more intimate and ambiguous than offi cial or religious discourse allowed. 62 A n d this is what she fi nds, too, even as she looks closely at how religion is enrolled to interfere in this everyday life by a variety of groups informed by a modern sensibility to animals. How societies assess and relate to key animals also throws crucial light on how they regard themselves in relation to other humans. By the early twentieth century, values transmitted from Victorian England had suff used Indian belief and practice, themselves dynamic through contact with earlier waves of interaction with other Asian and European ideas. Both religious ideas on cruelty, sacrifi ce, and companion species, as well as biological sciences focused on how humans resembled animals and what they might do to distinguish themselves through acts of civilized conduct. 63 The anti-cruelty values that had been hotly debated in the English landscape of the nineteenth century, travelled to India by the early twentieth. 64 Th ere they mingled with existing debates on kindness, compassion, protec- tion, and preservation of species. How, in this regard, domestication is understood, against its opposite tendency of becoming fertile, has to be situated alongside the situation of domesticates in human orders, relating to livelihood and belief. Th ere are, of course, varieties of approaches to knowledge about domestication, but recent work has emphasized unintended consequences of intimate relations between humans and animals, the transport of disease, commensal traditions, and the exchange of unfamiliar species accelerated by steam shipping, industrial revolutions, and colonial empires. 65 Th is wider context encases the processes through which Govind- rajan shows how being Hindu in the Western Himalaya today has a lot to do with how one views the practice of goat sacrifi ce in the temples. Whether it is an age-old custom to be continued or should be disal- lowed, or if it is a symbol of pan-Indian Hinduism or of the hill state’s 24 Shift ing Ground own distinctive regional identity is a moot point. On a similar note, just as a slew of studies made the forest–farm–pasture links much more complex and nuanced, so too did the politics of green issues, both past and present. A drive to save the endangered tiger could be as much about ecological patriotism of an India seeking its own path in a planet divided by the Cold War. 66 Opposition to a dam on the upper reaches of the Ganga had not only to do with anxieties about a geologically young mountain chain or fears of habitat loss, but at a key stage become a movement that made it a symbol of cultural national- ist assertion.67 Th e same issue could take on very diff erent overtones in terms of sacrality and local nationalisms in the Eastern Himalaya. 68 A close examination of animal sacrifi ce and the debate surround- ing it in the last couple of decades allows Govindrajan to unravel the ways in which emotional, religious, and legal relations with animals are debated and contested in India. Th e debates cannot, of course, be understood without reference to the expansion of rights-based con- ceptions of life, including non-human life, in India since the 1980s. And they must also be located in the spread of varieties of cultural nationalist revival and assertion, in political and religious domains, that have seized upon local practice of sacrifi ce and worship to evalu- ate them in terms of particular versions of canon and the idea of liv- ing by canon is itself reinforced thereby. Th us, while animal rights activists might agitate against any form of sacrifi ce, others point to the progress made in achieving sanctifi ed animal proxy for human sacrifi ce. And through this vivid ethnographic study, Govindrajan, thus, reveals what is in contest through the human–animal relations. How people identify with what it means to be civil, devout, and mod- ern or traditional has as much to with animal-human relations as with those between diff erent sets of humans. It is this contested notion of being modern and also concerned with nature in some fashion that becomes the focus of the essay by Daniel Klingensmith, who writes about the early twentieth century and the debates that sprang up within the colonial state and the Indian National Congress on what is nature and what is development. As European philosophers have noted, by the eighteenth century rapid changes had been wrought in ideas of nature in the Western world.69 And from the vantage point of the twentieth century, the idea of nature as either a divine creation or an inexhaustible mine of resources had Introduction 25 also come to be challenged. 70 Such challenge becomes visible in the debates in India that Klingensmith brings to the fore. Driven by a growing and overt commitment to what David Ludden identifi ed 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 devel- opment through mastery of natural resources like forests, agricultural lands, and productive domesticated animals.71 But by the start of World War II a critique was brewing within the colonial state and its civil society of Anglophile Indians. Most oft en they off ered docu- mentation of failed eff orts 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 riv- ers turned or soils eroded by increased extraction of the bounties they had to off er. Figures like Albert Howard and William Wilcox became emblems of this scepticism that combined both a critique of colonial state policy and the attitudes to nature they expressed. 72 I t i s an important insight of this essay that both ecological romanticism and technocratic ambition were products of the critique of colonial development and resource management strategies of the early twen- tieth century. Indian nationalists and British liberals were divided on whether solutions lay in less or more government and many queried the value of democracy to rational and sustainable development. Th e fi nal three essays provide careful empirical examination of the confl icts sparked by projects of rural development and con- servation that proliferated aft er Indian independence even as they place these confl icts in the specifi c historical contexts that shaped them from the earlier decades of debate that were the subject of Klingensmith’s essay. Arupjyoti Saikia writes in the spirit of situat- ing environmental change squarely in the context of agrarian rela- tions and confl icts over land in rural areas. His essay examines the late colonial history of competition within protected areas between Assamese peasants, incoming settlers whether East Bengali peasants or Nepali cattle herders. Questions of regulating grazing were not new to forest administration in colonial India. But this essay reveals how the question was shaped and changed by the period in which it was raised and the region in which it was active. Th us, learning from experiences in adjoining areas west of Assam, the imperial forest 26 Shift ing Ground service was already divided on what the impact of grazing actually was in Protected Forests, and how it might be contained. Th at the grazing question arose in Assam most acutely at least 40 years aft er it had been encountered in Bengal or central India meant that the imperial Forest Department approached it with ideas and experience diff erent from those of the late nineteenth century. Th at these questions were being confronted in the Brahmaputra valley in the period between the World Wars also meant that the local dynamics refl ected the infl ux of migrants from the south, coming to grow jute, and migrants from the north, looking to pasture milch cattle to supply a growing demand in Assam. Th ese historical conjunctures and sequences are crucial to the story that Saikia carefully unravels in his account. In an early example of the eff ects of global markets on local relations, we learn that the collapse of jute markets and the quest for paddy lands among Bengali settlers led to the opening up of carefully designated Grazing Reserves aft er the great depression. Th is fed the resentment of the other groups, Assamese and Nepali, who were adversely aff ected. A decade later the Bengal famine hastened the settlement of Bengali peasants in the Brahmaputra valley, and accentuated confl icts that could only get worse as the network of Protected Areas in Assam also expanded aft er Indian independence. As Vikramaditya Th akur shows, the eff ect of peasant settlement on forest and pasture land is a story that can be taken up across India throughout the modern period but with key diff erences in the story that arise from the period and scope of confl icts. Th e actual settlement process, driven by diff erent kinds of state imperatives, can also shape the nature and extent of forest loss and conversion. And we can see this clearly in the late-twentieth-century experience with the resettle- ment of farmers displaced by the construction of a series of dams, especially Sardar Sarovar, on the Narmada river system. Th is essay starts with the valuable backstory to the resettlements occasioned by the dam projects, through an earlier settlement of Bhil territories under colonial rule. In another instance of the value of studying belief and values along the political economy of landscape change, this essay reveals that postcolonial alterations in local agrarian relations owed less to government transition and more to the rise of Bhakti movements in the area aft er World War II. Th is coupled with the increasing local industrial uses of forest products and the frustrations Introduction 27 of Bhil peasants who were promised farmland by chiefs increasingly incapable of delivering on their commitment led to the onslaught on forests that followed soon aft er Indian independence. When, how, and why the loss of commons or open access resources took place or how these can be engaged with is a keenly contested issue for the researcher, activist, and policymaker alike. Th akur thus treads on terrain seen diff erently by those approaching it from vary- ing standpoints. Where his work is signifi cant is the ways in which he interprets the evidence paying equal attention to the shift s in Adivasi society as to the wider world in which they were enmeshed. Th e changes in the nature of state power and the evolution of markets have long commanded the attention of scholars, but the denudation he tracks has other wellsprings and drivers as well. In a sense it is a mark and evidence of new forms of subordination as much as open- ing of a few windows of opportunity for those who live and work in the hills and valleys. It is also important that his work examines in some depth the shift s in the early years of independence and before the coming of age of the environmental movements of the 1970s. In some sense, this was a crucial phase and unleashed forces that are still at work. It is in making these connections across time and space that Th akur gives a new sense to how we can approach the fate of the forest and those who live in and near it. From Adivasi pasts to a state-run reserve and the future of its mega fauna, Ghazala Shahabuddin’s essay addresses wider concerns through a specifi c narrative. Both the charismatic qualities of the tiger, as a great cat that through centuries past has evoked fear and awe, and its recent total or near extermination over most of its habitat have made it a key issue in environmental debates in India and other Asian countries. Biologists have made much headway on its ecology and behaviour but there is as yet little in terms of site-specifi c, ecologically sensitive socio-political investigation of its history or survival in its forests. Shahabuddin’s work does more than detail the endangerment or exclusivist attempts at securing for it a future. She shows how the collapse of the tiger population in Sariska, the former princely hunt- ing reserve and now Tiger Reserve for three decades, has to be viewed in terms of the grids and networks of power, wealth, and hierarchy that extend from within and well beyond the perimeter of the reserve. What seems at fi rst sight a question of number of predator and prey, 28 Shift ing Ground extant or alive, poached or struggling for living space becomes part of a larger crisis of rural human livelihoods and market linked pressures, mainly, though not wholly, urban. To intervene eff ectively requires grappling with larger dilemmas, not mere engagement with how many tigers there were or how best to reintroduce them (as has been the case in Sariska since 2008). How the webs of life intertwine with social, cultural, and political relationships is integral to understanding how best to secure a future for landscapes such as these. Here we return both to the theme of animals and people, and the work of science in a working democracy, fl agged earlier. As Latour has argued, the fundamental challenge before the politics of nature is what he calls the convocation of the collective. How to bring nature and society together in a politics that abjures violence as the main mode of interaction between the two realms so defi ned? 73 S o l u t i o n s to the extinction of tigers in a vaunted tiger sanctuary were varied. Apart from the reintroduction of tigers, many of the responses pre- saged violence, by beefi ng up policing and broadening the defi nition of crimes against wildlife. Even as tigers were reintroduced, the eff orts to remove people were increased and this, of course, sparked fresh confl ict and greater resentment of the animals given precedence over people who had diffi culty making the most basic living inside or outside the parks and sanctuaries. Such programmes of mega fauna conservation vividly illustrate the vagaries of people, animals, and their circuits of mobility, shaped and altered by changing attitudes not only to endangered species, but also the ways in which they are to be situated in national and regional culture as essential elements of a well-endowed landscape. In conclusion, the term ‘shift ing grounds’ encapsulates the sense that the volume as a whole seeks to capture. Earlier approaches— including by some of us here—privileged sharper lines of distinction between geographical spaces (forest, river, and farm) or peoples (herders, farmers, townspeople) or eras and epochs (pre-historic and historic and the triad of ancient, medieval, and modern or the colonial era and the post-colonial). None of this was or is invalid but each has with it certain inherent limitations that become quickly evident when one engages with the multiple dimensions of India’s environmental pasts. Our approaches to how people remake their environments with manifold consequences, some foreseen and others Introduction 29 unknown, has to engage with multiple pasts. Sharp bounds in time and space give way to more wide-ranging discussions about how the premises about one era shape our attitudes to the other, as in the case of ‘primeval forest’ in early India and the present-day forest frictions. Similarly, earlier notions of large mega fauna continue to inform attitudes today, as in how large carnivores as invariably shown in popular literature and art as living in caves (guhasaya from the Sanskrit pharmacopoeias of 1,500 years ago). Discussions on where and how people ought to live or not live in the forest or what to do about fl oods echo the discourses of the last two centuries. Too narrow a focus on the Raj and on independent India can easily obscure the longer-term material histories of a subcontinent that has seen human occupancy and presence for millennia. It is these shift s and changes, both long- and short-term, that need more careful teasing out in the coming years. Th e socio-ecological fabric has oft en been remade via contest with the fl uidity of environments and occupations being a major long-term feature of the past, with relationships fragmenting and coalescing in close conjunction with changing ecological milieus. It is to comprehend these longer-term shift s and do so while being attentive to our own times and concerns that India’s environmental history will remain an invitation for enquiry, discovery, and continu- ing journeys rich in insight.

Notes

1 . Th e work that arguably launched a scholarly tradition that could be named as environmental history in India was Ramachandra Guha, Th e Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989) (issued in an expanded edition by Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; and a new edition also in 2009, Ranikhet: Permanent Black). 2 . For somewhat discordant accounts of the exact origins and character of the economic changes that commenced in the last decades of the twen- tieth century, see Arvind Panagariya, India: Th e Emerging Giant (Delhi/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Arvind Subramanian, India’s Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation (Delhi/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3 . Ramachandra Guha, ‘Terminal Damage’, Hindustan Times , 23 July 2012. 30 Shift ing Ground

4 . We refer here, of course, to the path-breaking study by Raman Sukumar, Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1989). 5 . Bina Agarwal, Cold Hearths and Barren Slopes: Th e Woodfuel Crisis in the Th ird World (London: Zed Books, 1986); Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1989); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women/New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). At a policy level, Shekhar Singh, Ashish Kothari, Pratibha Pande, and Dilnavaz Variava, Th e Management of National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries in India (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1989). 6 . See Ali Kazmi’s fi lm, A Valley Rises and for an insider’s account, the book by Sanjay Sangvai, Th e River and Life: Peoples’ Struggle in the Narmada Valley (Panjim, Goa/London, UK: Earthcare Books, 2002). 7 . Robert Chambers, Naresh Saxena, and Tushaar Shah, To the Hands of the Poor: Water and Trees (London: Practical Action, 1990); Roger Jeff ery, Neil Th in, and Nandini Sundar, Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8 . Anil Agarwal, Ravi Chopra, and Kalpana Sharma, State of India’s Environment, A Citizens’ Report (Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1982); Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, State of India’s Environment, Th e Second Citizens’ Report , 1984–85, Towards Green Villages (Delhi: CSE, 1992) and Mahdav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Th is Fissured Land, An Ecological History of India (Delhi: OUP, 1992). 9 . See Subramanian, India’s Turn and Panagariya, India: Emerging Giant . 10 . People’s Union for Democratic Rights, Undeclared Civil War (Delhi, 1982); Darryl D’Monte, Temples or Tombs? Industry vs. Environment, Th ree Controversies (Delhi: CSE, 1985). 11 . Sanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press/Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). 12 . Ashish Kothari, Neena Singh, and Saloni Suri, eds, People and Protected Areas: Toward Participatory Conservation in India (Delhi: Sage, 1996); Savyasaachi, ‘Th e Tiger and the Honey Bee’, Seminar , 1994; also see Seminar , ‘Wildlife’, issues June 1998 and ‘Nature without Borders’, September 2010. Introduction 31

13 . Th e title of a contemporary book on pan-Asian debates including those in India captured the mood well—see Cory Meacham, How the Tiger Lost Its Stripes: An Exploration into the Endangerment of a Species (New York: Harcourt, 1997). 14 . John Wood, Th e Politics of Water Resource Development in India: Th e Narmada Dams Controversy (Delhi: Sage, 2007). Also see the insightful early papers Parita Mukta, ‘Worshipping Inequalities: Pro-Narmada Dam Movement’, Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 41 (13 October 1990): 2301–2; Amita Baviskar, ‘A Grain of Sand on the Bank of the Narmada’, Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 32 (August 1999): 2305–8; Nandini Sundar, Abha Mishra, and Neeraj Peter, ‘Defending the Dolki Forest’, Economic and Political Weekly (9–16 November 1996): 3021–3025. 15 . See Seminar , ‘Th e Tribal Bill’, August 2005, Debate in Economic and Political Weekly , 40 (19 November 2005). 16 . Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Alumnium Cartel (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). 17 . Arupjyoti Saikia, Th e Forest and Ecological History of Assam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18 . Vishwajit Pandya and Pankaj Sekhsaraia, Th e Jarawa Tribal Reserve Dossier: Cultural and Biological Diversities in the Andaman Islands (Paris/Delhi: UNESCO, 2011); T.R.S. Raman and D Mudappa, ‘Island in peril: Conservation caveats’, Th e Hindu , 25 February 2012. 19 . Ministry of Environment and Forests, Joining the Dots: Th e Report of the Tiger Task Force (2005); M. Rangarajan, A. Desai, R. Sukumar, P.S. Easa, V. Menon et al, Gajah: Securing a Future for Elephants in India (Delhi: Ministry of Environment and Forests, August 2010). 20 . Aseem Srivastava and Ashish Kothari, Churning the Earth: Th e Making of Global India (Penguin, 2012); Arundhati Roy, Th e Greater Common Good (Bombay: India Book distributors, 1999); Arundhati Roy, Listen - ing to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009). For more specifi c analyses see Himanshu Th akkar, Mountains of Concrete (Delhi: SANDRP, 2008); Himanshu Upadhyay, Big Dams, Bigger Questions (Delhi: Delhi Forum, 2010). 21 . Gurcharan Das, India Unbound (Delhi: Penguin, 2002); Kishore Mahbubani, Th e New Asian Hemisphere : Th e Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Aff airs, 2008). 22 . See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), for a discussion 32 Shift ing Ground

of the ways in which studies of science and culture may enrich historical political ecology, approaches exemplifi ed, we argue, in several of the cases in this volume. 23 . We refer here not only to the material resources consumed by the vastly increased purchasing power of urban and rural middle classes, but also the shift in their personal and group ambitions, as a function of their sense of self and expectations for a life well lived. 24 . A short list of works from the late 1990s alone would include: Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Confl icts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Delhi: OUP, 1995), Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest (Delhi: OUP, 1996), M. Buchy, Teak and Arecanut: Colonial state, Forest and People in the Western Ghats, 1800–1947 (Delhi: INTACH, 1996); Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (Delhi: OUP, 1997); Vasant Saberwal, Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats and Conservation in the Western Himalayas (Delhi: OUP, 1998), K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Delhi: OUP, 1999). A more holistic view also looked well beyond forests and rivers to the larger agrarian setting: Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, Special Issue on Forests and Pastures, Studies in History , new series 14, no. 2 (1998); K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 3–40); M. Rangarajan, ‘Environmental Histories of South Asia: A Review Essay’, Environment and History 2, no. 2 (1996): 129–43. 25 . Archana Prasad, Against Ecological Romanticism : Verrier Elwin and the Making of an Anti-Modern Tribal Identity (Delhi: Th ree Essays, 2003); Dhirendra Dangwal, Himalayan Degradation: Colonial Forestry and Environmental Change in India (Delhi: Foundation Books, 2000); most recently, Shashank Kela, A Rogue and a Peasant Slave: Adivasi Histories 1800–2000 (Delhi: Navayana, 2012). It was clear by the early 2000s that environmentalisms too came in diff erent shades, ‘Shades of Green’, Seminar, September 2003; Paul Greenough and Anna L. Tsing, eds, Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, 2003); Mukul Sharma, Landscapes and Lives: Environmental Dispatches on Rural Life (Delhi: OUP, 2001). 26 . For instance, see the contrasting views of two leading ecologists in their works, K. Ullas Karanth, View From a Macchan (Delhi: Permanent Introduction 33

Black, 2006), and Madhav Gadgil, Ecological Journeys (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Also worth a close look are the writings of the late A.K.N. Reddy, edited by S. Ravi Rajan. Also, Under preparation, M. Rangarajan, ed., Political Environmentalist: Th e Selected Writings of Dunu Roy . 27 . See Renee Borges, ‘Th e Anatomy of Ignorance or Ecology in a Frag- mented Landscape: Do We Know What Really Counts?’ in Battles over Nature , Science and the Politics of Conservation , eds V.K. Saberwal and Rangarajan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 56–85. 28 . Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds, Social Natures (Delhi: OUP, 2000); K. Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agrawal, eds, Regional Modernities (Delhi: OUP, 2003). 29 . Gunnel Cederlof and K Sivaramakrishnan, eds, Ecological Nationalisms (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2006). 30 . Peter Boomgaard, ‘Introduction’, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 54, no, 4 (2011): 447–54; also see his Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Another Asian example of these processes may be found in John Knight, Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People–Wildlife Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Also see Annu Jalais, Th e Forest of Tigers: People, Livelihood and Environment in the Sundarbans (Delhi: Routledge, 2010). 31 . Divyabhanusinh, Th e End of a Trail: Th e Cheetah in India (Delhi: Banyan Books, 1995), and also his Th e Story of Asia’s Lions (Bombay: MARG, 2005); R. Sukumar, Th e Story of Asia’s Elephants (Bombay: MARG, 2012). 32 . William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Deepak Kumar, Imperial Encounters : Th e British Empire and the Natural World (Delhi: OUP, 2011). Th is idea of a pre-colonial harmony has a counterpart in ecological works that pay scant attention to the longer-term changes due to human interac- tions with lands, soils, waters, fl ora, and fauna prior to more recent times. For a revision of such views vis-à-vis water rights see Tripta Wahi, Th e Punjab Past And Present 27, part 2 (October 2005), Serial No. 72. 33 . Romila Th apar, ‘Perceiving the Forest in Early India’, Studies in History (2001): pp. 1–16. Also see Shireen Ratnagar, Th e Other Indias (Delhi: Th ree Essays, 2004). 34 . Aloka Parasher Sen, Keynote Address ‘Forest and Garden in Ancient India, Keynote, ‘Environments and Histories’, Workshop at the Nehru 34 Shift ing Ground

Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 25 May 2012; Daud Ali and Emma Flatt, eds, Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India: Histories from the Deccan (Delhi: Routledge, 2012). Irfan Habib and F. Habib, Atlas of Ancient Indian History (Delhi: OUP, 2012). 35 . Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Harmony Books, 2012), pp. 4–5. 36 . For a detailed discussion of this literary tradition, see the section titled ‘Th e India of old stories’, in Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography , pp. 73–38, for instance. 37 . Michael Dove is a noted exponent of these studies, coming mostly from the outer islands of Indonesia. See, for instance, a compilation of his work in Michael Dove, Th e Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 38 . Th is is nicely illustrated in the point Rohan D’Souza makes in a recent collection on environment, technology, and development culled from classics published in the pages of Economic and Political Weekly . See Rohan D’Souza, ed., Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive Essays (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2012), p. 11, and the section of the volume on technology as anti-hero. 39 . On overland trade in the pre-modern period, see, for instance, Jean Deloche, Trade and Transport Routes in India before Steam Locomotion , Vol. II: Land Routes (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 1–10. 40 . Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 31; Deepak Lal, Th e Hindu Equilibrium: India c. 1500 BC–2000 AD (Delhi: OUP, 1988), Vol. 1, pp. 2–3, 33–34. In fact, as shown by Sumit Guha, the population density in the 2nd century CE, about 1,800 years before the present, was fi ve to a square kilometre. Th e total population of what is now India was about 20 million in all. Th is was to rise about 12-fold by 1850 when it was 250 million. Th e expansion over a period of some 1,600 years was still signifi cant even though it did not take place in a direct unlinear fashion (Sumit Guha, 2001: 29–31). 41 . Gadgil and Guha, Th is Fissured Land , pp. 91–2. 42 . Phadtare’s work on 7,800 years of material evidence suggests two prolonged dry spells, 2000–1000 CE and again 1000–1200 CE (N.R. Phadtare, ‘Sharp decrease in monsoon summer strength, 4000–3500 cal. Year BP Introduction 35

in the central Himalaya based on pollen Evidence from Alpine peat’, Quarternary Research 53 (2000): 122–9. Th is was also not new, for climates have rarely been stable, and earlier path-breaking work (Gurdip Singh, R.D. Joshi, S.K. Chopra, and A.B. Singh, ‘ Late Quaternary History of climate and vegetation in the Rajasthan Desert, India’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 286 (1974): 467–501.) had suggested a dry spell around 2000 BCE. 43 . For instance, Rila Mukherjee’s recent work stresses the existence of a north Bay of Bengal community around 1400 CE, with trade links with Yunan, Dimasa, Manipur, and Bengal across the sea. Cowrie shells from the Maldives in the Arabian Sea even served for two centuries as currency in Dimasa. Rila Mukherjee, Pelagic Passageways : Th e Northern Bay of Bengal before Colonialism (Delhi: Primus, 2011). 44 . While we await the work of Haripriya Rangan of Monash University, Australi (pers. Comm.) there is the insightful paper by J Burton-Page, ‘Th e problem of introduction of Adansonia digitata into India’ in P Th e Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals , eds J. Ucko and G.W. Dimbleby ed., (London: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971), pp. 331–5. 45 . Zarine Cooper, Archaeology and History: Early Settlements in the Andaman Islands (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 15–18. 46 . Andre Wink, Al Hind : Th e Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Vol. 3: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam, 7th –11th Centuries (New York: EJ Brill, 1996), pp. 81–82, 93. 47. Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192–1286 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 325, 334–35. 48 . Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 99–128, 104–5, and 65. 49 . Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 50 . David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 149–51. 51 . R Sukumar, Story of Asia’s Elephants , p. 139 52 . See Divyabhanusinh, Th e Story of Asia’s Lions . 36 Shift ing Ground

53 . Th e mythical Garuda, the mount of Visnu, is modelled most probably on the bearded vulture, a Himalayan bird par excellence. See Rishad Naoroji, Th e Birds of Prey of South Asia (Delhi: Om Books, 2009). 54 . Akbar’s inspection of the tusker Gajraj is an instance of a real life encounter passing into the lore of the empire. 55 . J.F. Richards, J. Hagen, and E. Haynes, ‘Changing Landuse in Bihar, Punjab and Haryana, 1850–1970’, Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 699–732. 56 . Irfan Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps (Delhi: OUP, 1983), Sheet 16B, Economic. 57 . As poignantly shown in the work of Ann Gold and Bhojuram Gujjar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 58 . Richard Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambride: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Grove, ed., Nature and the Orient: Th e Environ- mental History of South and Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 59 . Bhangya Bhukya, Subjugating Nomads: Th e Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizams (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2010). 60 . Th ere is now a rich body of work on the cultural production of pres- tige, honour, and hierarchy in the world of Indian princes and martial castes as the Mughal era gave way to British rule. Julie Hughes provides a valuable enrichment of that social history by intertwining it with landscape and animal history. For fi ne examples of the complementary social histories, see Ramya Sreenivasan, Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, 1500–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Malavika Kasturi, Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-Century North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 61 . Th e turning inwards of a society to generate new forms of hierarchical elaboration under colonial rule was fi rst termed involution in Cliff ord Geertz, Agricultural Involution: Th e Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Th e term is used in a similar sense here to describe the way minor Indian princes of the British Empire created increasingly elaborate forms of hierarchy and distinction by turning inwards on their relation to their wooded and grassland estates where wild animals roamed. Introduction 37

62 . Th e most infl uential study, arguably, of what we are referring to as the modern sensibility is Keith Th omas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983); see also Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 63 . See Th omas, Man and Natural World , pp. 92–140; also see Giorgio Agamben, Th e Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 64 . Harriet Ritvo, Th e Animal Estate: Th e English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Pratik Chakrabarti, ‘Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India’, History of Science 48, no. 2 (2010): 125–52. 65 . Several essays in Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, eds, Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (Oxford: Berg, 2007), discusses these questions in detail. Also see the papers in Gunnel Cederlof and Mahesh Rangarajan, eds, Special Section, ‘Predicaments of Nature and Power in India, Conservation and Society 7, no. 4 (2009): 21–6. 66 . Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Striving for a Balance, Nature, Science, Power and India’s Indira Gandhi, 1917–1984’, Conservation and Society 7 (2009): 299–312. For an insightful paper on access confl icts in a city forest see D. Parthasarathy, ‘Hunters, Gatherers and Foragers in a Metropolis: Commonising the Private and Public Spaces in Mumbai’, Economic and Political Weekly 46 (10 December 2011): 54–63. 67 . Emma Mawdsley , ‘Th e Abuse of Religion and Ecology: Th e Vishva Hindu Parishad and Tehri Dam’, Worldviews 9, no. 1 (2005): 1–24; Mukul Sharma, Green and Saff ron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian (R anikhet: Permanent Black, 2012). 68 . Vibha Aurora, ‘Gandhigiri in Sikkim’, Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 38 (20 September 2008): 26–8. 69 . Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: Th e Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 70 . Julia Adeney Th omas, Reconfi guring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 4–10. 71. David Ludden, ‘India’s Development Regime’ in Colonialism and Culture , ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 38 Shift ing Ground

Press, 1992), pp. 247–87; see also Ben Zachariah, Developing India: A Social and Intellectual History c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 72 . Albert Howard, Th e Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (1944, [Reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006]); William Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and Its Application to Modern Problems (Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1984). 73 . See Latour, Politics of Nature , pp. 56–62. Conceiving Ecology and 2 Stopping the Clock Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation

KATHLEEN MORRISON

Colonial-era changes—and archives—have been of immense interest to environmental historians interested in South Asia. Indeed, envi- ronmental history in this region got its start with analyses of the ecological impact of colonization and, at this point, majority of the literature on the environmental history of South Asia concerns itself with processes and events of the last few centuries. In contrast, inter- est in environmental issues has been much slower to develop among historians of pre-colonial South Asia. In other parts of the world, this pattern is more oft en reversed especially because of the long-standing interests of archaeologists and historical geographers in human–envi- ronment relationships. Indeed, the recognition of large-scale envi- ronmental transformation with colonization of the New World—the so-called Columbian Exchange—builds on a long record of research into pre-colonial environments and human histories. In India, archaeological research has conversely tended not to consider environmental issues at all, especially for later periods 40 Shift ing Ground with textual traditions. Here the distinction between prehistoric archaeology, the period up to and including the Early Historic period (600 BCE–300 CE), and historic-period archaeology (300 CE to about 1600 CE) is entrenched with architectural, art-historical, and histori- cal approaches used for these later periods, and ‘scientifi c’ approaches reserved for the more distant past. Th is division of labour, mirrored in the long-standing division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, is thus much more than a chronological preference; it is also a basic orientation to evidence and to archives that has fundamentally shaped our understandings of the South Asian past. Furthermore, there has been virtually no archaeological attention paid to the period aft er 1600. Th us, for the most recent past there is almost no archaeol- ogy or historical geography, and almost no tradition of interaction between historians and natural scientists simultaneously working on problems of landscape change. Th is is unfortunate, since archae- ologists and geographers elsewhere have served an important role as translators between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and the sciences; working both sides of the divide to bring into discussion diverse evidentiary material and identifying key issues for research. Th e potentials of the material record are thus oft en poorly under- stood among students of human history. Conversely, basic patterns of history are oft en ignored by natural scientists working with proxy data from non-human systems, too oft en leading to a limited view of causality in which, for example, all changes in vegetation are attrib- uted to climatic shift s. While this sociology of knowledge can help us to understand why it is that environmental history in South Asia has taken the shape it has, clearly existing research traditions need not limit future research. Th e important groundwork laid by environmen- tal historians working on the last few centuries needs to be expanded chronologically in order to contextualize more recent changes in light of longer histories of stability and rupture, and methodologically, to include critical information about the material world itself.

A Colonial Ecological Watershed?

Temporal Contextualization and Other Archives One infl uential argument in Indian environmental history is that colonialism constituted an ‘ecological watershed’, variously seen as a Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 41 key transition point, a moment of no return, a new course or direction, or an unprecedented moment of environmental and social change. Certainly there is good reason to stress the importance of colonial- period transformations in the forests, fi elds, and waters of South Asia, and there is no doubt that this was a time of signifi cant change. However, the assumption of a historically unique impact by European institu- tions and actions on South Asian environments would seem to call out for contextualization within a longer record of change. As this chapter shows, in several parts of India, environmental transformations prior to colonization were at least as signifi cant as later ones, suggesting some caution in accepting the idea of a universal colonial watershed. Th is shift needs to be established on a case-by-case basis rather than assumed as a matter of course. Comparing older conditions to more recent ones also calls into question the nature of our evidence. As I dis- cuss here, comparative pre-colonial cases sometimes turn out to be based on assumptions about the nature of ecological change that owe their power to literary tropes more than actual historical trajectories. Th us, we face both empirical and conceptual diffi culties when more recent periods are compared to the ‘pre-colonial’ past, a problematic construct collapsing tens of thousands of years of history into a single term. Beyond the unpleasant image of a subcontinent waiting for colonialism, as a historical category, pre-colonial is a sledgehammer, crushing and homogenizing time and process. Indeed, pre-colonial worlds oft en seem to lack the dynamic and complex interactions and transformations taken for granted in later periods, consistent with the work they do as presumed ‘baselines’ for later change. Considerations of change are deeply invested in imagined pasts, cultural landscapes (or culture-free wildernesses) whose natural features are no less morally charged than their cultural characteristics. More cynically, these can be thought of as pasts of the imagination because the con- tours of past landscapes are so oft en simply assumed or are based on extremely limited empirical evidence. While such evidence does exist, it may derive, in part, from archives other than texts. Th ese ‘other archives’ may be thought of as the primary sources of natural agents, historical archives not only of trees, soils, hills, rivers, and fi elds, but also of a great deal of past human action on the landscape. My own work is invested in the integration of textual and other archives, working towards understanding of socio-natural histories over the last 3,000 years in southern India. Both necessity and training 42 Shift ing Ground prompted me to analyse not only texts but also material remains— archaeological sites, landscape modifi cations, and paleoenvironmental records of past vegetation, fi re history, and geomorphological processes such as erosion and valley colluviation. While these disparate sources of data do not always combine as easily as we might like, the various material ‘proxy’ records are an essential part of doing environmental history, even in very recent periods. Th e concept of proxy records was formulated by climate scientists, who deploy a whole range of indirect indicators of past climate (foraminifera from ocean sediments, crea- tures highly sensitive to temperature fl uctuations; changes in tree ring widths and densities which respond to local rainfall; stratigraphic pol- len records which refl ect regional vegetation change), none of which directly measure the object of interest—temperature, for example—but all of which respond in some mediated way to this parameter. Th ese mediations are at the heart of understanding proxy records and mak- ing sense of them in terms of desired research outcomes. Climate sci- ence, thus, requires a range of specialists working both independently and together towards generating reliable proxy records and making sense of those records in terms of shared research concerns. Similarly, many of the questions asked by environmental histori- ans cry out for reliable proxy records, though in this case what these records may be proxies for is a more complex and interesting question. Far from a shared consensus around basic research needs, we have much broader sets of concerns about events, processes, and mean- ings. At the same time, however, we do make empirical claims about the past—‘India was densely forested until the eighteenth century’, or ‘serious impact on the Ghat forests began only under colonial- ism’. Th ese claims are amenable to investigation using various proxy records that may refl ect, for example, deforestation, erosion, saliniza- tion, or changes in species compositions. Th us, unpacking the notion of the pre-colonial—and amplifying the ‘voices’ of non-humans in any period—will require attention to non-textual evidence; not as an alternative to written records but as a source of independent information. Such information that can not only provide more accurate answers to some questions (‘was there overgrazing?’), but, even more critically, can also help us interrogate the historical record itself (‘What do people mean when they refer to this region as “wild”? How do varying accounts of the same physical Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 43 landscape differ in areas of interest and emphasis and relative to external evidence about that same landscape?’). Beyond the use of other archives, however, this chapter also makes a case for the importance of understanding longer-term records of stability and change. Th ere at least two reasons for contextualizing more recent change against longer-term records. Th e fi rst is that many environmental transformations have had long-term eff ects, eff ects which may continue into the present. In the example from the south- ern Deccan discussed here, early sixteenth-century (pre-colonial) landscape transformations were profound, altering water fl ows, soils, vegetation, and culturally-mediated understandings and routes of movement across the landscape. Th ese changes are not ancient his- tory for local residents, who continue to live with the consequences of long-ago decision and actions. Similarly, it would be diffi cult to study the colonial history of this region without some understanding of its longer history. Commercial agriculture was indeed established here in the nineteenth century, but it relied on much older irrigation facili- ties and mimicked, though did not replicate, forms of commercial production from the sixteenth century. Certainly historical debates over agrarian ‘growth, stagnation, or decline’ in British India require an understanding of what went before, and a sense of if, and if so, how, colonial changes fi t into longer-term shift s.1 While the need for comparison is widely recognized in colonial and modern history, too oft en the ‘chronological other’ is cast in simplistic terms as traditional or pre-colonial, reducing dynamic histories to a single condition. Th e second reason for expanding our temporal reach is conceptual. Both deep history and the evidence from proxy records of human– environment interaction have the potential to destabilize existing assumptions and tropes that continue to play powerful roles in environmental scholarship and activism. Deeply rooted conceptions about process and interaction, implicit understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and their interactions are at stake.

Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation

Progress and Decline: Linear Narratives of Loss Let us consider three opposing (but closely related visions) of the ecological history of India. Certainly it is not possible to do justice 44 Shift ing Ground to this literature here. Instead, I highlight several themes that run through this scholarship, themes of origins and of balance, of dis- ruption, loss, and degradation. Implicated in all these positions is a discourse of colonial science that, fi rst of all, saw South Asians as variously situated in a progression of agricultural and ecological sophistication, from ‘primitive’ swidden agriculturalists to more ‘advanced’ plough cultivators who, nevertheless, lacked modern, sci- entifi c understanding of cultivation practice or forest management.2 Swidden, for example, was seen by many colonial offi cials not only as primitive (and hence ancient) but also as irrational and destructive, posing a threat to forest environments through the use of fi re and the clearing of what were seen to be pristine forests.3 Such destruc- tion and disorder demanded the imposition of scientifi c, disciplined (and disciplinary) knowledge. Th ere has been much research on colonial science in India, especially forestry, but also agriculture, medicine, botany, and cartography, so it should not be necessary to belabour this point. What we may thus loosely term the ‘colonial perspective’ on Indian landscape history explicitly invokes notions of progress (especially Eurocentric cultural evolution) and science, the latter viewed in terms of human control of nature and empirical advances.4 In sharp reaction to such perspectives, romantic/national visions of ecological history such as that advanced by Gadgil and Guha, in their infl uential early synthesis of Indian environmental history, paint a rosy picture of pre-colonial ‘traditional balance’. 5 Happy indigenes living in harmony with nature were rudely interrupted by colonial intervention which brought about deforestation, degradation, and a breakdown of traditional forms of management and self-governance. In its most extreme form, this perspective sees caste as analogous to ecological ‘niche,’ suggesting that pre-colonial South Asians formed a kind of textbook ecosystem that was stable, sustaining to its members, and in equilibrium. Th e ‘Hindu Eden’ of the timeless pre-colonial was followed by a loss of innocence and massive destruction of environ- ment laid entirely at the feet of the foreign intruder. Th at such a vision biologizes social distinction and naturalizes power relations might go without saying; that it is simply false as a historical vision, must, however, be emphasized. To suggest that pre-colonial South Asia was an unchanging canvas of ‘green’ and happy equilibrium robs both Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 45 humans and the natural world of their dynamic history, and simply inverts the signs of the colonial discourse on ecological destruction without subjecting it to a serious challenge. 6 Both perspectives outlined earlier share a common narrative thread and are, in fact, variants of the same basic theory of social- ized nature. From an original state (a state of nature, one might say), human action is added; this action leads either to equilibrium (harmony with nature) followed by disequilibrium (romantic), or its reverse (colonial). Both agree, however, fi rst, that equilibrium is possible and second, that an original condition of nature has been modifi ed (unnaturally) by human beings. If colonial ‘degradation visions’, to borrow a term from Fairhead and Leach, paint a picture of primitivity and ignorance leading to ecological destruction, checked only by the application of science and good management, then romantic visions simply re-place this transition into the colonial and postcolonial periods. 7 Th e power of such narratives is well illustrated by Mosse’s discus- sion of perceptions of South Indian reservoir systems as constantly being in a state of decay, a state presumably resulting from the dissolution of ’traditional institutional arrangements’ for their use. 8 He notes that in development circles, the decline of reservoir sys- tems is commonly described in terms of the incursion of colonial rule into ‘traditional’ village-based institutions. Similarly, East India Company administrators also viewed the decline of reservoir sys- tems as

… a sign of the administrative and moral disorder of the regimes they had come to replace. Tank systems have, in fact, been interpreted as being in a state of decline, neglect, and disrepair whenever they have been described. Th e historical identifi cation of ‘traditional’ village sys- tems and the moment of their collapse is no simple task. It involves a seemingly endless journey back in time. 9

Mosse comments, ‘Like the ideal rural order of which they are a part, tank systems never simply change, they decay…’. 10 Th e existence of long-standing tropes of decline, decay, degeneration, and loss does not mean that such processes never occur, but it should alert us to a possible problem in that the idea of a colonial destruction of 46 Shift ing Ground traditional village-based institutions, for self-regulation of irrigation is a consistent part of the argument for an agro-ecological watershed at this time. Images of decay raise problem of origins. What could have been the ‘original’, ‘natural’ state of South Asian terrestrial environments? Variability in climate and landforms across this region suggests that there will be no simple answer, but the more important response to such a query is historical. Humans inhabited the subcontinent well before the dramatic worldwide climate shift s that marked the begin- ning of the present interglacial era, the Holocene, about 10,000 years ago. ‘Environment’, as a complex blend of rainfall, soils, hydrology, vegetation, and animal life, is always relative to climate change so that for all practical purposes India’s ancient ‘environment’ as a potential comparison to the recent past can only begin in the Holocene, by which time humans were already well-established. Th ere was thus never an originary period, a stable non-cultural beginning against which to measure later transformations. Even within the Holocene, there seems to be an unwritten yet widespread assumption that the basic trajectory of landscape change has been from forests to open areas, with forests always in decline relative to the growth of human population. Even without any evi- dence about paleoenvironments, some scholars have simply assumed that clearing of primeval forest was always at issue at some time in the past and that ‘originally’ the subcontinent was entirely cloaked in for- ests. Th e use of other archives makes it clear that this assumption is not always warranted. Contemporary development discourse partakes of both the pro- gressive narratives, oft en combining them into novel forms which may postulate, for example, that indigenous people once lived in har- mony with nature until the forces of Western civilization moved in to destroy natural (and cultural) environments. Now, however, Western science must step in to save both nature and culture. In both scientifi c and development circles one fi nds a (not unjustifi ed) perception of Indian environments as continuously poised on the brink of human- induced disaster, visions which, though owing much to unfounded assumptions about long-term landscape histories, are still powerfully compelling. Perhaps, however, we would do better to build contem- porary action on real historical footings rather than on assumed Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 47 progressions (or regressions) of change, assumptions which overwrite historical complexities of actual history.

Out of Balance, Falling from Grace A third critical perspective on Indian ecological history is scientifi c. Here I focus on only one aspect of this approach that shares certain narrative conventions and assumptions with both the colonial and romantic perspectives which, aft er all, were both formulated in asso- ciation with it. In natural science usage, the notion of climax vegeta- tion is related to concepts of plant succession, especially ‘primary’ succession that takes place under ‘natural’ conditions apart from human impact. 11 In a way similar to studies of cultural evolution, succession studies generally proceed on the basis of spatial rather than temporal analysis.12 Th at is, although vegetation succession is explicitly diachronic, it is usually reconstructed on the basis of observations of a spatial series of extant plant communities rather than through paleoecological data—that is, by substituting spatial variation for chronological progression even though historical meth- ods (palaeoecology) do exist. Th e idea of vegetation succession, and especially climax, suggests a beginning and an end, the latter gov- erned by a stable (albeit dynamic) equilibrium. Climax vegetation has reached a stable state of becoming. Th is discussion oversimplifi es the conceptual apparatus surrounding vegetation succession, but it should be clear that the notion of climax vegetation constitutes the arguably mythical origin point for all the discourses of degrada- tion discussed here (the colonial, the romantic, and the scientifi c). Climax vegetation is the state of nature humans will eventually despoil. Th e equilibrium assumptions of classical succession theory have come under attack as critics raised issues of climate change, fi res, and other ‘natural’ processes of disruption.13 Indeed, critiques of Clementsian climax theory or monoclimax began almost immedi- ately, resulting in a series of modifi ed climax ecology positions. Most important of these early challenges was that of Tansley who argued in the 1920s and 1930s that there could be multiple climax states in any one region. 14 Edaphic conditions, heavy grazing, or recurrent fi res could, for example, create apparently permanent types of vegetation 48 Shift ing Ground which deserved to be considered climaxes. Tansley referred to both these conditions and to the long-modifi ed vegetation of Britain as ‘anthropogenic’ formations, refusing to see these as ‘disturbance climaxes’ as Clements would suggest.15 In spite of such challenges, the notion of climax was persistent. Even the ‘modern’ notion of climax, advanced by Whittaker in 1953, which asserts that ‘[t]here is no absolute climax for any area, and climax composition has meaning only relative to position along environmental gradients and to other factors’, clings to the notion of a steady state. ‘Th e climax is a steady state of community productivity, structure and population, with the dynamic balance of its populations determined in relation to its site’.16 Th e one ‘disturbance’ factor that has resisted integration is, of course, human beings, a problem that concerned many ‘anti-climax’ theorists of the early twentieth century. Although they raised the important problem of how, if at all, to sepa- rate human action from that of nature, the solutions off ered by these critics were far from satisfactory, either seeing vegetation groupings (and by extension, whole biotic communities) as ‘accidental’ and plants as purely ‘individualistic’ and hence disruption of natural groupings of no great consequence, or asserting, as Tansley did, that there are ‘anthropogenic climaxes,’ human-made biological systems, ‘as stable and balanced as Clement’s primeval climax’, a solution which retains climax thinking while simultaneously minimizing the poten- tially disruptive eff ects of human action. 17 Non-equilibrium ecologies, although based on earlier challenges and bolstered by research in palaeoecology, have only been promi- nent since the 1980s.18 As Kingsland notes, in addition to providing evidence for signifi cant post-Holocene climate change, ‘[p]alaeoecol- ogy also revealed that biomes were not stable entities of fi xed species composition, but were associations of species that happened to come together by historical accident and that, once altered by human actions, might not be recoverable in their original form’. 19 Th e ‘new natural history’ and the ‘new ecology’ asserted that historically observed envi- ronments are characterized by disequilibrium and instability as much as their opposites; environmental processes thus need to be consid- ered generalizable and historically contingent. 20 Non-equilibrium ecologies radically undermine the concept of ‘normal’ conditions, Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 49 and by extension, the notion of a human-free environment as more normal or natural. If vegetation communities have no stable beginnings but are instead always in a process of adjustment, then narratives of deg- radation are built upon a perilous substrate. In response to this, and in recognition of the impact of humans in shaping vegetation, French ecologists have come up with the notion of a ‘plesioclimax’, the vegetation climax that would be achieved were human beings and their animals to disappear from the scene. Th at this is a thought- experiment is clear from the fact that there is no suggestion as to how one might study such changes; perhaps the French scientists would remain. 21 Such a concept accepts prior history—human as well as vegetational—as given, but again works to remove human agency from the landscape. Th e notion of plesioclimax is an attempt to defi ne stability in a shift ing world. I have made light of this concept, but it is not without logic. Aft er all, consistent factors and processes do, and we must understand their operation as well as the particular historical trajectories of landscapes. Even a cursory look at landscape history shows human interference—or co-construction—in even such seemingly organic features as soil nutrient profi les. Invoking plesioclimax does not allow us to stop the clock or to erase humans from the landscape. Like the ‘fall’ and expulsion from the garden in romantic approaches, scientifi c approaches adopt the view of human-modifi ed natural environment s, original states of nature against which cultural action is arrayed. Th e long human history in South Asia, along with its changing climate, make it clear that there can never have been such a beginning, and that humans cannot be excised from histories of the landscape. Beyond this, many accounts of change, whether of environ- mental, political, or social history, drink from the same metaphorical well, invoking common tropes of loss, degradation, and decay. Th at tropes are shared across diff erent intellectual traditions points to their pervasive appeal, but should perhaps also make us wary that they nec- essarily represent past actualities rather than serving present needs. If we abandon the quest for a preanthropic historical origin point for human landscape history, then these narratives lose an essential part of their structure. Easy narratives lost, we are left with processes and 50 Shift ing Ground relationships involving humans and others; relationships operating contextually and historically and in their confl uence creating the more complete environmental histories.

Opening up the Pre-colonial: Building Comparison and Mapping Change

Let us return to the notion of a colonial ecological watershed. Historians have presented a compelling case for the signifi cance of changes in forests, agriculture, and aspects of land rights and gover- nance at this time, changes that seem to be pivotal for understanding contemporary India. What is less clear is that whether these changes always represented novel and unprecedented transformations, or were such changes ever part of ongoing processes that may have predated colonial interference. Rather than juxtaposing a dynamic present or recent past to a static pre-colonial baseline or beginning, clearly it is necessary to elucidate both human and non-human histories along a fl exible timeline. What follows are three brief examples of such analysis. In the fi rst case, we see an exception to the usual disconnect between human and environmental histories in the context of the relatively distant past of the Indus Valley. Here evidence for non-human agency in shap- ing historical change was strongly resisted by archaeologists leery of environmental determinism and for whom notions of a ‘fall from grace’ precipitated by human profl igacy proved more appealing. Th e other two examples focus on forests and their disappearance. Narratives of both progress and loss are evident in the case of the early agricultural settlement of the Gangetic plain where technologi- cal and civilizational development were presumed to have destroyed primeval forests. Material archives, however, call this assumption into question. In the fi nal case, it was found that the region around the city of Vijayanagara in the southern Deccan had undergone large-scale environmental transformations several times prior to colonization, with early sixteenth-century patterns of deforestation and erosion having a much greater impact than any period prior to the twenty- fi rst century. Here, long-term history evident from multiple proxy records shows no evidence of a colonial ecological watershed. In each instance, pre-colonial pasts reveal patterns of dynamic and sometimes Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 51 unexpected change; never static, such patterns resist characterization as simple baselines for later change.

Western Rajasthan and the Indus Delta: Life on the Edge

In 1974, Gurdip Singh and his colleagues published the results of a pollen analysis from three salt lakes in western Rajasthan and one freshwater lake in the Aravalli Hills. 22 While much of this record detailed (a proxy record of) changes in vegetation associated with the early Holocene, within archaeology their assertion that the vegetation in Phase IV (ca. 3000–1000 BCE) was correlated with an increase in rainfall, except for a relatively drier period from 1800–1500 BCE, raised a great deal of scepticism. Th e Harappan was an early state, or more likely, series of early states that fl ourished in and around the fl ood plains of the Indus river system between about 2600 and 1900 BCE. Th ese were the fi rst urban centres in South Asia, a development that took place within that more mesic period identifi ed on the basis of an expansion in the pollen of wetland plants and an overall increase in vegetation cover. Linked by a shared writing system, weights and measures, and norms of town planning as well as by trade, the Indus sphere in its ‘Mature’ phase encompassed more area than any other early state. While Indus sites are found across a range of environ- mental contexts, with outlying settlements as far away as Oman and Afghanistan, most were sited to take advantage of the alluvial soils and fl ood water of the Indus system. Th e decline of that urban system took place within the temporal window identifi ed by Singh and his colleagues as a period of aridity. Around 1900 BCE, the great city of Mohenjo-daro was abandoned, not to be reoccupied until the fi rst century CE when a Buddhist mon- astery and stupa were built on the site. Many other Harappan cities were also abandoned around the same time and the size and complex- ity of the city of Harappa was reduced. Beyond this pattern of deur- banization and abandonment, we also see the cessation of many of the features that seemed to link the vast world of the Indus—including the script, stamp seals, and shared ceramic styles. While ecological despair was in some sense the order of the day— Ehrlich’s popular 1968 work, Th e Population Bomb, predicted serious 52 Shift ing Ground food crises by 1974, with the Pope even advocating abortion and birth control to control the crisis—the preferred conception of ecological crisis was human-induced degradation. Strikingly, many archaeolo- gists routinely discounted the accuracy of Singh et al’. study entirely. More popular were narratives of degradation and profl igacy, with deforestation brought on by excessive fuel use in the production of fi red bricks being one common suggestion, albeit one not backed by any evidence other than the presence of said bricks. By the 1980s, concurrent with a shift towards more political expla- nations of change, much new archaeological work had been con- ducted, including Mughal’s pioneering survey of the Ghaggar–Hakra River system (on the Pakistan side) and a later Indo-French eff ort (on the Indian side) which identifi ed hundreds of settlements, includ- ing several major cities, that had literally been left high and dry by major shift s in the river’s course.23 Looking for culture, archaeologists had encountered nature once again. It thus now seems probable that the end of Indus urbanism, and political collapse as well, was linked to mobility of the Indus rivers. 24 Agrarian crisis in the core domain seems to have precipitated a more general cultural, as well as political and economic transformation. How this happened and why is an important and, to my mind, as yet unanswered question. For Possehl, a rejection of the Harappan ideology explains why the successors ‘largely ridded themselves’ of its memory. Kenoyer, on the other hand, sees considerably more conti- nuity of Mature Harappan elements into the post-Harappan societies that emerged around 600 BCE on the Gangetic Plain, though he, too, points to the importance of river movements, almost certainly linked to tectonic patterns, for explaining the end of the Indus system.25 But what of Singh and his colleagues? As it turns out, they were right. Despite the wholesale rejection of their fi ndings by archae- ologists, they continued working on environmental records from the region, as did others, and there now exists a whole suite of proxy data indicating the existence of more arid conditions around 2000 BCE, peaking around 1500 BCE, an extremely widespread climate trend.26 Th e pollen record of western Rajasthan has been rehabilitated within archaeology, though I suspect the fact that proxy records of climate and vegetation change are now securely established may be less important than the current interest in ‘collapse’ and the newfound Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 53 acceptability, in an age of global warming, of factoring environmental conditions into historical explanations. What this account shows us is that having accurate information on past conditions may be a necessary, but certainly not suffi cient, condition for understanding human–environment relationships in the past. Establishing a change in climate, vegetation, or any other environmental parameter does not, in itself, elucidate its signifi cance for past human action, either as cause or consequence. Here, again, we need to know what such measures are proxies of—vegetation change can be caused by climate, disease, human action, succes- sional eff ects, or some combination of agents, and of course humans may respond to environmental changes in many ways. Consistently tempting are dominant narratives of loss and decline; stories of the supposed profl igate fi ring of bricks invoked devastated forests and human folly. Th e actions of Harappan urbanites almost certainly led to long-term environmental eff ects of contemporary relevance. In this sense, the ancient record is relevant to modern history. However, what the struggle over interpretation of the pollen data also shows is the need for theoretical frameworks that bring together human and non-human agency into novel forms of historical understanding. New archives bring new problems as well as new perspectives.

The Gangetic Plain: Losing Primeval Forests

Th e vast and fertile plain of the Ganga and its tributaries is today home to hundreds of millions of people and is a key zone of agricultural production. Formed only during the Late Quaternary, the Gangetic plain does not have a long pre-human geological history but was (and is) instead under active construction by both meandering rivers and human action. For many years, archaeologists speculated that agricul- ture was only possible on the densely forested Gangetic plain aft er the development of iron tools made it possible to clear forests and plant fi elds.27 Th is notion quickly became orthodoxy and is widely repeated even today.28 Th e fi rst damage to the story of the forests and the iron axe came from within archaeology when it was noted that pre-iron peoples in many parts of the world had handily cleared forests using only stone axes. Th us, technology alone could hardly account for the apparent 54 Shift ing Ground lack of early agricultural settlement. 29 Th e second blow, too, came from within as scholars began to look more carefully for early settle- ments—and found them. At this point, the story should have ended. Early agriculturalists did indeed settle on the fertile, hydrologically active northern plains, even without iron tools. Th e latter appear to have been introduced from southern India where, as we will see, agriculturalists had already had a signifi cant impact on vegetation and soils by 800 BCE. Why do we still hear this story? Some blame falls on a tendency to repeat entrenched viewpoints, but more important, I suspect, is the power of the vision of a vast, impenetrable forest conquered by humans through technological ingenuity. As noted, the idea of universal or near-universal, pre-human (primeval) forests is a con- sistent historical trope and the demise of forests, whether lamented or celebrated, is oft en viewed as an inevitable consequence of human history. 30 Recent paleoecological studies, however, show defi nitively that many parts of the Gangetic plain were never densely forested at all. 31 Sharma and colleagues, for example, used pollen and stable isotope evidence from a 15,000-year record of stratifi ed sediments in oxbow lakes on the central Gangetic plain to show that vegetation around the lake never contained many trees or woody shrubs but was instead a grassland savannah throughout the Holocene. 32 W h i l e more work on regional variation in vegetation history remains to be done, it seems clear that narratives about the loss of the great central Gangetic forests can be put to rest once and for all. Critically, what Sharma and colleagues call ‘cultural pollens’, weedy plants oft en associated with fi elds or anthropogenic burning and large- pollen grasses, occur throughout the entire 15,000-year sequence.33 It is possible that this long-term presence of weedy pioneer species adapted to disturbed zones indicates consistent pressure on the envi- ronment—agriculture, anthropogenic burning, or some other cause. A human role in structuring the ‘natural’ environment of the central Gangetic plain since before the onset of the Holocene is thus a dis- tinct possibility. Once the alluvial fl ood plain of the Ganges was urbanized begin- ning around 600 BCE, the ‘second urbanization’, there was no turning back. Here, as elsewhere, we fi nd a pattern in which deeply strati- fi ed sites were formed as generations lived, farmed, and carried out Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 55 their lives in the same places for long periods of time. As Possehl has pointed out, memory of the Indus civilization was completely lost—it was discovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century. In con- trast, historical memory of the Gangetic plain constitutes a durable cultural repertoire that, while far from unchanging, has anchored patterns of land use and settlement that emphasize reuse, reoccupa- tion, and commemoration of specifi c places. Whether such memories are a consequence, a cause, or both, of the more continuous record of human settlement on the Gangetic plain as opposed to the Indus fl oodplain is perhaps not answerable. What is clear, however, is fi rst that the latter constitutes a much more problematic environment for intensive agriculture and urban settlement than the former. Th e history of neither region, however, conforms well to a picture of uni- lineal change from forests to fi elds. While the savannahs of the early Holocene Gangetic plain became increasingly intensively cultivated and modifi ed through time, the drier grasslands and swampy mar- gins of the Indus and its tributaries saw signifi cant fl uctuations up and down in the intensity of human activity. Th is, along with large- scale processes of climate change and the active regime of shift ing rivers, led to a highly punctuated history of human–environment relationships—a see-saw rather than a slide.

The Southern Deccan: Forest Loss, Resurgence, and Destruction

Leaving the world of the great rivers and moving to the semi-arid interior of the peninsula, we arrive in a region lightly blessed with a low and variable rainfall and a perennial but entrenched river, the Tungabhadra. In this region, extensive archaeological, paleoecologi- cal, and historical research has shown some contours of long-term landscape histories; histories neither as dramatically interrupted nor as radically uninterrupted as the examples discussed earlier.34 I n s t e a d , what we see are episodes of discontinuity breaking up lengthy records of settlement stability. By stability I do not mean lack of change, but consistent choices in settlement location and use and reuse of the same places and features, even if for very diff erent purposes. By combining varied forms of information—proxy records from art and architec- ture, texts, archaeological survey, and pollen analysis—we have been 56 Shift ing Ground able to document a dynamic landscape history and, here at least, one where pre-colonial environmental changes were even more signifi - cant than colonial-era ones. From the earliest agriculture (3000–1300 BCE) to the Early Modern (around 1750 CE), long-term environmental change in the southern Deccan is marked by a sustained but irregular trajectory of agricul- tural intensifi cation and forest loss punctuated by brief periods of for- est recovery. We have documented signifi cant soil erosion off the high granitic hills of this region, a process which led to both the exposure of bare rock and colluvial deposition of sediment, enriching low-lying valleys. Remote sensing data show a correlation between hills occu- pied during the Iron Age (1300–500 BCE) and exposed rock, a pat- tern supported by geo-archaeological evidence. 35 Erosion was caused not only by hilltop towns and villages, but also by expanded grazing and vegetation clearing. By 1000 CE, when we have good information on regional vegeta- tion, we see a landscape that was very open and not thickly forested. Th is pattern is clear despite consistent discussion of forests—places encoding signifi cant cultural and strategic value—in Middle Period texts. As several scholars have noted, cultural conceptions of ‘forests’ were complex, something also true in contemporary ecology, where defi ning just what a forest is has proven vexingly diffi cult.36 While very early residents of this region were clearly biological and even geological agents as well as cultural actors, the scope of land- scape change increased signifi cantly in Middle periods and especially during the Late Middle Period (1300–1600 CE) when the vast city of Vijayanagara was established. In this semi-arid region, agricultural fi elds are concentrated in the colluvial valleys between outcropping ridges—the very same colluvium enhanced by Iron Age erosion—and along the limited alluvium of the Tungabhadra River. Th e open veg- etation evident in the eleventh century continued into the fourteenth, with proxy measures of vegetation and fi re history showing an anthro- pogenic regional fl ora which included cultigens and fi eld weeds. Th e founding and rapid growth of a large city required rapid and profound transformations in production. Vijayanagara city was located in a bend in the Tungabhadra, one of the few places it was possible to build long, river-fed canals. Although one small canal had been built prior to the establishment of the city, there was a rapid investment Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 57 in canal construction starting in the early fourteenth century. All the early canals and canal-fed reservoirs lay close to the city, in the limited alluvial zone along the river, where the early Vijayanagara settlement was also concentrated. During the early sixteenth century, urban population expansion led to dramatic changes in the hinterland, including intensifi cation of areas close to the city. More striking, however, was the spatial expan- sion of agriculture, with entire valleys becoming home to long chains of interconnected run-off -fed reservoirs. In this very dry region, res- ervoirs can be a dubious economic investment. Although a very few allow wet cultivation and most aim to make dry farming more secure and productive, reservoirs silt in, breach—sometime with disastrous consequences as when the village of Daroji was swept away—and fail in some years to collect any water at all. In at least one historically recorded famine, reservoir-irrigated fi elds fared worse than dry- farmed fi elds because of the rapid evaporation of water needing to fl ow some distance to fi elds below.37 By the early sixteenth century, then, agricultural practice became both more intensive and diverse. Areas where more canals could be built or older canals extended came under irrigation. Further out, entire areas were converted to cultivation by residents of new villages; the landscape transformed into a patchwork of fi elds and grazed grasslands. Agriculture, mining, and settlement expansion during the height of urban expansion transformed local landscapes to an unprecedented extent, reworking local vegetation, slopes, and soils and creating new confi gurations of settlement, transportation, irri- gation, and sacred spaces. Pollen and microscopic charcoal confi rm this archaeological picture, showing not only that regional vegetation was already signifi cantly transformed well before the founding of the city, but also that sixteenth-century environmental impacts— deforestation and erosion—occurred on a scale unmatched by any previous or later period. Although the city of Vijayanagara was quickly and completely abandoned aft er 1565, nearly all of the small agricultural villages sur- rounding it remained occupied. Demographic loss was not restricted to the urban elite, but also included many craft speople, merchants, temple personnel, and others. Even though rural villages were not abandoned, the loss of urban markets meant that production was 58 Shift ing Ground radically restructured. Th e complex sixteenth-century agricultural landscape did not (and perhaps could not) last very long. With the defeat of the imperial armies and the plunder and abandonment of the capital city, the majority of consumers disappeared from the local scene and many of the pre-existing arrangements around the control of land, water, labour, and produce were suddenly disrupted or called into question. Within a relatively short period of time, the majority of the outlying reservoirs, many already choked with silt, were either abandoned or allowed to grow smaller and less eff ective each season. At the same time that many dry-farmed areas fell out of use, the canal network continued to be maintained and used. Although the city itself lay in ruins, changes to the landscape, material and conceptual, continued to shape the ways in which local people interacted with it. In this region, environmental consequences of land use histories have been profound, with human impact on landforms by the fi rst millen- nium BCE and major episodes of erosion and deforestation by the fi rst millennium CE. Strikingly, the scale of erosion and loss of woody vegetation cover during the (pre-colonial) sixteenth century remains as yet unsurpassed. Th e construction of canals, reservoirs, terraces, and other facilities has modifi ed slopes and water fl ows, aff ecting not only sediment, vegetation, and fauna, but also climate. Paddy soils have formed under areas of wet rice, bringing about a permanent change in soil structure. Demographic and spatial expansions of the sixteenth century resulted in the founding of many new villages, many still occupied, as well as the construction of roads, temples, wells, and other features that continue to structure transportation, pilgrimage and worship, residence, and agriculture. Th e environmental changes that took place over the last several thousand years in this region, con- trary to the notion of a colonial ecological watershed, created much more dramatic and far-reaching changes than those of the last few hundred years, though the inhabitants of the twenty-fi rst century are working hard to make up the diff erence.

Discussion

Clearly, the present always builds upon the past, and in arguing for greater attention to long-term environmental histories and a concom- itant destabilizing of the notion of a unitary ‘pre-colonial’ past, I am Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 59 not suggesting that we need always reach back to beginnings. Indeed, beginnings always elude our reach, elusive, and perhaps, ultimately fruitless goals. Looking for historical baselines, as we have seen, can lead to a futile quest for a past that never was, as a problematic and unenlightened era, or a golden age prior to the decay brought about by modernity, colonization, or—as for Vijayanagara rulers—the inferior rule of a rival. Indeed, the very notion of a pre-colonial baseline against which colonial and post-colonial history can be measured, is, as I have argued, deeply problematic. Not only does the fi rst part of that construction falsely reduce and homogenize diverse and dynamic histories, but the second part builds on the problematic logic of suc- cession. If, on the other hand, there is no originary state, no baseline, but instead contingent socionatural histories, we are left with the problem of sorting out both processes of change and moments of sig- nifi cant transformation from within an expansive chronological fi eld. To do this eff ectively will require both new tools—including the use of other archives—and new strategies for eff ectively bringing together diverse sources of information. Histories of South Asia’s terrestrial environments, painstakingly constructed with all of the resources at our disposal, textual and material, signifi cantly complicate and may even contradict existing narrative conventions about environmental change. Th ere never were dense forests in the central Gangetic plain. Th e dry tropical forests of northern Karnataka were in serious decline by 1000 CE and virtually gone by the early sixteenth century. But they did come back, at least for a while. Contemporary farmers all across India cope with environ- ments transformed by human action—and they, too, add their part to this history. Th e story of Lake Lunkaransar and the other sites of the pollen and stable isotope records studied by Singh and his colleagues shows that simply knowing the history of climate and vegetation cannot in itself fi ll the gaps of environmental history. As much as we must recognize the existence of certain longstanding tropes such as uni- versal primeval forests as conventions rather than empirical evidence , it is also important not to assume that ecological shift s necessarily or unambiguously prompt cultural responses. All historical records are proxy records, of course, and the same kinds of source-side ana- lytical skepticism applied by historians to texts need to be exercised 60 Shift ing Ground with respect to the testimony of material records. If we can unite the potentials of both kinds of archives—the primary sources of human and non-human history—we can make environmental history a pow- erful and productive approach to understanding socionatural worlds in South Asia and beyond.

Notes

1 . S. Guha, ed., Growth, Stagnation, or Decline? Agricultural Productivity in British India (Delhi: Oxford, 1999). 2 . For example, D. Arnold, Colonising the Body: State, Medicine, and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); D. Arnold and R. Guha,‘Introduction: Themes and Issues in the Environmental History of South Asia’, in Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, eds D. Arnold and R. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–20; L.H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: Th e Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002); M. Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); R.P. Tucker, A Forest History of India (Delhi: Sage, 2011). 3 . cf. J. Fairhead and M. Leach, Misreading the African Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for a parallel argument. 4 . cf. M. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 5 . Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6 . cf. R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); See Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest; K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Forests and the Environmental History of Modern India’, Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 2 (2009): 299–324. 7 . See Fairhead and Leach, African Landscape , p. 288. 8 . D. Mosse, ‘Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of “Community Management”: Th e Case of Tank Irrigation Development in South India’, Modern Asian Studies 3, no. 2 (1999): 303–38; D. Mosse, Th e Rule of Water: Statecraft , Ecology and Collective Action in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Mosse cites Gadgil and Guha (1992) as making this claim, but this assumption is widely shared. Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 61

9 . Mosse 1999: 307, italics in the original. 10 . Mosse 1999: 308 11 . H.R. Delacourt and P.A. Delacourt, Quaternary Ecology: A Paleoecological Perspective (London: Chapman & Hall, 1991), pp. 61–7; and see S.E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology , Second Edition (Chicago, 1995), p. 18. 12 . See Delacourt and Delacourt, Quaternary Ecology ; S.T.A. Pickett, J. Kolasa, and C.G. Jones, Ecological Understanding, Second Edition: Th e Nature of Th eory and the Th eory of Nature (New York: Academic Press, 2007). 13 . Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211. 14 . Summarized in Worster, Nature’s Economy, 238–53, and see F.B. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More than the Sum of the Parts (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 100. 15. J. Keulartz, The Struggle for Nature: A Critique of Radical Ecology (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 143–6. 16 . Cited in Golley, Ecosystem Concept in Ecology , 100–1 17 . Worster, Nature’s Economy , 240; Keulartz, Struggle for Nature . 18 . See important papers by M.B. Davis in Climatic Instability, Time Lags, and Community Disequilibrium, in Community Ecology, eds J. Diamond and T.J. Case (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), pp. 269–84; M.B. Davis, ‘Ecology and Paleoecology Begin to Merge’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 9 (1994), pp. 357–8. 19 . See S.E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature , p. 232. 20 . W. Balée and C. Erickson, ‘Introduction’ in Time, Complexity and Historical Ecology, eds. W. Balée and C. Erickson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 1–21; K.S. Zimmerer, Human Geography and the ‘New Ecology’: Th e Prospect and Promise of Integration (New York: Blackwell, 1994). 21 . H. Gaussen, P. Legris, L. Labroue, V.M. Meher-Homji, and M. Viart, Carte Inernationale Du Tapis Vegetal, Notice de la Feuille: Mysore. Extrait des Travaux de la Section Scientifi que et Technique de L’Institut Francais de Pondicherry, Hors Serie 7, 1996. 22 . G. Singh, R.D. Joshi, S.K. Chopra, and A.B. Singh, ‘Late Quaternary History of Vegetation and Climate in the Rajasthan Desert, India’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 267 (1974): 467–501. 62 Shift ing Ground

23 . R. Mughal, ‘Th e Protohistoric Settlement Patterns in the Cholistan Desert, Pakistan’ in South Asian Archaeology 1987 , ed. M. Teddei, (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1990), pp. 143–156. 24 . G.L. Possehl, Th e Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective (New York: Altamira Press, 2002), pp. 240–243. 25 . J.M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 26 . G. Singh, R.J. Wasson, and D.P. Agrawal, ‘Vegetational and Seasonal Climatic Changes Since the Last Full Glacial in the Thar Desert, Northwestern India’, Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 65(1990): 351–8; see also R.F. Denniston, L.A. Gonzales, Y. Asmerom, R.H. Sharma, and M.K. Reagan, ‘Speleothem Evidence for Changes in Indian Summer Monsoon Precipitation Over the Last ~2300 Years’, Quaternary Research 53(2000): 196–202. 27 . D.P. Agrawal, Th e Copper Bronze Age in India: An Integrated Archaeo- logical Study of the Copper Bronze Age in India in the Light of Chrono- logical, Technological, and Ecological Factors, ca. 3000 –500 B.C. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971); D.D. Kosambi, Th e Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). 28 . But see M. Lal, ‘Iron Tools, Forest Clearance and Urbanization in the Gangetic Plains’, Iron and Social Change in Early India, Debates in Indian History and Society , ed. B.P. Sahu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 137–49. 29 . F.R. Allchin, Th e Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: Th e Emergence of Cities and States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 65; M. Lal, Settlement History and the Rise of Civilization in the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, From 1500 BC to 300 AD (Delhi: BR Publishing, 1984). 30 . S.B. Hecht, in press, ‘The Social Lives of Forest Transitions and Successions: Th eories of Forest Resurgence’, in Th e Social Life of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence , eds S.B. Hecht, K.D. Morrison, and C. Padoch. Cf. R.P. Harrison, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), for a literary analysis. 31. M.S. Chauhan, ‘Pollen Record of Vegetation and Climatic Changes in North Eastern Madhya Pradesh During Last 1, 600 Years’, Tropical Ecology 46, no. 2 (2005): 265–271; A. Farooqui and B. Sekhar, ‘Climate Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock 63

Change and Vegetation Succession in Lalitpur area, Uttar Pradesh (India) During Late Holocene’, Tropical Ecology 52, no. 1 (2011): 69–77. 32 . S.M. Sharma, M. Joanchimski, H.J. Tobschall, I. B. Singh, C. Sharma, M.S. Chauhan, and G. Morgenroth, ‘Late Glacial and Holocene Environ mental Changes in Ganga Plain, Northern India’, Quaternary Science Reviews 23, no. 1–2 (2004): 145–59; S. Sharma, M. Joachimski, H. J. Tobschall, I. B. Singh, C. Sharma, and M. S. Chauhan, ‘Correlative Evidences of Monsoon Variability, Vegetation Change and Human Inhabitation in Sanai lake Deposit: Ganga Plain, India’, Current Science 90, no. 7 (2006): 973–8. 33 . Sharma et al. 2004. Although pollen from the entire grass family (Poaceae) is broadly similar, pollen from domesticated grasses such as wheat, barley, rice, and millets are typically larger than wild grasses, forming the Cerealia group. It is unlikely that domesticated grains were already being grown on the Gangetic plain by 13,000 BCE, and it may be that at least some of these grains belong to the few large-pollen wild grasses such as Coixlachryma-jobi . 34 . In this section I draw on information from several sources, including archaeological survey and excavation, K.D. Morrison, Daroji Valley: Landscape History, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System (Delhi: Manohar, 2009); C.M. Sinopoli and K.D. Morrison, Th e Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey, Vol. I, University of Michigan Museum of Archaeology, analysis of texts, 2007; A.L. Dallapiccola and C.T.M. Kotraiah, King, Court and Capital —An Anthology of Kannada Literary Sources from the Vijayanagar Period (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003); K.D. Morrison and M.T. Lycett, ‘Centralized Power, Centralized Authority? Ideological Claims and Archaeological Patterns’, Asian Perspectives 33, no. 2 (1994): 312–53; K.D. Morrison and M.T. Lycett, ‘Inscriptions as Artifacts: Precolonial South India and the Analysis of Texts’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Th eory, 3, nos 3–4 (1997): 215–37; and analyses of pollen, sediment, and microscopic charcoal, K.D. Morrison, Fields of Victory: Vijayanagara and the Course of Intensifi cation , (Berkeley: Archaeological Research Facility, 1995). 35 . A. Bauer and K.D. Morrison, ‘Assessing Anthropogenic Soil Erosion with Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery: An Archaeological Case Study of Long Term Land Use in Koppal District, Karnataka’, South Asian Archaeology 2007 , ed. M. Tosi, British Archaeological Reports, 2011. 64 Shift ing Ground

36 . F. Zimmerman, Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Th eme in Hindu Medicine (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999); R. Th apar, ‘Perceiving the Forest: Early India’, India’s Environmental History 1(2011); Hecht in press. 37 . K.D. Morrison, ‘Naturalizing Disaster: From Drought to Famine in South India’, in Environmental Disruptions and the Archaeology of Human Response , eds G. Bawden and R. Reycraft (Albuquerque NM: Maxwell Museum, 2000), pp. 21–33. From Eminence to Near 3 Extinction Th e Journey of the Greater One-Horned Rhino

SHIBANI BOSE

Despite growing consensus regarding the pre-colonial past having been far from idyllic, engagements with India’s ancient ecological past have, at best, comprised broad surveys of the ancient period.1 Th is gap is particularly evident in the case of faunal histories with few exceptions that have moved beyond the general focus on the Mughal and the colonial periods. 2 Even within wildlife histories, the rhinoceros, curiously, has received scant attention as against the iconic status enjoyed by elephants and lions or the attention given to the tiger or the cheetah. Against this backdrop, I endeavour to provide insights on eras bygone, in order to chart the passage of the animal across millennia and to situate it within the realms of culture and ecology. Th e story I piece together with the aid of diverse sources will attempt to weave in available archaeofaunal data along with glimpses of the creature in art and literary accounts. As will be evident, we are charting the 66 Shift ing Ground presence of the animal in various cultural niches from hunter–gatherer societies to the fi rst urban civilization of India and beyond. Th e details of this story are thus integral to understanding aspects of the environ- mental history of ancient India as also for recovering echoes of the animal’s presence in areas where it is now extinct. A massive body, stumpy legs, and an armour-clad prehistoric look is what the mind construes of the Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis). Labelled as one of the two greatest success stories in rhino conservation (the other being the southern white rhino in South Africa), what is less known is that the animal is still vulnerable in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) 2012 Red Data List of threatened species.

Past Distribution and Habitat

Of the multitude of rhino species distributed all over the world, only fi ve survive. Th ese include the Indian rhinoceros, the African white or square–lipped rhinoceros (Ceratotheriumsimum ), the African black rhinoceros (Dicerosbicornis ), the Asiatic two–horned or Sumatran rhinoceros (Didermoceros/Dicerorhinussumatrensis ), and the lesser one-horned or Javan rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus). Most have been threatened with extinction and almost all are in confl ict with humans. Of these, the greater one-horned rhinoceros is known to have roamed the marshes of northern India—from Sind to the Brahmaputra valley, as well as the terai regions of Nepal and Sikkim. 3 Th e magnitude of the impact of changes in human landscape on wildlife ecology can be gauged by the fact that a species abundantly distributed in grasslands and riverine fl oodplains till not so long ago, now exists only in Nepal, parts of West Bengal and Assam. Th e mention of habitat ties up crucially with the centrality of these giant plant-eaters to the ecological architecture of the tree-dotted tall grass- land. Weighing nearly two tonnes, rhinos have a profound impact on the habitat in which they live. Th eir size and feeding habits infl uence the physical habitat and spatial distribution of other species in the ecological community. Conservationists caution that with the disap- pearance of rhinos, the vital ‘landscape architecture’ phenomenon also disappears and the resultant ecological changes can be swift and profound.4 From Eminence to Near Extinction 67

As natural landscape architects, rhinos demonstrate the impact of selective browsing by mega herbivores on forest structure and canopy composition. Exclosure studies at Chitwan, Nepal, revealed how browsing and trampling by rhinos inhibited the vertical growth of Litsea and Mallotus saplings which occur in high densities in riv- erine forests. Rhinos, in this case, also played a prominent role in the dispersal of the seeds of Trewianudi fl ora, a common riverine forest tree of southern Nepal. 5

Retracing the Trail: The Testimony of Archaeology

Traversing back in time, fossils tell tales of extinct species of the animal. Th e genus can be traced back to the Pliocene of northern India though most known fossils of Rhinoceros unicornis seem to go back to probably the middle Pleistocene. 6 However, the earliest known co-habitation with humans was noted in a middle Palaeolithic context in the Son Valley. 7 Experts reported its presence in the ter- minal Pleistocene faunal assemblage of the middle Son valley, which together with a large proportion of cervids and equids indicated a landscape with substantial tracts of relatively open grassland.8 Th at the species was the unicornis was inferred from the presence of the animal in this region during the late Pleistocene.9 Here then were the beginnings of an interface which was to mature and manifest itself in the realms of subsistence as well as aesthetics. Holocene remains in early contexts are documented from the east in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, to the west in Pakistan, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and even as far south as Tamil Nadu. Th e unicornis fi gured in the faunal reports of the Mesolithic sites of Langhnaj 10 and Kanewal 11 in Gujarat and Sarai Nahar Rai,12 D a m d a m a ,13 a n d Mahadaha 14 district in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh. An analysis of faunal material at the Mesolithic site of Damdama, the dates for which place it in the fi rst half of the seventh millennium BCE, revealed bones of large mammals like the elephant, rhinoceros, gaur , wild buff alo, and possibly wild cattle. Th e hunting of such large mammals for food was, however, questioned in view of the techno- logical level of the Mesolithic population. Instead, the carcasses or isolated bones were suggested to have been utilized for making bone tools. Th e bones of these large mammals were also found concentrated 68 Shift ing Ground on the southeastern part of the site and were well preserved without much charring or fragmentation. Th ese were proposed to have been intentionally kept raw material for the preparation of bone tools and objects. 15 Such investigations prove beyond doubt that the economic exploi- tation of this animal goes back to ancient times. However, the reserva- tions expressed regarding the fl esh of big mammals like the elephant and the rhinoceros having been consumed, need to be examined from a broader perspective. For this, we will need to take into account all the evidence including those derived from rock paintings (dealt with subsequently). Additionally, if the technological level of the Mesolithic population permitted the utilization of the bones of a dead rhino (scavenged or hunted), then one wonders as to how the same technological level prevented them from utilizing its meat as well. It is evident that a large mountain of meat off ered by a rhino would not be easily foregone. In fact, rhino hide, despite its tough appearance is known to be quite tender at places, making the animal far more vulnerable than it looks.16 At the Mesolithic site of Langhnaj in Gujarat, Frederick Zeuner painstakingly demonstrated how the deliberate pits on a shoulder blade of the animal at the site indicated its use as an anvil for making microlithic tools. 17 Further, from the predominance of game animals in the food debris at the site, he inferred that the economy must have been largely dependent on them. Whether the rhinoceros was a pos- sible inclusion in the diet is a matter of speculation since he mentions the animal as the most ‘remarkable’ of the game animals at the site. Subsequently, however, Juliet Clutton-Brock concluded that all spe- cies at Langhnaj, except the mongoose and the wolf were part of the food economy, clearly reinforcing what Zeuner had hinted at 13 years earlier.18 Comparing the measurements of the scapulae of the three surviving Asian species led to the two rhinoceros scapulae at the site being attributed to the unicornis. Its presence with other swamp liv- ing animals was considered indicative of the availability of perennial water in northern Gujarat during this period. Th e evidence from Langhnaj is also considered interesting in view of the suggested contemporaneity between the late Mesolithic occupa- tion of Langhnaj and the Harappan site of Lothal, 100 km to the south of Langhnaj. Th is interpretation viewed Langhnaj as a campsite of From Eminence to Near Extinction 69 nomadic hunter–gatherers or pastoralists whose movements brought them into repeated contact with the urban agriculturalists.19 S i n c e both sites yielded rhinoceros bones, it clearly testifi es to the exploi- tation of the animal in hunting–gathering and agricultural contexts which co-existed with each other. It also underlines the fact that cul- tures do not necessarily follow each other in a chronological pattern and that an overlap and co-existence of cultures is not uncommon. At Chirand in district Saran, Bihar, the animal’s existence was reported in a Neolithic context. 20 A moist and swampy prehistoric climate as compared to present-day dry conditions was inferred from the presence of the rhinoceros at the site. In the Harappan civilization (c. 2600–1900 BCE), the creature asserted its presence both in the form of bones and art-terracotta fi gures and seals. We have traces of the animal in the form of archaeo- faunal remains retrieved from the sites of Harappa, 21 Kalibangan,22 Lothal, 23 K u n t a s i ,24 Surkotada, 25 K h a n p u r ,26 a n d S h i k a r p u r .27 B u t given that the bones occur sparingly in the faunal collections of this period, it was considered unlikely that big mammals like the rhino formed any signifi cant part of the diet. Rather, the bones were suggested to have been collected as curios or used for making stronger bone tools.28 Even more signifi cant is the archaeological evidence from penin- sular and south India. We encounter rhinoceros bones in a Neolithic context at Paiyampalli in district North Arcot, Tamil Nadu 29 and in Chalcolithic contexts at Nevasa 30 and Inamgaon31 in Maharashtra, suggesting that the environment, at least in pockets of south India during the Neolithic–Chalcolithic period must have been conducive for the survival of large mammals like the rhino. From issues of subsistence and tool-making, we pursue the animal in its trail to the domain of creative expression. Th at the animal had captured the artist’s imagination from early times is apparent in the way it found favour as a subject for rock paintings. Explorations in the Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh revealed more than 15 fi gures of the one-horned rhino in the rock-shelters of the region.32 Th e sites were restricted to a particular area, roughly near the Son River in the southern region of the central part of the district. Moreover, rhino portrayals were encountered only in the paintings of earlier phases, suggesting that the animal may have become extinct in the area later 70 Shift ing Ground on. Far more interesting are extensive scenes presumably belonging to the Mesolithic period, from Kerwaghat in the same district, show- ing the butchering of these animals.33 At Bhimbetka near Bhopal in central India, six Mesolithic hunters confront a giant rhinoceros with microlith-tipped spears, causing the animal to bleed. Th e perils of hunting are unambiguously conveyed when one hunter is tossed in the air by the horn of the rhino. Noteworthy is the contrast between animal and human power visible in the massive body of the rhinoc- eros with its sharp horn, open mouth, raised ears, and twisted tail juxtaposed against the tiny stick-shaped human fi gures.34 X-ray style depictions are a clear indication of human familiarity with the anatomies of the animals they were hunting. In the Pachmari hills, Mesolithic paintings depicting dances involved headdresses and animal masks representing, among other animals, the rhinoceros.35 The paintings convey undiluted engagement with the subjects with generally no eff ort being made towards creating a background or foreground. It has also been observed that not all wild animals are portrayed, the representations being the outcome of a conscious selection that has been explained by human preoccupation with ani- mals that mattered the most or those that formed a part of the diet suggesting that prehistoric artists were mainly interested in edible animals. Th e others such as the felines were represented only because they inspired awe. 36 Th e tradition of depicting the rhinoceros continued during Har- appan times. Figurines in terracotta as well as representations on seals are common at several sites. Th e regularity of portrayals and a closer look at them clearly indicates that the Harappans were seeing this animal more than frequently. Th e qualitative details and graphic fi del- ity of the depictions reveal an interaction close enough to facilitate careful observation of its anatomical features. Th e popularity of the animal as an object of portrayal can be safely inferred from statistics suggesting that depictions comprise 6.3 per cent of the total terracotta collection at Harappa, which is more than double the representations of sheep and goat.37 Signifi cantly, at Mohenjo-daro, though rhinoceros bones are not reported, the creature occurs frequently in the animal figurines, mostly made of pottery and hence seems to have been found within close vicinity. Representations on seals, showing the animal standing From Eminence to Near Extinction 71 over a manger-like object, were arguably considered an indication of the animal having been kept in confi nement aft er being caught young. 38 Similarly, the terracotta models at Lothal in Saurashtra are clearly indicative of Rhinoceros unicornis , which must have inhabited the swamps and marshes around the site in the protohistoric past.39 I t must be pointed out that Lothal is located in an open, partly swampy and fertile tract of territory called Bhal which was wooded with medium-sized and large trees, shrubs, and grasses in protohistoric times and the type of vegetation growing around swamps must have been congenial to rhinoceros and other animals.40 It would be worthwhile to weave into this narrative a discussion regarding how animals like the rhinoceros have been perceived as markers of ecology. In the Harappan civilization, for instance, its pre- ponderance with the relative paucity of the horse is intriguing as in any habitation horses are likely to be more common. Th is was attrib- uted to a humid climate in the early part of the Mature period which nurtured a favourable terra fi rma. 41 Earlier literature, however, argued that marshy habitat is not a prerequisite for rhino existence nor should it be treated as an indicator of any particular climate.42 Th is interpre- tation argued that the climate was relatively dry and could support only sparse vegetation. Hence, both in Sind and Gujarat, animals like the rhinoceros were confi ned to the river valleys and their nala s. A reconstruction of the ecological variables that formed a rhino habitat in Saurashtra about 4,000 years ago, also argued that rhinos exhibit a lot of fl exibility when it comes to adapting to a particular ecological backdrop. 43 It argued that the fl oral record from archaeo- logical sites in Saurashtra indicates the existence of xerophytic veg- etation. Given that climatic conditions there have remained more or less stable in the last four millennia, it becomes vital to investigate the disappearance of the rhino from this region since other animals which shared the rhino habitats survive today. Th e contention is that by the time Harappans arrived in Saurashtra, rhinos were struggling for existence in the eastern part (since thick forests in the western part hindered rhino penetration) and the Harappans, by locating their settlements near water courses, brought biotic pressures to bear on the already embattled rhinos.44 Moreover, it was argued that as long as Harappans of the ‘Mature phase’ (c. 2300– 1750 BCE) were given to trade and commerce there was no organized 72 Shift ing Ground pattern of land use. But a rise in population by late Harappan times entailed an intensive pattern based on dry farming. Th e intrusion of cattle into grasslands also reduced the chances of rhino survival in Saurashtra. Rhinos are known to become asocial when faced with dwindling food supplies and death rates mount. 45 Such early local faunal collapses were not unknown. Th e local extinction of the swamp deer or barasingha in Mehrgarh, Baluchistan around 300 BCE was probably a result of over-hunting and loss of its riverside habitat to cultivation. Its susceptibility to such disturbances also accelerated the process though it survived along the Indus till about a century ago.46 Returning to what archaeology tells us, excavations have amply demonstrated that the animal’s popularity transcended spatial and temporal barriers. Distant sites like Shortughai and Tell Asmar have yielded Harappan or Harappan-influenced seals with rhino depictions. 47 A terracotta fi gure of the animal is known from the Chalcolithic level at Dangawada in Madhya Pradesh. 48 Th e continu- ity in the tradition of depicting the rhinoceros is also attested by the Chalcolithic paintings at Ramchajja in Raisen district and Deurkothar in Rewa district of Madhya Pradesh.49 Varsus, a site yielding late Harappan material in the Dhulia district of Maharashtra, revealed a terracotta mask of a rhino.50 A rock painting of a rhinoceros found in association with a post-Harappan script also came from Kanyadeh in the Chambal Valley. 51 No survey documenting the journey of the rhinoceros would be complete without a mention of the celebrated hoard of bronzes at Daimabad, a Chalcolithic settlement in district Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, assigned to a late Harappan context and chronologically placed between c. 2000–1800 BCE. Given their magnitude and bulk, they were assumed to have been required for community religious purposes. Since all the bronzes had wheels, they were probably meant to be taken out in procession. Th is conjecture is reinforced keeping in mind a seal from Mohenjo-daro, depicting a religious procession, showing an elephant, a rhino, a tiger, and an indistinct animal in a fi le facing right.52 Th ereaft er, there appears to be something amiss in the sources available to us. Th ough the tradition of rhino depictions persisted, portrayals progressively lessened. Th e paucity of evidence regarding From Eminence to Near Extinction 73 the animal aft er the Harappans is intriguing and the reasons are open to speculation. What is palpable is a gradual distancing of the animal from popular imagination which now gets captured with imageries of the mightier elephant and the faster horse. 53 Whether this had to do with the regularity with which the former as well as the lat- ter were encountered, as also their potential to be tamed, controlled, and used vis-à-vis the rhino, is worth considering. Th e realistic modelling of the terracotta fi gurines of the animal at Kausambi, district Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, still indicated the familiarity of the potter with this creature. More or less arid now, it is contended that much of this area in the third century BCE, was covered with forest and received a larger amount of rainfall than today. Th is inference seemed plausible in view of the references to jungles in the vicinity of Kausambi at the time of Buddha. Even during the times of the Chinese pilgrims Faxian (fi ft h century CE) and Xuanzang (seventh century CE), the whole area was probably covered with dense forest.54 Scarce in Maurya times (c. 324–187 BCE), representations nevertheless continued. Rhino fi gures on a soapstone seal dated to the third century BCE from Bhita, Allahabad district, Uttar Pradesh, and on a soapstone disc, tentatively dated to the fi rst century BCE, discovered from Murtaziganj near Patna, stand out as examples. 55 Other representations spread over time are at Sanchi, Begram, and Chandraketugarh. 56 Th e Buddhists and the Jains were also responsible for representations. 57 We meet the rhinoceros again in the Gupta period in the Rhinoceros-Slayer type coin of Kumaragupta I (c. 413/415–455 CE) with pompous legends both on the obverse as well as on the reverse. 58 Th e use of this mega herbivore as a symbol stands out as an innovation against the Tiger- Slayer type of Samudragupta (with the legend vyaghraparakramah ) and the Lion-Slayer (simhavikramah ) type of Chandragupta II. Its signifi cance, therefore, has been a subject of much deliberation. Views have ranged from drawing political and military inferences to those that have attributed a religious signifi cance to it. Th ere are others that perceived the coin as another of the mrgaya or hunting type issued by the Gupta rulers, celebrating their love for big game. It has been argued that although Kumaragupta coins depict the rhino, these are aberrations because they are not popular portrayals and are clearly in exaltation of the ruler slaying the animal and deriding its might. 59 74 Shift ing Ground

Th e Gupta empire reached the peak of its territorial expansion during the reign of Chandragupta II (c. 376–413/415 CE) when it extended from Bengal to the northwest and from the Himalayan terai to the Narmada. 60 To us, the depiction of the animal on the coin is not just a device employed to assert the prowess of the ruler vis-à- vis forces to be reckoned with but is also an indication of the animal having been suffi ciently around to be encountered during hunts at least in the Ganga valley. Yet, depictions in popular art were steadily decreasing. By early medieval times the rhinoceros was an animal that was least depicted even though it was not absent.61 S i g n i fi cantly, rhino representations continued but never again became a part of art associated with the masses, and the animal slipped into oblivion for almost a millennium till the Mughals rendered it visible once again. By the end of the sixteenth century, rhino depictions were again in vogue but only in art associated with the nobility.62 Th e reasons for this hiatus were certainly far more complex than just a decrease in numbers, for despite their dwindling fortunes the animal was still around till the time of the Mughals in parts of north India, well beyond its present-day confi nes. Th e possible explanations could be changes in popular imagination that now engaged more intensely with the elephant and horse as also derision arising out of lack of util- ity of the animal as a resource.63

In Search of the Rhino in Literary Accounts

With the dawn of recorded history, literature casts additional light on this enigmatic creature. A brief review of some telling textual references to the rhinoceros helps take our story further. Th e Rgveda (X 86,18) refers to the parasvat :64 ‘Vrsakapi found a killed parasvat , a butcher’s knife, a butcher’s bank, a new cooking pot and a cart loaded with fi re-wood’, this pas- sage argued to indicate that rhinoceros meat was edible. 65 However, though it is possible to cull more references to the parasvat, the endeavour is clearly not worthwhile in the absence of any specifi c physical characteristic aiding its identifi cation as a rhinoceros. We tread on fi rmer ground in our search for the armoured giant when we encounter the khadga , the word most commonly used for the rhinoceros. A pointer to the identity of the animal is that several From Eminence to Near Extinction 75

Vedic passages situate the khadga in the realm of fi erce wild beasts and suggest that its hide is armour-like, an observation that accurately describes the Indian rhino.66 Th e ecological sensibilities of ancient India come forth when the rhinoceros features with the elephant and water buff alo in the list of kulacara animals which live on the banks.67 Th e khadga fi nds mention in the Vajasaneyi Samhita (24.40) which enumerates the animals to be tied to the 21 yupas (sacrifi cial stakes) and in the intermediate spaces during an ashvamedha sacrifi ce and dedicates diff erent animals to diff erent deities. While domestic animals are bound to the stakes, in the spaces between the yupasare confi ned wild animals among which features the rhinoceros. All these animals are not killed; some are set free aft er the fi re is taken around them (paryagnikarana ). A rhino is one of those to be set free.68 Th ough such contexts do not suggest anything more than a ritual association of the rhinoceros, we can perhaps turn to later Vedic material (which suggests an interest in the meat and skin of the rhinoceros) for more telling clues. One learns, for instance, about the Vedic use of the rhinoceros in a ritual dakshina or priestly gift at the one-day Soma rite.69 Th e Sankhayana-Shrautasutra (14.33.26) mentions that ‘Th e sacrifi cial fee is a horse-chariot, coated with rhinoceros-hide, covered with tiger fell, with a quiver boar-hide, with a bow-case of panther-hide, drawn by brown horses’. 70 Similarly, the Jaiminiya-Brahmana (II. 103) expounds that ‘[t]he dakshina for this (ritual) is a horse chariot, yoked with four (horses) … Its covering is made of tiger (-skin), its bow- case of leopard (skin), its quiver of bear (skin). Th ere is a mounted warrior, with armour of rhinoceros (-hide), girded (for battle), along with a girded charioteer’. 71 Th e combined ferocity of the animals was possibly employed to compel the ‘respect’ for which this ritual was undertaken.72 Several ancient authors forbade the eating of ‘fi ve-nailed’ ( pan- canakha) animals, except for a restricted list, which oft en included the rhinoceros. An interesting case has been made of how and why the rhinoceros came to be added to the list, particularly since it has only three toes and also because it is out of scale with the rest of the animals mentioned like the porcupine, hedgehog, monitor lizard, hare, and tortoise. 73 Th e rhino was considered a later inclusion, which though perplexing, can be explained by the way most dharma texts 76 Shift ing Ground of the time extol rhino meat as the best food to be served to ancestors. Th e Apastamba-Dharmasutra (2.17.1) enjoins: ‘With the meat of a rhinoceros off ered on rhinoceros-skin, their (ancestors) gratifi cation lasts an unlimited time’. 74 A similar injunc- tion occurs in the Gautama-Dharmasutra ( 15.15).75 I n t h e Manu- smriti (5.18) the khadga is amongst those fi ve-nailed animals whose fl esh a twice-born may eat and its fl esh satisfi es the manes for endless time (3.272).76 Rhinoceros meat thus came to fi gure prominently in a food hier- archy remembered later even in the medical treatise of Sushruta, which also noted the purifying and macrobiotic qualities of rhinoc- eros meat when eaten on the occasion of a sacrifi ce to ancestors.77 Th e sacrifi ce of the rhinoceros or other wild animals for a shraddha presupposed catching the victim in the forest suggesting possible links between hunting and sacrifi ce though the two social activities in principle remained separate.78 In ancient texts, the catalogue of meats was generally based on the polarity between jangala and anupa (marshy lands). Th e Sushruta Samhita , following the same principle, worked out a hierarchy 79 i n which the rhinoceros featured in the kulacara subdivision of the anupa category. ‘Th e meat of khadgin (rhinoceros) calms phlegm, astringent, it calms wind, propitious to the ancestors, purifying, good for longevity, very dry, it retains urine. 80 Th e exalted status of rhino fl esh in the food chain was attributed partly to Vedic ritual and partly to textually unpreserved lore about the animal. 81 In legends, the animal is associated with divinities like Vishnu and his incarnation Lord Krishna.82 Strangely however, despite its impressive size, famed ferocity, and legendary association with divini- ties, the rhino never became the vehicle or vahana of any god in the Hindu pantheon. It did fi gure as a vehicle of god Agni in Khmer art in Cambodia and also appeared in Jaina iconography as the cihna of the eleventh Jina, Shreyamsa, but did not get assimilated in the numer- ous vahanas in Hindu mythology and iconography. 83 An attempt to explain this anomaly contemplates if an ugly animal befi ts a god. 84 But a quick look at common mounts like the tiny mouse accompa- nying the elephant-headed Ganesha or the buff alo with Yama, the god of death, calls for a reconsideration of this view that underlines a charming appearance as a prerequisite for qualifying as a vahana. From Eminence to Near Extinction 77

One wonders, if this had something to do with its infrequent encounters with humans as also the fact that the animal was neither domesticated nor ridden nor did it perhaps evoke mortal fear of the kind that the carnivores did. Not just the manes, rhinoceros meat was also a favoured delicacy for Ravana. Hanuman’s description of the banquet hall of the demon king is unambiguous on this point.85 In a duel between Bhima and Ashvatthaman, the latter struck the former with a varaca type of arrow, which struck Bhima’s forehead and he is compared to a rhino with a horn on its head (Mahabharata 8.11.6). 86 By the time of the epics and the puranas, the word khadga, however, in most cases denoted a sword.87 It was when ancient authors began confusing both meanings of the word that they started using the word ganda for the animal.88 Nevertheless, Kalidasa (4–5 CE) was still using the word khadga while describing Rama’s feats in Raghuvamsa. In literature, aft er Kalidasa, the animal took a few centuries to reappear again in texts like the Kalikapurana . 89 Beyond its economic uses, we are told that animal fi ghts, including fi ghts of wild bulls, tame rams, rhinos, and elephants, were a royal pastime during the reign of Chandragupta Maurya.90 Ashoka, on the other hand, forbade their slaughter. His fi ft h pillar edict clearly indi- cates that human depredations on wildlife had begun as it decrees: ‘[When I had been] anointed twenty-six years, the following animals were declared by me inviolable, viz. parrots, mainas , the rhinoceros, white doves, domestic doves, [and] all the quadrupeds which are neither useful nor edible’. 91 Asoka’s word for the rhino is palasata , reminiscent of the Sanskrit parasvat .92 Th e Arthashastra of Kautilya, on the other hand, spells out to the Director of Forest Produce the following items as forest produce: ‘skin, bones, bile, tendons, eyes, teeth, horns, hooves, and tails of the lizard, seraka , leopard, bear, dol- phin, lion, tiger, elephant, buff alo, camara, srmara, rhinoceros, bison and gavaya , and also of other deer, beasts, birds and wild animals’. Th e Superintendent of Armoury is instructed to arrange for

machines for use in battles, for the defence of forts and for assault on the enemies’ cities … nistrimsa, mandalagra and ariyasti are swords. Th e horn of the rhinoceros and buff alo, the tusk of the elephant, wood and bamboo-roots form the hilts. A coat of mail of metal rings or metal 78 Shift ing Ground

plates, an armour of fabrics, and combination of skin, hooves and horn of dolphin, rhinoceros, dhenuka , elephant and bull are armours. 93

Th e rhinoceros fi nds mention with other animals in the Sudha- bhojana Jataka (535) 94 and the Vidhurapandita Jataka (545)95 which envisions an aesthetic and captivating view of the landscape including troops of deer, lions, tigers, rhinoceroses, and other animals, when it mentions a magic jewel through which the entire world could be seen. Th e Khaggavisanasutta immortalized the animal by imploring one to live alone as the rhinoceros does: ‘eko care khaggavisanakappo ’.96 A prototype of Buddha is called khadga as he wanders alone. 97 Th is ancient characterization, signifi cantly, corresponds with modern des- criptions of rhinoceros behaviour. Turning to medieval accounts, several Muslim travellers also wrote about encounters with the rhinoceros in India or Pakistan.98 Alberuni’s (c. 1030 CE) account of the ganda, reported them in large numbers in India, particularly around the Ganges, and according to him Brahmins had the privilege of eating its fl esh.99 Ibn Battuta saw them near the Indus in 1334 AD. 100 In 1398, Timur hunted the animal on the frontiers of Kashmir.101 Reviews illustrate how the Mughal rulers, despite their engagement with aff airs of the state, were keen observers of the bounties of nature. 102 In 1519, Babur hunted the rhino and reported ‘masses of it in the Parashawar and Hashnagar jungles, so too between the Sind river and the jungles of the Bhira country. Masses there are also on the banks of the Saru river in Hindustan’.103 His memoirs relate that mane-less lions, wild elephants, rhinoceri, and wild buff aloes used to roam the Mirzapur hills, and were actually seen around his camp at Chunar.104 H u m a y u n liked chasing rhinos on horseback, shooting arrows at them. Abul Fazl states that rhinoceros could be seen in Sambal Sarkar of Delhi during the reign of Akbar and mentions breast-plates and shields made of rhinoceros skin and fi nger-guards for bow strings from its horn. 105 Th e book of Sidi Ali, a Turkish admiral of Suleiman, men- tions sightings near Kotal pass, west of Peshawar in 1556.106 In 1622, Emperor Jahangir mentions a rhinoceros hunt in the neighbourhood of Aligarh.107 A map of Mughal India sketched by Gentil, agent for the French government in Shuja-ud-daula’s court at Faizabad, in 1770, shows the rhino in Awadh.108 In fact, down to the eighteenth From Eminence to Near Extinction 79 century, North Bengal and Assam were marked by such an abundance of rhinoceroses that a French map describes that area as ‘Contrée de Rhinoceros’ and late medieval temples in Bengal, approximately from the same period, are decorated with terracotta panels showing rhinoceros hunts.109

Decline and Near Extinction

It was the introduction of modern fi rearms by the British and their intimate connection with shikar which proved to be its doom. In most accounts, the animal is belittled yet hunted. Colonel F.T. Pollock killed at least 47rhinos in Assam and Bengal and left countless wounded. Not to be outdone by the British, the Maharajah of Cooch Bihar recounts having shot 207 rhinos between 1871 and 1907 in West Bengal and Assam.110 Additionally, the giving out of bounties in various provinces to eliminate ‘dangerous’ beasts like the elephant, the water buff alo, and the rhinoceros launched a ruthless war against these species. Nevertheless, even in the nineteenth century, rhinos were still around despite having disappeared from much of northern India. T.C. Jerdon111 had heard from sportsmen of the occurrence of rhinos as far west as Rohilcund but they had become rare there when he wrote. Hewitt reported rhinos in Uttar Pradesh near Nepal’s western border until the 1870s, but the last one was shot in Pilibhit district in 1878. 112 Buchanan reported rhinos in most of the wild parts of Bhagalpur in 1810–11 and informed that formerly there were many in the marshes at the foot of the hills between Rajmahal and Sakrigali, and even in his time there were some there, but they had been much disturbed by sportsmen and had become scarce and exceedingly shy.113 Th e animal was also spotted in the district of Purnea, in the marshy woods of the south.114 By 1890, Indian rhinos had vanished from most areas except southern Nepal, the Bhutan Duars, parts of West Bengal, and the Brahmaputra valley of Assam. 115 Apart from climatic, biotic, and temperature changes, mounting demographic pressure forced the animal to make way for human settlements and cultivation. Habitat destruction aided hunting and sounded the death knell, pushing the animal to the verge of near extinction. 80 Shift ing Ground

Th e hapless creature was threatened in ways more than one. Legends abounding in folklore endowed it with a divinity that cost it dearly. Superstitions credited the rhino’s horn, fl esh, and other organs with almost curative and rejuvenating powers and thereby contrib- uted to its slaughter for trade. Conservation eff orts have left us with around 2,500 individuals of the species who survive to tell the tale of their journey through the tapestries of times and space before in most areas only their echoes were left to be heard. A long history of asso- ciation with human cultures has been marked in the two centuries past with decline to the edge of the abyss of extinction. Extinction is but a few small steps away. Following the rhino trail since prehistoric times thus presents a kaleidoscope of shift s in the fortunes of the animal that fl uctuated with changing forms of human settlement and production as also with the ebb and fl ow of kingdoms and cultures. Th e animal has captivating stories to tell of perceptions, attitudes, and sensibilities, oscillating between veneration and persecution that provide vital clues for reconstructing early human interactions with it. As an ani- mal of the grasslands, its fortunes are also a good index for mapping landscape changes in early India.

Notes

1 . See Kathleen D. Morrison’s chapter in this volume. 2 . Divyabhanusinh, Th e End of a Trail: Th e Cheetah in India (2002), Th e Story of Asia’s Lions (2005); Raman Sukumar, Th e Story of Asia’s Elephants (2012). 3 . A repertoire of historical and hunting references testifying to the exten- sive occurrence of this animal in the alluvial fl ood plains of mega rivers like the Indus, Ganges, and the Brahmaputra is not surprising since the animal, we know, typically inhabits alluvial grasslands and riverine fl oodplains providing ample wallows and swampy feeding grounds. Kathleen D. Morrison’s chapter in this volume gives a good sense of early landscapes. 4 . Maan Barua, ‘Th e Road Ahead for the Indian One-horned Rhinoceros’, Sanctuary Asia 26, no. 1 (February 2006): 49. 5 . Eric Dinerstein, ‘Eff ects of Rhinoceros Unicornis on Riverine Forest Structure in Lowland Nepal’, Ecology 73, no. 2 (1992): 701–4; Eric From Eminence to Near Extinction 81

Dinerstein, Th e Return of the Unicorns: Th e Natural History and Conservation of the Greater One-horned Rhinoceros (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 153–76. 6 . William Andrew Laurie, Th e Ecology and Behaviour of the Greater One- horned Rhinoceros (Cambridge: Selwyn College, 1978), p. 6; William Andrew Laurie, ‘Rhinoceros Unicornis’, Mammalian Species, no. 211 (1983): 2. 7 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Harappan Environment as One Variable in the Pre- ponderance of Rhinoceros and Paucity of Horse’, Puratattva 35 (2004–5): 21. 8 . Robert J. Blumenschine and U.C. Chattopadhyaya, ‘A Preliminary Report on the Terminal Pleistocene Fauna of the Middle Son Valley’ in Palaeoenvironments and Prehistory in the Middle Son Valley, eds G.R. Sharma and J.D. Clark (Allahabad: Abinash Prakashan, 1983), p. 283. 9 . G.L. Badam, Pleistocene Fauna of India (Poona: Deccan College, 1979). 10 . Juliet Clutton-Brock, Excavations at Langhnaj: 1944–63 Part II Th e Fauna (Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, 1965), pp. 9–10. 11 . D.R. Shah, ‘Animal Remains from Kanewal’ in R.N. Mehta, K.N. Momin and D.R. Shah Excavation at Kanewal (Vadodara: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1980), p. 75. 12 . U.C. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Researches in Archaeozoology of the Holocene Period (including the Harappan Tradition in India and Pakistan)’ in Archaeology and Historiography: History, Th eory and Method. Indian Archaeology in Retrospect , eds S. Settar and R. Korisettar (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), p. 372. 13 . Chattopadhyaya, ‘Researches in Archaeozoology’, p. 372 14 . Chattopadhyaya, ‘Researches in Archaeology, p. 372 15 . P.K. Th omas and P.P. Joglekar, ‘Faunal Evidence for the Mesolithic Food Economy of the Gangetic Plain’ in Bioarchaeology of Mesolithic India: An Integrated Approach, Colloquium XXXII of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences , eds G.E. Afanas’ev, S. Cleuziou, J.R. Lukacs and M. Tosi (Forli: ABACO Edizioni, 1996), pp. 256–8. 16 . Divyabhanusinh, personal communication. 17 . F.E. Zeuner, ‘Th e Microlithic Industry of Langhnaj, Gujarat’, Man , no. 182 (1952): 129–31. 18 . Clutton Brock, Langhnaj , pp. 9–10. 82 Shift ing Ground

19 . John R. Lukacs, ‘On Hunter-Gatherers and their Neighbors in Prehistoric India: Contact and Pathology’, Current Anthropology 31, no. 2 (April 1990): 183. 20 . Bhola Nath, and M.K. Biswas, ‘Animal Remains from Chirand, Saran District (Bihar)’, Records of the Zoological Survey of India , 76 (1980): 122. Th ough Nath and Biswas assigned an antiquity of c. 1700 BCE to the Neolithic phase at Chirand, the beginning of occupation at the site is now suggested to have been even earlier than the middle of the third millennium BCE (See D.K. Chakrabarti, India: An Archaeological History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 244). 21. B. Prashad, Animal Remains from Harappa (Delhi: Manager of Publications. Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India no. 51, 1936), pp. 30–1. 22 . S. Banerjee, R.N. Mukherjee, and Bhola Nath, ‘Identifi cation of Animal Remains’ in Excavations at Kalibangan: Th e Early Harappans (1961–69) , eds B.B. Lal, Jagat Pati Joshi, B.K. Th apar, and Madhu Bala, (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India no. 98, 2003), pp. 267–339. 23 . Bhola Nath and G.V. Sreenivasa Rao, ‘Animal Remains from Lothal Excavations’ in S.R. Rao, Lothal: A Harappan Port Town 1955–62 Vol. 2 , (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India no. 78, 1985), p. 642. 24 . P.K. Th omas and P.P. Joglekar, ‘Holocene Faunal Studies in India’, Man and Environment 19 nos. 1–2 (1994): 188. 25 . A.K. Sharma, ‘Animal Bone Remains’ in Excavation at Surkotada 1971–72 and Exploration in Kutch, ed. Jagat Pati Joshi (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, no. 87, 1990), p. 381. 26 . P.K. Th omas, ‘Archaeozoological Aspects of the Prehistoric Cultures of Western India’ (PhD diss., Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, 1977), 138. 27 . P.K. Th omas, P.P. Joglekar, Arati Deshpande-Mukherjee, and S.J. Pawankar, ‘Harappan Subsistence Patterns with Special Reference to Shikarpur, a Harappan Site in Gujarat’, Man and Environment 20, no. 2 (1995): 38. 28 . Th omas and Joglekar, ‘Holocene Faunal Studies in India’, p. 188. 29 . Indian Archaeology 1967-68: A Review , p. 28. 30 . Th omas and Joglekar, ‘Holocene Faunal Studies in India’, p. 189. 31 . Th omas and Joglekar, ‘Holocene Faunal Studies in India’, p. 189 From Eminence to Near Extinction 83

32 . Rakesh Tewari, Rock Paintings of Mirzapur (Lucknow: U.P. State Archa- eological Organisation, 1990), p. 12. 33 . Erwin Neumayer, Lines on Stone: The Prehistoric Rock Art of India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), p. 115. 34 . Yashodhar Mathpal, Prehistoric Rock Paintings of Bhimbetka Central India (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984), p. 87. 35 . M. Dubey, ‘Rock Paintings of Pachmarhi’, in Rock Art of the Old World , ed. Michel Lorblanchet (New Delhi: IGNCA, 2002), p. 132. 36 . R.K. Varma, ‘Subsistence Economy of the Mesolithic Folk as Refl ected in the Rock-Paintings of the Vindhyan Region’ in Bioarchaeology of Mesolithic India: An Integrated Approach, Colloquium XXXII of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, eds G.E. Afanas’ev, S. Cleuziou, J.R. Lukacs, and M. Tosi (Forli: ABACO Edizioni, 1996), p. 330. 37 . George F. Dales and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Preliminary report on the Fourth Season (January 15–March 31, 1989) of Research at Harappa, Pakistan (University of California at Berkeley and University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1989), p. 20. 38 . Ernest Mackay, ‘Figurines and Model Animals’ in Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization Being an Offi cial Account of Archaeological Excavations at Mohenjo-Daro carried out by the Government of India between the years 1922 and 1927, Vol. I, ed. John Marshall (London: A. Probsthain, 1931), p. 348. 39 . S.R. Rao, Lothal A Harappan Port Town 1955–62 (New Delhi: Archa- eological Survey of India, Vol. II, 1985), p. 485. 40 . Y.M. Chitalwala, ‘Th e Disappearance of Rhino from Saurashtra: A Study In Palaeoecology’, Bulletin of the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute 49 (1990): 79–80. 41 . Manuel, ‘Harappan Environment’, p. 24. 42 . Frederick E. Zeuner, Environment of Early Man with Special Reference to Tropical Regions (Baroda: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1963). 43 . Chitalwala, ‘Disappearance of Rhino’, pp. 80–2. 44 . Chitalwala, ‘Disappearance of Rhino’, pp. 80–2. 45 . Chitalwala, ‘Disappearance of Rhino’, pp. 80–2. 46 . Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 4. 47 . Manuel, ‘Harappan Environment’, p. 23. 84 Shift ing Ground

48 . Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty, Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar, and Maheshwari Dayal Khare, Dangawada Excavations, Madhya Pradesh (Bhopal: Archa- eology and Museums, 1989), p. 75. 49 . Manuel, ‘Harappan Environment’, p. 23. 50 . M.K. Dhavalikar, ‘Sub Indus Cultures of Central and Western India’, in Frontiers of the Indus Civilization, eds B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta (New Delhi: Books and Books, 1984), p. 251. 51 . G. Kumar, ‘Chronology of Indian Rock Art: A Fresh Attempt’, Purakala 11–12. (2001): 27. 52 . M.K. Dhavalikar, ‘Early Bronzes’, in Th e Great Tradition Indian Bronze Masterpieces, ed. Asha Rani Mathur (New Delhi: Brijbasi Printers Pvt Ltd, 1988), p. 18–20. 53 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Depiction of Rhinoceros: Transition from Popular Art to State Sponsored Art’ in Expressions in Indian Art: Essays in Memory of Shri M.C. Joshi , Vol. I, eds B.R. Mani and A. Tripath i(Delhi: Agam Kala, 2008), p. 36. 54 . G.R. Sharma, Excavations at Kausambi (Delhi: Manager of Publications, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, no. 74, 1969), p. 70. 55 . Joachim Bautze, ‘Th e Problem of the Khadga ( Rhinoceros Unicornis ) in the Light of Archaeological Finds and Art’, in South Asian Archaeology , eds J. Schotsman and M. Taddei (Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale, 1983), p. 413. 56 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, pp. 413–15. 57 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Depiction of Rhinoceros’, p. 36. 58 . On the obverse it runs as bhartakhadgatrata Kumaraguptojayatyanisam while on the reverse it is Sri Mahendrakhadgah. Th e translation of the legends being somewhat problematic (since khadga can be interpreted as a rhinoceros as well as a sword and both are seen on the coin), is not dealt with extensively here. Nevertheless, one translation runs as ‘Ever victorious is the Lord Kumaragupta who is khadgatrata , i.e., a protec- tor by the sword from the rhinoceros’. Th e legend on the reverse has been interpreted as ‘Sri Mahendra, the swordsman’ or ‘Sri Mahendra, the slayer of rhinoceros’ (cited in M.M. Nagar, ‘A Rhinoceros Slayer Type Coin of Kumaragupta I’, Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 11, Part I (June 1949): 7. 59 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Depiction of Rhinoceros’, p. 34. 60 . Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India from the Stone Age to the 12th Century (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008), p. 480. From Eminence to Near Extinction 85

61 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Depiction of Rhinoceros’, p. 36. 62 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Depiction of Rhinoceros’, p. 36. 63 . Joseph Manuel, ‘Depiction of Rhinoceros’, p. 36. 64 . R.T.H. Griffi th interprets parasvat as a ‘wild animal’ while for Roth it is the ‘wild ass’. Bautze, however, notes H. Lüders’ contention that parasvat was the oldest word used for the rhinoceros. 65 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 409. 66. Stephanie W. Jamison, ‘Rhinoceros Toes, Manu V. 17–18, and the Development of the Dharma System’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 118, no. 2 (1998): 252. 67 . Francis Zimmermann, Th e Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Th eme in Hindu Medicine (California: University of California Press, 1987), p. 86. 68 . M.A. Mehendale’s correspondence with Divyabhanusinh, who gener- ously shared it with me. 69 . Jamison, ‘Rhinoceros Toes’, p. 255. 70 . W. Caland translated 1953 cited in Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 410. 71 . W. Caland edited and translated 1970, cited in Jamison, ‘Rhinoceros Toes’, p. 255. 72 . Jamison, ‘Rhinoceros Toes’, p. 255. 73 . Jamison, ‘Rhinoceros Toes’, pp. 249–56. 74 . Patrick Olivelle, Dharmasutras Th e Law Codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana, and Vasistha (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, Reprint 2003), p. 99. 75 . Olivelle, Dharmasutras , p. 157. 76 . Mehendale’s correspondence with Divyabhanusinh. 77 . Zimmermann, Jungle and the Aroma of Meats , p. 183. 78 . Zimmermann, Jungle and the Aroma of Meats , p. 183. 79 . Zimmermann, Jungle and the Aroma of Meats , pp. 103–11. 80 . Zimmerman, Jungle and the Aroma of Meats , p. 108. 81 . Jamison, ‘Rhinoceros Toes’, p. 255. 82 . Arup Kumar Dutta, Unicornis: Th e Great Indian One Horned Rhinoceros (Delhi: Konarak Publishers Pvt Ltd, 1991), pp. 23–5. 83 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, pp. 416, 428. 84 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 428 85 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 412. 86 . Mehendale’s correspondence with Divyabhanusinh. 86 Shift ing Ground

87 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 412. 88 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 412. 89 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 412. 90 . R.C. Majumdar, ed., Th e Age of Imperial Unity: Th e History and Culture of the Indian People, II (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1960), p. 66. 91 . E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka: Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum Vol. I , (Varanasi: Indological Book House, 1969), p. 127. 92 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 414. 93 . R.P. Kangle, Th e Kautilya Arthasastra Part II (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1972), pp. 129–30. 94 . H.T. Francis, trans., Th e Jataka, Vol. V (1905) at sacred-texts.com. 95 . E.B. Cowell and W.H.D. Rouse trans., Th e Jataka, Vol. VI (1907), at sacred-texts.com. 96 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 414. 97 . Mehendale’s correspondence with Divyabhanusinh. 98 . Richard Ettinghausen, ‘Studies in Muslim Iconography’, Th e Unicorn , Freer Gallery of Art, Occasional Papers. 1, no. 3 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1950) pp. 12–3. 99 . L.C. Rookmaaker, ‘Th e Former Distribution of the Indian Rhinoceros ( Rhinoceros unicornis) in India and Pakistan’, Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 80, no. 3 (1983): 558. 100 . Rookmaaker, ‘Former Distribution of the Indian Rhinoceros’, p. 559. 101 . Dutta, Unicornis , p. 52. 102 . Rookmaaker, ‘Former Distribution of the Indian Rhinoceros’, pp. 559– 60; Salim Ali, ‘The Moghul Emperors of India as Naturalists and Sportsmen’, in A Century of Natural History , ed. J.C. Daniel(Bombay: Bombay Natural History Society, 1983), pp. 1–16; H. Srinivasa Rao, ‘History of our Knowledge of the Indian Fauna through the Ages’ in A Century of Natural History , ed. J.C. Daniel(Bombay: Bombay Natural History Society, 1983), pp. 68–72. 103 . Rookmaaker, ‘Former Distribution of the Indian Rhinoceros’, pp. 559–60. 104 . D.L. Drake-Brockman, Mirzapur : A Gazetteer Being of the District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Allahabad: Superintendent, Government Press, United Provinces, 1911), p. 31. 105 . Ali, ‘Moghul Emperors of India’, p. 16. 106 . Rookmaaker, ‘Former Distribution of the Indian Rhinoceros’, p. 560. 107 . Ali, ‘Moghul Emperors of India’, p. 16. From Eminence to Near Extinction 87

108 . Susan Gole, Maps of Mughal India; Drawn by Col. Jean-Baptist-Joseph Gentil, Agent for the French Government to the Court of Shuja-ud-daula at Faizabad, in 1770 (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1988), p. 27. 109 . Bautze, ‘Problem of the Khadga’, p. 415. 110 . Esmond Bradley Martin and Chryssee Bradley Martin, Run Rhino Run (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), p. 30. 111 . T.C. Jerdon, Handbook of the Mammals of India (London: J. Wheldon, 1874), p. 233. 112 . Laurie, Th e Ecology and Behaviour , pp. 9–10. 113. C.E.A.W. Oldham, ed., Journal of Francis Buchanan Kept During the Survey of the District of Bhagalpur in 1810–1811 (Patna: Superintendent, Govt. Printing, Bihar and Orissa, 1930), p. 253. 114 . Francis Buchanan, An Account of the Disrict of Purnea in 1809–1810 (Patna: Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 1928), p. 284. 115 . Martin and Martin, Run Rhino , p. 29. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others 4 in the Mughal Landscape*

DIVYABHANUSINH

Th e empire of the great Mughals saw emperors and courtiers keenly observing the world around them. Th ey left copious records of their activities both in the written word and in pictures. Th e present chap- ter is an eff ort to ascertain, through these records, the fate of some large mammals aft er their encounter with the empire between the fi rst quarter of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, with a brief mention of what followed.

Landscapes

Th e empire of the Mughals at its height stretched from Herat in western Afghanistan in the west to Bengal and beyond in the east,

* I am grateful to Dr M.K. Ranjitsinh, Dr Asok Kumar Das and Dr Mahesh Rangarajan for their critical comments which have enriched this paper. Its shortcomings are mine alone. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 89 and from Kashmir in the north to the Deccan in south India. According to one estimate, the human population of the Mughal Empire (excluding Afghanistan) at the time was 116 million which increased to 285 million by 1901 in the same region. Another author- ity estimates the population in c. 1605 to have been between 150 to 170 million which increased to 250 million around 1850, that is, a rise of about 100 million at the most in 250 years.1 Th e population density has been estimated to be 35 per square kilometres by 1650 for the Indian subcontinent.2 At the heart of the Mughal Empire, the suba province of Agra had only 27.5 per cent of the land under cul- tivation in c. 1608 and most other subas in the plains of Hindustan had even less land under agriculture. Th ere were, therefore, vast areas available as pastures for cattle with abundant supply of fi rewood in most parts of the realm and possibly there was more forest land available than was once thought to be the case.3 Francois Bernier, a French physician, travelled in the Mughal Empire between 1656 and 1668, during the closing years of Shah Jahan’s reign and the inaugural years of Aurangzeb’s stewardship. He has left a graphic description of the landscape between Agra, Delhi, and Lahore, the three great Mughal capitals:

In the neighbourhood of Agra and Delhi along the course of the Gemna [Jumna] reaching to the mountains [Himalayas] and even on both sides of the road reaching to Lahor, there is a large quantity of uncultivated land covered either with copse wood or with grasses six feet high.4

Over the years the imperial paraphernalia grew to very large proportions. Th ough the three great capitals were established with several smaller urban centres, the emperors remained peripatetic throughout this period. For instance, during his rule of 27 years, Jahangir travelled between Agra, Lahore, Kabul, Delhi, and back to Agra; the journeys were spread over a period of one year between March 1607 and March 1608. His journey from Agra to Ajmer to Mandu and Burhanpur took place between October 1616 and March 1617. He journeyed to Gujarat once, to Kashmir thrice, and to Kabul one more time with similar travel schedules. 5 Th e size of the Mughal caravans at the zenith of empire was gigantic. Jahangir had spent nearly three years at Ajmer when he 90 Shift ing Ground decided to break camp in 1616. Sir Th omas Roe, the Ambassador of King James I of England, was in tow. He estimated that the Mughal capital on the move took 12 hours to pass one spot and when the tents were pitched the circuitt (circumference) was less than 20 English miles.6 Jahangir himself estimated that it would take 100,000 Banjara cattle to feed a large Mughal army on its march from Multan to Kandahar since there was little vegetation on the way.7 It is evident that the sport of the Mughals would be confi ned largely to the vicinity of their travel paths. Th us, large mammal species became unwittingly or otherwise, the object of their shikar if they were found in grasslands and jungles near their highways and encampments. Irfan Habib’s atlas lists 16 imperial hunting grounds including such celebrated ones as Rupbas and Bari near Agra, Bhatinda, and Sunam in the Punjab and Jodhpur, and Merta in Rajasthan.8

Animals

The fauna that came to the notice of the emperors, courtiers, chroniclers, and artists at court can be divided into three categories: (i) those that were hunted; (ii) those that were required for impe- rial purposes; (iii) those that were presented at court as oddities or rarities such as Burchell’s zebra (Equus (Hippotigris ) burchelli ), com- mon turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), the dodo (Raphus cucullatus ), the blue crowned hanging parrot (Loriculus galgulus ), and the African elephant (Loxodonta africana ). Interesting as these animals and birds are, they were not of the Indian landscape. Th ere were other birds and animals such as the Barbary falcon ( Falco peregrinus babylonicus ), the Siberian crane (Grus leucogerenus , which are seen no longer in India), the Sarus crane (Grus antigone), the western tragopan ( Tragopan melanocephalus), the four-horned antelope (Tetracerus qudricornis ), and the markhor (C apra falconeri ), which were either migrants to or residents of India. Th ey, however, do not give us any information of their landscape or their behavioural ecology. We shall therefore con- fi ne ourselves to two examples in each of the fi rst two categories only.

Asiatic Lion ( Panthera leo persica ) Hunting had become a very important court activity by the time of Akbar’s rule. His adoring chronicler, Abul Fazl, goes to great lengths Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 91 to justify Akbar’s penchant for it by recording that it gave him the opportunity to visit remote areas of the empire which were not oth- erwise likely to be visited, and see for himself the conditions of his subjects.9 Under Mughal rule, the lion had become royal game in so far as only the emperor and his favoured relatives, courtiers, or guests would be permitted to hunt it. Sir Th omas Roe was at Mandu in 1617 with Jahangir’s encampment. He was much harassed by a lion which raided his camp. He had to seek special permission to tackle the menace ‘for no man may meddle with lions but the king’. 10 Bernier, on the other hand, records that during the reign of Aurangzeb, large tracts en route the three great capitals were ‘guarded with utmost vigilance; and excepting partridges, quails and hares which natives catch with nets, no person, be he who may, is permitted to disturb the game, which is consequently very abundant’ and ‘of all the diversions of the fi eld the hunting of the lion is not only the most precious, but is peculiarly royal; for except by special permission, the king and the princes are the only ones who engage in the sport’.11 He also goes on to record that a successful lion hunt was a favourable omen, whereas if the lion escaped, it was ‘portentous of infi nite evil to the state’. A successful hunt would result in the dead lion being brought before the emperor who would sit formally in durbar with his nobles. Th e carcass would then be accurately measured and it would be minutely examined. A record would be made ‘in the royal archives that such a king on such a day slew a lion of such a size and of such a skin, whose teeth were of such a length, and whose claws were of such dimensions and so on to the minutest details’.12 Jahangir maintained meticulous records of his hunts. In the elev- enth year of his reign, that is in a span of 39 years during which he kept records of his shikar, he writes that he had either shot or was present at shoots when a total of 28,532 game animals and game birds were hunted, which included 86 lions.13 He shot a massive lion at Rahimabad near Agra in 1623, which weighed 255 kilograms and was 9 feet 4 inches long14 which ranks it as the twenty-fi rst largest lion recorded in India. 15 Th e weight range of male lions is between 145 and 225 kilograms which makes this lion the heaviest recorded in India. 16 A thorough search I conducted of all known hunting records over two decades has resulted in the collection of details of only 77 lions shot in India between 1850 and 1950. One can only imagine 92 Shift ing Ground what a wealth of information the court records would have had of Jahangir’s 86 lions alone, which he shot in 39 years. No doubt he shot many more subsequently, which too would have been recorded along with the trophies of Akbar, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, and probably the trophies of the lesser Mughals. But a search through the records of the time from Babur to Aurangzeb does not reveal any anxiety of the lion being rare in their domains. Th e enquiring eye of even Jahangir makes no such mention. Th e large Mughal caravans did move in some of the preferred habitats of the lion. Painters from the imperial atelier travelled with the entourage and recorded various events, including those con- cerning lions, on command or as a matter of course. Th ere are more than 30 such paintings concerning lions in the public domain, all of which depict the animal in open terrain.17 Th ese very paintings give us an insight into the animal’s morphology. Th e manes of all the lions are scanty and not black as one sees today on most full-grown lions of the Gir forest, though there are many variants among the latter too. In contrast with the Mughal paintings, the paintings from the thickly wooded principality of Kotah in Rajasthan tell a diff erent story. Th ough in this school of art the animals are stylized, all of them are depicted in forested areas and their manes are black in colour. 18 Why do lions in Mughal paintings, unlike those depicted in the Kotah paintings, have light coloured scanty manes? Is it an adaptive variation evolved over millennia to suit an open environment? Th e lions of the savannahs of Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere, on the other hand, have luxuriant dark manes. Why do the lions in the Mughal paintings not have dark manes? We can raise these questions, but we have no answers at the present. Mughal paintings give us some idea of the lion’s prey base as well. A painting by an unknown artist titled, ‘Akbar on a hunt’ c . 1598–1600 from the National Museum, New Delhi, shows Akbar slaying a lion with an arrow from horseback. Th e wounded lion is in the process of killing a wild ass ( Equus hemionus khur ). Th e wild ass was a common enough animal in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Sindh, and Punjab, and the predator and prey shared wide open spaces. Another painting by an unknown artist titled ‘Animals’ c. 1610 in the St Petersburg Muraqqa (album) preserved in St Petersburg, Russia, has a lion killing a nilgai, and another killing a chital ( Axis axis), both of which prey animals Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 93 continue to be hunted by lions in the Gir to this day. Th e lion painting attributed to Nanha referred to earlier, shows the lion having eaten a cow. A painting by an unknown artist titled ‘Landscape with lions and fi gures’ c. 1610 has Akbar surveying a scene which has a lion kill- ing a nilgai while a lioness with three cubs sits across a small stream and looks on the proceedings. Beside her are a human skull and a ribcage, suggesting man eating! 19 Lions usually live in prides and lionesses provide common care to cubs of the group unlike other cats, which are essentially solitary by nature. In 1562, Akbar came across a pride of seven lions near Mathura, of which one was caught alive while the rest were killed. In 1568, he came across two lions between Ajmer and Alwar. Th e text of the Akbarnama , Abul Fazl’s chronicle of his reign, is not clear regarding the sex of the animals, 20 but abiding coalitions of two male lions are well-known occurrences among lions of today in the Gir forest and in Africa. In the year 1608, Jahangir shot a pair of lions between Karnal and Panipat to ‘eliminate the evil’, since they had taken up residence by the roadside and were harassing the people.21 In April 1617, Jahangir and Nur Jahan came upon four lions which were dispatched by the empress with six bullets from elephant back. Th is pleased Jahangir no end, and he presented her with a pair of pearls and diamonds worth two lakh rupees, no mean gift even for a great Mughal! 22 Nowhere in the records of the time do we fi nd mention of large prides of the kind we see on the Serengeti plains in Tanzania or Masai Mara in Kenya or elsewhere in Africa. In the Gir, I have seen very large prides, the largest being of 21 animals, but this was at a time when lions were fed artifi cially and a regular supply of food was avail- able to them to sustain such a large group. Once this feeding stopped, the prides became smaller. It is likely that while food was aplenty dur- ing the Mughal Empire, the prey animals were not as concentrated as in some parts of East Africa. Upon the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the era of the Great Mughals came to a close. In the chaotic times between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the revolt of 1857, it is diffi cult to trace the lion. However, a few indications of what happened to it are available. Lions were found all over north India in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. William Fraser shot 84, ‘being personally responsible for 94 Shift ing Ground their extinction in the area (of Punjab and Haryana)’ c. 1820. In the 1830s, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s lancers bayoneted them near Lahore. In the 1850s, a Colonel George Acland Smith is reputed to have killed more than 300, of which 50 were from the Delhi region, the rest being from central India. Ten lions were shot in Kotah around 1866 and Raja Bishan Singh of Bundi shot upwards of 100 around the 1840s. A colonel ‘D’ killed 80 lions c. 1857 and Captain William Rice shot 14 in one shoot in Kathiawar about the same time. My own estimate is that about 1,500 lions were shot between 1820 and 1880 in India outside the Kathiawar peninsula.23 Th e eighteenth century and the fi rst half of the nineteenth century appear to have been very unfor- tunate for them and in the nineteenth century by 1880 they were only to be found in the Kathiawar peninsula.

Indian Tiger ( Panthera tigris tigris ) Tigers are rather sparsely noticed in Mughal records. Th is is not surprising at all. Th e animal’s preference for thick cover, its solitary nature, its nocturnal habits, and its absence from grasslands and scrub jungles made it very elusive. It was not likely to be met with frequently in the path of imperial peregrinations. Th e lion was royal game, tiger was not; it was an object of shikar when met with. Jahangir mentions it but once when he shot it in 1607 near Giri on the Malwa Plateau. He took the opportunity to fi nd out the cause of its bravery, so he had it dissected. He concluded that it was a result of the location of its gall bladder inside the liver and not outside, as is the case in other animals. Th e point while seemingly minor requires careful attention. Th e word for the animal in the text is shirbabr, Persian for tiger; the word for the lion in Persian is shir . I take it as such, though the translators have confused the animal with the lion as happens every so oft en in India today, where in Urdu/Hindi sher is usually translated as tiger and babrsher as lion. In other words, standard versions of the Ain and the Tuzuk I Jahangiri in English still convey an incorrect impression of the big cat species and their range. Th e confusion created by Urdu and Hindustani usage should not obscure the clarity of the writers and artists of medieval times who knew both animals very well by sight and experience.24 Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 95

My extensive search has brought to light only two paintings concerning tiger encounters which are in the public domain. One of them which records a chance encounter is very well known. It is a double page painting titled ‘Akbar slays a tigress which attacked the royal cavalcade’ from the Akbarnama , preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.25 Akbar’s cavalcade was attacked near Narwar near Gwalior in 1561 by a tigress and her fi ve sub-adult cubs. Th e mother was slain with a sword by Akbar himself and the rest were dispatched by his entourage. Th e double-page painting verso is painted by Basawan and Sarwan and recto by Tara Kalan and Basawan. While the text of the Akbarnama extols Akbar’s bravery, the painting is a graphic presentation of the event. Of abiding inter- est is the colour of two of the cubs on the right-hand page which is described by Robert Skelton as ‘light fawn’. Th is is not a natural colour of tigers at all. It is the earliest known record of albinism or white colouration amongst tigers, in other words of ‘white’ tigers. 26 Th e other painting is the one titled ‘A royal hunting scene’ from the National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi. It appears to be a copy made at Lucknow between 1780 and 1790 from an earlier mid– -seventeenth century version, according to Asok Kumar Das. It shows Shah Jahan on elephant back with horsemen and foot soldiers facing two tigers with a thick forest behind them. Th ey have obvi- ously been beaten out of the jungle into the open for the shoot. Tigers do appear as part of the animal world in the various paintings in the Anwar-i-Suhaili , the Persian rendering of the Panchatantra , the classical fables of Ancient India. Asok Kumar Das, who examined Muraqqa-e-Gulshan prepared for Emperor Jahangir preserved in the Gulistan Palace Library, Tehran, with some of its folios preserved in Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, notes that the tiger appears in the hashiyas (margins) of the paintings in it. Th ey contain monochrome draw- ings in black and gold and depict, among others, a tiger behind a hilly outcrop, a tiger hunting chital, and a Rajput nobleman shooting a tiger with a gun. Th e tiger also appears along with cheetahs, the blackbuck, the caracal ( Caracal caracal), and other animals in the Razmnama, the illustrated Persian translation of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic, which Akbar commissioned.27 The lion continued to occupy centre stage until the British came on the scene. As lions became rare, the tiger took its place. 96 Shift ing Ground

Th e British introduced the telegraph, the railways, the motor car, and the high-powered rifl e. In spite of these ‘advances’, there were still about 40,000 tigers at the dawn of the twentieth century according to E.P. Gee, though M.K. Ranjitsinh and Kailash Sankhala settled for a fi gure between 25,000 to 30,000.28 What happened to the animal thereaft er is, as they say, history. Th is brings us to the second category of animals which were required for imperial purposes.

Asiatic Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus ) Coursing blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) with tame cheetahs was an important form of sport. As such, there was a constant demand for them to be procured from their natural habitat. Th ere is a crucial diff erence between the Mughal approach to lions and their approach to cheetahs. Th e former was an object, the ultimate object being royal game, to be dispatched in style when encountered. Th e cheetah, on the other hand, was to be caught and trained aft er taming it, as an instrument of shikar. It therefore was treated like other animals used by humans, such as the elephant and the horse. It appears in the records in great detail. Akbar took to the sport of coursing blackbuck at a very young age and became, in time, a keen patron at trapping them from the wild, having evolved in the process, a totally new method to do so. In his half-a-century long reign, he is reputed to have collected 9,000 cheetahs as noted by Mutamad Khan, a chronicler of Jahangir’s reign. According to Jahangir himself, his father had a thousand cheetahs in his stable at one time. 29 Such a vast enterprise required a continuous supply, which in turn required an organization within the apparatus of the empire to fulfi l the demand. Ali Muhammad Khan’s Mirat-i-Ahmadi , an account of Mughal administration in the early eighteenth century, states that the daroga (administrator) of Gujarat had to ensure that suffi cient number of trainers to catch, tame, and train cheetahs were available. All appointments were made as per the instructions received from Delhi under the seal of the qurawalbeg (master of the hunt). Jean de Th evenot, who visited Ahmedabad in the early years of Aurangzeb’s reign, also notes that only the governor of the province could trap Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 97 cheetahs and no one else was allowed to do so. 30 Th e cheetahs appear to have been a monopoly of the empire. In the Punjab and Haryana of today, cheetahs were caught from the environs of Pattan, Sunam, Bhatinda, and Bhatnair. In Rajasthan, they were caught from Jhunjhunu, Nagaur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Merta, Fatehpur, Amarsar, and Bari, and across the Chambal River from Sumanli in present-day Madhya Pradesh. In Gujarat, they were caught from Bedi Bandar near Jamnagar, Palanpur, and the environs of Ahmedabad.31 While this list is not exhaustive, it is clear that chee- tahs were caught from grasslands and scrub jungles, many of which survived till the 1950s. Cheetah paintings of the time too are ample proof of the landscape. A painting by Goverdhan titled ‘Antelope and deer hunt’ c. 1607–10 in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, also shows all the animals in a clear landscape with rocky out- crops in the background. In fact, the painting in question is a study of the predator and its prey base. Th e cheetah is depicted killing a blackbuck, whereas a nilgai pair, a hare ( Lepus nigricollis), a chital, and a Punjab urial ( Ovisvignei) make up the rest of the landscape along with a man with a knife ready to perform halal, the orthodox Muslim method of animal slaughter, on the blackbuck which would be taken away from the cheetah and could then be eaten. One must ask the question why Rajasthan and Gujarat dominate among the cheetah catching centres. Aft er all, cheetahs were found as far east as Deogarh in Bihar and as far south as Mysore and beyond and they were found in the north in Afghanistan as well. Ali Muhammad Khan states that the cheetahs from Gujarat are better and superior to the cheetahs from other places. Akbar’s governor of Delhi, Muhibb Ali Khan Khass Mohalli, states in his Baznama (trea- tise on falconry) that the mountain cheetah favours shade and runs little because in mountainous regions there is shade and cover and the animal takes its prey without having to run. Whereas, the desert cheetah—the animal of arid regions or grasslands—is the best to hunt with, as it runs fast for long distances and does not require shade. Th e Baznama of Tonk at the Oriental Institute, Tonk, Rajasthan, dated to the middle of the nineteenth century, is a record of earlier traditions. It states categorically that the cheetahs found in Multan and the forests of Lakhi are short in height, intrepid, and swift . Th ese animals are taller than those found in the Deccan. 32 According to a 98 Shift ing Ground study by M.K. Ranjitsinh, the blackbucks of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Punjab regions are larger than the animals found elsewhere in the country. Th ey are representatives of Antilope cervicapra rajputanae which are larger than the nominate race Antilope cervicapra cervi- capra. 33 It is not surprising that the Mughals found cheetahs of these regions more suitable for their purposes as not only were they more adept at tackling larger prey but also because they were creatures of the open grasslands. Th ey were ideally suited for the swift , long chase in the hot climate of the plains frequented by the imperial cavalcades. At court, cheetahs were looked after with great care. During Akbar’s reign they were divided into eight diff erent classes. Th ey were kept in ‘sets’ of 10 each and 30 of them were khasa , special animals, favourite of the Emperor. Many had names such as Madankali, Daulat Khan, and Dilrang. Th e last two named were drowned while cross- ing the Ganga in 1574 and another of Akbar’s favourite, one Samand Manik, was carried around in a special palanquin with a naqqara , a drum, being beaten in front of it.34 Since the purpose of keeping cheetahs was to hunt with them, details of their methods of catching, training, and coursing with were maintained. Suffi ce it to note that hunts were closely watched and noted. In one instance, we have the incident of 1572 at Sanganer, the site of the present-day Jaipur airport. Akbar was hunting there when a blackbuck jumped across a 25-yard- wide nullah or rivulet, his cheetah, Chitr Najan, jumped aft er it and brought it down. Th e feat was so unexpected that Akbar ordered that the cheetah be given a jewel studded collar and a drum was beaten in front of it.35 Jahangir, on the other hand, set up an experiment during a hunt in 1619 at Palam, the present location of Delhi’s international airport, which was one of the imperial hunting grounds. He had heard that an antelope would not survive if it had been brought down by a cheetah. In order to fi nd out the fact, he had several antelope from the 24 caught by the cheetahs during the hunt, released from the cheetahs and kept in his presence. He noted that they behaved normally for 24hours, but soon became disoriented and did not survive despite being sedated with an opium preparation. 36 Two unique facts about cheetahs were recorded by Jahangir in his autobiography. In 1608, Raja Bir Singh Deo of Orcha, a faithful friend and courtier, brought a yuz-i-safed, a white cheetah, to show him. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 99

Jahangir was so wonderstruck that he described the animal in detail: ‘Its spots which are (normally) black were of blue colour and the whiteness of the body was inclined to the same colour’. Th is phenom- enon happens because of a recessive gene at the D (dilution) locus. Th is locus frequently produces an allele ‘d’ which results in a bluish phenotype. Th e eye colour is normally unaff ected, but the black of the coat is bluish, while the yellow becomes cream coloured, according to Colin P. Grovers. Th is is the only recorded instance of a white chee- tah till date. Jahangir notes that he had never seen a white ( tuyghun ) cheetah though he had seen many other white animals and birds.37 It is a well-known fact that cheetahs were very diffi cult to breed in captivity until recently. Jahangir, in 1613, noted thatone of his tame cheetahs slipped its collar and mated with a cheeti , a female, and aft er two and half months she gave birth to three cubs. Th e uniqueness of the event was not lost on him; he noted that though his father had 1,000 cheetahs and he had tried to mate them, he had failed. He goes on to write ‘Th is has been recorded because it appeared strange’. 38 It is the only recorded instance of cheetahs breeding in captivity until 1956, when the Philadelphia zoo bred them successfully. In 1567, Akbar staged a hunt near Lahore. According to the Akbarnama, a qumargah , a battue, was ordered and the ‘birds and beasts’ were driven from near the mountains on one side and from river Bihat (Jhelum) on the other. ‘Each district was made over to one of the great offi cers and Bakshis, Tawacis and Sazawals were appointed to every quarter. Several thousand footmen were appointed to drive game …’ the circle at the commencement of the hunt was 10 miles in circumference which decreased and the game was concentrated in it. 39 Th e Akbarnama at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London has a double-page illustration of the event. Th e right hand page executed by Miskin and Sarwan and the left hand page by Miskin and Mansur encapsulate the animals and the chase. Th ere is one variation though; the text records a quamargh, while the accompanying painting depicts a classic shakhbundh , a stockade! Th e animals we know were driven from the Salt Range and from the plains below. Th e cheetahs are seen in various stages of the hunt, being released, coursing, and bringing down the quarry. Th e black- bucks are well represented. Th e full-grown black males, sub-adult dark fawn males and females are accurately drawn. A water carrier 100 Shift ing Ground skins a blackbuck to make a skin-container to carry water and there is even an accurate rendering of a blackbuck head with deformed horns. Additionally, there is a hyaena ( Hyaena hyaena ), small Indian civets (Viverrica indica), a dead markhor ( Capra falconeri , which was not found in the Salt Range and it is a strange inclusion in the paint- ing), and several Punjab urial ( Ovis vignei ) which were found in the Salt Range and some survive there today, nilgai, chital, Indian hare ( Lepus nigricollis ), and animals that look like Indian foxes (V ulpes bengalensis), and jackals ( Canis aurius ). Th ough the thrust of the Akbarnama is the hunting prowess of Akbar, the very rendering of the painting gives us an extensive record of the larger mammal wealth of the region. 40 Th at cheetahs were plentiful at the time is evident from the fact that the emperors maintained such large numbers in captivity. Th e wild population was the pool for an animal of which there is but one record of captive breeding in the seventeenth century. And yet, an extensive search, if not an exhaustive one, through various sources by Mahesh Rangarajan and myself, has given us only 229 defi nite refer- ences to cheetahs between Tipu Sultan’s 16 cheetahs in 1799 and our own times, though surely many escaped detection. Th ere is no doubt that large parts of northern, western, central, and southern India were integral parts of the range of the global range of the cheetah. But the decline in captive numbers over time is an indication that they became rare in early eighteenth-century period. Th ey certainly came under immense pressure during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, since so many were taken from the wild for hunting purposes, a practice which continued till the animal became nearly extinct in India in the twentieth century.

Asian Elephant ( Elephas maximus ) It is estimated that there were between 750 and 1,000 war elephants in the pilkhana, elephant stables, of the Delhi Sultanate at the height of their power in the early fourteenth century, whereas the numbers had declined to a little below 500 aft er 1350, during the reign of Firoz Shah Tuglaq. Under the Mughals, the fi gures are confusing. Simon Digby notes Jean-Baptist Tavernier’s varying figures from 400 to 30,000 which he had collected! However, Tavernier enquired from Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 101 the keeper of the royal elephants at Shahjahanabad, Delhi, during the reign of Shah Jahan and was informed that he had 500 elephants of the household in the imperial stables, of which only ‘80 or at most 90’ were used for warfare. 41 It must be stressed that this fi gure is of one stable, there were several other stables within the realm apart from those owned by nobles, princes, and landlords. Th e low fi gure of elephants used in warfare is not surprising. In 1526, Ibrahim Lodi is reputed to have put 1,000 in the fi eld at Panipat. However, he lost to Babur’s deadly muskets. By the time of Shah Jahan, small canons which could be easily manhandled on the battlefi eld had become an established instrument of war. Th e elephant’s role in warfare had diminished, though they were used as draft animals by the army and they continued to be so used by the East India Company and the British Indian Empire up to the 1870s and beyond. However, there is another estimate of elephant numbers which must be noted as it gives a somewhat diff erent picture. In an unpub- lished paper presented by Shireen Moosvi at a symposium ‘Call of the Elephant’ held at the Indian Museum, Kolkata, 18–19 August 2001, she estimated that there were 5,000 elephants with the Mughals in 1595, while their courtiers had another 2,800. Her estimate for the total captive population in the empire is about 17,000. According to another scholar, the number of elephants in the Mughal stables was 12,000, with 40,000 in the empire during Jahangir’s reign between 1605 and 1627.42 Th e latter fi gure appears to be a total of both captive and wild populations. Records of the time are replete with information on localities from where elephants were caught. Irfan Habib’s atlas, which is dis- tilled from contemporary sources of the Mughal Empire, notes such locations. From Hardwar to the Gandak River and beyond, right up to Assam along the Shivaliks, the terai and the foothills of the Himalayas to Murshidabad in Bengal and the Sunderbans in Bengal were their habitat. In western India, they were to be found at Dohad, on the bor- der of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and from the west of the Malwa plateau to Sarguja in Chattisgarh. Additionally, there were other areas including those that were not part of the Mughal Empire from which elephants were procured. Akbar himself took part in an elephant catching foray at Sipri between Mandu and Agra, where he was impressed by a wild male 102 Shift ing Ground from a herd of 70 elephants, which were caught. Th e male broke the fort wall and ran off but was caught again and became a khasa elephant with the name Gajapati , king of elephants. 43 On his return from Gujarat, Jahangir encamped at Dohad in 1618 where he ordered a quamargah and with the help of tame elephants began the hunt. However, the circle was broken and only a few elephants were caught. Of these, two male elephants impressed him very much whom he named Ravant Bir and Ban Bir, because they were caught near a hill by the name of Rakas (Rakshas) Pahar or Demon hill! 44 Today there are no elephants there or at Sipri and hardly anything survives by way of a forest which can sustain them. Abul Fazl devotes lengthy passages to the elephant in the Ain-i- Akbari, the offi cial record of the Mughal Empire during Akbar’s reign. He notes that ‘It adds materially to the pomp of a king’. Th e animal also contributes to the ‘success of a conqueror … Experienced men of Hindustan put the value of a good elephant equal to fi ve hundred horses … When guided by a few bold men armed with matchlocks, such an elephant alone is worth double that number’.45 Th e elephant occupied a prominent position at court. Akbar was known for his love for them. His tackling of a fi erce elephant named Hawai, and his subduing of another Ran Bagha, are the stuff of legend. Jahangir was very fond of them too, and took a personal interest in their well-being, to the extent of providing warm water for bathing them in winter! Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, also continued using elephants for the hunt as Jahangir had done before them. A ‘white’ elephant was an object to be prized though it was not considered of any signifi cance of a divine nature as it was in Buddhist countries. A ‘white’ elephant from Pegu came in for special mention and Dara Shukoh’s white elephant was painted by a court painter believed to be Bichitar. A daryaihathi (African elephant) was painted by an unknown artist during Auranzeb’s reign.46 It is so accurately rendered that its morphological features which diff er from the Indian elephant are clearly noticeable. Jahangir also gives us an idea of the price of a good elephant. He records that in 1608, Ratan, a son of a Rajput nobleman, presented him with three elephants, the best of which became one of his khasa elephants. It was valued by the pilkhana offi cials at Rs 15,000. He goes on to comment that formerly the elephants of the great rajas of Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 103

Hindustan cost no more than Rs 25,000 but ‘they have now become very dear’. An elephant presented to Shah Jahan named Mahavir Deo was valued at Rs 300,000. Th is arguably is the most highly priced elephant recorded. On the other hand, Shireen Moosvi records a price of between Rs 5,000 and Rs 2,500 for ‘more ordinary’ elephants from Masulipatam in the years 1661 and 1662.47 Abul Fazl describes the elephant in detail. He notes diff erent ‘types’ of elephants: records their habits, diet, mating, and gestation period. He notes that hitherto elephants were not bred in captivity as it was considered unlucky, but on Akbar’s orders ‘Th ey now breed a very superior class of elephants’. Th e imperial stables carefully classifi ed elephants into seven classes with food, care, and servants provided to them according to the needs of the animals in each class. Th ey were regularly mustered for Akbar’s inspection and khasa elephants were specially earmarked for his use alone. 48 We have noted a fi gure of 40,000 elephants in the Mughal Empire at the beginning of the seventeenth century. R. Sukumar states that the distribution of wild elephants at the end of the Mughal Empire’s zenith remained unchanged until the British opened up the coun- try by the middle of the nineteenth century. G.P. Sanderson, a renowned hunter and chronicler of British Indian sport, wrote as late as 1896 that the wild elephant ‘abounds’ in most of the large forests from the foothills of the Himalayas throughout the peninsula to the extreme south.49 Today the situation is desperate. R. Sukumar estimates the population to be between 26,390 and 30,770 for all of India. Th e fi gure according to him for northwest and central India is between 3,150 and 3,700,50 which approximates to the Mughal Empire’s heartland, though some areas of the northeast and south India, which were either under Mughal control or were sources of supply, are left out. According to Alamgir Nama of Muhammad Kazim, which is a record of Aurangzeb’s rule, Assam had four or fi ve places in it which could supply 500 to 600 elephants every year. 51 On the other hand, Mirat-i-Ahmedi laments that elephants were no longer to be found at Dohad as their routes of migration were now under human habitation, a startling change between the reigns of Jahangir and Aurangzeb. 52

* * * 104 Shift ing Ground

As far as lions are concerned, the Mughal records do not mention or sound an alarm that they were a rarity in the landscape. Interestingly, Gir forest, the current home and the last bastion of Asiatic lions, was a distant place in a far-off corner of the empire. It was believed to be only about 90 square kilometres in area. When it was measured in the Great Trigonomical Survey of 1875–6, it was found to be 96 kilometres in length and 48 kilometres in width with an area of 3,109 square kilometres.53 Th e chaos and disintegration of the empire which followed Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 resulted in the paucity of central records. Th e period between the early eighteenth century to the fi rst half of the nineteenth century leaves a void of information. Provincial courts maintained records, some of which survive and need to be examined to elicit information. Since lions were royal game they were protected fi tfully up to 1947 in the princely state of Junagadh ruled by the Nawabs of the Babi dynasty, and that is the reason for their survival today. Th e tiger was of peripheral importance to the Mughals because their preferred habitat was not frequented by the Mughals and their peripatetic entourage! We know that human population grew at a very slow pace up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Tigers were so plentiful in the nineteenth century that bounties were paid for their destruction and the Bombay Presidency had a special offi cer appointed to shoot them. It is estimated that between 1875 and 1925 more than 80,000 tigers along with 150,000 leopards and 200,000 wolves were destroyed.54 Yet, despite this wholesale carnage, as many as between 25,000 and 30,000 tigers possibly survived in India around 1900. Th e British had to pay to destroy them in the interest of ‘development’ c . 1900 and later. Th e post-Independence era has driven them to the brink of extinction. As per the latest count, the total number of tigers at present is between 1,165 and 1,657. 55 Th e cheetahs, on the other hand, were removed in very large numbers from their natural habitat throughout this period, as the Mirat-i-Ahmedi and other sources testify. Th ey suff ered from all sides as both males and females were captured, leaving the cubs unpro- tected by their mothers. Additionally, they did not breed in captivity barring the one noted instance. Th us, the Mughal hunts appear to be a major cause of the decline of the cheetahs. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 105

Th e elephants too were removed in large numbers from their natural habitats. Yet they survived in appreciable numbers because their habitat is thick jungle, that they shared with the tiger. It was the last to come under human pressure with increase in population from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards and the opening up of the country at that time. Th e cheetah’s grassland habitat came under pressure much earlier. Th is habitat was shared by the lions as well. Both were easy to see in daylight and thus easy to hunt or capture. Consequently, the lion became extinct earlier—barring the relict population of some 400 animals in the Saurashtra (Kathiawar) peninsula which survives today. It was soon followed by the cheetah. It was last sighted in the winter of 1967–8 in the jungles of central India, 87 years aft er the last lion was reported in India outside its peninsular sanctuary. Th e Mughals lived by the tenets of their times; their sport and pastime hastened the decline of some mega species and yet, they sur- vived, albeit in reduced numbers. Th e sophisticated knowledge of the natural world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is astound- ing. For most researchers of environmental history though, the pre- British period is mostly a tabula rasa in spite of the fact that Salim Ali published his seminal papers on the subject as early as 1927–8.56

Notes

1 . Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia: From the Earliest Times to the Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 34; Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction (Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001), p. 16. 2 . See Guha, Health and Population in South Asia , p. 60. 3 . K.K. Trivedi, ‘Estimating Forests, Wastes and Fields, c 1600’ in Studies in History 14 no. 2: 301–311 (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd). Shireen Moosvi (1993) in her paper ‘Man and Nature in Mughal Era’, Symposium Paper: 5 of Indian History Congress, gives a somewhat dif- ferent picture of agriculture in and around Agra, lands between Yamuna and Ganga and Gujarat. However, Bernier’s description of the path of the Mughal cavalcade to which we shall come presently, is relevant for our purpose. Trivedi (1998) and Guha in Health and Population 106 Shift ing Ground

in South Asia , give us a later analysis of the landscape than the period covered by Moosvi’s paper. She has, however, developed the argument on the lines similar to her 1993 paper, in a later work: People, Taxation and Trade in Mughal India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History , p. 16. 4 . Archibald Constable, trans., Travels in the Mughal Empire by Francois Bernier 1656–1668 A.D . Second edition, revised by Vincent A. Smith, (Delhi: Oriental Reprints, 1983/1934), p. 374. 5 . Wheeler M. Th ackston, Th e Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India , Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (New York/ Washington D.C: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 461–2. 6 . Sir William Foster, Th e Embassy of Sir Th omas Roe to India, 1615–1619 as Narrated in His Journals and Correspondence (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 1990), pp. 297–324. 7 . Alexander Rogers, trans., and Henry Beveridge, ed., Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri or Th e Memoirs of Jahangir II, (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 1980), p. 233. 8 . Irfan Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps with Detailed Notes, Bibliography and Index (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). 9 . H. Blochman, trans., Th e Ain-i-Akbari by Abul Fazl Allami, Vol. I, Second Edition, rev. and ed. D.C. Phillot (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1977), p. 292. 10 . See Foster, Embassy of Sir Th omas Roe , p. 365. 11 . See Constable, Travels in the Mughal Empire , pp. 374, 378. 12 . Constable, Travels in the Mughal Empire , p. 379. 13 . Th ackston, Jahangirnama , p. 216. 14 . Th ackston, Jahangirnama , p. 411 15 . Divyabhanusinh, Th e Story of Asia’s Lions, Second edition (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2008), p. 229. 16 . Mel Sunquist and Fiona Sunquist, Wild Cats of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 288. 17 . Asok Kumar Das, personal communication, 2003. 18 . Divyabhanusinh, Story of Asia’s Lions , pp. 28, 98–103. 19 . Divyabhanusinh, Story of Asia’s Lions , pp. 50, 91, 106, 247. 20 . H. Beveridge, Th e Akbar Nama of Abul-Fazl vol II (New Delhi: EsEs Publications, 1904/1979), pp. 294, 482–3. 21 . See Th akston, Jahangirnama , p. 91. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape 107

22 . Th akston, Jahangirnama , p. 218. 23 . See Divyabhanisinh, Story of Asia’s Lions , p. 122–3. 24 . See Th akston, Jahangirnama , p. 217; Eskandar Firouz, Th e Complete Fauna of Iran (London/New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2005), pp. 65–6; Rogers and Beveridge, Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri , I, p. 351. 25 . Geeti Sen, Paintings from the Akbarnama: A Visual Chronicle of Mughal India (Varanasi/Delhi: Lustre Press Pvt Ltd/Rupa & Co, 1984), pp. 48–9, 163. 26 . Robert Skelton, personal communication, 1984; Divyabhanusinh, ‘Earliest Record of a White Tiger’, Journal, Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai, 83 (supplement) (1986): 163–6 and ‘Hunting in Mughal Painting’ in Flora and Fauna in Mughal Art , ed. Som Prakash Verma (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1999), pp. 94–103. 27 . Asok Kumar Das, personal communication, 2006; Rai Krisnadasa, Anwar-i-Suhaili: Iyar-i-Danish (Varanasi: Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras Hindu University, 1999), Pl. B, C, E; Pl. III, fg.b; Pl.VII; fg. 10; A.K. Das, Paintings of the Razmnama: Th e Book of War (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2005), pp. 59, 69, 81, 115. 28 . E.P. Gee, Th e Wildlife of India (London: Collins, 1964), p. 57; Kailash Sankhala, Tiger! Th e Story of the Indian Tiger (London/Calcutta: Collins/ Rupa & Co., 1978), p. 176; M.K. Ranjitsinh, Beyond the Tiger: Portrait of Asia’s Wildlife (New Delhi: Brijbasi Printers Pvt. Ltd., 1997), p. 22. 29 . See Blochman, Ain-i-Akbari , p. 298; Rogers and Beveridge, Tuzuk-i- Jahangiri 1909–14, I, p. 240. 30 . Sayed Nawab Ali, ed., Mirat-i-Ahmadi of Ali Muhammad Khan (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1930), p. 130; Divyabhanisinh, Th e End of a Trail: Th e Cheetah in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 45; Surendranath Sen, Indian Travels of Th evenot and Careri (New Delhi: National Archives of India, 1949), p. 16. 31 . Irfan Habib, 1982, Sheets 4B, 6B, 7B; Sen, Paintings from the Akbarnama , p. 16. 32 . See Ali, Mirat-i-Ahmadi , p. 30; Muhib Ali Khan Khass Mohalli, Baznam , British Library Manuscript BL Ms. Egerton 1013, 1930, tr. (of relevant portion) A.H. Morton; Anonymous, Baznama , Th e Oriental Institute Manuscript, Tonk, tr. (of relevant portion) Chander Shekhar. 33 . M.K. Ranjitsinh, personal communication, 1995. 34 . See Blochman, Ain-i-Akbari , p. 297–8; Beveridge, Akbar Nama , 1939, vol. III, p. 132. 108 Shift ing Ground

35 . Ibid., 1904, vol. II., p. 539. 36 . Rogers and Beveridge, 1909–14, vol II, pp. 109–10. 37 . Divyabhanusinh, ‘Record of Two Unique Observations of the Indian Cheetah in Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri’, Journal, Bombay Natural History Society , Mumbai 84, no. 2 (1987): 269–274. 38 . Ibid. 39 . See Beveridge, Akbar Nama , vol. II, pp. 416–18. 40 . See Sen, Paintings from the Akbarnama , pp. 100–1. 41 . Simon Digby, War Horse and the Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971), p. 58. 42 . R. Sukumar, Th e Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behaviour and Conservation , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 76–7. 43 . Asok Kumar Das, ‘Th e Elephant in Mughal Painting’ in Flora and Fauna in Mughal Art . ed. Som Prakash Verma (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1999), pp. 36–54. 44 . See Th akston, Jahangirnama , pp. 258–9. 45 . See Blochman, Ain-i-Akbari , I, pp. 123–4. 46 . See Das, ‘Elephant in Mughal Painting’. 47 . Rogers and Beveridge, Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri 1909–14, I, p. 140; Das, ‘Elephant in Mughal Painting’, Figure 15; Moosvi, ‘Man and Nature in Mughal Era’, 1993. 48 . Blochman, Ain-i-Akbari , I, pp. 123–40. 49 . R. Sukumar, Elephant Days and Nights: Ten years with the Indian Elephant (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 153; G.P. Sanderson, Th irteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India (London: W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd, 1896), p. 48. 50 . See Sukumar, Living Elephants , p. 403. 51 . Habib, 1982, Sheet 13 B, p. 52. 52 . Habib, p. 26. 53 . Habib, p. 25; Junagadh State Administration Report 1906–7, pp. 1, 21–2. 54 . Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History , p. 32. 55 . Yadevendradev V. Jhala, Rajesh Gopal, and Qamar Qureshi, eds, Status of Tigers, Co-Predators & Prey in India (Dehra Dun: National Tiger Conservation Authority, Government of India, Delhi/Wildlife Institute of India, 2008), p. 9. 56 . Salim Ali, ‘Th e Mughal Emperors of India as Naturalists and Sportsmen’, Journal, Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai 31, no. 4: 833–61; 32, no. 1: 34–6; 32, no. 2: 264–73. Also see M.A. Alvi and A. Rahman, Jahangir: Th e Naturalist (Delhi: National Institute of Sciences of India, 1968). Environmental Status and 5 Wild Boars in Princely India

JULIE HUGHES

A well-known miniature painting, presented in 1890 by the artist Shivalal to his patron Maharana Fateh Singh of Mewar (r. 1884–1930), looks over the walls and into the courtyard arena of the Khas Odi hunting lodge where a wild boar and tiger are fi ghting. Noble spec- tators watch from the gallery as state servants provoke the animal combatants with fi recrackers.1 Ensconced high above the action on a balcony, the prince casually follows the proceedings while attending to state business. In the background, a clouded sky frames an arid pre-monsoonal landscape, relieved only by trees near Khas Odi and a scattered array of bushes in the distance, marking the beginnings of the Aravalli Hills where huntsmen earlier captured the pig and its opponent. Th e year of this particular battle was 1888, but staged fi ghts between wild boars and other beasts were common occurrences in the southern Rajputana state of Mewar. Th roughout Fateh Singh’s tenure as prince, and then into the 1930s and 1940s, the wild boar ranked favourably 110 Shift ing Ground alongside other emblems of regional pride and local Rajput identity, including the lake palaces of Udaipur, the historic fort of Chittor, and the Eklingji Temple. Th e signifi cance of Mewar’s boars was such that interstate rivalries became manifest in these animals, as well as in the state’s hunting grounds and those of its immediate neighbour, the comparably ranked desert realm of Jodhpur. Despite the prominence of wild boars in the courtly miniatures, hunting photographs and memoirs, and agricultural records of Mewar (and elsewhere) throughout the colonial period, historians of modern India have neglected the environmental, political, and cultural sig- nifi cance of these animals. Even when environmental historians have looked at animals in addition to forests and, more recently, water, they have preferred to focus on India’s more charismatic and threatened species like tigers and Asian elephants. In doing so, they have followed trends set in part by conservation biologists. Th e prevailing consensus throughout the twentieth century was that protecting tigers in India and gorillas in Africa would automatically protect other species that shared the same habitats. Likewise, international NGOs have suc- cessfully courted popular support by publicizing the dangers facing individual species, like the giant panda that has served as the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) logo since 1961. Critics now question the effi cacy of this ‘umbrella’ of protection, along with the conservation practices and environmental policies that ecologists and govern- ments developed with charismatic species in mind. Omnivorous, nearly ubiquitous, and (allegedly) unattractive, the wild boar boasts of neither the characteristics of a charismatic species, nor those of an umbrella species. Conservation biologists naturally chose other subjects, and NGOs other foci; so too have environmental historians. Th e major exception to the rule thus far in the Indian context did not come from an environmental historian. It was the anthropolo- gist Ann Grodzins Gold and her assistant Bhoju Ram Gujar, pursuing their primary interest in power and memory among the present-day inhabitants of the former chiefdom of Sawar, who followed their informants’ lead to wild boars and the advantages and disadvantages of what they remembered as ‘the time of trees and sorrows’.2 Th is chapter takes the next step, off ering an environmental history of wild boars, the princely contexts they inhabited, and the regional cultures they helped defi ne in a major Rajput state. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 111

Th e 500 or so princes of India ranged from the superlatively rich Nizam of Hyderabad, with his realm of some 83,000 square miles, to the rulers of humble chiefdoms with a few square miles apiece. Covering nearly one-third of the subcontinent’s area and distributed throughout its biogeographic zones—from the seasonally dry Deccan through the frigid Himalaya and humid northeast—the diversity of these states extended to environment and ecology. Mewar and its rival Jodhpur confronted one another across a biogeographic divide between semi-arid and desert, helping to substantiate and shape the actual and perceived diff erences between their residents, environ- ments, and wildlife. Th e scope of princely diversity necessitates close investigation into local conditions; just as it is impossible to comprehend an entire ecosystem by considering only its most charismatic species, it is wrong to neglect ‘princely ecology’ (see below) merely because British India and its claims to paramountcy and legitimacy through environmental stewardship (see Klingensmith, this volume) are well known. 3 Princely houses varied in their connections with neighbour- ing states and the Government of India, in their internal relations with nobles and subjects, and in their environmental ideals. Each state thus developed its own unique princely ecology—or web of rela- tionships between politics, society, economy, and environment that princes perceived as existing in their states—embodied in a complex grid of hunting preserves, conservation practices, animal cultures, and human identities. Th e grounds fi guratively, and literally, shift ed between each territory. Remnants of these worlds remain embedded in India’s modern network of protected areas, many of which incor- porate former state grounds. At the same time, the princely states had a great deal in common with one another in terms of their broadly similar experiences of political subordination under the Mughals from the sixteenth century onwards. The empire-wide standards of courtly culture that the Mughals and their Rajput allies, among others, developed and disseminated—and that the increasingly independent regional kingdoms of the eighteenth century would adapt to their changing circumstances—provide the most proximate pre-colonial founda- tions of similarity across the states. By the early nineteenth century, the expanding web of British territorial control stretched from coast 112 Shift ing Ground to coast and around the edges of innumerable princely holdings, ultimately providing a new shared context of British paramountcy. In Rajputana, the East India Company established its infl uence in 1818, aft er the Th ird Anglo-Maratha War, by concluding a series of favourable treaties with Mewar and its fellow Rajput states, many of which were vulnerable, fi nancially drained, and unstable following decades of Maratha raids. Judging by the subject matter of contemporary Mewari min- iatures of the hunt and the accounts of James Tod, the Company’s fi rst political agent in Mewar aft er 1818, wild boar, and possibly deer and hare as well, were the favoured prey of Maharana Bhim Singh (r. 1778–1828).4 As nineteenth-century British policies promoted centralization of state power on the princes—through the infl uence of British political agents—and the subordination of ‘unruly’ nobles, Mewar’s successive maharanas trended away from deer and hare and increasingly supplemented wild boar with tiger and leopard. In doing so, they exchanged the relatively tame for the distinctly dangerous, and game normally pursued and killed by a party of huntsmen for those ultimately slain by a single sportsman. Sporting fashions thus mirrored political change, yet wild boars retained their status as royal prey. As the courtly Rajput elite of Mewar watched boars fi ghting and frequently defeating tigers and leopards at Khas Odi, and even more so as they pursued pig in the countryside with rifl e and spear, they thought of themselves and these impressive beasts as similar prod- ucts of the local environment. Wild boars, and the typically Mewari landscapes they lived in, refl ected and produced the physical prowess, noble character, and preeminent status that state Rajputs claimed as their birthright. Diffi cult terrain and fi rst-class game taught them to master environmental challenges and to shape themselves into formidable sovereigns and admirable men. Steep hills, thorn forests, and mixed grasslands produced larger, stronger, and bolder animals that, in turn, required bigger, better, and braver Rajputs to hunt them. Th eir belief that specifi c environments produced distinctive animals was no innovation. Divyabhanusinh reports elsewhere in this volume that the Mughals, apparently inverting the Rajput logic for wild boars, preferred long-winded, desert-dwelling cheetahs over their allegedly more sedentary mountain cousins. While Khas Odi was the best place Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 113 in Mewar to watch the state’s wild boar, it should come as no surprise that the most meaningful interactions with these animals took place outside and on the grounds that produced them, in the royal hunting preserves in and around the Aravalli Hills. High-quality boars were central to Mewari identity, and pig hunt- ing in the Aravalli Hills was a common entry in the court’s daily registers or haqiqat bahida. Besides the obligatory and frequent nota- tions recording the maharana’s successes, the fi rst kill made by the prince’s son and heir rated special mention. Th e registers report that Bhupal Singh got his fi rst boar in the Aravallis on Lorya Magra, just shy of his 12th birthday in 1896. 5 One of Fateh Singh’s state huntsmen was around 17 when he got his fi rst boar on another of these hills near Jaisamand; he recorded the event in his diary, and later included it in his published memoirs.6 Indeed, writing of Mewar in the 1860s, the European traveller Rousselet reported that a ‘young Rajpoot … is not received into men’s society until he has single-handedly killed one of the enormous wild boars which inhabit the Aravallis’. 7 Th e killing of a wild boar as an informal rite-of-passage was complemented by the Rajputs’ celebrated taste for the animals’ fl esh. Th e British defi ned Rajputs as a group in part by their affi nity for wild pork. Th e political agent James Tod even accused one branch of the Kachhwaha clan of neglecting Rajput tradition, alleging that ‘the wild hog, which … should be eaten [at least] once a year by every Rajpoot, is rarely even hunted by a Shekhawut’. 8 Hobson-Jobson , the well-known 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary, identifi ed culinary habits as ‘a measure of the purity or degradation of the constitution of an individual Rajput’. 9 Th e case of a former prince of Alwar proved the point; his association with pork-eschewing Muslims had led to his corruption, manifest in a refusal to eat wild boar. Boars were worthy prey and appropriate food because they were brave, full of vitality, and challenging to obtain. 10 In Mewar, the prince and his nobles frequently gave and received gift s of meat culled from the boars they killed. 11 It was even better to share a repast of wild pork when out hunting. Commensal feasting allowed the prince and his nobles to reinforce fraternal bonds and to reaffi rm or shift hier- archies, while the al fresco setting refreshed their connections to the land as they sat on the ground and ate off plates made from leaves.12 In addition, the practice echoed the camp experiences and rugged 114 Shift ing Ground lifestyles they associated with their ancestors, who had taken refuge from Mughal onslaughts in the state’s hilly tracts. Whether they were hunting wild boars in the Aravallis or watch- ing them at Khas Odi, Mewaris judged the desirability of individual animals on the basis of gender, maturity, and size—full-grown adult males being best—and ‘type’—either teliya or machiya . 13 Teliya or oily pigs were grey or black in colour, long and tall in body, quick to anger, and named for their indigestible, fatty fl esh. Machiya boars had brown coats and sloped backs. Th ey grew as large as teliya pigs, but their tusks were shorter and their nature less fi ery. Th ey also tasted better and were nicknamed butter pigs. Regardless of type, all boars were strong and destructive. Th ey were swift runners, good jumpers, and could swim for miles. Th ey were more dangerous than leopards or tigers, as bad for cultivation as rats, and as tenacious as a fi ve-year-old horse (or, in English idiom, a bulldog). 14 Because teliyas and machiyas alike gave pig-stickers good runs and hard fi ghts, any full-grown adult male had the potential of being worthy prey. Although a teliya’s longer tusks and nastier temperament presumably made it more formidable, while a machiya’s fl esh rendered it more palatable, this broad typology seems to have mattered more in theory than in practice. When Mewaris wrote about boar hunts, they rarely specifi ed if the animals they pursued were teliyas or machiyas. On the other hand, they consistently commented on their prey’s temperament, and almost always recorded gender, maturity, and size. Th e length of a boar’s tusks, its colour, and fl avour were less signifi cant to Mewaris than its strength, speed, bulk, and bravery. English pig-stickers in north Indian plains and the Deccan similarly categorized boars, apparently drawing on regional variants of teliya and machiya, calling the athletically built, darker, and longer-tusked ‘breed’ tatainya or tatira , and the coarsely built, paler, and shorter- tusked variety muckna , besides adding two additional categories: the small, light-coloured kookunnee and the compact sooeur . 15 L i k e Mewaris, English pig-stickers singled out adult males and prized boars that put up good fi ghts. Unlike Mewaris, they were extremely interested in tusk length—the prime measure among the English of a boar’s quality. It was on the basis of tusk length that the 1922 edition of Rowland Ward’s authoritative Records of Big Game listed its 15 inde- pendently verifi ed record Indian boars. 16 Th ese trophy animals came Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 115 from pig-sticking centres in British India, including Meerut, Bihar, and the Central Provinces, as well as Ceylon and Burma. Not one came from Mewar, suggesting either that the Mewari boar fell short of the mark or that Mewari sportsmen did not submit their trophies for certifi cation. Taking at face value the numbers provided by one state huntsman, it would seem that the size of the Mewari boar was not the issue. It is more likely that Mewari elites, because they evaluated boars diff er- ently than Englishmen, were unimpressed with records that provided the length of an animal’s tusks but not its other more vital statistics. In fact, not only were the boars in Records of Big Game not from Mewar, none of the sportsmen in possession of the listed trophies were princely. Th e situation diff ered for other game including tigers, leopards, and blackbucks. With these animals the information princes considered most important apparently matched the criteria used in Rowland Ward’s book, making elite Indians—including the Rajput maharajas of Alwar, Bikaner, and Kotah—more likely to submit their trophies for consideration. All wild boars, whether teliya or machiya, male or female, adult or sub-adult, improved with the quality of their surroundings. Mewaris believed their state’s rugged Aravalli Hills embodied defi ance, glory, and honour, and in turn fostered physical strength and character in local Rajputs and wildlife. In contrast, fl at plains and desert expanses failed to produce comparable levels of heroism or vitality. Th e dis- parity between their own loft y landscapes and the lower grounds and lesser dignities of some neighbouring states, particularly Jodhpur, literally raised the house of Mewar, its environment, and its pigs over all rivals. For the princes of Mewar and their subjects, the arid expanses of the Jodhpur state, visible from the summits of the Aravalli range, pro- vided the perfect foil for their own typically hilly countryside. Th ey believed that Mewar’s landscape had played a vital role in preserving their state’s independence throughout history. Th ey celebrated the Aravallis for sheltering royal family members from hostile forces, for hosting Mewar’s most famous battles, and for keeping the state relatively isolated from outside powers. Inferior landscapes, like the plains of Jodhpur, had left Mewar’s rivals exposed, rendering their princes less capable of defi ance and more 116 Shift ing Ground willing to compromise their honour to secure their independence. From the mid-seventeenth century, the rulers of Mewar saw resistance against diplomatic marriages between their daughters and the non- Rajput and Muslim Mughal emperors as a confi rmation of Mewari exceptionalism, grounded in their state’s natural defences. 17 Th eir nineteenth and twentieth century descendants continued to look down on the house of Jodhpur for its history of comparative openness to such associations, the logical outcome of indefensible surround- ings. Th e moral decline’ associated with environmental degradation in the form of deforestation (specifi cally that caused by agricultural encroachments, over-grazing, or unsustainable fi rewood collection occasioned by lax princely oversight) elsewhere in Rajputana here echoes Mewar’s supposed ascendancy over Jodhpur on account of that state’s environmental disadvantages. 18 Yet, even as Mewaris celebrated the harshness of their environ- ment for defending them from foreign elements, they embraced the green valleys and deep reservoirs nestled in the midst of their hills. Perfectly complementing the secure isolation provided by the rug- ged highlands, the inviting fi elds and natural fecundity of the state’s comparatively well-watered lowlands preserved Mewar from undue provincialism and deprivation. Likewise, succulent foliage and sharp thorns grew in roughly adjacent habitats, alternately gracing and protecting the state’s territory. While the forbidding Aravallis most clearly separated Mewar from Jodhpur, in places, the comparatively green and tender fl ora of Mewar’s lowlands marked the border instead. Tod recounted how one Mewari emissary insisted that specifi c plants delineated the state’s territory from Jodhpur’s with even greater precision than the hills. Th e region of Godwar, then included in Jodhpur, properly belonged to Mewar because ‘wherever the anwal [ Cassia auriculata ] puts forth its yellow blossoms, the land is of right ours … Let [Jodhpuris] enjoy their stunted babuls [Acacia ], their karil [ Capparis decidua], and the ak [ Calotropis procera or C. gigantea]; but give us back our sacred pipal [ Ficus religiosa ], and the anwal of the border’. 19 A common Mewari saying reiterated this distinction: ‘Anwal , anwal Mewar; Bawal , bawal Marwar [Jodhpur]’. Th orny, stunted, and unpleasant plants disfi gured Jodhpur. Benign, loft y, and appealing fl ora embel- lished Mewar. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 117

While there was some truth to these generalizations, the contrasts were overdrawn. Visitors describing the Mewari countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consistently noted the domi- nance of cacti, dry scrub, and thorny acacias. 20 Th ese were the same plants Mewaris considered emblematic of Jodhpur, even if off set by pipal trees and yellow-fl owering anwals. Besides, Jodhpur was not entirely a fl at, sandy expanse. Th ere were low hills around the capi- tal and at Jawantpura and Jalor, while portions of the Aravalli range itself extended into the state’s territory. In the early twentieth century, Jodhpur had some 345 square miles of forest (admittedly just 1 per cent of the total area), and a smattering of ravines, rivers, and seasonal marshes, along with numerous reservoirs and several lakes (the latter admittedly salt).21 Yet, as Morrison reminds us in her contribution to this volume, the dominant cultural discourses around environ- mental conditions in specifi c locations frequently clash with ‘reality’ as revealed in proxy records of historical vegetation available to sci- entists, such as stratigraphic pollen records. Furthermore, given the idiosyncrasies of colonial foresters’ defi nitions (see Th akur, this vol- ume) and the diffi culties even modern researchers have faced in stan- dardizing just what they mean by ‘forest’ (see Morrison, this volume), it is no surprise that the princes exercised signifi cant leeway in their own defi nitions and uses of the term and its vernacular analogues. In contrast to Jodhpur, the characteristic landscapes of Mewar supposedly excelled in producing superior game, and in presenting hunters with appropriate challenges. Pig-sticking was at its best when it was diffi cult and somewhat hazardous. Near the royal shooting palace at Nahar Magra, the Maharana’s premier pig-sticking grounds of Bara Bir and Rana Kui ka Bir were full of stones that could trip or injure a galloping horse. Mid-nineteenth century paintings show the region dotted with trees, which would have forced quick turns and reduced the range of sight. Th e unoffi cial buff er zones between these grounds and areas under cultivation reportedly narrowed over the years—yet another example of shift ing grounds, this time in relation to land-use—but both preserves retained signifi cant grass, shrub, and small tree coverage at least through 1930.22 Th e stones certainly remained. One English sportsman condemned Mewar’s grounds as ‘hilly and rough’, arguing that the ‘country round Udaipur itself, though 118 Shift ing Ground abounding in pig, does not lend itself to pig-sticking like Jodhpur and Jaipur’.23 Jodhpur had smooth, treeless plains that offered horse and rider few obstacles and minimal danger. Th e Mewari huntsman Dhaibhai Tulsinath Singh Tanwar conceded in his memoirs that Jodhpur was in fact more suitable for pig-sticking.24 Bara Bir, on the other hand, was ‘a very bad place’, while Rana Kui ka Bir was quite simply dangerous.25 Nevertheless, Tanwar insisted that Rana Kui ka Bir was ‘a good place … for pig-sticking’.26 He valued the diffi cul- ties posed by the thicker foliage and sharper contours—and by the more challenging animals that lived in their midst—bragging that in Mewar, unlike in Jodhpur, ‘on account of the thuhar plants, bushes, trees, steep water channels, and plenty of rocks, it was not possible to kill a boar easily even if one worked very hard to do so’. 27 J o d h p u r ’ s undemanding environment enfeebled the game and spoiled the experience. As a result, despite their fame as pig-stickers, Jodhpuris were soft er and less skilled. In contrast, Mewaris sported in a more rewarding landscape. Ironically, even as the Mewari environment was imagined to pro- duce better game and better Rajputs, some of the vegetation hailed as most conducive to Mewar’s superior wild boars were desert fl ora associated with Jodhpur. It was not Mewar’s broad-leafed pipals, but its thorny scrub that housed, fed, and protected these animals. State huntsmen believed the thuhar , a cactus-like shrub of the genus Euphorbia that grew throughout the state, provided an ideal habitat for wild animals by checking the spread of civilization into wilder- ness preserves.28 Th e plant also enhanced Mewari sport when game took refuge in thick clumps of the stuff . It was diffi cult and danger- ous to fl ush game from these thickets, and so the thuhar’s thorns helped hone Mewari character by, quite literally, maintaining a sharp divide between hunter and prey that only the best of Rajputs could surmount. Mewari plants could be as prickly as their Jodhpuri counterparts, but they signalled the greater fertility of their state’s soil by producing more berries and blossoms, growing in greater numbers, and achiev- ing higher densities. Another drought-resistant plant that reportedly fl ourished in the Rana Kui ka Bir and Bara Bir pig grounds was a bush closely related, if not identical, to Jodhpur’s signature acacias. In the 1860s the slopes around Nahar Magra were ‘entirely covered with a Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 119 thick underwood of thorny dwarf acacias’, and the local boar thrived on their abundant berries.29 Th ick-skinned and well-nourished boars made for tougher fi ghts, longer runs, and larger trophies. Naturally, those who pursued them had to be equally well-conditioned. While elite Mewaris treated plants like the thuhar as markers of wilderness, the peasantry cultivated more domestic views. Th roughout Rajputana, they maintained thuhar hedges to demarcate their fi elds and defend their crops from wild boars, antelopes, and deer, neatly inverting elite understandings of the thuhar’s associations. In addi- tion, they cut and dried its branches for fuel and extracted its juices for various medical purposes. 30 Th e peasantry also diff ered in their ideas of an ideal landscape in relation to wild boars. When the landscape in question abutted their fi elds, they preferred tracts devoid of cover that boars would be reluctant to cross. Wild boars, along with tigers, leopards, and deer, belonged on the far side of such buff er zones, in jungles suffi ciently rich to deter them from straying, and productive enough to sustain villagers with forest produce for themselves and their livestock. Fateh Singh’s princely ideals particularly conflicted with his subjects’ concerns around his Nahar Magra hunting grounds. Th e prince claimed there had been ‘bushes [everywhere] and in all such bushes pigs were found’ in the mid-nineteenth century, while by the early 1920s villagers had destroyed most of the growth beyond the reserve boundary, both to burn as fuel and to protect their crops from boars.31 Indeed, while Gold and Gujar convincingly document nostalgia among erstwhile princely state residents for ‘the time of trees’, peasant cultivators and even hill communities including the Bhils (see Th akur, this volume) repeatedly embraced opportunities to relieve their ‘sorrows’ by killing princely boars and, especially aft er 1947, by clearing forests for cash wages and promises of land.32 Th e diffi culties princes increasingly faced in parlaying their triumphs in the fi eld into sovereign credits with their subjects rested in large part on these and similar disparities in the views of princely elites and the peasant classes. While Fateh Singh’s subjects generally began by peti- tioning for forest and grazing rights and relief from wild boars, their tactics could escalate if their concerns went unanswered. During one especially dramatic episode, some 500 villagers collectively trespassed on reserve grounds in 1921. As Fateh Singh described it, they waited 120 Shift ing Ground until he came to Nahar Magra to hunt, and then ‘cut the fencing … and let loose their cattle on the land’. 33 When he tried to quell the protest, they ‘cut the bushes and killed pigs’. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it was not so much contested environments like Nahar Magra and the wild forage they produced that determined the quality of boars as it was the feed that state huntsmen gave them. In Mewar, boars had been fed from royal shooting boxes as early as the eighteenth century. By 1900, they ate makki or corn at Diwan Odi, Rang Burj, Kesar Bag, and Bari Odi at Nahar Magra, at Khas Odi near the capital, and elsewhere besides.34 Th ey received larger portions in the winter to compensate for decreased natural forage and to fi x them to known locations during the hunting season. Jodhpur’s wild boars received handouts as well. Unlike Mewar’s corn-fed animals, Jodhpuri boar in the early 1940s feasted on a more drought-tolerant crop: lentils. Th e results failed to impress when Mewari huntsmen visited the state. Th e boar looked ‘fat in body, but upon being weighed, it didn’t come out. By appearance, they were thought to be 6 or 7 maunds . Upon investigation, it turned out that their bodies were bloated on account of living in the desert and eating lentils’. 35 Mewar’s invigorating landscape and succulent corn pro- duced the real thing. Jodhpur’s indigestible lentils artifi cially infl ated its boar into disappointing desert mirages. As tempting as it may be to dismiss this as hollow boasting, there are plausible explanations that could account for Mewari observations. While legumes such as lentils are a protein-rich feed, in monogastric animals like the domestic pig and their wild cousins, legumes can cause excessive gas production during digestion.36 Overindulgence can lead to abdominal pain and, in severe cases, death as the result of stomach distension and rupture. Another drawback is that pigs are less effi cient at metabolizing the energy stored in lentils, a problem related to their diffi culties in digesting them in the fi rst place. Th eir stomachs are better adapted to grains, including corn. It even appears that pigs fi nd corn more palatable than lentils, which further explains why feed intake and growth both suff er in domestic pigs fed on legumes. While treatments including dehulling, cooking, or soaking can eliminate most of these problems, if Jodhpuri boar were eating a diet rich in untreated lentils, then it is possible that they actually Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 121

were bloated, stunted, and lethargic in comparison with their Mewari counterparts.37 Unlike Mewari huntsmen by the 1940s, Fateh Singh seemingly found nothing amiss with Jodhpuri animals when he killed two and injured one from horseback while visiting the state in 1892. 38 P e r h a p s the boar were not yet eating lentils, or the Maharana was simply being polite. When diplomatically advisable, Mewari confi dence in and insistence on the superiority of their own boar could remain quietly in the background. Local dignity required, however, that Jodhpuri visitors to Mewar be remembered as somehow having acknowledged the excellence of local prey, grounds, or hunting methods. Whether Jodhpuri visitors expressed polite approval or heartfelt admiration, the Maharana and his followers preferred to construe their words as affi rmations of Mewari exceptionalism. Th is imperative was most acute when it came to well-known Jodhpuri sportsmen like Sir Pratap Singh (b. 1845). One story cast Sir Pratap as a sincere admirer of Mewari sport who showered praise on Maharana Fateh Singh for attaining the highest Rajput standards in pig-sticking. While visiting Mewar, aft er Fateh Singh tumbled from his horse while pig-sticking in the treacherous Rana Kui ka Bir, Sir Pratap comically, but movingly, asserted that he was glad the Maharana had lost his seat and that his horse had kicked him in the head. Sir Pratap explained that modern Rajputs had abandoned their real nature and duties in favour of whore houses and music halls. In the Jodhpuri regent’s opinion, Fateh Singh’s acci- dent certifi ed that the Mewari prince, at least, was still engaged in ‘the true work of Rajputs’.39 Given Sir Pratap’s fame as ‘the best pig-sticker in India [and a man] trained to fi ght a boar on foot with only a knife in hand’, his high opinion did much to validate Fateh Singh’s own reputation. 40 Fateh Singh further asserted his superiority over the rulers of other realms through his selective hunting habits. He restricted himself for the most part to large, dangerous game including boar, tiger, and leopard, and he avoided female and juvenile animals. 41 During his reign, he shot 990 boar and speared another 275 from horseback, while also killing 375 tigers and 991 leopards. He concentrated on these species, widely viewed as among the best game in India, to keep his actions commensurate with his high status. In contrast, he shot 122 Shift ing Ground paltry numbers of the other animals available to him, including just 20 sambars and two blackbucks. Fateh Singh’s selectiveness extended to his choice of shooting locations. Aft er his 1892 foray into Jodhpur, the Maharana never again hunted in foreign territory. An offi cial record of game shot by the prince prior to 1898 reported with pride that, of the animals listed, he had obtained ‘only three or four’ outside the state.42 Seemingly unaware of the Jodhpur excursion, Tanwar boasted repeatedly that Fateh Singh had never once shot beyond Mewar’s borders.43 Th e prince’s fi delity advertised that Mewar’s grounds could meet a dis- cerning sportsman’s demands without external supplementation, reiterating the state’s reputation for self-suffi ciency and independence. It further implied that other realms had nothing better to off er. Fateh Singh’s policy of limiting his activities to Mewar when his high rank would have granted him easy access to sport elsewhere was atypical. Most rulers were happy to hunt as guests in other states, in part because their visits reinforced the close relations between royal families linked by marriage, friendship, or shared interests. It was common practice for princes to visit other states, British territory, or even Africa to pursue game unavailable in their own lands. Nor was it unheard of for Mewari rulers to hunt in neighbouring realms, although precedents involving Bundi State had resulted in the assassi- nation of former maharanas on more than one occasion, most recently in the eighteenth century. 44 For Fateh Singh, however, there appears to have been more to lose from hunting abroad than there was to gain. Considering that Fateh Singh killed well over a thousand boar, the dearth of paintings or photographs showing him out pig-sticking is surprising. Th e situation is best explained not by his disinterest in the sport—that possibility is easily disproven by his lifetime totals—but rather by his need to maintain a certain distance between himself, his nobles, his princely peers, and the British. Tiger and leopard hunts dominated miniature paintings because he could kill these animals freely in his own state, while others could not. Since so many individuals could hunt wild boar, when Fateh Singh’s artists associ- ated him with one of these animals, the boar in question had to be something special. Th e best way for a boar to impress was to attack a leopard or fi ght a tiger. Wild boar that failed to stand out did not become focal points in visual records of the prince’s activities. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 123

Th roughout Mewar, wild boar posed a persistent threat to farmers and their crops, and therefore to landlords and their rents, Mewari nobles and their incomes, and fi nally the state and its revenues. Land revenue in the early twentieth century accounted for approximately half of the state’s returns. 45 But the Maharana alone could not keep the wild boar population within acceptable bounds; there were simply too many. From an economic standpoint, Fateh Singh could not aff ord to declare boar hunting a princely monopoly, although the sport could and did remain limited to the elite. Because far fewer tigers and leo- pards than wild boar lived in Mewar, and because they left crops alone and mostly preyed on wild animals—including boar—the Maharana was able to monopolize the right to shoot them. In addition, tigers and leopards kill swift ly with their teeth and claws; wild boar work slowly through crop destruction and its resultant hardships. When a sportsman bagged a big cat, he dramatically avenged or averted a potential future death or maiming of a villager or domestic animal. When killing wild boar, the life—and-death consequences for local residents were less obvious, and less dramatic. Th e Maharana had little to lose in popularity or income and much to gain in prestige and power—in the eyes of his fellow elites and the British—by severely restricting the number of legitimate shooters when it came to the big cats. Th e situation with wild boar was reversed; he had more to gain from dispersing rights widely amongst the elite than from narrowly concentrating them. Unlike official state imagery, popular stories enthusiastically recounted the Maharana’s heroic battles with local boar to demon- strate his fi tness as a ruler and his status, in relation to Mewar’s power- ful sporting nobles, as a pig-sticker primus inter pares. Th e intense physical demands of pig-sticking proved Fateh Singh’s vitality in one tale concerning events that took place in 1922, soon aft er the British restricted his sovereign powers because of his alleged incompetence and governmental mismanagement. Over 70 years old, the prince outstripped his fellow riders at Nahar Magra to kill a large boar with ‘a spear-thrust into the nape of the … neck, which passed through its chest and stuck in the ground’.46 Th e strength and heroism of this particular boar enhanced the Maharana’s achievement. It was the fi rst animal bold enough to emerge from the grass to face the hunters that day, and, even when gravely injured, it stood its ground as though 124 Shift ing Ground nothing had happened, keeping the horses at bay until additional thrusts fi nally killed it. Familiar with this boar’s excellence, the leg- endary diffi culty of the grounds, and the singularity of Fateh Singh’s feat, loyal Mewaris would have interpreted the kill as a testament to their prince’s continuing physical prowess and mental acuity. Fateh Singh himself considered exploits against wild boar to be suffi cient proof of his competence. In 1924, he informed the viceroy of his continuing ability ‘to ride for 20 or 25 miles and take other physical exercises such as pig-sticking, with the consequence that my physical constitution can easily bear the strain of work which my duties as ruler of my State impose upon me’. 47 So long as he could hunt boar at Nahar Magra, around Jaisamand, and elsewhere along the edges of the Aravallis, he could rule. Th e benefi ts of pig-sticking relied on the qualities of Mewar’s hilly-yet-fertile and thorny-yet-salubrious environment and the out- standing boar it produced. Th ese connections between superior landscapes, superior boar, and superior Rajputs gave elite Mewaris a vested interest in maintaining their state’s pig-friendly environment. Keeping an environment pig-friendly is, however, a less taxing opera- tion than, say, keeping it amphibian-friendly. According to the lat- est International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report, the Eurasian wild pig ( Sus scrofa) is ‘highly adaptable and highly resistant to a variety of degradative processes, and may thrive under conditions of habitat modifi cation and hunting pressure which have devastated other forms of wildlife’. 48 O ffi cially categorized on the Red List as of Least Concern, wild boars live in a variety of habitats, including grasslands, tropical rain forests, and temperate woodlands. Th ey happily forage in agricultural fi elds. In Mewar, they preferred places within easy reach of agricultural fi elds, and grasslands with regular access to water.49 Th ey liked best to eat jujubes, wild yam and other tubers and roots, and anything cultivated. Despite their adaptability and resilience, the vital importance of wild boar encouraged Mewar’s princes to take an active interest in their condition and numbers. In parallel with their own reduced pow- ers under British paramountcy, Mewar’s rulers suspected their pig grounds and game populations were contracting in the face of agricul- tural expansion and power shift s that favoured anti-pig farmers and petty landholders. Even if numerous boars remained, an increasingly Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 125 cultivated landscape, which featured a heightened availability of domestic mates, severely destabilized the situation. Indeed, wild boars readily and successfully hybridize with domestic pig, resulting in lit- ters of fi ve to ten equally fertile off spring. From a princely perspective, wild boars were an endangered species. Just as Rajputs degenerated when they compromised their nature and honour by living in unsuitable environments and mixing with inferiors, interbreeding with domestic pigs diluted the essential characteristics of wild boars and would result in unnaturally infe- rior beasts that would ultimately undermine the very foundations of the state. While Fateh Singh does not appear personally to have agonized over porcine miscegenation, he did attempt to enumerate and increase the population of (presumably) pure-blooded boar in his preserves. During the hunting seasons from 1907 through 1909, state huntsmen monitored animals at Nahar Magra by recording the number of adult males, sows, sub-adults, and piglets visiting Diwan Odi, Kesar Bag, Bari Odi, and Rang Burj shooting towers, along with the amount of corn they consumed.50 Th is information helped the Maharana judge the effi cacy of his feeding programme, as measured in the hoped-for multiplication and improvement of wild boars. Th e existence of these reports suggests that Fateh Singh was anx- ious about Mewar’s boar, but the information they contained should not have been overly alarming. As many as 23 boar were visiting Diwan Odi, Kesar Bag, Bari Odi, and Rang Burj on a daily basis in 1907. 51 Aside from a poor showing aft er the hunting season in March 1909 when only two boar were seen at Diwan Odi and Bari Odi, one at Kesar Bag, and none at Rang Burj—perhaps having grown cautious aft er repeated hunts—their numbers generally stayed between 10 and 20 from 1907 through 1909. A lone report from July 1924 indicates that only three to fi ve boars were frequenting Diwan Odi, while one was coming to Rang Burj, two to Kesar Bag, and one to Bari Odi. 52 Th ese numbers suggest Fateh Singh may have had cause for concern by the mid-1920s—aft er the people’s 1921 attacks on the reserve and its pigs—but the limited data and the timing of the tally just aft er the hunting season make it impossible to reach a reliable conclusion. Th e integrity of wild bloodlines was a bigger concern for the next maharana, Bhupal Singh (r. 1930–55). In 1942, he ordered the destruction of a particularly troublesome wild boar known for 126 Shift ing Ground invading villages and mating with domestic sows. 53 Around the same time, he maintained breeding programmes for wild boar at Samor Bag and Dudh Talai in Udaipur, and at Lalit Bag near Nahar Magra. Th e fact that Bhupal Singh worried specifi cally about interbreeding whereas Fateh Singh had concerned himself more generally with population size and distribution strongly suggests that, by the 1940s, the grounds separating domestic pigs from wild boar were shift ing in unwelcome ways in Mewar. Nevertheless, Bhupal Singh could still shoot boar in the 1940s that matched or exceeded in size those he had killed in his youth. In 1909 at the age of 25, he had bagged an impressive 335-pounder, his largest boar yet.54 In 1942, he got an even bigger animal out of a herd of 200 near Jaisamand. 55 It was 380 pounds, 3 feet tall, over 6 feet long, and had tusks measuring a respectable 8 inches. By way of comparison, the records for Indian wild boar tusks ranged from about 9 inches through just over 12.5 inches, while the weight of ‘a good boar’ was 250 pounds or more. 56 Th is animal was so impressive that Bhupal Singh had it memorialized in a painting covering an entire wall in one of his palace courtyards at Jaisamand. Th e following year, the prince killed an even more remarkable boar, the equal of which ‘had never before been hunted’.57 Nevertheless, Bhupal Singh was lamenting a ‘great scarcity of pigs’ by 1947.58 Perhaps there really were fewer shootable boars than before. Aft er all, Fateh Singh too had complained of sharp reductions in pigs in the royal preserves between his own time and that of his immediate predecessors. Or perhaps the real trouble was that the available animals somehow were not living up to expectations, leading Bhupal Singh to believe they were not genuine Mewari boars at all, because the pigs themselves and their environment had degraded over time. Th is suspected devolution put the Maharana and his court in a disagreeable position vis-à-vis their peers in Jodhpur and their own environmentally based elite Rajput identity. Bhupal Singh’s eff orts to breed fi rst-rate wild boars in the 1940s were, then, a matter of self- preservation. If Mewari boar were endangered, so too were Mewari Rajputs. Likewise, Fateh Singh’s attempts to elevate the characteristic animals and landscapes of Mewar above those of Jodhpur had been exercises in self-promotion. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 127

Under the infl uence of environmental values and identities not so far removed from those once dominant among the Rajput princes of Mewar, the species that benefi t most from modern wildlife protec- tion campaigns have sometimes been among those seemingly least in need of it from a survival perspective, like the wild boar. Th e founda- tions of local pride and the workings of regional rivalries can and sometimes do quietly guide wildlife conservation and environmental protection eff orts.59 As human societies struggle to preserve what they have identifi ed as the appropriate numbers, preferred distri- butions, and most essential characteristics of the species they most admire, their patronage factors into processes of natural selection, adapting wild animals and wild places to suit their own environmen- tal ideals, reifi ed as natural characteristics of a natural environment. Th is, however, may simply be a less recognized feature—if one signifi cantly amplifi ed through science and technology, government policy, and popular sentiment—of the natural workings of ecol- ogy. As Morrison asserts elsewhere in this volume, the erroneous assumptions of natural equilibrium that defi ned theories of climax ecology have given way to non-equilibrium ecologies, in which disequilibrium and instability are just as expected as temporary stretches of equilibrium and stability. Ultimately, there is no single, primordial, or ‘true’ condition for any given species or environ- ment. Nevertheless, what humans think about wild animals and environments, and how they act in relation to them, remains vitally important for all parties concerned. But we gain little by calling our environmental interests and impacts unnatural. Like the princes of colonial India, modern wildlife conservationists, conservation biologists, and everyday environmentalists have been protecting something of themselves all along, and not (just) wild animals or environments. Th ere is no shame in this, merely an acknowledge- ment that animals and environments help make us, as much as we help make them. William Cronon famously argued of the American wilderness that, ‘far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation’. 60 Th e same may be said of Mewar’s rugged hills and their animal inhabit- ants, so long as it is remembered that, just as profoundly, they helped create the Mewaris. 128 Shift ing Ground

Notes

1 . Andrew Topsfi eld, City Palace Museum Udaipur: Paintings of Mewar Court Life (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 1990), p. 115, Fig. 46. 2 . Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan (Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2002), passim . 3 . Julie E. Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 3–6. 4 . Andrew Topsfi eld, Court Painting at Udaipur: Art Under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers and Museum Rietberg Zurich, 2001), p. 218, Figure 194, p. 221, Figure 197, and p. 236, Figure 216; James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India, ed. William Crooke (New York: Humphrey Milford, 1920), 2, pp. 660–2, 751. 5 . G. N. Sharma, ed., Haqiqat Bahida: H.H. Maharana Fateh Singhji, (24 Dec., 1884 to 24 May, 1930) V.S. 1941–1987 (Udaipur: Maharana Mewar Research Institute, 1992–6), 3: 95. 6 . Dhaibhai Tulsinath Singh Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar (Udaipur: privately printed, 1956), pp. 270–1. 7 . Louis Rousselet, India and its Native Princes, Travels in Central India and in the Presidencies of Bombay and Bengal (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1975), p. 157. 8 . See Tod, Annals , 3, pp. 1381. 9 . Jason P. Freitag, Th e Power Which Raised them from Ruin and Oppression: James Tod, Historiography, and the Rajput Ideal, (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2001), p. 139. 10 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 54. 11 . See Sharma, Haqiqat Bahida , 2: 171, 172–3, and 191. 12 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 187; and Dhaibhai Tulsinath Singh Tanwar, Samsmaran: Maharana Fateh Singhji, Maharana Bhupal Singhji, Maharana Bhagvat Singhji Mewar (Udaipur: privately printed, 1982), pp. 64–5. 13 . A.E. Wardrop, Modern Pig-sticking (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1914), p. 21. 14 . Th is paragraph draws on Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 12. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 129

15 . R.S.S. Baden-Powell, Pigsticking, or Hoghunting: A Complete Account for Sportsmen; and Others , (London: Harrison and Sons, 1889), pp. 27–8. 16 . Guy Dollman and J.B. Burlace, eds., Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, with their Distribution, Characteristics, Dimensions, Weights, and Horn and Tusk Measurements , 8th edition (London: Rowland Ward, Limited, 1922), pp. 444–5. 17 . Cynthia Talbot, ‘Th e Mewar Court’s Construction of History’, in Kingdom of the Sun: Indian Court and Village Art from the Princely State of Mewar , ed. Joanna Gottfried Williams (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, 2007), p. 15. 18 . See Gold and Gujar, Trees and Sorrows , p. 255. 19 . See Tod, Annals , 2, pp. 803. 20 . For example, see Rousselet, India and its Native Princes , p. 172. 21 . K.D. Erskine, Th e Western Rajputana States Residency and Th e Bikaner Agency (Gurgaon: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 50, 113. 22 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , pp. 184, 271–2, 299, and 304. 23 . F.W. Caton Jones, ‘A Glance at Udaipur’, Th e Hoghunter’s Annual 3 (1930): 80. 24 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , pp. 54–5. 25 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , pp. 284, 299. 26 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 271. 27 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 277. 28 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 350. 29 . See Rousselet, India and its Native Princes , p. 172. 30 . Th e Rajputana Gazetteer 2 (Calcutta: Offi ce of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1879): 11; and Archibald Adams, Th e Western Rajputana States: A Medico-Topographical and General Account of Marwar, Sirohi, Jaisalmir (London: Junior Army and Navy Stores, Limited, 1899), p. 421. 31 . Fateh Singh, to Lord Reading, c. 1924, pp. 57–8, cat. no. 352.0544 PAL, Maharana Mewar Special Library. For similar strategies of population control in colonial Africa, see Th addeus Sunseri, ‘Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Majimaji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania)’, Journal of African History 38 (1997): 251. 32 . See Gold and Gujar, Trees and Sorrows, passim . 33 . Fateh Singh, to Lord Reading, 4–5. 34 . Kamdar of Nahar Magra, to Hakim of Girwa, samvat 1962 kati sud 10 , Mewar Mahakma Khas (MMK), Revenue Dept., 269 of VS 1962, Rajasthan State Archives-Udaipur (RSA-U); Padam Singh, to Kesri 130 Shift ing Ground

Singh, report, 5 March 1907, MMK, Revenue Dept., 269 of VS 1962, RSA-U. 35 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 296. A maund is about 40 kilograms. 36 . D. Jezierny, R. Mosenthin, and E. Bauer, ‘Th e Use of Grain Legumes as a Protein Source in Pig Nutrition: A Review’, Animal Feed Science and Technology 157 (2010): 111, 116. 37 . Apichai Mekbungwan, ‘Application of Tropical Legumes for Pig Feed’, Animal Science Journal, 78 (2007): 347–8. Some portion of their lentils were sprouted, suggestive of soaking, see Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 296. 38 . See Sharma, Haqiqat Bahida , 3: 170. 39 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 272. 40 . Charles Hardinge, My Indian Years, 1910–1916: Th e Reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (London: John Murray, 1948), p. 34. 41 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 197. 42 . Shikar ka Naksha , Udaipur, c . 1921, 3. 43 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 197, and Tanwar, Samsmaran , p. 81. 44 . See Tod, Annals , 1, p. 506 and 3, p. 1477. 45 . Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series, Rajputana 23 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908): 122. 46 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , pp. 271–2. 47 . Fateh Singh, to Lord Reading, 10. 48 . W. Oliver and K. Leus, ‘Sus scrofa ’, in IUCN 2010. IUCN Red List of Th reatened Species , version 2010.4, http://www.iucnredlist.org accessed 2 January 2011. 49 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 12. 50 . Order no. 7524 of kati vid 11 samvat 1964, MMK, Revenue Dept., 269 of VS 1962, RSA-U. 51 . Naksha shikargah mukam Nahar Magra , December 1907 through May 1909, docs. 15, 18, 20, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 52, 58, and 60, MMK, Revenue Dept., 269 of VS 1962, RSA-U. 52 . Naksha shikargah mukam Nahar Magra (Diwan Odi, Bari Odi, Rang Burj, Kesar Bag) , July 1924, MMK, Revenue Dept., 269 of VS 1962, RSA-U. 53 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , pp. 292–3. 54 . See Sharma, Haqiqat Bahida , 4: 402. 55 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , pp. 293–5. 56 . See Dollman and Burlace, Rowland Ward’s Records , p. 444. 57 . See Tanwar, Shikari aur Shikar , p. 297. Environmental Status and Wild Boars in Princely India 131

58 . Bhupal Singh, to Arthur Cunningham Lothian, 31 December 1947, Mss. Eur. F144/1, British Library. 59 . For comparison, see Divyabhanusinh, ‘Junagadh State and its Lions: Conservation in Princely India, 1879–1947’, Conservation and Society 4, no. 4 (2006): 522–40; Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Region’s Honour, Nation’s Pride: Gir’s Lions on the Cusp of History’, in Th e Lions of India , ed. Divyabhanusinh (New Delhi: Black Kite, 2008), pp. 252–61; Arupjyoti Saikia, ‘Th e Kaziranga National Park: Dynamics of Social and Political History’, Conservation and Society 7, no. 2 (2009): 113–29. 60 . William Cronon, ‘Th e Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995), p. 69. Th e Imperial Ambition of 6 Science and Its Discontents Animal Breeding in Nineteenth-Century Punjab

BRIAN P. C ATON

If the human body is a site of contestation between colonizer and colonized over the power to rule, then so must be the animal body. A substantial body of scholarship following David Arnold focuses on medicine’s defi nitions of what is normal ‘health’ or behaviour, thus disciplining (colonial) bodies in order to carry out imperial power relations.1 Th is focus on disciplining the body might not seem to apply to a study of animals, because British offi cials were not especially interested in making cows, for example, into well-behaved imperial subjects. Th ey were however interested in making cow owners and herders into well-behaved subjects. Th is led to the implementation of a fairly wide range of administrative strategies with the sedenta- rization of herders as their goal, but it also led to offi cial interest in the social and political geography of trades in animals. 2 S t r a t e g i c concerns of greater, Presidency-wide geographic scope regarding the supply of horses, cattle, and ovines overlapped with the more local Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 133 drive for sedentarization, leading to a smaller, yet equally powerful, set of strategies that valued certain qualities of the shape, composition, and functioning of animal bodies. Th e government of the East India Company, like its many Indian contemporaries and predecessors, was interested in promoting the reproduction of horses because horses, like elephants, were unmistak- ably decisive in military ventures. Eighteenth-century governments, as a rule, did not promote reproduction of or knowledge about bovines or ovines because their military use could be successfully managed by Banjaras and similar specialists. 3 Th erefore, scholars have been able to estimate roughly the number of horses populating pre-colonial and early colonial India, because governments and foreign observers took an interest in this strategic concern; Jos Gommans, for example, has set the population for the fi rst three quarters of the eighteenth century at between 400,000 and 800,000. 4 No scholar has attempted an estimate for cattle, mainly because the sources do not provide the data for it. Although the Company’s army (and later the Indian Army) never completely abandoned its interest in horse breeding, the devel- opment of an offi cial interest in cattle breeding represents something new in India’s administrative and environmental history.5 Why did this interest emerge? In the fi rst decades of the nineteenth century, military logistical problems pushed the government to risk invest- ment in breeding experiments. 6 However, the government’s discourse on cattle breeding was articulated in the vocabulary of science in order to valorize its own eff orts (and animals) over supplies managed through local knowledge and practice. Th us, the story of government’s material investment in cattle breeding facilities, particularly in the Government Cattle Farm, Hissar, indicates a modest yet measurable level of commitment to the intellectual enterprise of science, which by the end of the nineteenth century had begun to eclipse military motives for continued offi cial support for breeding projects.

Engineering the Animal Body

Breeding, or the human activity of infl uencing the reproduction of domesticated animals for the exaggeration or continuation of desired qualities, is perhaps as old as domestication itself, but science identifi es 134 Shift ing Ground specifi c technologies to make ‘breeding on scientifi c principles’, or scientifi c breeding. Generally speaking, the antecedents of scientifi c breeding in England emerged in the context of the Agricultural Revolution, the academic shorthand for a series of processes, includ- ing the trend among rural large landowners to experiment with agri- cultural practices. 7 Regardless of the motivations, enclosure and the accumulation of capital in land made such experimentation possible, by reducing the costs suff ered in case of the experiment’s failure.8 Certainly, men of all classes attempted, when they could, to reserve for breeding purposes male animals which had the characteristics they desired, but the prerequisites of time and herd size, and the risks involved in experimentation, limited this activity to elites, who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided the class of men involved in the production of scientifi c knowledge. For England in the eighteenth century, breeding experiments focused on the production of animal genealogies and the develop- ment of breed purity. Th e former may be traced back to the eff orts of Robert Bakewell. By carefully inbreeding, Bakewell could produce, within a few generations, animals that carried the sort of traits British consumers desired, such as fatty forequarters in sheep and effi cient meat producers in cattle. More important, though, Bakewell kept records of all his crosses, so that he could advertise the success of his stud animals and the purity of their lineage, meaning purity of breed. Th is practice established what one might call scientifi c breeding, in the sense that the records (genealogies) of crosses could be used to ‘prove’ why a certain off spring exhibited the desirable qualities of its sire and dam. It could not, of course, predict with certainty that a particular match would produce an off spring with specifi c desired qualities. Th is method was an advantage over earlier patterns of gentlemanly breeding only because previous practice left parentage uncertain, and Harriet Ritvo has argued that Bakewell’s method was more a market- ing strategy than science.9 Breed purity also depended on salesmanship, but men trading in breed purity needed to sell a particular defi nition of what char- acteristics defi ned a breed (and therefore diff erentiated one breed from another). Th e idea of breeds depends mostly on certain mor- phological characteristics that are visible and occasionally perceptible through touch. Some characteristics could be measured (especially Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 135 height of horses), but most depended on the judgment of the assessor. Breeds also depend, perhaps because of pre-modern practices, on certain characteristics dominating in certain spatial territories, and therefore, breeds oft en, but not always, carry place names, for example, Jersey cows, Leicester and Norfolk sheep.10 British offi cials applied these principles of breed identifi cation to animals in India, but mainly to bovines. However, at least one offi cer in the late eighteenth century doubted the utility of distinguishing Indian breeds:

I stumbled on an old school fellow & country man of mine Captain L[?] Mackennon, who was on his private aff airs at the Presidency [of Madras] as he has been on Command in the Fort of Janacundah, with his Battal- ion for these three years past, in the neighbourhood of Angole. I thought him, of course, a good judge of the Breed of Cattle thereabouts, but was much surprized, when he informed me, that all was a mistaken notion respecting them and that Captain Dinwiddie who had Commanded at Angole for many years assured him, that while he was there, he never could get any for himself, or for his Friends at Madras &c. who had applied to him. He further added that what they called Angole Cattle erroneously, were a kind of Guzzyral Cows, which were sometimes brought across the country, by itinerant Merchants, and Horse dealers[.] aft er this Information, I gave up all thoughts of enquiring further about these Cattle as a needless business.11

If Mackennon’s assessments were correct, then this letter reports a circumstance in which British military offi cers sought to apply a method of discerning breeds on the basis of locality to patterns of ani- mal mobility and reproduction that had a more extensive geographi- cal reach. However, one should not overestimate that reach; from evidence pertaining to pre-colonial and early colonial cattle theft and trade, animals destined for the market tended not to travel more than 300 miles. So the breeds that populate offi cial correspondence, particularly the Angole, Nagore, and Hariana breeds of cattle, may have had visibly diff erent characteristics, but there does not appear to be any clear basis in geography or local knowledge for applying those breed names. Th e rationale was rooted in British desires to manage cattle breeding along lines of nomenclature established in the mid- eighteenth century. 136 Shift ing Ground

Animal Breeding in India

Breeding programmes initiated by the East India Company intended to solve logistical problems of the military: fi rst, in order of impor- tance, cavalry, and second, ordnance. Sujit Sivasundaram has dem- onstrated the processes of breeding and creating knowledge about elephants, which the Company used for both combat and com- missariat purposes; but elephant breeding was not carried out on a scale comparable to that of horses and cattle, and therefore, did not alleviate the army’s logistical problems in the short or long term. 12 Such problems emerged once the Company chose to project its power beyond the immediate environs of its factories in the seven- teenth century, and particularly in its military actions in the early eighteenth century. An awareness of the problem of supplying cav- alry remounts is well established in most histories of colonial South Asia, which need not be recited here. Regarding ordnance problems, military historians refer to reports of artillery pieces being shift ed from Company ships to shore, and, in the absence of suitable draught animals, being hauled by hand to combat sites. 13 Although military thinkers in Europe (and specifi cally Britain) tended to think of horses when addressing the problem of draught for artillery and ordnance purposes, the abundance and eff ectiveness of cattle used by Indians for these purposes led Company military commanders to prefer mobilizing local cattle for these services, in addition to hauling grain and other food supplies. During wartime, this mobilization reached a prodigious scale: between 80,000 and 100,000 bullocks were used in operations against Mysore at the end of the eighteenth century, in addition to at least 76,000 bullock-loads of grain delivered to the Company’s army by itinerant traders.14 Of course, the appropriation of that much animal labour could have devastating short-term eff ects on local agrarian economies, an eff ect that military planners used as one of several justifi cations for the establishment of cattle breeding operations under military supervision. Although some members of the Bengal Military Board in 1790 were aware of the problems caused by the diffi culty in obtaining adequate cattle supplies, the orders of the Governor-General in establishing the Company’s Stud in 1794 were very much focused on the production of horses for induction into the regular cavalry. 15 Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 137

Although it is tempting to attribute this inequity to the same Whiggish instincts that led Cornwallis to authorize the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, it probably had more to do with the gentlemanly preten- tions of the Stud’s main advocate and fi rst superintendent, Lt William Frazer. He was responsible for getting the project through the many administrative obstacles raised in Calcutta, and the government relied on Frazer’s possession of ‘a knowledge of the Subject, and a zeal for the Success of the undertaking’ in order to make the Stud fulfi l the Company’s expectations.16 While little is known about Frazer’s social background or how he received his military commission, his expertise in horse breeding did not approach even remotely that of someone like Bakewell; more likely, Frazer’s zeal outmatched his ‘knowledge of the Subject’. Th e start-up costs for the Stud included money needed to purchase land from property owners around Pusa, a village on the Gandak River some distance above its confl uence with the Ganges, and for constructing the buildings of the establishment.17 Th e plans also called for digging a trench around the Stud in order to make it an island in the Gandak, presumably to more successfully segregate Stud animals from substandard animals wandering in the countryside.18 And, importantly, suitable breeding animals (stallions) had to be bought. Frazer, following Bakewell, paid most attention to the sire. Accordingly, he insisted on importing stallions of Arab and English varieties, persuading the Board of Superintendence to pay as much as Rs 4,000 for a single animal, in this case an English horse named ‘Capsicum’. Importing animals from overseas was risky business, and fortunately for Frazer, Capsicum survived the voyage, though he produced a disappointingly small number of off spring that were suit- able for adoption into the cavalry, and therefore, in time, to become suitable for use as breeding stallions. 19 Th roughout his tenure as Superintendent of the Stud, Frazer faced fi scal and bureaucratic challenges. Th e lack of staffi ng and the cost of suitable fodder led Frazer to turn away from housing the majority of brood mares at the Stud grounds in Pusa and to developing a system of leasing out Stud-owned stallions to trustworthy Indians (called naulbands or ‘native grooms’20 ), who would bear the expense of feed- ing the pregnant mare and caring for the off spring for the fi rst two to three years of its life. Th e Governor-General explicitly mistrusted this system, arguing that natives, particularly of the lower classes 138 Shift ing Ground

(from which naulbands were inevitably drawn), ‘could not resist the Temptation which money would bring with it … [to permit stal- lions] to Cover mares under the Standard and become a Source of Profi t to Individuals rather than of benefi t to the Public’.21 By late 1799 the Board of Superintendence began to question the competence of Frazer to run the Stud, leading the Governor-General to ask the Court of Directors to appoint a veterinarian, preferably ‘a Person who has been regularly bred at the Veterinary College’, to serve the Stud and whose contract might be arranged by the Court rather than by the Company administration in India. 22 Th e military by 1804 began to complain to the Governor-General about the low numbers of horses suitable for adoption into the service; in defense of Frazer, the Board of Superintendence answered these complaints by arguing that the military adopted animals at too young an age and that the Stud had been established to provide cavalry remounts not for European dra- goons but for native light cavalry, for which the smaller animals would serve perfectly well.23 Frazer himself added that many of the rejected animals were a fraction of an inch shorter than the required height of 14 hands and that cavalry offi cers bought many of the rejected horses. 24 Despite this criticism, the Stud expanded its operations to include depots at Ghazipur, Hajipur, and Bareilly, which would allow off spring to be born in localities closer to the ever-expanding north- western frontier of the Bengal Presidency. Even in the face of this expansion of the Stud, the Company administration nearly brought the operations of the Bengal Stud to a halt in 1806. In the spring of that year, the Governor-General judged that enough military offi cers could be spared from the Company’s campaigns to act on the Court of Directors’ request, expressed in an 1804 letter, that the Company assess the viability of the entire Stud operation and, ultimately, to consider the closure of those operations. 25 Within weeks of the Governor-General’s decision to review the Stud with a mind to close it, Frazer wrote to the Board of Superintendence, defending his work on several grounds. First, he argued that his prac- tices were in line with what Bakewell had done in England, which had been approved by Arthur Young, one of the leading fi gures in agrarian improvement at the turn of the century. Second, he con- tended that the Stud had done more than any other establishment to improve the breed of horses in India up to that date in so short a time. Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 139

Th ird, because the Board of Agriculture in England had only recently admitted that high-quality horses could be bred in such distant locations as Yorkshire and Clydesdale, it could also be the myopia of military men in India that caused them to fail to recognize the high-quality of horses bred in India. 26 By 1807 he had retired and the superintendence of the Stud taken up by the eminent London veterinarian William Moorcroft , who since 1801 had been in charge of purchasing animals in England to be sent by sea to India. 27 D u r i n g Moorcroft ’s tenure as Superintendent, the Stud continued to expand to the northwest, adding a depot at Hapur, located about 16 miles south of Meerut, and at Hissar, as explained later. From the beginning, British military offi cials relied on the par- ticipation of local petty landlords for the ultimate success of the horse breeding programme. Certainly, some mares were kept at the Stud at Pusa, but the Stud gave away mares to selected zamindars, who were obligated to maintain the mare, have it covered by a Stud stallion, and bear the costs of raising the off spring until such time as it became eligible for induction into the cavalry, if male, or further breeding service, if female. In many cases the care of foals fell to the women of zamindar families, although patriarchs retained the material ben- efi ts of owning property in horses. 28 Th e correspondence between 1799 and 1804 pertaining to the Stud includes long lists of horses produced through the zamindari system which were rejected by the cavalry, leading to some degree of mistrust of the zamindars, based on speculations that they had bred their mares with local ‘country’ stallions. Th ere is little evidence of wilful neglect of horses distributed by the Company, unlike the frequent reports of this form of resistance to the distribution of bulls and rams later in the nineteenth century.

The Government Cattle Farm, Hissar

Th e failure of the Bengal Stud under Fraser and Moorcroft to pro- duce cattle in quantity or quality for induction into the ordnance service left the Commissariat Department of the Bengal Army with the same problem it faced in the 1790s, when the Stud was created, that is, how to ensure an adequate supply of animal labour for trans- porting ordnance and other supplies to the places the Army needed to use them, without depleting the countryside through which the 140 Shift ing Ground

Army travelled of its stock of cattle used for agricultural production. Considering the scope of military activity carried out by the Bengal Army between 1790 and 1813, the offi cer corps of the Commissariat Department had to think creatively to meet the logistical challenge— but probably ended up relying on the strategies of hiring the cattle trains of beoparis, banjaras, and other medium-distance merchants; hiring cattle owned by cultivators during agricultural off -seasons, which would limit the time frames of military campaigning; or trying to meet commissariat needs with inadequate numbers of cattle. Th e Government Cattle Farm in Hissar thus came from the creative response of one of the Deputy Commissary Generals of the Bengal Army, James Lumsdaine, to an ongoing logistical problem. Although it is not clear precisely when Lumsdaine fi rst contemplated a cattle- breeding farm, by May 1814 the Commissary General forwarded Lumsdaine’s proposals to the Commander-in-Chief of the Bengal Army, who in turn recommended them to the Governor-General. Lumsdaine based his proposals for breeding cattle for Ordnance purposes on his earlier experiment in breeding camels for transport purposes. Th at experiment had originated perhaps as early as 1809, and at the time of the Governor-General’s inspection in February 1815 had the appearance of being able to recoup the initial outlay and to be self-supporting within its fi rst decade of operation. Lumsdaine, in his written proposal, had persuaded the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General that the breeding of ordnance cattle would operate on the same footing as the camel experiment and therefore would also become self-sustaining. Th e Governor-General approved the joining of the camel and cattle operations to the proposed site in Hissar, and further recommended that the Stud establish a depot there, by sending a certain number of mares and stallions from the Stud at Pusa, despite the inability of the Stud to either turn a profi t or produce enough horses to resupply cavalry units. 29 Lumsdaine’s letter to the Board of Superintendence of the Stud in October 1815 reveals the social impact of the Farm on the local population and scope of the operation then underway. When Lumsdaine returned to Hissar from his Commissary duties on the Bengal Army’s Nepal campaign in August, he found a population of about 400, mostly Muslim Ranghar Rajputs, living in the fourteenth- century fort built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq rather than in the city, Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 141 which had fallen into ruin. Th ey derived most of their income from the production and sale of ghi in all directions, but particularly to Delhi and the northern Doab. Some crops were on the ground, notably moth, bajra , and jowar —all known for their relatively less desirable status on the market and for their hardiness in the face of diffi cult soil and climatic conditions and competition from weeds. Because of the town’s prior record of habitation, lined wells with access to sweet water were plentiful if otherwise in need of repair. Th e town also lay astride the route connecting Delhi and Bhatinda, pointing west towards Multan; Lumsdaine noted that the prospect of the repopulation of the town by government offi cials and their entourages attracted the notice of merchants and petty moneylenders from Bhatinda and Bikaner, who begged permission of Lumsdaine to settle in Hissar town. Th e presence of several uninhabited villages in the neighbourhood of Hissar town suggested to Lumsdaine that once the herders occupying the fort could be relocated to the town, it would require little additional eff ort to appropriate empty land for the purpose of the Farm, should it need to expand. For security reasons, Lumsdaine constructed the stalls and other buildings in the shadow of the fort, to the east; they formed a rectangular shape, with a 600 × 140 yard space in the centre for exercise, and with bastions and a ditch surrounding the exterior. Additional paddocks and cultivation were reserved outside this central area; north of the fort Lumsdaine had already set some locals to work cutting and stacking the uncultivated grasses found there. Th ose stacks were to be removed to the fort itself for secure storage of a year’s supply of grass. By October Lumsdaine had already bought half of the stock in cattle he needed for the scale of breeding operations he had proposed. Th e animals were either ‘the real Sinde Breed’ or crosses of Nagore bulls with Sindh and Hariana cows, the crosses being ‘the fi nest produce I ever beheld’ and thus the preferred variety to be inducted into the ordnance service, a deci- sion over which Lumsdaine, by the end of 1815 acting as Offi ciating Commissary General, had nearly independent authority to make. Nevertheless, Lumsdaine eagerly sent for a batch of Angole cows waiting for him at Patna, revealing awillingness to experiment rather than an exclusive focus on maximizing the production of a particu- larly desirable cross. Lumsdaine was perhaps excessively optimistic about the capacity of the Farm and its hinterland for supporting the 142 Shift ing Ground horse operations that had been suggested by the Governor-General, in one instance suggesting that 100 mares could be sent to the villages under the zamindari system, and in another instance claiming that the entire number of mares at the Pusa Stud, about 250 in his estima- tion, could be supported easily through the Hissar Farm. 30 Moorcroft , as Superintendent, proposed that fi ft y mares and three stallions be sent, which the Governor-General authorized. 31 Th e project could have been crushed with the early death of Lumsdaine in 1816, but the Farm’s subsequent supervisors, espe- cially Capt. H.E. Peach, managed to expand the size of the farm in the 1820s. At some point in the early 1820s, Peach judged that the amount of land claimed by Lumsdaine at the outset could not accommodate the growing numbers of the cattle owned by the farm. In early March 1824, Peach contacted the local Revenue offi cer, a Mr H. Graham, to request that the government resume the territo- ries of Rajpura, Salli, Gangua, and Daudpura, and the uninhabited villages of Sulayman Shaikhon, Miaduri, and Talwandi, all of which bordered the Farm in some way.32 Graham visited three of the vil- lages (Salli, Rajpura, and Gangua) later that spring, and reported to his superiors at the Board of Revenue, Western Provinces, that the landowners in these villages were unwilling to quit them—although Graham requested authority to compensate them for a total of just over Rs 8,700. 33 Graham even suggested that the proprietors might be compensated with land in other villages in addition to a money payment. In reply, the Board approved the proposed money payment and requested that any other objection be reported in order to permit the Board to fi gure out how to achieve the goal of acquiring this land for the Farm. 34 However, by the end of July, Graham reported that the proprietors of not only the three villages he visited in June but also the other villages requested by Peach had ‘the most decided aver- sion to quit the Soil’, even when off ered money compensation exceed- ing the amounts which the Board had authorized. Graham reported that the landowners explained that the lands were their inheritance and that they would ‘lose their name and respect by parting with them’ by any means other than force.35 By 11 August, it seems as though Graham gave up the business as a bad job and requested that Peach attempt to negotiate with the landowners of the villages in question. In a letter directly to the Board of Revenue, Peach reported Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 143 successful negotiations with all but one of the villages, on what can only be described as extremely generous terms: the cash payment originally proposed by Graham; the assessment of a temporarily dis- counted land tax on the new villages to which they would relocate; the retention of a proprietary right in land in their original villages, to be ensured through a nominal ground rent paid by the Farm; and the right to ‘remove any building materials that may be useful to them’, although the Farm was not to harm any trees or religious structures.36 Although he politely requested that the Board authorize Graham to conclude the negotiations, Peach had the further temer- ity to suggest that he himself draw up the necessary papers—as the village landowners requested. Getting wind of this communication, Graham wrote tersely to Peach, which I quote in full:

Sir, I beg to inform you there will be no further occasion for you to interfere in the arrangement for the surrender of the villages required for the use of the Hissar Establishments as the arrangements if it takes place will be done in this Offi ce and reported to the Board at Delhie. 37

Technically, Graham was in the right to defend his very small piece of bureaucratic turf, but every experienced bureaucrat knows that there is always another channel. Peach wrote to the Board of Superintendence of the Stud to explain the predicament of the Farm and mainly to explain that the failure of the Farm to expand as needed was not his fault.38 Th e Board, like any bureaucratic unit looking aft er its own interests, forwarded the entire correspondence to the Bengal Military Secretary, in hopes of getting the Governor-General to look favourably on Peach’s arrangement.39 In addition to revealing the tensions of a bureaucratic turf war between the military and revenue branches of the East India Company, this episode is instructive on several fronts. First, it shows that government offi cials were willing to appropriate lands for their purposes as before, but this time with a sense of needing to compen- sate locals claiming proprietary right for the act of taking. Secondly, it shows that government offi cials, particularly members of the Board of Superintendence of the Stud, were willing to make generous off ers— much more generous than revenue counterparts later in the nine- teenth century—to village proprietors to achieve their desired ends. 144 Shift ing Ground

Most important, it suggests that government officials at quite high levels were committed to the success of animal breeding schemes for the military, and implicitly interested in the expansion of bovine pro- duction in general. Although the precise chronology is not clear from my research thus far, over the nineteenth century the Farm’s opera- tions shift ed from producing camels, cattle, and horses for induction into military service to breeding bulls and rams that could be given, sold, or made available to peasants and herders for improving the qualities of animals destined for mainly non-military careers.

Effects of and Resistance to Government Breeding Programmes

Eff orts to modify animal bodies and to persuade animal owners and breeders of the value of scientifi c breeding practices enjoyed variable success. Apart from the fi scal challenges to the Stud during Fraser’s tenure as Superintendent outlined earlier, local men identifi ed as ‘breeders’ by Stud offi cials responded variably to the incentives put into practice. By late 1815, Moorcroft had mixed feelings about the breeders in Rohilkhand. On one hand, they had done more than any other breeder to undertake the cultivation of oats, which Moorcroft identifi ed as the fodder most likely to reduce disease and keep overall maintenance costs low. On the other hand, they had an apparently insuperable preference for mares with long, arched necks and long, pointed ears that met at the tips—heedless of the other virtues of the English horse. At some point it seems that Moorcroft had tried to per- suade them to take the English mares (and to cover them with English stallions), because the government was the primary customer for the off spring, and the government desired the larger size of the English horse. In reply, the breeders agreed that this argument would be valid if, in fact, the government bought all the off spring, but since the government rejected so many animals it made more economic sense for breeders to use animals that would be more desirable to Indian consumers. Moorcroft thus began his investigations into tapping into horse markets to the northwest of Delhi, an eff ort to which he devoted a considerable portion of his energy and ultimately ended his life.40 Military inspectors rejected many off spring of Stud stallions and local mares on the basis of inadequate height, and in some cases, Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 145 this resulted from stunted growth from inadequate food during the young animal’s adolescence. At times this neglect was so widespread that the Board of Superintendence thought to take notice of the role of women of the breeder’s family in the care and feeding of the young stock. Th e Board proposed in 1816 that the best-fed young animal in each Stud Assistant’s circle be awarded Rs 25, in the form of ‘some Ornament’ to be given to the owner, who would be advised to pass along the ornament to the woman who had done most to rear the winning animal. Perhaps one should not be surprised that the Governor-General rejected this proposal.41 Reports from the civil administration, soon aft er the annexation of Punjab, suggest that the Stud at mid-century had given up the pro- cess of breeding horses at Hissar, preferring instead to turn all horse breeding to the zamindari system and focusing its energies on breed- ing bulls and rams that could be sent to far-fl ung districts in hopes of making general improvements in the quality of cattle and sheep. Whether the qualities of the Farm’s animals counted as ‘improve- ments’ proved highly contestable, so that by the 1860s and 1870s government offi cials expressed some uncertainty over the usefulness of some of these projects. Sheep breeding is probably the most vis- ible illustration. In 1872 the provincial government expressed some concern to the managers of the Farm over the rising price of mutton in the open market; by breeding a larger animal, presumably, the sup- ply of mutton in the market would increase and the price increases could be checked. 42 Th e matter proved to be important enough to attract the attention of the central government, perhaps because they wished to be assured that, aft er the shipment of Southdown rams to the Northwestern Provinces, the remainder of rams at the Hissar Farm allotted for Punjab would in fact be put to use. 43 O t h e r imported breeds had been tried at the Farm, particularly the Leicester, Cotswold, and Merino, but management judged them too unsuitable to the climate. Th e military in fact harboured a studied pessimism to the whole enterprise:

Th e native shepherds, like all other breeders of stock in India, have acted on a principle exactly opposite to European breeders. Th e European breeder invariably tries to raise the breed in value by forcing the ani- mal to perfection by judicious feeding and exercise . Th e Indian breeder, 146 Shift ing Ground

on the contrary, poverty-stricken, and his country subject to short crops and famine, endeavours to raise a breed which will exist on the smallest possible amount of food .44

Th e military further expected resistance from local shepherds on three grounds: the ‘foreign’ animals would not eat Indian food; Indian villages could not provide enough food; and the white wool of the rams would produce patchy fl eeces before the black color of the indig- enous breeds could be replaced. A report submitted in 1875 showed that in only one case, in Muzaff argarh District, did a herder of some stature (and capital) take the breeding project seriously enough to produce a signifi cant number of off spring. In other districts where rams had been sent, rams had been permitted to starve, some had been segregated for several months before joining them to local fl ocks, and at least one was reported ‘lost’.45 A follow-up report in 1878 showed an increase in the number of districts participating in the programme and the number of off spring successfully produced by the Farm rams, but most district offi cers forwarding data for the report remained pessimistic about the success of the project as a whole.46 Th is pessimism continued into the 1880s.47 I f s u c h m a r g i n a l success had appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it would likely have drawn the criticism of the Company’s accountants in Calcutta, with proposals for the experiment’s closure. But in the 1880s, sheep breeding persisted in the face of pessimistic reports. Th is suggests other motives were at work in the provincial or imperial circles of the government in India, which could include an obstinate belief in the superior qualities of European breeds, a genuine interest in the economic development of the Punjabi peasantry, or the desire to make Punjab a laboratory for agricultural experiments to feed the production of universal knowledge. Perhaps all of these motives were involved, but perhaps, the long-term operation of the Farm provided enough institutional inertia to overcome a combination of Punjabi and offi cial resistance. Th e Government Cattle Farm changed the way Punjabis bred animals in a few specifi c ways. Th e Farm was most successful in distributing and selling stud bulls to villages and individuals situated in the neighbourhood of the Farm itself and in the areas of northern Punjab where settled agriculture had long been established. Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 147

Cattle herders in southern Punjab tended not to seek out these animals, and the Farm did not seem particularly interested in forc- ing bulls onto unwilling clients. Stud rams tended to have a similar reception, although some of those animals were sent eastward to the northern districts of the United Provinces. In the areas that received bulls, the Farm acted as a central point from which desirable ani- mals would be called for, whereas in the past (and in other locations) herds including desirable animals moved to places where cultiva- tors kept their cows (and cultivation). Although not absolutely so, this is a move towards a more centralized breeding practice, and its reliance on the government served to break down social ties and economic patterns that had previously obtained between cultivators and breeders. Th us, the Farm bulls were particularly popular among immigrant cultivators settling in Punjab’s canal colonies from the 1870s onward. Although Hissar bulls had been most successful in eastern Punjab, by the end of the nineteenth century, they became unpopular in the Hariana tract itself, because the Farm sent out ‘cross-bred’ bulls which were deemed to be weaker than the local bulls.48

* * *

One could read the foregoing narrative as yet another instance of a colonial government debating, using, and revising an administra- tive strategy or tool in a more or less precisely bounded colonial environment. Certainly, it provides some lessons to those seeking to explain the gradual, contentious process of establishing colonial rule.49 However, one may read it through several alternative lenses. By pointing to the morphological changes in animals themselves and to the topographical changes in animal location and movement, it reinforces earlier studies of environmental, political, and economic changes brought about through transformation of land through irrigation. 50 It also adds to the body of work in environmental his- tory, including Arupjyoti Saikia’s chapter in this volume that seeks to write a history of animals distinct from the environments inscribed by the colonial and postcolonial gaze. Such insights on domestic animals can also supplement the growing body of work on their free-ranging wild counterparts and their confl icts and associations 148 Shift ing Ground with polities, economies, and cultures. In fact, the rich corpus of such work (as by Hughes or Divyabhanusinh in this volume) is not as yet equalled by a body of work on the political history of tame animals. Animal breeding programmes, both equine and bovine, showed that offi cials of the East India Company, and later the Crown, sought to use animal bodies as sites for struggle with Indians over the right and means to rule, even as it was articulated initially in administrative correspondence as a matter of the logistics of military supply. Some Indians resisted the government appropriation of land for the use of centralized breeding facilities, and others resisted the imposition of stud animals intended to ‘improve’ the breed. However, the economic value of ‘improved’ breeds or handed-out mares led at least some Indians to engage in British breeding schemes, even if not in the ways administrators imagined for those programmes. Also, the physical structure of the Government Cattle Farm, Hissar, lent British breed- ing a central place and permanence which began to reorganize spatial and temporal movement from pre-colonial patterns, which had been structured by socioeconomic patterns of cattle theft and medium- distance carriage trade routes operated by owners of cattle and cam- els. One is left not with a simple narrative of technology transfer or of collaboration and resistance; rather, Punjabis adopted or rejected colonial technologies, in the form of animals, as their shift ing contexts suggested. By the end of the nineteenth century, the sciences pertaining to domesticated animals had not completed their imperial goal of obliterating local knowledge and practices. Veterinary medicine had accomplished the most in this regard, but most of its gains occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Such government programmes self-confi dently engaging in ‘breeding on scientifi c principles’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century, rode a broader crest of civili- zational chauvinism. Th e underlying assumptions about Indian dis- interest in agricultural improvement never quite disappeared. Horse breeding schemes worked best only in places where the government was willing to purchase the locally raised produce of Stud animals. Government cattle breeding schemes, and the Hissar Farm in par- ticular, had to insert themselves into established patterns of cattle trade and reproduction; in other words, the Farm had to act like a beopari without the advantage of mobility. Even then, bulls and rams Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 149 sent out to ‘improve’ local breeds risked rejection based on unforeseen economic and environmental considerations. Yet, government breed- ing did not fail utterly, as the size and longevity of the Hissar Farm suggests. On balance, though, it seems that the imperial ambition of animal science in the nineteenth century outstripped its ability to overcome the social patterns of animal management it hoped to replace.

Notes

1 . David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 2 . For administrative strategies, see Brian Caton, ‘Settling for the State: Pastoralists and Colonial Rule in Southwestern Panjab, 1840–1900’, (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003), chapters 4–5. 3 . André Wink, Al-Hind: Th e Making of the Indo-Islamic World , vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 142–3, and vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 154–5. 4 . Jos J.L. Gommans, Th e Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c. 1710–1780 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 87–8. 5 . Saurabh Mishra has tracked the British emphasis on horses in two recent articles: ‘Beasts, Murrains, and the British Raj: Reassessing Colonial Medicine in India from the Veterinary Perspective, 1860–1900’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 85 (2011): 587–619, and ‘Th e Economics of Reproduction: Horse-Breeding in Early Colonial India, 1790–1840’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 5 (2012): 1116–44. In the former article, Mishra’s eff ort to show the Army’s and government’s neglect of cattle in favour of horses led him to ignore entirely the sporadic eff orts to breed animals other than horses and the institution of the Government Cattle Farm, Hissar. 6 . G.J. Alder, ‘Th e Origins of the Pusa Experiment : Th e East India Company and Horse-Breeding in Bengal, 1793–1808’, Bengal Past and Present 98, no. 1 (1979): 10–32. 7 . Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: Th e Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 1; Joan Th irsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 2. 150 Shift ing Ground

8 . See Overton, Agricultural Revolution , pp. 6–7, 170–1. 9 . Harriet Ritvo, Th e Animal Estate: Th e English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chapter 2. 10 . Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses Since 1800 (Baltimore and London: Th e Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 11 . Appendix no. 9, ‘Extract of a letter from One Bengal Offi cer to Another, Relative to Ongole Cattle’, attached to Extract of John Murray, Military Auditor General, Minute given to Military Board, 6 June 1791, in Extract of Bengal Military Consultations, 2 June 1794, OIOC L/MIL/5/465. 12. Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: Th e East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’, Th e Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (2005): 27–63. 13 . Edward Stirling Rivett-Carnac, Th e Presidential Armies of India (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1890), pp. 238–9. 14 . Th ese traders were in the category of banjaras. Col John Murray, Military Auditor General, Extract of Minute to Military Board, Bengal, 6 June 1791, OIOC L/MIL/5/465. Murray estimated that 40,000 died for want of food or access to safe pasturage. 15 . E[dward]. Hay, S to Govt, 31 October 1794, included in Extract Proceedings of the Board of Agriculture at Bengal the 13 November 1794 [to Th omas Graham, Acting President of the Board of Revenue; Col John Murray, Senior Member of the Military Board; Capt John Collins, Military S to the Governor General, i.e., the initial Board of Superintendence of the Stud], OIOC L/MIL/5/465. 16 . Extract of Governor-General’s Letter from Bengal, 31 December 1794, OIOC L/MIL/5/465, para 30. 17 . On the unwillingness of landowners to sell, see OIOC L/MIL/5/465, Revenue No. 5, Bengal Horse Farm, Examiner’s Offi ce, September 1797. 18. William Frazer, Survey Report to the Board of Superintendence of the Stud, 7 May 1795, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, Extract of the Military Letter from Bengal, 18 August 1795. 19 . On Capsicum’s purchase, see Extract Bengal Military Consultations, 1 August 1799. Secretary, Board of Superintendence, to Lt Hook, Sub- Secretary to Government, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, Military No. 12, Public Stud—Breed of Horses, Examiner’s Offi ce, February 1801. On Capsicum’s off spring as studs, see Maj W. Fraser, Superintendent of the Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 151

Stud, to Capt G.H. Fagan, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, 14 July 1806, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, No. 8, August 1806. 20 . Th e term naulband derives from the Persian na’‘lband , which in the A’in-i Akbari refers to an offi cial whose responsibility was limited to shoeing horses. Abu’l Fazl ‘Allami, A’in-i Akbari, H. Blochmann, trans., D.C. Phillott, ed., Bibliotheca Indica 61, vol. 1, Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927, 143–5. 21 . Minute of the Governor-General on the Report of the Superintendent of the Stud and the Proceedings of the Board of Superintendence of the Stud, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, Extract Proceedings of the Board of Superintendence for Improving the Breed of Cattle, 28 May 1795. 22 . Extract of a Military Letter from Bengal, 31 December 1799, in OIOC L/ MIL/5/465, Military No. 12, Public Stud—Breed of Horses, Examiner’s Offi ce, February 1801. Pun in original. 23 . Extract Military Letter from Bengal, 1 November 1804, in OIOC L/MIL/ 5/465, Military No. nil, Reports of the Committee on the Examination of Horses from the Stud at Poosa, Auditor’s Offi ce, [November 1804?]. 24 . Capt W. Frazer, Superintendent of the Stud, to Lt G. H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence for Improving the Breed of Cattle, 17 July 1804, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, Military No. nil, Reports of the Committee on the Examination of Horses from the Stud at Poosa, Auditor’s Offi ce, [November 1804?]. 25 . Extract Military Letter from Bengal, 19 May 1806, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, No. 1 [of 1806]. 26 . Maj W. Fraser, Superintendent of Stud, to Capt G. H. Fagan, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, 14 July 1806, in OIOC L/MIL/5/465, No. 8, August 1806. 27. Garry Alder, Beyond Bokhara: Th e Life of William Moorcroft , Asian Explorer and Pioneer Veterinary Surgeon, 1767–1825 (London: Century Publishing, 1985), pp. 62–8. 28 . No. 8, August 1806, Capt W. Fraser, Superintendent of Stud, to Th omas Graham, Esq., President, and members of the Board of Superintendence, 18 Oct 1804, OIOC L/MIL/5/465. 29 . Extract Military Letter from Bengal, 7 October 1815, OIOC F/4/544. 30 . James Lumsden, Supervisor Hurreanah Establishment, to William Grant, President of the Board of Superintendence [of the Stud], d/11 October 1815, enclosure in Extract Bengal Military Cons. 14 November 1815, No. 82 and 83, G. H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, 152 Shift ing Ground

to C. W. Gardiner, Secretary to Government in the Military Department, d/10 November 1815, OIOC F/4/544. 31 . No. 121, W. Moorcroft , Superintendent of the H. C. Stud, to Captain G. H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, d/30 November 1815, OIOC F/4/544; No. 122 (No. 634), C. W. Gardiner, Secretary to Government, to Captn G. H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, d/29 December 1815, OIOC F/4/544. 32 . No. 28, Capt H. E. Peach, Supervisor, Hissar Establishment, to H. Graham, Principal Asstt. W. D. O. T. Futtehabad d/3 March 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 33 . H. Graham, Principal Asstt., to W. H. Valpy, Secretary to the Board of Revenue Western Provinces Delhie, d/23 June 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 34 . H. Valpy, Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Western Provinces, to H. Graham, Principal Assistant in charge of Western Division Hansee, d/1 July 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 35 . H. Graham, Principal Assistant, to W. H. Valpy, Secretary to the Board of Revenue Western Provinces Delhie, d/21 July 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 36 . No. 252, H. E. Peach, Supervisor, Hissar Establishment, to W. H. Valpy, Secretary Board of Revenue Western Provinces Delhie, d/15 September 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 37 . H. Graham, Principal Assistant, to Captain Peach, Supervisor & ca. Hissar, d/3 October 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 38 . No. 279, [Capt] H. E. Peach, Supervisor Hissar Establishment, to Lt. Hickey, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, d/7 October 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 39 . No. 455, Lt. Wm. Hickey, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, to Lieutt. Coll. W. Casement, C.B. Secretary to Government in the Military Department, d/27 December 1824, OIOC P/31/10, Bengal Military Consultations 1825, No. 163. 40 . Th ese investigations included sending one of his assistants to Kathiawar to assess horse markets there. No. 128, W. Moorcroft , Superintendent H.C. Stud, to Captain G.H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, d/13 November 1815, OIOC F/4/544. 41 . Extract Bengal Military Cons., 1 March 1816, No. 219 and 221, G.H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, to C.W. Gardiner, Secretary to Th e Imperial Ambition of Science and Its Discontents 153

Government, Military Department, d/9 February 1816, OIOC F/4/544; No. 220 (No. 335), C.W. Gardiner, Secretary to Government, to Captain G.H. Gall, Secretary to Board of Superintendence, d/1 March 1816, OIOC F/4/544. 42 . Proceedings of the Government of the Punjab in the Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce Department (hereafter Progs Rev ) for the Year 1872 , No. 2 November 1872, No. 1564, Lepel Griffi n, Offi ciating Secretary to Government Punjab, to Offi ciating Superintendent of Stud Farm Hissar, 1 November 1872. Later, the Financial Commissioner suggested that the price increased for reasons other than a decrease in supply: Progs Rev , No. 11 May 1873, No. 397–2781, J.A. E. Miller, Secretary to Financial Commissioner Punjab, to Secretary Government Punjab, 22 April 1873. 43 . Progs Rev , No. 12 April 1873, No. 22, Lt Col W.C. MacDougall, Offi ciating Superintendent of Studs, to Secretary Government of India, Military Department, 11 July 1872; No. 53A., Lt Col W.C. MacDougall, Offi ciating Superintendent of Studs, to Secretary Government of India, Military Department, 7 December 1872; and No. 51, J. Geoghegan, Offi ciating Secretary Government India, Department of Agriculture Revenue and Commerce, to Secretary Government Punjab, 28 March 1873. 44 . Progs Rev, No. 12 April 1873, No. 53A., Lt Col W. C. MacDougall, Offi ciating Superintendent of Studs, to Secretary Government of India, Military Department, 7 December 1872. Emphasis in original. 45 . Progs Rev , No. 2 December 1875, No. 1284, C. R. Hawkins, Offi ciating Secretary to Financial Commissioner Punjab, to Secretary Government Punjab, 29 November 1875. Th is did not prevent the Government of India from blaming the poor showing on district offi cers: Progs Rev, No. 3 May 1876, No. 56, A.O. Hume, Secretary Government India, Department of Revenue Agriculture and Commerce, to Secretary Government Punjab, 24 April 1876. 46 . Progs Rev , No. 7 February 1878, No. 104, J.A.E. Miller, Secretary to Financial Commissioner Punjab, to Offi ciating Secretary to Government Punjab, 30 January 1878. 47 . Progs Rev , No. 13 July 1881, No. 27C., J.M. Douie, Secretary to Financial Commissioner Punjab, to Secretary to Government Punjab, 28 June 1881. 48 . See Annual Report of the Civil Veterinary Department in India for 1895– 96 , pp. 168–9. 49 . K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 154 Shift ing Ground

1999); Gunnel Cederlöf, Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests over Nature (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008). 50 . David Gilmartin, ‘Scientifi c Empire and Imperial Science: Colonialism and Irrigation Technology in the Indus Basin’, Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 1127–49; Imran Ali, Th e Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); M. Mufakharul Islam, Irrigation, Agriculture and the Raj: Punjab, 1887–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997). Making Room Inside Forests 7 Grazing and Agrarian Confl icts in Colonial Assam

ARUPJYOTI SAIKIA

Political debates on agrarian activities inside forests, wildlife sanctuaries in particular, have come to occupy a central place in contemporary Indian politics and public debate.1 Th e introductory chapter of this volume makes this point and we fi nd that the north- eastern Indian state of Assam is no exception. Issues of competing rights over forests were, and remain, a central feature of political contest, ecological confl ict, and social life. Th e distinctive feature of the region is the substantial area of Grazing Reserves (PGR) within forested zones. Th ey came to acquire a clear institutional form since the early decades of the twentieth century. Th ese are mostly carved out from the existing Reserved Forests and Unclassed State Forests (USF) which covered little less than 20,000 square miles of area in the state during 1910–11. Th is was more than half of the total area of the state. Having half the land mass in government forest is unusual given that the fi gure for British India as a whole was a little over one-fi ft h, 156 Shift ing Ground but undivided Assam included present-day Meghalaya and Nagaland. 2 Th is chapter focuses on the valley of the Brahmaputra, then as now a key arena of Assamese politics. Th e PGR aimed at accommodating agrarian practices, and also conforming to the parameters of forest conservation practices. Th ese grazing reserves provided room for economic activities by three distinctive social groups. Th ese included the migrant Nepali professional cattle herders, migrant East Bengali peasants, and local Assamese peasants. 3 Th e agrarian practices and settlement pattern of each of them diff ered. Th e last three decades of colonial rule (1917–47) found each of them making separate claims over these grazing reserves. Th ese oft en confl icting claims for the forest space had very far-reaching implications for the politics of Assam as a whole. Th e contest for grazing in the forest was a central issue of political contention. For instance, on the eve of Indian inde- pendence, these grazing reserves quickly emerged as signifi cant space for the new groups of East Bengali peasants. Th is in turn was seen as a demographic and political issue. Th ere is little scholarship to date that grapples with these com- plexities. Th ose scholars who highlight the centrality of the land issue in the regional polity have not fully illuminated the ecological conse- quences.4 Yet, these unresolved competing claims continued to sur- face repeatedly then, and now in present times. Th is essay investigates the nature of social space of grazing in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. By mapping the social history of agrarian confl icts the essay examines how complex claims for this space had social, political, and ecological consequences. Th e best place to begin is with the his- torical origin of grazing reserves within the wider context of forest conservancy in colonial Assam.

Agrarian Practices and Redefi ning Forestry

Th e Assam Forest Department began conserving the forested areas in the second half of the nineteenth century.5 Th e acreage expanded and from an estimated 270 square miles in 1875 the area under forest conservation increased toapproximately 4,000 square miles by 1947. Apart from this, an estimated 14,844 square miles were declared as Unclassed State Forests in 1947, eff ectively keeping an estimated 38 per cent of the geographical area of the region secluded from Making Room Inside Forests 157 most agrarian activities.6 Added to it were tracts under the control of tea-plantations which would have been approximately 6 per cent of the land area.7 As the Forest Department made relentless eff orts to bring increasing areas under its management and control, it increas- ingly faced pressure from various quarters to open up these Reserved Forests. Th ere were also eff orts by the Revenue Department to open up such tracts. Th e Revenue Department would oft en press the Forest Department to free more land for expansion of acreage. However, the most unrelenting pressure was from the powerful lobby of the tea planters. Th e latter’s zeal to expand their tea-gardens or establish new gardens never quite went away. Th e Forest Department was oft en locked in fi erce competition with the tea planters about their res- pective areas of jurisdiction. An understanding of the valley and its landscape will help place these confl icts in a geo-economic perspective. Flowing from east to west, the river Brahmaputra and its river system is a major feature of the agrarian landscape.8 Its Himalayan origins, from steep to fl at gradients, Himalayan as well as other mountain tributaries make it a powerful river, for the size and width of its fl ows. Severe fl oods and sediments continuously make and remake a shift ing web of channels and river islands of all sizes. Th e river itself is unique for its braided character which is the multiplicity of channels, many of which are then abandoned by the river.9 Th e abandoned channels are oft en reclaimed by the peasants for cultivation. Short-term channel migration is drastic and commonplace, much more so than in the Ganga basin in north India. 10 Conservative estimates suggest that such channel migration takes place at rates of movement as high as 2,600 feet per year. 11 Sandbars are formed at regular intervals, giving a new dimension to the agrarian activity. Th eir longevity is limited. 12 However, they became crucial acreage for the expansion of the winter crop. Floods remained endemic and peasant communities over the centuries learnt to cope with these natural challenges and continue with agriculture. Th e historical evidence suggests that peasant com- munities did not live permanently very near the rivers till around the end of the nineteenth century. Th e agrarian landscape, as it evolved, became largely a fl ood-dependent one. Floods endowed the landscape with ample nourishment. Over the centuries, the Brahmaputra, and its fl ood plains, became an agrarian landscape where the land mass 158 Shift ing Ground available for cultivation was transient and shift ing. As the river shift ed, so did the cultivated arable. The first principles of imperial forest conservancy were clear. Forest conservation meant that government-owned forested lands remained beyond the reach of agrarian practices. Further, it implied that livestock and their access to pasture would be prohibited in the forested tracts. Th e exclusion of livestock from the forested tracts, more particularly from the forest plantation tracts or their neighbour- hood, became the standard practice of new forestry programmes. Such practice was oft en sharply in confl ict with the older systems of land use familiar to the Assamese peasantry. Essentially, the forest- ers and the Assamese peasants, as elsewhere in British India, began to perceive cattle in mutually contradictory ways. Th at the Forest Department since the early days of imperial forestry regarded the presence of livestock as a serious threat to forest conservation is now a well-known fact. Contrary to this perceived threat, the peasants believed that cattle grazing could help in fertilization of farmlands and also ensured pasture for cattle. 13 Th is was particularly true in the Brahmaputra valley where rains, fl oods, and long dry seasons created uncertainties of providing adequate pasture for cattle. Th e only relief was the green grass available for limited months of the year. Limited access to green grass forced the peasants to keep their cattle for free grazing, leading to petty disputes amongst themselves. Th ere was a strong and persistent bias of the imperial forestry programme against livestock, cattle in particular. Oft en they saw the presence of cattle even in non-plantation area as damaging to forest resources. Th e widely spread out Unclassed State Forest, covered with savannah grasses and thought by the Forest Department as tempt- ing for the cattle, became the crucial space inviting the wrath of the peasants and others. Th e Unclassed State Forests were part of the new administrative arrangement of the forest administration in Assam alongside the Reserved Forests. Th ey diff ered from the Reserved Forests in the sense that they contained little hardwoods and was directly under the revenue administration. Th e matter reached such a stage that in 1899 the Assam branch of the Indian Tea Association, a powerful lobby of the tea planters, had to register a complaint, asking why the Forest Department would levy a tax for every fl ock of sheep Making Room Inside Forests 159 brought for sale into the province, which was passing through any Unclassed State Forest.14 Since a total ban was not feasible, foresters tried to identify and restrict the movement of domestic herds through such a forest. Like the Indian Forest Act of 1878, the Assam Forest Regulation of 1891 too provided for grazing reserves. Th is provision continued in later enactments. Th e Forest Department could choose which tracts were to remain completely beyond the reach of cattle. In certain areas the department prohibited the entry of goats and sheep to assist repro- duction of saplings. Th e question of how many cattle to admit was closely bound up with the assessment of the impact of the cattle on the vegetation in general and timber coverage. At the same time, by asserting its exclusive right over forested tracts, the Forest Department began to charge sheep, goat, or cattle owners a grazing fee for allow- ing their animals access to the forests. Th e department was not under much pressure to grant access to cattle at the time of the creation of Reserved Forests but the situation would change dramatically aft er the early decades of the twentieth century. Forestry never got over its aversion to livestock.

Grazing and Forestry: Incompatible Uses of the Forest

At the end of the nineteenth century, Berthold Ribbentrop, the Indian Inspector General of Forests (IGF) reminded his fellow conservators how grazing and forestry were ‘incompatible’.15 Goats and sheep were the most ‘powerful or universal’ cause of deforestation. Goats were indiscriminate browsers while herdsmen increased the risk of forest fi res. Nevertheless, provincial governments still sought pasture when- ever possible. In 1892, the Assam government had already seriously considered reserving areas for pasture and fodder. 16 Th e Conservator of Forests in Assam did not see any great loss of revenue and favoured continued access.17 In fact, such concessions became part of govern- ment policy forcing the imperial forestry programme to review its stand on grazing since the early days of the twentieth century. By 1900, Ribbentrop readily admitted, ‘the extension of our forest reserves absorbed too large a portion of the customary grazing grounds of the country and that they must yield fodder as well as wood’.18 B u t t h e 160 Shift ing Ground

IGF Ribbentrop was unsure of his views. Aft er all ‘a Forest Offi cer’s heart may bleed that he cannot bring all his forests to that state of perfection, nor eff ect their regeneration as rapidly, satisfactorily, and completely as might be achieved if grazing were entirely excluded’. 19 Not everybody agreed with Ribbentrop. Illustrative of this trend was Robert Scott Troup (1874–1939), forestry scientist and author of Indian Forest Utilisation , who argued that ‘there are exceptional circumstances under which a certain amount of controlled grazing may even be benefi cial. Th us grazing tends to keep down rank grass and under-growth; this lessens the danger from fi re, and may even assist in freeing seedlings which would otherwise be suppressed’. 20 F. Beadon Bryant, who succeeded Ribbentrop as IGF also diff ered with the latter.21 In 1912, while referring to the nature of grazing in the Reserved Forests of Assam, he mentioned that government- owned forests were ‘remarkably free from injurious grazing’. He also admitted that the Nepali graziers who squatted in the Unclassed State Forests did not cause any harm to the forest if abundant land was avail- able. Grazing tax had contributed to the revenue. Bryant estimated that in 1910 approximately 135,000 buff aloes and 512,000 cows and bullocks were found grazing in government forests, earning the state exchequer a profi t of Rs 298,860 as grazing fees, which equalled a fi ft h of Assam’s land revenue.22 Despite support coming from the impe- rial forest managers, the Assam Forest Department could not aff ord to allow an increase in the area under grazing. It is not diffi cult to explain this hesitation. Th e increasing commercial value of minor for- est produce, especially from the Unclassed State Forests, had already compelled the Forest Department to reemphasize its control over USF and thus take another look at its grazing policies. Th e department now found it extremely diffi cult to accommodate the presence of large herds. Livestock ate the young growth and trampled down saplings. Grazing was in confl ict with output of minor forest produce. Strict rules were put in place for controlling grazing inside the USF. At the same time, the government assumed that there was an abundance of grazing grounds in Assam which thus ensured that a separate forested tract reserved for pasture was not required. Despite such continued and divided opinion on the inviolate nature of forested tracts, and thus, opposition to grazing, the idea of ‘regu- lated grazing’ was seen as critical to forest regeneration. Th e Indian Making Room Inside Forests 161

Famine Commission also had in the 1890s strongly favoured opening government forests for fodder during famines.23 Th is approach of the Famine Commission was bound to have an impact on Assam. Th e Assam offi cials were always worried about the poor health of the cattle and the unavailability of grazing in the Brahmaputra valley. 24

Making Room: Creating Grazing Space

Th e Assamese peasantry was increasingly becoming hostile to forestry practices, with resistance taking diverse forms. It was in this context that the Assam government began advocating the creation of pasture grounds by selecting specifi c tracts as Professional Grazing Reserves in 1912.25 Animal husbandry, especially if practised by itinerant groups, was a dilemma for colonial rulers. Not only did graziers, who were essentially pastoral communities, freely roam around seek- ing green pastures but it also made it diffi cult for the government to assess.26 Increasingly, pastoral communities found their movements restricted. Apart from the changing paradigms of scientific forestry the other crucial factor which forced the Assam government to create professional grazing reserves was the increasing migration of Nepali cattle herders into the fl ood plains of the Brahmaputra valley. Th ough numerically insignifi cant in comparison to the East Bengali migrant jute producers, and the tea-plantation workers, Nepali graziers were seen as potentially destructive for the forestry programme.27 Th eir set- tlements resulted in the growth of a complex grazing economy, which soon yielded substantial revenues to the Assam government. Cattle rearing, previously inconsequential to the valley’s agrarian economy, soon became remunerative for rich Assamese peasants. Before long, large numbers of Assamese also joined the Nepali grazers in resisting curbs. Th e settlement of Nepali herders also came to be regulated by the Revenue Department.28 Th e Assam Revenue Department was now in the forefront of partial management of the forested tracts in the valley. Th ese Professional Grazing Reserves posed a powerful challenge in the political landscape of the region. Most importantly, a crucial landscape became closely bound up with the complex process of agrarian production. Many such reserves in the USF were near 162 Shift ing Ground cultivated plots or riverine areas. In some cases the river islands also became part of these reserves. Th e river islands in Brahmaputra— widely known in the Ganga–Brahmaputra delta as char —were well known as microhabitat for wild herbivores. Swamp deer and hog deer, wild buff alo and rhino, and their predator, the tiger, found these to be an ideal habitat. Th ese chars were also vulnerable to instability due to river erosion but grazing by cattle as much as by wild herbivores could withstand such natural challenges. When the waters advanced, the animals moved elsewhere to graze. Other grazing reserves were located well inside forested and well-wooded tracts. Foresters lived with livestock in forests to net more revenue. Within a couple of years the department and forestry programme lost its control over these spaces. In the 1940s, they turned out to be major sites for landless peasants, who rallied around caste and religion to stage political struggles demanding land for cultivation. Th e grazing reserves were not meant for the maintenance of the livestock of the local peasantry. Th e latter was expected to depend on the village grazing grounds. Th e district deputy commissioners could create these village grazing reserves depending on the local needs and demands. By 1935, over 200,000 acres of forest land were reserved as village grazing grounds in the raiyatwari districts. Th e access to the village grazing grounds was without restrictions but many a time these tracts were located on the distant outskirts of the villages. Th e threat of wild animals and distance from their villages or habitats fi nally prohibited the local peasants from frequently accessing these reserves.

Forest Working Plan: Legitimizing Grazing

Working plans now claimed that grazing could partner forestry in two ways: M.C. Jacob, a forester in the Assam Forest Department, wrote that ‘it would be best to get the jungle reduced by grazing before starting plantation or taungya work’.29 Second, others thought that everything would ‘be gained in permitting grazing’ in specifi ed forests.30 Once grazing emerged a partner to forestry the subject lost the attention it used to get within forest management. By 1946, grazing reserves covered 30,000 acres, mostly in west- ern and central Assam districts. 31 Th ere were reliable fi gures of the number of cattle and buff aloes in these grazing reserves. Yet, the Making Room Inside Forests 163 grazing assessment registers for Nowgaon, located in central Assam, in 1943 indicated that there were 13,700 buff aloes and 21,000 cattle. 32 Th is estimate was only for one district out of six districts in the valley. Th e fi gures were not reliable as either the dairy fi rm owners would under-report to avoid higher fees being charged, or foresters were unable to assess the situation. Th e reserves were largely free from fl oods and were savannah or grasslands. Th ose closer to wetlands were used for buff alo grazing as the latter also required water. Th e grasslands which would have rarely come under peasantization or any forest production were earmarked as Professional Grazing Reserves. What became important next was the rate of tax on livestock. While diff erent rates of fees were levied on cattle and buff aloes, graz- ing fees were a major source of forest revenue.33 To ensure maximum collection of revenue the Forest Department began to monitor the distribution of livestock in the grazing reserves. Th e Assamese land- lords entered into this lucrative livestock business. As the government continued to increase the grazing fees, the Assamese landlords began to pressurize the government, through lobbying in the Legislative Council, to lower the rate.34 Th e controversy over the grazing tax arrived at a new phase aft er the formation of the provincial legisla tive council in 1906. In 1919, Rohini Kanta Hati Baruah, the Assamese Congress leader known for his pro-landlord stand, challenged the grazing fees in the Assam Legislative Council. Acrimonious debate followed but the colonial government did not want to lose lucrative revenues earned from the grazing tax and refused to accept pleas from Assamese landlord groups. Protest by the Assamese landlords on the issue of grazing tax continued to surface in later decades.35 But this primacy of Professional Grazing Reserves in the political landscape of the valley was only short-lived as further intervention into the agrarian landscape was sought by the imperial government.

Producing Jute: Redefi ning the Arable

Meanwhile, the imperial government encouraged the migration of Bengali Muslim peasants, particularly from the districts of Rangpur, Mymensingh, and Sylhet of East Bengal.36 Most immigrants settled in the western districts of Assam. Visible peasant migration from these northern districts of East Bengal to the western region of the 164 Shift ing Ground

Brahmaputra valley began to refl ect fi rst in 1891 Indian census enumeration. Unavailability of land locally, erosion, and challenges from fl ood forced the peasants to seek settlement in the neighbour- ing river islands or riverine areas. Many of them would produce jute. By the early twentieth century the river sandbars of Assam in British India emerged as a powerful site through which a region’s otherwise subsistence rice-producing economy was transformed into a highly productive jute-producing zone. Political engineering, 37 depeasanti- zation, and increasing decline in the agrarian relationship between Hindu landlords and Muslim tenants 38 further aggravated by ecologi- cal challenges 39 propelled this wave of migration. Th is migration—an estimated 250,000 in 1931 alone 40—succeeded in transforming many riverine grasslands into jute fi elds. Immigrant labour and expanding jute markets combined to power rapid expansion of the cultivated arable. Th e eff ect of immigration on population composition was easily visible. In 1874 the percentage of Muslims in the Brahmaputra Valley was 5.9 per cent; by 1941 it had risen to 23 per cent.41 C o m p a r e d t o t h e all-India population growth rates of 5.7 per cent, −0.3 per cent, and 11 per cent in the fi rst three decades of the twentieth century, Assam’s population grew at much higher rates of 16.8 per cent, 20.2 per cent, and 20.1 per cent.42 Many thought not all of this could be attributed to East Bengali peasant immigrants. Th ere was a simultaneous infl ow of tea garden workers and Nepali graziers to the state. Lowland Assam was an agrarian frontier where ecology and demography were in a state of fl ux. Migrant peasants converted large patches—from an estimated 38,000 acres in 1902 to 300,000 acres in 1932—of alluvial land along the river Brahmaputra into a highly productive agricultural land. Th is land reclamation addressed the nineteenth-century colonial con- cern about the Assamese peasants’ supposed apathy to production. Offi cials oft en described the Muslim peasants from East Bengal as ‘hard-working’ compared to the ‘simple and lazy’ and ‘non-produc- tive’ caste-Hindu Assamese peasants. Landed groups also gained from such infl ux of labour not only for extension of agriculture but to help keep the wage rates low. Jute production also meant reclamation of tracts adjacent to waterbodies, or of low-lying areas, leaving forested savannah tracts as the only areas of the valley not under the plough. Making Room Inside Forests 165

Th is land reclamation in the riverine areas redefi ned the agro- ecological context, milieu, and material conditions of Assamese peasant life. Th e sharp competition over agricultural land and the commons soon spilled over to the grazing reserves. Th e key reason of the expansion of confl ict into grazing reserves was the East Bengali peasants’ preference for lands suitable to grow paddy. Th e lay of the land made this easy: the wet savannah was transformed into wet paddy fi eld. Th is new saga of land speculation and its attendant confl icts was more complex than anyone in the government had imagined. Public concerns about the apparent ‘decrease’ of land for a growing popu- lation of Assamese peasants resulted in localized resistance. Oft en resident or local Assamese peasants asserted their own prior rights over the newly reclaimed land. Economic expansion not only created new wealth but also grounds for fresh confl ict in a literal sense. At the same time, new settler farmers’ agrarian practices, centred on jute production in low-lying, fl ood-prone areas, appeared diff erent from the Assamese peasants’. Th is helped in ensuring social isolation between the two groups. Social isolation and cash-crop production of the new settlers led to the cultural and economic insecurity of the Assamese peasants. By the 1920s this sparked a major rural political confl ict which in turn led to a control in the population movement. It was known as Line System, whose essential origin could be con- nected to imperial rulers’ fi xation with the idea of separate spaces for diff erent religious and ethnic communities. 43 Th e aim was to regu- late the settlement of East Bengali Muslim peasants. Th e Assamese resident peasants and East Bengali migrant peasants were visualized as two distinct social and economic entities. Th e migrant peasants, who were seen as crucial partners for sustaining imperial British jute industries in Bengal, continued to resist the idea of Line. As resis- tance surfaced, both through political debate and physical resistance, the government allowed the mechanism to lose its intended meaning.

Grazing Reserves Move to Centre Stage

By the 1930s, when the world economic depression led to the sharp fall of jute prices, the East Bengali peasants began to look for land for growing paddy. Th e area under jute production declined sharply. Due to the search for new land for paddy production, land speculation 166 Shift ing Ground increased, especially in the reclaimed and settled areas. Under pressure the Assam government opened several existing professional grazing reserves for settlement of the East Bengali peasants. It was in this con- text that professional grazing reserves became an important politi- cal space where both migrant and local peasants forcefully asserted competing claims. Th e earliest resistance was from the Nepali grazers with tactical support from the rich Assamese peasants. Th e Nepali grazers felt that their ‘privilege to graze cattle’ in the professional graz- ing reserves had been curtailed. As early as 1928, the Nepali grazers of Barpeta in western Assam demanded the Assam government cancel the settlement granted to East Bengali peasants. 44 Th ey demanded eviction of the latter. Simultaneously, the East Bengal peasants—fast emerging as the dominant minority community and gaining crucial political voice—also laid down their right over tracts. Th ough they cited ‘humanitarian’ grounds it was essentially their understanding of the ecology of the grazing reserves which convinced them to reclaim these patches of land. Many were close to immigrant settlements.45 Existing reserves were too large for cattle herding. Further grazing caused immense danger to the cultivation.46 Th ey demanded cancel- lation of the remaining professional grazing reserves and their culti- vation. Such pressures grew manifold. What emerged out of these confl icts were the contested notions of resource use: the agrarian practices of the East Bengali peasants being viewed by colonial government as part of a progressive economy against weak and backward economic practices collectively practised by the Nepali graziers and the rich Assamese peasants. Th e climatic period was 1946–47. Th e heightened political mobilization ahead of independence made professional grazing reserves more vulnerable to agrarian settlement. Peasant mobilization around the grazing reserves had increased and the followers of the Muslim League had temporar- ily challenged the grazing practices. Provincial politics, in the mean- while, became impregnated with controversies over land settlement and without an understanding of these it will be diffi cult to gauge the vulnerability of the grazing reserves.

Political Dynamics of Land Settlement

Unlike the experiences of northern and eastern India, the pro- cess of depeasantization gathered momentum in the valley of the Making Room Inside Forests 167

Brahmaputra only in the thirties. Rising debt since the fi rst decade of the twentieth century and increased revenue burden had made life diffi cult even prior to the world economic depression of 1929.47 Th ose vulnerable to the downward trends included both immigrants and the local peasantry. Th e landless peasants were out in search for unploughed government land. Land speculation momentarily took a backseat. Th e political leaders, representing the local and migrant peasantry, took the matter to the fl oor of newly formed Assam Legislative Assembly. Th e legislative debates were highly polarized over the issue. Amidst this heated political mobilization the Muslim League members now saw the Line System as an obstacle for the migrant peasants and demanded its abolition. Th ese intense debates helped reinforce a popular perception amongst the migrant East Bengali peasants that the Line System was about to be abolished. Th is anxiety actually hastened the process of occupation of government land by the migrants.48 What was the ecological impact of this land reclamation? Th ere is very little research to understand this impact. Contemporary lit- erature was sensitive to the ecological impacts of tea plantation in eastern Assam. Land reclamation and jute production in western Assam too transformed wildlife habitats by fragmenting grasslands. Th e political landscape of Assam changed aft er the civil disobedi- ence movement. Congress reinforced the nationalistic elements in its political programme. At the same time the ascendant economic power of the Muslim peasants—through an increase in their land holding—was viewed as a threat to the political and economic domi- nance of the Assamese. Assamese public opinion saw the issue oft en as one of the Muslim League and its adherents reclaiming govern- ment land. Towards the end of 1939, the Assam Congress ministry, led by Gopinath Bordoloi, adopted a resolution on the land question. Th e government denied land settlement in grazing reserves. It also announced that it would regulate settlement of landless peasants and evict East Bengali migrants who had settled in the government land now earmarked as ‘protected tribal blocks’.49 Th is was to have long-term implications for the polity. Th e Bordoloi-led Congress ministry resigned in September 1939 on the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. Th is brought relief for the Muslim peasants on government land. Reversing this policy in 1940, the Muslim League government widely publicized 168 Shift ing Ground a land settlement policy of settling land for all sections of landless peasants in the valley. 50 Th is all-inclusive character was highly decep- tive. Th e Muslim League had rejected the Line System.51 Th e new policy had provision of benchmarks for only those East Bengali land- less peasants who had arrived in the valley before 1938; only they could become settlers with legal rights. Th e Assamese who had lost land in the process of river erosion were also eligible.52 A S p e c i a l Offi cer was appointed to examine whether the proposed areas could be opened for settlement without loss of amenity for grazing and forestry.53 Many landless peasants gained title but there were also instances of rich peasants acquiring land. In December 1943, the government further specifi ed that a settler could get a maximum of 10 acres.54 In July 1942, the Bengal Legislative Council, now reeling under an imminent threat of famine, demanded the Indian government to end bureaucratic hurdles in the way of immigration to the Brahmaputra valley. 55 In August 1943, the Assam government started distribut- ing land among the landless peasantry under the ‘Grow More Food’ programme. Th is opened up many Professional Grazing Reserves in western Assam and Reserved Forests in the valley. 56 Th e Revenue Department opposed the move as Professional Grazing Reserves gen- erated much revenue for Assam.57 I n a n o ffi cial report the Revenue Department offi cial even argued that it would be diffi cult to believe that it is the considerable and deliberate policy of any responsible author- ity to put land which produces the most important (from the point of view of nutrition and public health) food to producing less important food.58 Th e Muslim League ministry overruled revenue offi cials and threw open grazing reserves for immigrant peasants. In 1943 the Assam government authorized deputy commissioners to open parts of professional grazing reserves that were ‘surplus’. Between September 1943 and August 1944 the government could settle 34,000 acres of land from the professional grazing reserves with settlers from East Bengal as well as local settlers in western and central Assam. 59 Th e government also settled 62,000 acres of land in Nowgaon and Kamrup which were not part of the grazing reserves. 60 Political mobilization around the issue of land settlement polarized political opinion in and outside the legislature. Th e League govern- ment denied it was discriminating against the Assamese peasantry.61 Making Room Inside Forests 169

Abdul Hamid Khan, the charismatic and popular Muslim League leader, defended the rights of immigrants to agricultural lands in Assam. He hoped that Assamese people would welcome newcomers and enable economic progress. 62 In 1945 a three-party conference arrived at a consensus. A new government resolution allowed land to the landless. Wastelands in Goalpara, Kamrup, Darrang, and Nowgaon were open to peasants of all categories, most critically the pre-1938 immigrants. Th e Congress came back to power aft er the interim election in February 1946.63 Th e government set out to re-examine the Assam Land Revenue Manual to protect the interests of the local peasants and the pre-1938 immigrants.64 Th e Assam Land Revenue Regulation Manual (amendment) bill was placed in the Assembly. In May 1947, with independence approaching, Revenue Minister Bishnuram Medhi, distinguished between the ‘immigrant question’ and problems of the landless peasantry.65 He asserted that the immigrant question in Assam was not a problem of the landless peasants. He claimed that there were more wastelands available in Bengal than in Assam. Th e Bengal government was duty-bound to distribute land among the Bengal peasantry. He felt the Muslim League was intensifying the Pakistan movement in the name of giving land to the East Bengal peasants. Th e Ahom leader Surendranath Buragohain also opposed the Muslim League policy of land for the immigrants.66 H e c l a i m e d that ‘when this government embarked on this policy of land settle- ment to outsiders in 1943 August my Association was the fi rst in the province to raise its voice of protest’.

Grazing Reserves: Space for Political Peasants (1943–46)

While the numbers of peasant claimants for settlement inside grazing reserves increased manifold, others protested against any change in the existing territorial arrangement of professional grazing reserves. Urban Assamese elites opposed the opening up of the grazing reserves. Th ey claimed an impending scarcity of milk in towns and cities. Th ere were some reports of actual decline in the supply of milk and other dairy products across the valley. Th e dividing lines were not simply between Assamese and Bengal peasants or Nepali graziers. Th ey were much more complex. 170 Shift ing Ground

Encroachment into grazing reserves had wide-ranging impact on the political landscape of Assam. Th e Muslim League claimed there were large wastelands in every district available for settlement by Assamese peasant who needed land. 67 Th e East Bengal peasants also claimed land from the grazing reserves and Reserved Forests. Th ey believed that the government would not evict them. Th e Muslim League ministers publicly exhorted the immigrant landless to occupy land. Assam’s nationalists diff ered and very emphatically argued against any further migration. Th e senior land revenue offi cial S.P. Desai admitted that so far as the East Bengali peasant’s interest in the ‘grazing reserves were con- cerned the regulation of the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation was virtually non-existent’. Th e East Bengali peasants claimed to have short-circuited the Revenue Offi ces in staking rights over land inside the grazing reserves. Desai presented a graphic description:

Th e few Nepali grazers and Assamese pamua fi nding no protection from anywhere gave dohai in the name of king Emperor. To this, some East Bengals were said to have replied that the East Bengal themselves were the king. Th ey felt that the law was meant for them and not for East Bengal. All section of local population was greatly perturbed and their talk exhibits deep-seated bitterness against the East Bengals, who did not listen to protests. Th e only alternative for the grazers was to migrate. 68

The immigrant peasants were mobilized to clear land in the reserves in the winter of 1944. Th is was especially common in central and western Assam. Clashes with Assamese cultivators and Nepali grazers intensifi ed. Herders formed an umbrella committee to oppose land reclamation in grazing reserves.69

Grazing Reserves and Muslim League: A Polarized Polity

Till early 1945 such tensions were mostly localized. Th e only advantage the East Bengal peasants had was the institutional support of gov- ernment in demanding land settlement. Pro-Pakistan mobilization intensified in both Bengal and Assam. 70 ‘Unoccupied wastelands and grazing reserves of rural Assam now became a symbolic space Making Room Inside Forests 171 where the East Bengali peasants asserted their right to Pakistan. 71 In the process the localized confrontation between Assamese and East Bengali peasants spilled over from localities to larger political landscape of Assam. Th e political programme of the Assam Provincial Muslim League, till now primarily confi ned to electoral and legislative politics, became aggressive at a mass level. Th e popular Muslim League leader Abdul Hamid Khan mobilized the land-hungry Muslim peasants in the Valley around the slogan of Pakistan. 72 Even earlier his front the Asom Chasi Majdur Samitee had successfully campaigned for ending the Line System. Th e Congress-led Assam government decided to evict the Muslim squatters from the Professional Grazing Reserves in 1946. Th e League soon gained more support. Th is eviction programme created a sense of solidarity amongst the East Bengali peasants whose hope of a good future in the valley was dashed to ground. Popular literature por- trayed a sense of gloomy future. 73 Sensing sympathy from millions of Bengali-speaking immigrants, the Bhasani-led Assam Provincial Muslim League decided to have ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August 1946.74 A refusal to be evicted became synonymous with the demand for Pakistan. Th ey decided to encroach into the reserves and any other wasteland in Assam. Th ere were meetings, processions, and strikes by the Muslim League across rural western Assam.75 R e s o l u t i o n s condemned the Congress government and called for resistance to eviction by all means. 76 Th ere were a number of small roadside pub- lic meetings largely attended by poor East Bengali Muslim peasants. Th e support for the Muslim League’s politics by the East Bengali peas- ants was overwhelming. Th e rural economy was disrupted; ani mosity between Muslim and Hindu neighbours had increased, and both sides even boycotted each other socially and economically. 77 Aft er a temporary halt the Muslim League re-launched peasant mobilization and civil disobedience in January 1947.78 And in the next couple of days numerous public meetings and impressive pro- cessions of East Bengal peasants in Kamrup, Darrang, and Goalpara enabled extensive reclamation of the grazing reserves. 79 Mobilization reached a high point between September 1946 and March 1947. Th e construction of killa (forts) and encroachment in the Professional Grazing Reserves were popular forms of civil disobedience.80 172 Shift ing Ground

Th e Nepali herders and Assamese peasants found themselves in a corner. Th e Asom Jatiya Mahasabha, a nationalist platform of the Assamese, took up the issues of the latter.81 But such nationalist mobi- lization did not push any programme of land reclamation or pose any challenge to government land. Th e Mahasabha opposed the proposal and vociferously articulated the fear of the imminent danger of Assam being included in Pakistan.

Peasants, Grazing, and Forestry Practices after Independence

Th e coming of Independence in August 1947 did not lead to any major change in the character of India’s forest policy. Partition did not end the story of the land question in Assam.82 Neither the fi erce contest around ecological space nor political polarities had subsided. India’s foresters still saw herders as antithetical to forestry. Th e new National Forest Policy adopted in 1952 (the fi rst time since 1894) declared, ‘all grazing in forests, particularly unlimited or uncontrolled grazing is incompatible with scientifi c forestry’.83 Policy-makers were against the grazers.84 Th e impact of such overwhelming and uniform policy on grazing practices across the country was huge. What hap- pened to the Professional Grazing Reserves and the grazing economy in Assam? Even before the Congress government in Assam could fully establish itself, the Brahmaputra valley witnessed widespread peas- ant discontent. Th is saw peasants mobilize across caste or tribal lines. Assamese and tribal landless peasants and sharecroppers pro- tested. Th ey demanded land from the Professional Grazing Reserves, waste lands in the tea gardens or from government forest lands. Th e Communist-led peasant movement led to panic in government cir- cles. Th e surplus areas from the Professional Grazing Reserves were opened up in a bid to defuse discontent. Th is amounted to a little token concession. Between April and December 1950, an estimated 9,000 acres of land from professional grazing reserves were settled by the landless Assamese peasants.85 Th is process continued till the 1970s. It was only then that the Assam Forest Department exerted control beyond the Reserved Forests. Meanwhile the rich Assamese peasants found grazing less lucrative and withdrew political support Making Room Inside Forests 173 from the Nepali herders. Most Muslim peasants now voted in favour of Congress in the 1952 general elections. Th ere was an economic logic to a new socio-political alliance in the Valley. Assamese land- lords needed the labour of migrant peasants. A new agrarian rela- tion between Assamese landlords and immigrant sharecroppers was reaffi rmed. In 1972 the Congress-led Garibi Hatao (abolish poverty) programme featured the new Assam Tenancy Act. Th is sought to transfer tenurial rights to tenants from Assam landlords. Since the former were mostly Muslim and the latter largely Assamese Hindu, this tension took on a sectarian colour. Th e contests for land resources in colonial Assam were complex and multilayered. Th ese involved three diff erent processes through which these agrarian confl icts came to be staged and became part of the Assamese regional nationalist politics. It began with alienation of the Assamese peasants by the colonial government. Various agencies of land and forest administration played pivotal role in disempower- ing cultivators. Th e Assamese middle class, motley body of landlords, and those in other professions, made signal gains in this new eco- logical landscape. In the next phase, land became scarce, as large-scale immigration enabled a substantial degree of agrarian expansion. Demographic change and cultural assertion were central to politics in the 1930s–40s. Th e Raj gained from divisions prior to Partition. By the end of the twentieth century the subject of grazing and peas- ant use of forest resources returned to centre stage. 86 Th e centrality of forests, pastures, and the changing agrarian frontier to the demo- graphic, political, and social changes which was under way since the early twentieth century in Assam continued to be relevant like else- where in other parts of India as shown in several other essays of this volume. Th e ecological dimensions and consequences of large-scale socio-political changes continue to play a critical role in the political landscape of Assam.87 Th e Valley’s fl oodplain ecology continues to play a critical role in sustaining the tall-and short-grass savannah and spaces around it, well into the twenty-fi rst century when it has all but vanished in the Indus and Ganga basins. Th is equally creates condi- tion for contest over landscape. But at the same time the Indian forest management practices had hardly changed aft er Independence. As shown in another essay of this volume, the communities of science are divided on the relationship of cattle with forests, wildlife, grassland, 174 Shift ing Ground and the larger ecological landscape.88 Most ecologists are opposed to the practice of cattle grazing in wildlife sanctuaries. 89 Th ese sharp polarities of the present echo those of the past in the valley of the Brahmaputra and the lands around it. Th is chapter illustrates that ecological history acts as more than merely background or legacy, but is fi ercely contested space. Its signifi cance extends well beyond the forestry practices or peasant society, Assamese and migrant polari- ties. Th ese contests of past and present are central to the ecology and politics of the entire region.

Notes

1 . Th e issue has gained further currency in the wake of public debate surrounding the implementation of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers Forest Rights Act 2006. 2 . A. Saikia, Forests and Ecological History of Assam: 1826–2000 (Delhi: OUP, 2011), p. 78. 3 . For a brief history of migration of various agrarian communities into the Brahmaputra valley, see J. Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012); A. Saikia, A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900 , (Delhi: Routledge, 2013). 4 . S. Barua, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Delhi: OUP, 1999), pp. 85–6. 5 . For an account of the early forest administration in Assam, see Saikia, Forests and Ecological History of Assam 6 . See Saikia, Forests and Ecological History of Assam , chapter 3. 7 . Government of Assam, Statistical Handbook of Assam, 2000; Rana P. Behal, ‘Power Structure, Discipline, and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations Under Colonial Rule’, International Review of Social History 51 (2006): 143–72. 8 . D.C. Goswami, ‘Brahmaputra River, Assam, India: Physiography, Basin Denudation, and Channel Aggradation’, Water Resources Research 21, no. 7 (1985): 959–78. 9 . W. Roy Richardson, Colin R Th orne, ‘Multiple Th read Flow and Channel Bifurcation in a Braided River: Brahmaputra–Jamuna River, Bangladesh’, Geomorphology 38 (2001): 185–96. 10 . M. Sharma, Landscapes and Lives: Environmental Dispatches on Rural India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Making Room Inside Forests 175

11 . James M. Coleman, ‘Brahmaputra River: Channel Processes and Sedi- mentation’, Sedimentary Geology 3, Issues 2–3 (August 1969): 129–239. 12 . V.P. Singh, Nayan Sharma, C. Shekhar and P. Ojha, Eds, Th e Brahmaputra Basin Water Resources (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 210. 13 . M. Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (Delhi: OUP, 1996), p. 68. 14 . Letter from J. Buckingham, Chairman, Assam branch of ITA to Secretary to chief commissioner of Assam, no. 51, 4 March 1899 in Assam Secretariat Proceedings (hereaft er ASP) Revenue A, nos. 51–58 June 1899 (Assam State Archive hereaft er ASA). 15 . B. Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India , fi rst published 1900 (Delhi: Indus Publishing Co., 1989), pp. 160–65. 16 . Assam Secretariat Proceedings (hereaft er ASP), nos. 71–4, Revenue-A May 1892, (ASA). 17 . ASP, nos 4–8. KW, Revenue-A, April 1893, (ASA). Th e conservator pre- pared statement showing cases, award and total value of reward: 1887- 88:193/1/Rs25; 1888-89:390/-/-; 1889-90: 285/1/20; 1890-91:219/2/30; 1891-92:260/5/65. 18 . See Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India , p. 134. 19 . Ibid. 20 . Robert Scott Troup, Indian Forest Utilisation (Government of India, Shimla: Government Print, 1907), p. 138. 21 . R.K. Winters, ‘Forestry Beginnings in India’, Journal of Forest History 19, no. 2 (April 1975): 89. 22 . F.D. Bryant (1912) para. 16. Comparison of grazing fees with land rev- enue is arrived at from Table no. 48, year 1910 of the Statistical abstract relating to British India. From 1903–4 to 1912–13. 23 . Letter from J.O. Miller, secretary to Government of India to All local Governments and Administrations (Except Assam, Coorg, NW Frontier, Berar, and Baluchistan) 23 September 1903, in Revenue A, no. 4–5, 1903 (ASA). 24 . H.Z. Darrah, ‘Cattle in Assam’, Th e Agricultural Ledger 1 (1894): 221–9. 25 . K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Delhi: OUP, 1999), p. 195. 26 . B.B. Chaudhuri, Peasant History of Late Pre-colonial and Colonial India (Delhi: Pearson, 2008). 27 . Government of Assam, Th e Second Working Plan for the Goalpara Forest Division, Eastern Bengal and Assam (Shillong, 1908), para 75. 176 Shift ing Ground

28 . For a brief overview of Nepali migration to Assam see, Monimala Devi, ‘Economic History of Nepali Migration and Settlement in Assam’, EPW 42, no. 29 (2007): 3005–7. 29 . M.C. Jacob, A Working Plan for the Forest Reserves of the Darrang District (1941–1951) , part II, 1942, pp. 103–4, para 281. 30 . Ibid., para 281. 31 . ‘Speech by Bishnuram Medhi’, 9 September 1946 ALAP. Th e numbers are Kamrup-346116, Darrang-140875, Nowgaon-170769, 32 . Report of the Special Officer Appointed for the Examination of the Professional Grazing Reserves in the Assam Valley (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1944), p. 7. 33 . Aft er 1914 the Assam government decided to charge Rs 8 for Goalpara and Rs 6 for the other districts despite in neighbouring Jalpaiguri district it was increased to Rs. 12. Enhancement of the rates of grazing fees in the un-classed state forests in the Assam valley districts, ASP, Revenue A, Nos. 10–39, September, 1914 (ASA). 34 . A. Guha, Planter-Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826–1947 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1977), pp. 196–7. 35 . Members from Assam speaking before the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India highlighted the issue of grazing tax as major imped- iment for restricting grazing business in Assam. See Royal Commission Agriculture in India V, Evidence taken in Assam, Calcutta: Government Print, 1927. 36 . E.A. Gait, Census of India 1891, Assam, vol. 1, Report, Calcutta: Government Press, pp. 71–4. 37 . In 1906 Muslim League member from Bengal, Nawab Salimullah (1871–1915), exhorted the Muslim masses to migrate and settle in the Brahmaputra valley. See Jayanta Ray et al. ‘Informal Challenges to Security and Responses’, in Jayanta. K. Ray, ed., Aspects of India’s International Relations 1700–2000: South Asia and the World , (Delhi: Pearson, 2007), p. 499. 38 . For a comprehensive understanding of the East Bengal case, see, Ift ekhar Iqbal, Th e Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 39–92. 39 . M.A. Allison, ‘Historical Changes in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta Front’, Journal of Coastal Research 14, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 1269–75. 40 . H. Goswami, Population Trends in the Brahmaputra Valley (Delhi: Mittal, 1985), p. 104. Making Room Inside Forests 177

41 . Th e Muslims formed 85 per cent of the East Bengal immigrants (Boruah 1980, 53). In western Assam the change was drastic. In Barpeta sub- division of Kamrup district the Muslim population percentage rose from 0.1 to 49 between 1911 and 1941 (Guha, 1977): 258; (Kar 1980): 69–70. 42 . M. Weiner, ‘Th e Political Demography of Assam’s Anti-immigrant Movement’, Population and Development Review 9, no. 2 (June 1983): 283. 43 . Government of Assam, Report of the Line System Enquiry Committee , vol. 1 and 2, (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1938). 44 . Petition of Chandicharan Talukdar and others, Revenue-A, December 1930, Nos. 395–464. 45 . See Report of the Special Offi cer , p. 7. 46 . Petition of Rahijuddin Mia and eight others for cancellation of grazing reserve in Chandmama, Kheli, Khatateri, Gerali in mauza Rupasi, under Barpeta subdivision. Revenue-A, December 1930, Nos. 395-464; ibid., No. 414, Memorial of Taimuddin Mandal and others. 47 . A. Saikia, ‘Th e Moneylenders and Indebtedness: Understanding the Peasant Economy of Colonial Assam, 1900–1950’, Indian Historical Review June 2010, 37, no. 1: 63–88. 48 . Secretary, Revenue Department to the Commissioner, Assam Valley Division, Memo. no. 4204-R of 28.12.37, Nagaon District Record Room. 49 . See Guha, Planter-Raj To Swaraj , p. 262. 50 . Letter from the Secretary to commissioner of the Assam Valley Division no. 2180/14-R dated 3 January 1941(NDRR). 51 . Th e League, in the fi rst annual conference held in November 1939, had already rejected this arrangement. Chief Minister Saddulla held an all- party meeting on 31 May and 1 June 1940 to deliberate on this system and adopted a scheme for further distribution of land. 52 . A. Saikia, Ecology, Floods, and Political Economy of the River Brahmaputra in Late 20th Century North East India , paper read at the Environmental History of India, Panel 1, American Historical Association, Boston, 7 January, 2011. 53 . See Report of the Special Offi cer . 54 . A discussion on the land settlement policy is in the chapter 6. 55 . O.K. Das, Assam’s Agony: A Socio-economic and Political Analysis (Delhi: Lancer, 1982), p. 28. 56 . Assam Gazette , part 1, 25 August 1943. 57 . S.P. Desai, Chief Secretary, Assam to all district commissioners (October 1943) NDRR. 178 Shift ing Ground

58 . See Report of the Special Offi cer , p. 7. 59 . ‘Return for the Acceleration of the Land Settlement Scheme for the month of August, 1944’ Speech by Munwar Ali, 14 November 1944, ALAP. Speech by Mahi Chandra Bora and Munwar Ali, 27 November, 1943, ALAP. Speech by Munwar Ali 18 November 1944, ALAP. 60 . Speech by Munwar Ali 18 November 1944, ALAP. 61 . Abdur Rouf, the revenue minister in the Saadulla ministry claimed that in the year 1941–2, of the total land distributed, only 13 per cent were settled with the East Bengal peasants. Speech by Abdul Rouf, budget session 1945 ALAP. 62 . Speech by Abdul Hamid Khan, 17 March 1944, ALAP. 63 . Indian Annual Registrar January–June 1947 vol. I. 64 . Press Statement of Mahendra Mohan Chaudhury, Secretary Congress Parliamentary Party, Sadiniya Assamiya , 15 June 1946. 65 . Dainik Assamiya , 16 May 1947. 66 . Speech by Surendranath Buragohain budget session 1945, ALAP. 67 . Ibid. 68 . Quoted in Speech by Beliram Das, 16 November, 1944, ALAP. Also, File no. 54 of 1944 Settlement Branch, Revenue Department (NDRR). 69 . Resolution no. 2 of the Emergency Meeting of the Grazers Association , Tezpur 19 January, 1947 (NDRR). 70 . For details in Bengal see, J. Chatterjee, Bengal Divided: Hindu Com- munalism and Partition 1932–1947 (New Delhi:Foundation Books, 1996). 71 . See Saikia, A Century of Protests , chapter 3. 72 . Sayed Abdul Maksud, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1994). Th ere has been little research on the political activities of Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani, the highly popular Muslim League leader. Bhasani could live up to the dream of hundreds of thousands of Muslim peasantry. 73 . See A.F.M. Abdul Hai, Adhrsha-Khetiak (Mymensingh: Abdul Hai, 1921), p. 32. Quoted in Sugata Bose ‘Roots of Communal Violence in Rural Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 16, no. 3 (1982): 463–81. 74 . See Sayed, Maulana Abdul Bhasani , p. 51. 75 . Abstract of the Assam Police Intelligence Weekly Report (hereaft er, APWR) Assam 24.3.46. 76 . A.P.W.R. Cachar, 25.3.46. 77 . A.P.W.R. Goalpara, 21. 9. 46; A.P.W.R, Goalpara 18.10.46 and A.P.W.R. 25.10.46. Making Room Inside Forests 179

78 . Mitra, N.N. (ed) Indian Annual Register , vol. I 1947. 79 . A.P.W.R, Assam, 22.3.47. On 19 March 1947 about 500 East Bengals re-encroached into the Fulura professional grazing reserve in Barpeta. A.P.W.R, Kamrup, 22.3.47. 80 . File no. 19/46-47 PHA. Dainik Assamiya 26 March 1947. Also Assam Chief Secretary’s Fortnightly Report, March, second half, 1947. 81 . See Guha, Planter-Raj to Swaraj , pp. 202–303. 82 . See Saikia, A Century of Protests , chapter 3. 83 . Government of India, National Forest Policy , 1952, para 21. 84 . Th e Budget Estimate Committee of the Indian parliament further endorsed the stand taken by the National Forest Policy in 1952. See, Richard Haeuber, ‘Indian Forestry Policy in Two Eras: Continuity or Change?’ Environmental History Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 49–76. 85 . Speech by Hareswar Das, 10 March 1951, ALAP. 86 . Saikia, ‘Th e Historical Geography of the Assam Violence’, Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 41 (13 October 2012): 15–19. 87 . A. Saikia, ‘Forest Land and Peasant Struggles in Assam, 2002–2007’, Journal of Peasant Studies 35, no. 1 (2008): 39–59. 88 . Th is is especially true of Ghazala Shahabuddin’s essay in this volume. Also, P.S. Yadav, ‘Savannahs on North East India’, in Patricia A. Werner, ed., Savanna ecology and management: Australian perspectives and intercontinental comparisons , (London: Oxford Blackwell, 1991), p. 49. 89 . Laura Riley, William Riley, Nature’s Strongholds: Th e World’s Great Wildlife Reserves (Princeton, 2005), p. 221; ‘Concern at Spurt in Livestock Grazing’, Th e Assam Tribune , 12 October 2006. Nature and Politics at the End 8 of the Raj* Environmental Management and Political Legitimacy in Late Colonial India, 1919–47

DANIEL KLINGENSMITH

Colonialism and the Environment in the Interwar Era

How were understandings of nature in crisis related to the political crisis that overtook British rule in India between the end of the First World War and Independence? A signifi cant component of Victorian colonialism’s earlier bid for legitimacy in India and elsewhere was the claim of British, and more generally European, ‘mastery’ over

1 . My thanks to Ralph Austen, Arun Bandopadhyay, Jayanta Bandyo- padhyay, Ranjan Chakrabarti, Rebecca Klenk, Mahesh Rangarajan, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, Kalyan Rudra, and K. Sivaramarkishnan for shar- ing their insights as I have developed this research; to participants in the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Water conference at Harvard University, 2008, and the Terrestrial Environments in India conference at Yale University, 2009; and to the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars. Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 181 non-human nature in various ways—for example, through colonial irrigation and transportation engineering, scientifi c agriculture, for- estry, and hunting. For various reasons, however, certain events and trends during the last decades of the Raj contradicted this claim, par- ticularly in these areas. We can gain a richer understanding of the crisis and end of colonialism by attending to its environmental dimensions, although the political signifi cance attributed to perceived failures of environmental management was by no means unitary.1 Moreover, independent India’s approaches to managing and exploiting the non-human natural world were infl ected by the debates and practices of the interwar period. Asking about the connection between nature and politics during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s can illuminate the pre-history of later approaches to development and environmental management. Th is chapter is a kind of reconnaissance of issues related to these points. As is obvious, the dates limiting this study refl ect political rather than ecological disjunctures. I do not seek to argue here that this period was in any unique or unprecedented way an era of envi- ronmental crisis, nor to trace a history of loss, degradation, and decay from a pre-colonial or colonial environment. Instead, the focus here will be on the political implications of narratives of loss, degradation, and decay among some of the key Indian and British constituencies of imperial rule. Th e late colonial period did see some infl uential contri- butions to the notion of a stable, benefi cial balance between humans and non-human nature in India, destroyed by colonialism, but—as discussed later—these contributions did not readily conform to the political divide between the colonial regime and its nationalist critics. 2 While Victorian imperialists in India and elsewhere sought to justify British domination by asserting that they could, in signifi cant ways, master the non-human world to improve conditions for their subjects and liberate them from some of the environmental con- straints on their happiness,3 such self-assurance did not necessarily mean feckless disregard for nature. As several historians have noted, administrators and scientists in the employ of the Government of India generated many ecological critiques of practices associated with colonial rule during the nineteenth century. 4 However, admin- istrative publication both enabled but simultaneously limited the political force of such critiques. More broadly circulating popular 182 Shift ing Ground representations—memoirs, hunting narratives, and adventure stories— commonly suggested confi dence rather than anxiety about the British ability to manage tropical nature, at least before 1914. Th ree Kipling stories from the 1890s come to mind as examples. In ‘Th e Bridge Builders’, ‘Th e Tomb of His Ancestors’ and ‘In the Rukh’, mastery over nature is a part of mastery over India. Th e heroes of these (and other) stories subdue destructive waters, bravely hunt tigers feared by Indians, and befriend oppressed and ‘uncivilized’ adivasi s. Th ey manage nature in India in ways that check destructive Indian carelessness and fatalism and create the basis for a secure, stable Indian society. Along the way they test their own mettle (in the tiger hunts but also through other feats of strength, courage, and endur- ance), demonstrating to themselves and to Indians the necessity and benefi cence of the rule of white men. Such representations reinforced the legitimacy of colonialism in Britain, and to some extent, also among urbanized, middle class Indians. I cite them as indicators of the Victorian background to public discussion of nature in the inter- war years, during a period of crises that conspicuously undermined imperial claims of the sort popularized by Kipling and other authors. A few examples will illustrate what I mean. During the 1920s and 1930s the nationalist monthly Th e Modern Review reported regularly on catastrophic fl ooding throughout India, and occasionally else- where in Asia as well. It tended to focus on the suff ering of victims and on Indian civil society’s organization of relief, and consistently represented the colonial state as insuffi ciently attentive to causes or consequences of fl ooding. An article in July, 1929, for example, noted that recent events in the United States had shown that the Ohio River had been tamed, while fl ooding in Bengal, Assam, and Burma had been the most devastating in recent memory, and asked why, if Britain’s wealth had been founded on India’s poverty, Britain could not repay its debt through the proper management of Indian rivers.5 Th e Modern Review ’s coverage was echoed by another Calcutta jour- nal, Science and Culture , founded in the mid-1930s by the physicist Meghnad Saha. Saha was a nationalist popularizer of science and, in the 1940s, a campaigner for developing India’s rivers according to precedents set by the American New Deal (in particular, by building dams on them). Among Saha’s earliest eff orts as a public intellectual were articles on fl ooding in Bengal.6 During the interwar period what Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 183

Saha referred to as ‘the Problem of India’s Rivers’ became increasingly an issue of public discussion among colonial observers and urbanized, middle-class Indians, especially in Bengal. A related water manage- ment problem was malaria. Rabindranath Tagore portrayed malaria as a representative colonial evil, in that it was enabled by British greed and lack of concern for nature on the one hand, and on the other by the lack of social solidarity on the part of those Indians most aff ected by it.7 Whether incidence of malaria had actually increased in India as a whole by the period in question I cannot say, but, like fl ooding, its prevalence was seen as an all-India problem and, by many, as an indictment of the colonial regime. I will return to debates about water management in the next section. A further issue of increasing concern was erosion. Th e Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion, by G.V. Jacks and R.O. Whyte (1939), diagnosed the problem of erosion in India as a combina- tion of ‘the consequences of recent exploitation … superimposed upon those of the land’s senile decay’. 8 Th is ‘senility’ of the land (a trope echoing Kipling’s story ‘Th e Enlightenments of Padgett, MP) was the result of ‘prolonged rather than excessive utilization’, and aff ected China as well.9 Th e more recent, and destructive, erosion was illustrated for them by the Punjab Sivaliks, where deforestation and overgrazing by pastoralists had supposedly destroyed the protective plant cover. Here the authors were directly following the analysis of the Punjab Forest Department. As Vasant Saberwal has shown, that analysis, though it has had a lasting impact on forest policy and on the regulation of grazing, employed simplistic models of erosive processes, tended to portray worst cases as representative, drew heavily upon a globalized discourse of civilizational collapse due to soil erosion based in part on the American Dust Bowl, and served the Punjab Forest Department in its bureaucratic struggle with the Revenue Department.10 Regardless of its validity, however, the analy- sis signifi cantly informed the apocalyptic rhetoric about soil erosion throughout the British Empire and the United States, to which Jacks and Whyte were important contributors. Th eir proposed programme was a greatly expanded role for state-managed, scientifi c expertise in managing soil worldwide. Another important writer on soil issues was Sir Albert Howard, whose An Agricultural Testament is oft en cited as one of the earliest 184 Shift ing Ground manifestos of organic gardening. Howard’s career was spent in India from 1905 to 1931, and he formed his mature views while in the ser- vice of the Indore darbar .11 Like Jacks and Whyte (and the Punjab Forest Department), Howard looked to the American Great Plains as a harbinger of dangers threatening the whole world. But he did not endorse the idea of the ‘senile decay’ of Indian and Chinese soils due to long use. Rather, ‘[t]he agricultural practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test—they are almost as permanent of those of the primeval forest, of the prairie or of the ocean [sic]’.12 H o w a r d believed that it was the agriculture of modernity—cash-cropping, profi t-oriented production for the world market, cultivation of prod- ucts meant to feed the industries and workers of the world’s industrial centres—that put the future of civilization in doubt: ‘we know from long experience that the fi elds of India can respond to the hunger of the stomach. Whether they can fulfi l the added demand of the machine remains to be seen’.13 Aided by chemical fertilizers, mod- ern agriculture depleted humus, sacrifi ced sustainable fertility and production for short-term gains, and led to erosion, a ‘disease of the soil’ which, outside of the normal process of weathering, was ‘always preceded by infertility’. 14 A contemporary of Howard’s with similar views was G.T. Wrench, among whose books were Th e Restoration of the Peasantries (1939) and Reconstruction by Way of the Soil (1946). He too argued for the accumulated wisdom of peasant subsistence cultivators, denouncing large-scale, commodity-oriented agriculture and associated ‘improvements’ as socially and ecologically ruinous. Among the evidence he marshalled was the record of salinization pro- duced by the Lloyd Barrage (now the Sukkur Barrage) on the Indus, which had been dedicated in 1932 and by 1937 had already created substantial areas of badly salinized soils.15 Both Jacks and Whyte, on the one hand, and Howard and Wrench, on the other, assumed a static, ‘traditional’ agriculture, but they dis- agreed on its merits. Th is disagreement illustrates a more general aspect of late colonial environmental anxiety. Th ere was no easy or necessary correspondence between a position politically and bureau- cratically enabled by colonial power and the advocacy of technologies and economic structures that held a strong affi nity for the central- izing power associated with the colonial state. Th ere was no single colonial—or, for that matter, nationalist—narrative on ecological issues. I will return to this point later. Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 185

Other important problems included the spread of exotics (for example water hyacinth in the Bengal delta 16), deforestation, and depletion of species. Deforestation was an issue of intense worry to forest bureaucrats.17 It coincided with a number of forest-based polit- ical movements in, among other places, the Uttarkhand Himalaya, Chotanagpur, and central India, protesting the earlier arrogation, by colonial fi at, of enormous tracts of forest land and the exclusion of peasant and swidden cultivators. 18 Th e most obvious examples of depletion of indigenous species were those favoured by hunters. 19 Concern about diminishing numbers of tigers, leopards, and other species threatened by over-hunting (and habitat loss) engendered doubts in the forest offi cer F.W. Champion and the shikari Jim Corbett.20 Both worked to popularize the cause of wildlife preservation in the interwar years, among other achievements persuading the Government of the United Provinces to create the fi rst national park in India in 1934 (initially named aft er the governor, Sir Malcolm Hailey, but today named aft er Corbett himself). Both also turned away from hunting and towards writing about and photo- graphing wildlife. Champion published With a Camera in Tigerland (1927) and The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow (1933).21 Corbett began writing a series of hunting tales in the 1930s, fi rst collected in Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944). 22 Th ese tales famously combined the thrill of the hunt with regret over the decline in the numbers of tigers and leopards. Corbett insisted that big cats became man-eaters out of desperation as human activity disrupted their habitat.23 While all of these concerns about nature might be traced, directly or indirectly, to the intrusions of the global market and the colonial state, the point here is not to delineate the colonial ecological foot- print. Instead, what stands out here is that the claims about nature and its management implicit in popular Victorian representations of the Raj (like those of Kipling mentioned above) were directly con- tradicted by environmental calamities in the last decades of the Raj. Th e shikar that enacted colonialist constructions of race, masculin- ity, and rulership had encountered an unexpected diffi culty, in large part of its own making—there were now fewer tigers, leopards, and other animals on which to prove one’s white masculinity. Th e soil that colonial forestry and agricultural science was supposed to have saved against Indian misuse was now understood to be at risk, in part or, according to Howard and Wrench, wholly because of policies that 186 Shift ing Ground incorporated India into the world economy under British auspices. Th e forest peoples constructed by Kipling and others as the most natural (in multiple senses) of British allies in the subcontinent were in revolt against forest laws. While none of these crises enveloped all of India, they posed new challenges to and new opportunities for representations that did address an all-India question—political legitimacy.

* * *

The Pasts and Futures of the Bengal Delta

Nevertheless, diff erent observers drew disparate conclusions about the origins and signifi cance of ecological change and decline, a point well illustrated by debates about the impact of colonial engineering on the Bengal delta. From the mid-1920s to the 1940s, an evolving debate centred on the charge that British engineering had ruined the delta. In 1925, C.A. Bentley, a malariologist and the director of public health in Bengal, delivered a scathing criticism of the Raj’s mismanagement. Contrary to popular belief, he insisted, river del- tas, although potentially prone to malaria, should generally be free from extensive occurrence of the disease. Proper cultivation did not promote the disease but rather helped to suppress it (like Albert Howard and G.T. Wrench, Bentley sought the sanction of antiquity for his views, here citing Pliny the Elder and Strabo). Th e yearly fl ood both enriched the land with silt and kept down mosquitoes. Shutting out the fl ood with embankments, as the British had done, had led to appalling malaria epidemics, because it led to soaring mosquito populations and plummeting agricultural fertility, and hence in the long run also peasant nutrition (otherwise healthy, well-fed people showed greater resistance to malaria). Bentley estimated that around two-thirds of the population of Bengal was affl icted by malaria, almost a quarter severely so. Th e proportions were far worse in western and central Bengal, but better in the east.24 Bentley attributed the diff erence in malaria incidence and mortal- ity between Bengal’s various parts to the fact that more embankments had been built in the western and central areas. Arguing that railways and roads (the main reason for embankments) had not, as was oft en Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 187 assumed, led to economic prosperity, he cited fi gures showing that northern, central, and especially western Bengal, with signifi cantly more transportation mileage than eastern Bengal, also had consider- ably more fallow land: land that had gone out of cultivation because the population that had once tilled it had sickened, died, or emigrated. Bentley reckoned the toll over 70 years from malaria and malnutrition to be in the millions of lives and the tens of millions of rupees. In a series of lectures and articles from 1928 to 1931, the renowned irrigation engineer Sir William Willcocks expanded on Bentley’s claims. He maintained that the ‘overfl ow irrigation’ of the ‘ancient kings’ of Bengal had ensured the country’s prosperity and freedom from malaria. Overfl ow irrigation distributed the nutrientrich, silt- laden fl oodwaters of the Brahmaputra and Ganges evenly over the delta, watering and more importantly fertilizing fi elds, maintaining the supply of fi sh throughout the countryside and sweeping away the mosquito populations. Floodwaters were directed through a system of wide, shallow canals with minimal embankments in which, at an appropriate time during the yearly monsoon, breaches were made to facilitate useful fl ooding. Th e canals also drained the land as fl oods receded, preventing water-logging. According to Willcocks the dis- tribution of water was put in the care of local water boards, which worked with cultivators. As long as the system was maintained in good working order, with canals kept clear of silt or sand accumula- tion, Bengal was rich: Willcocks cites the seventeenth-century French traveller Bernier’s statement that Bengal was the richest land in the world, producing abundant surpluses for export.25 Moreover, the irri- gation system founded in ancient times encouraged social cohesion as well economic advance: it gave neighbours a stake in each other’s success and was the source of what he called the Bengali’s ‘inherited love of co-operation’. 26

Th at the ‘overfl ow irrigation’ of the ancient Bengal rulers is the only one adapted to Bengal and to all countries similarly conditioned is amply borne out by what has happened in the last seventy years. Th e Irrigation Department has tried its hand at every kind of project it could imagine except ‘overfl ow irrigation’. Th e resulting poverty of soil, congestion of the rivers, and malaria, have stalked the canals and banks, and the country is strewn to-day with the wrecks of useless and harmful works.27 188 Shift ing Ground

While, according to Willcocks, colonial irrigation engineers may have worked wonders in Punjab and the United Provinces, they had blundered egregiously in Bengal by mistakenly considering silted-up canals to be ‘dead rivers’ about which little could be done. Moreover, the government had constructed a railway embankment along the left bank of the Damodar in the 1850s, eff ectively cutting off the area north of the river from the fl ow of silt and fl oodwater so necessary to the health and prosperity of the region. Th is and other embank- ments erected for various purposes concentrated what had gener- ally been benign, shallow fl oods spread over a large area into much more devastating inundations like the Damodar fl ood of 1913, while in most years, also preventing the removal of mosquito larvae. Th e British had ruined other canals in order to maintain steamer routes. Where they had built their own irrigation canals, they had provided them with high banks, impeding the easy overfl ow of water in order to control access to it. In the British model of irrigation, peasants were expected to pay for irrigation, giving cultivators an incentive to do without or to steal water; Willcocks theorized that overfl ow irrigation had been paid for out of the general land tax and was available to all cultivators free of additional charge. Th e answer to the problems of malaria and diminishing soil fer- tility, as well as catastrophic fl ooding in rural areas and the siltation of Calcutta’s port, was the restoration of this ‘ancient system’ of over- fl ow irrigation, with a few modern improvements, such as a barrage on the Ganges in central Bengal which would divert water to the southwest. Colonial technologies (like railways and steamers) must be adapted to meet the needs of the system, rather than the reverse. Embankments ought to be speedily removed. 28 Th e most startling of Willcocks’ claims was that important geo- graphical features of the Bengal delta were not natural, but rather arte- facts of the system he theorized. What had been wrongly seen as deltaic channels in central and western Bengal were in fact human-made canals, ‘spaced apart and placed just about the distance apart that canals should be placed’. 29 Th e British had neglected these canals because they had not understood their nature. Moreover, the sharp southward turn in the Damodar downstream from Burdwan (Barddhaman) was created by an ancient monarch, Bhagirath, to keep the Damodar from depositing its silt into the river that bears his name, the Bhagirathi. Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 189

Indeed, he claimed, the Bhagirathi itself was originally not a river but the master canal feeding the system, constructed by an engineer-ruler who was a peer to Menes of Egypt and Nimrod of Babylonia.30 If Bentley’s account, though equally damning, was both more careful and less fl oridly romantic than Willcocks’, the latter’s indict- ment of colonial engineering sparked both more admiration and indignation. In part, this was perhaps due to the sophistication of the past he imagined for Bengal, which disrupted some British assump- tions about India even if (as I shall discuss later) it was deeply rooted in Orientalist romanticism. It was also due to the fact that Willcocks was himself one of the most famous practitioners of British imperial irrigation. Born in India in 1852 and a graduate of the college of engi- neering at Roorkhee, Willcocks became one of the most important fi gures in irrigation engineering in Egypt aft er its conquest in the 1880s. He had designed the fi rst Aswan dam at the turn of the cen- tury, and later advised several governments. Th is pedigree made his indictment of colonial engineering in Bengal all the more unsettling to anyone with an ideological stake in its achievements. 31 As to the historicity of these claims, the prosperity of the Bengal delta in early modern times, including its western and central parts, is well-established. So, too, is Bengal’s decline from being a food exporter to a food importer by the interwar period. Moreover, there is ample evidence that cultivators throughout the delta actively har- nessed fl ows of water and silt, rather than simply enduring fl oods— as Rohan D’Souza has described a similar situation in Orissa, the agrarian regime should be seen not as ‘fl ood vulnerable’ but in fact as ‘fl ood dependent’.32 Some recent works endorse the contention that the western delta was not as plagued by malaria in earlier times as it was aft er the mid-nineteenth century. 33 A few British observ- ers before Bentley had noted, to less public response, the decline of fertility and increase of malaria in the western and central parts of the delta, and the link between embankments and malaria had been discussed among Bengalis for some decades.34 Indeed, the hostility which marked the initial offi cial reaction of the Bengal engineering establishment to Willcocks was more the product of defensiveness engendered by his accusatory rhetoric than of disagreement with his views about embankments. A committee constituted by the Government of Bengal to investigate the Irrigation 190 Shift ing Ground

Department in light of Willcocks’ attack rejected his criticisms as both untimely and unfair. Neither the response of the committee nor of the chief engineer of the Irrigation Department, C. Addams- Williams, denied the deleterious eff ects of embankments constructed in the nineteenth century, but they did disclaim the responsibility of the present generation for past mistakes and argued that pulling embankments down would be very diffi cult.35 On the other hand, Willcocks’ most remarkable claim, that the delta was in signifi cant ways engineered by an ancient king, Bhagirath, was greeted with much more scepticism: in Addams-Williams’ words, ‘in most cases it will be found that the ancient King that created the rivers and altered them was Nature ’. 36 On the larger point, that colonial embankments were the root cause of the western and central delta’s declining fertility and increasing malaria, there is an interesting twist. In the next decade or so, there appeared a number of lectures, articles, and books by Bengali authors writing in English, discussing the condition of the delta. Two of the most infl uential were Radhakamal Mukherjee’s Th e Changing Face of Bengal (1938) and S.C. Majumdar’s Rivers of the Bengal Delta (1942). Mukherjee, a geographer and sociologist at the University of Calcutta, and Majumdar, chief irrigation engineer in Bengal in the early 1940s, both saw the delta as much more the product of natural forces than did Bentley or Willcocks, specifi cally a product of the deposition of sediments from its rivers combined with the action of the strong tides of the Bay of Bengal. Mukherjee main- tained that the main channel of the Ganges was gradually migrating eastward, shift ing its course as its old channels gradually fi lled with silt, and inevitably fi nding new, faster paths to the sea. Th e corol- lary to this movement was that the character of the delta and quality of the land diff ered, depending on whether an area was in the new, ‘actives’ areas to the east, where the main river continued to build new land and fertilize existing stretches through the deposit of silt during monsoon fl oods, or in the old, ‘decadent’ areas of western and central Bengal, where this deposition had largely or completely ceased. Active areas were more fertile and less malarial because of the salutary eff ects of monsoon inundations (about which both agreed with Bentley and Willcocks); the decadent areas were becoming less Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 191 and less habitable because they naturally received less fl oodwater and silt. 37 While both agreed that colonial embankments had harmed the agriculture of western and central Bengal, they gave precedence to geo-morphological factors, especially Majumdar, who took some pains to demonstrate that Willcocks’ assertion that the Bhagirathi was actually a very old feeder canal for a larger system could not be correct. Subsequent observers have followed Mukherjee and Majumdar in drawing attention to the geological and hydrological dynamics of the delta, and have had little to say about the faults of colonial water management.38 By the early 1940s, meanwhile, another proposal for dealing with the water problems of Bengal and the rest of India was beginning to circulate, the idea of the multi-purpose dam. A major proponent of dams in the 1940s was Meghnad Saha. Despite some points of overlap with Willcocks and Bentley, in general Saha’s view was that the colo- nial state had not so much mismanaged as neglected Bengal’s rivers. What was needed was the application of modern hydraulic technology on a far larger scale. Th is approach gained ascendancy by the end of the Second World War. In Bengal its ultimate result was the creation of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), inspired in part by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States. Elsewhere I have argued that the transnational appeal of such projects refl ected the various ideological contexts into which they could be assimilated, and the ways in which they could make visible commitments to mod- ernism, liberalism, and anti-colonial nationalism. 39 Here it is neces- sary only to note that they captured the imagination of key portions of the polity, particularly the English-educated middle class, in the very last years of the Raj and the decades aft er Independence, overwhelm- ing the discussion of ‘overfl ow irrigation’ and its benefi ts. In Bengal, moreover, political interest in revitalizing pre-colonial practices of harnessing deltaic fl oods waned, not only due to the advent of large dams and the oft en unrealistic hopes invested in them, including especially a much faster rate of agricultural and industrial growth than that implied by overfl ow irrigation, but also due to the political partition of the delta in 1947.40

* * * 192 Shift ing Ground

Nature, Politics, and Legitimacy

To return to the question posed at the beginning, how were the ecological anxieties I have discussed related to the political crisis of British India during the 30-odd years from the First World War to Independence? Th ere is no single answer—the challenge to Victorian confi dence about the management of nature did not simply result in a corresponding lack of confi dence in colonial rule, though I will argue that that was one important outcome. Th e interpretation given to evidence of environmental decline varied. Th e ‘decadence’ of the Bengal delta is a case in point. Willcocks saw this as an indictment of the British record and valourized pre-colonial water management. Saha thought the situation called for water management based on the latest American models. Mukherjee, Majumdar, and others took a much more nuanced view which drew attention to factors beyond human control. All of these might, in principle, be glad to see the end of the political status quo. Th e Bengal Irrigation Department, though it might concede many of the points raised by these critics, could not be expected to concur. As William Beinart and Lotte Hughes have shown, Willcocks viewed pre-colonial water management in the Middle East as well as India with a surprising degree of respect for one so prominent in modern water engineering. Th ey have also noted that he foresaw that at some point the British would withdraw from India and believed that this would be best for all, and they treat him as a fi gure who com- plicates the connection between colonial power and technology. 41 While he certainly does that, he was not straightforwardly anti-colo- nialist. He was heavily indebted to enduring Orientalist stereotypes about Bengalis, Egyptians, and others. He subscribed to the essential reality and incompatibility of diff erent racial groups. Th e ‘withdrawal’ from India about which he speculated in his memoirs was one in which the British would gradually turn most of the country back over to its princes and its ‘martial races’, with the British Army confi ned to a few strategic bases (and with India still a part of the British Empire). British East Africa and Mesopotamia would be opened to Indians, who would be excluded from Canada, Australia, and other temper- ate areas, which he saw as the natural preserve of whites.42 Willcocks’ admiration for the technical and scientifi c achievements of ancient Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 193

India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia was of a piece with a larger Orientalist romanticism: it was based on a notion of the departed glory of Asian empires—a static grandeur, now past, but one which might be revived under colonial leadership.43 In the report that followed its investigation of the issues raised by Willcocks, the Bengal Irrigation Department Committee deplored his criticisms, most important, for undermining public confi dence in the department. 44 But their report too warned of impending disaster should embankments not be removed. 45 Th e rancour with which Willcocks’ views were greeted by colleagues who agreed with their practical conclusion is a symptom of vulnerability in the colonial equation of mastery of nature with mastery of India. For if colonial modernity, in this case via its engineering achievements, had ruined Bengal, did that not call into question the legitimacy of British rule, which claimed technologically based ‘improvement’ as one of its principal achievements? Nevertheless, the practical work of the irrigation department had to go on—including now the dismantling of embankments.46 Th e provincial legislative council passed the Bengal Development Act in 1935, which was meant to provide a legal basis for rehabilitation of ‘decadent’ tracts. Reaction elsewhere to Willcocks’ criticisms shows that the Bengal Irrigation Department Committee was not wrong to be nervous about their public impact. In the later 1930s, a protest in Burdwan district against this same Bengal Development Act denounced the levying of improvement taxes for the Damodar Canal on the grounds that

… there had been an irrigation system prevailing when the British established their regime. If the system broke down, it was maintained that the breakdown was due to the failings of the administration and the landlords.… So whatever irrigation arrangement was being made now was a belated compensation and a meager compensation at that for damages that had already been done. Hence no levy was due from the ryots.47

Th e notion of Bengal’s ecological ruin was easily politicized: the terrible consequences of embankments in the delta were further ref- erenced by politicians from diff erent points in the political spectrum, 194 Shift ing Ground including Srischandra Nandy, the Maharajah of Cossimbazar, a min- ister in the anti-Congress provincial government of Bengal of the late 1930s,48 and Jawaharlal Nehru, who referred to them in Th e Discovery of India as an example of the colonial state’s poor planning of what ought to be desirable innovations.49 Th e embarrassment of colonial engineering did not mean the same thing to all Indian observers. Meghnad Saha was initially interested in Willcocks’ criticisms, and endorsed his denunciation of embank- ments, but the latter’s ‘excursion into archeology’ was never a good fi t for an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology and science. As noted before, by the early 1940s, he was campaigning not for the ‘restoration’ of overfl ow irrigation but for a technocratic develop- ment of the Damodar basin directly inspired by the TVA. As I have discussed elsewhere, Saha’s ultimate criticism of colonial engineering was not that it was inherently unsuitable, but that the British had not lived up to their own best standards of science in the public interest, a view similar to Nehru’s. 50 A ft er Independence, of course, the pro- ponents of large-scale, modernist water management strategies, oft en based on colonial plans, won the debate, at least for the time being. Saha’s proposal for a ‘TVA on the Damodar’ was at the core of the Damodar Valley Corporation, established in 1948. Far from aiding in the re-establishment of overfl ow or fl ush irrigation, as S.C. Majumdar had proposed, the storage reservoirs built by the DVC in Chotanagpur were supposed to change the whole basis of agriculture (through dry season irrigation via conventional canals, in concert with synthetic fertilizers, not through overfl ow irrigation), and more generally, to help to make West Bengal into an Indian ‘Ruhr’. 51 More generally, if the environmental crises of the interwar period disrupted Victorian representations of the connection between the Raj and nature, with important implications for the ecological and political imaginations of the British community and the Indian middle class,52 these implications did not in any simple way refl ect the colonial–nationalist dichotomy. Th e scientists and engineers who served the government’s bureaucracies for managing nature (such as the Punjab Forest Department or the Bengal Irrigation Department) used such crises to call for the expansion of their mandates, arguing against laissez faire but also insisting on the value of colonial authori- tarianism in upholding scientifi c conservation. Th ey might agree with Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 195

James Best, who wrote in his memoir, Forest Life in India, that ‘[t]he forests are too ripe a plum for a democratic chancellor of the exche- quer’. 53 Such a perspective could in principle be the foundation for a stronger link between nature management and the legitimacy of the colonial state. On the other hand, Nehru, Saha, and other modernists could claim the record of despoliation as evidence that the colonial state, serving the fi nancial and military needs of Britain and liable to capture by special interests, actually blocked India from achieving the promise of effi cient and sustainable resource development. Far from scientifi c conservation requiring colonialism, it could never fully be realized without independence. Because of the common concern with science and technocratic conservation which united some adherents and opponents of colonialism, it was not inconsistent for both the wartime British government of Bengal and, at the same time, a critic like Saha, to lobby for a series of dams on the Damodar, or for Nehru to embrace enthusiastically projects like the Hirakud and Bhakra dams, the genesis of which was colonial.54 Meanwhile, others less enamoured of modern technologies might look to the condition of non-human nature and draw still diff erent conclusions. Th e unsustainability of the modern world was of course a very important Gandhian theme. While the specifi cally ecological dimensions of Gandhism were extensively developed only in later decades, even during the period under discussion Gandhi himself and J.C. Kumarappa (the lone Gandhian member of the National Planning Committee created by the Congress in 1938) had much to say that resonated with the concerns of some British critics of the Raj’s management of nature.55 In a diff erent way, so did Tagore (whose Viswa Bharati Quarterly published Willcocks’ views). At the same time, from a diff erent political location, Willcocks, G.T. Wrench and others shared some of the same discomfort with modern technologies. Corbett, too, combined concern about moder- nity with a strain of Orientalist romanticism. His books are fi lled with stock (if positive) interpretations of simple rural Indians, much like Kipling’s, under his protection and in danger of being spoiled by the outside world. Th ey evoke nostalgia for a simpler time, yearned-for but, by the 1940s, forever unavailable, because the modern world was ruining both Indian wildlife and India. While the notion of a colonial ‘ecological watershed’ now seems to be a signifi cant oversimplifi cation, 196 Shift ing Ground it is, in any case, interesting that a number of important contributions to it emerged in the last decades of the Raj, and from diff erent (and oft en confl icting) political perspectives. In short, the ‘evidence’ regarding the legitimacy of colonial rule aff orded by non-human nature could serve as the basis for both an ‘ecological nationalism’ as well as a refurbished colonial ‘environ- mentalism’.56 Concerns about nature and sustainability were never the exclusive province of either colonialism or nationalism, and there were a variety of perspectives on either side of the political divide about what those concerns properly were. But if ‘nature in crisis’ provided ammunition to both supporters and detractors of the Raj, it provided considerably more to critics, in particular those like Nehru who embraced the same project of modernization and development on which liberal colonialism was founded. Two caveats here are that political debate in the 1930s and 1940s tended to focus on other issues of more pressing concern (for instance, communal politics), and that control over nature was not the only claim to legitimacy that the Victorian Raj had made. Nevertheless, the regime had to admit very serious mistakes (for example, in mismanagement of the Bengal Delta, or of wildlife populations), even if, as in Bengal, offi cials blamed their predeces- sors in earlier generations. Such admissions came at a time when, aft er the First World War, another imperial assumption, essential- ist racism, was becoming less and less plausible to both rulers and ruled. Although such racism hardly disappeared from British think- ing about India, offi cial rhetoric in the interwar period was pushed toward more liberal premises. One enduring promise of liberalism is technological progress in the mastery of non-human nature, but evidence of ecological decline under British auspices seemed to indict colonialism’s record on precisely this score. Nationalists like Saha or Nehru could argue that colonialism had hindered rather than aided the rational development of nature and its resources. If the modernist nationalist view departed from the resource bureaucracies of the Raj on the necessity of colonial authority to conservation, at the same time it diff ered from the indictments of the colonial ecological record made by such disparate critics as Willcocks, Howard, or the anthropologist Verrier Elwin in its embrace of the romance of technology, progress, and the state rather than, like them, Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 197 the romance of authenticity, the static past or the small community. Meghnad Saha’s ‘TVA on the Damodar’ may ultimately have rested on as much oversimplifi cation as Willcocks’ ‘ancient system of over- fl ow irrigation’. But the romantic valorization of Indian ecological ‘tradition’ held limited political appeal for the urban Indian middle class when modernist nationalists could point to what appeared to be American and Soviet successes in realizing the fruits of modern technology. Th e former counselled restraint and the maintenance of diff erence; the latter held out the promise of affl uence and the achieve- ment of equality. Indeed, much of the political appeal of the United States was validated by what seemed to be a rational organization of nature to provide for both economic growth and democracy.57 Hence, an alternative, anti-colonial organization of modern tech- nology and science for the control of nature seemed to be at hand, one which would exercise a profound eff ect on government priorities in independent India and Pakistan. Th e existence of such an alterna- tive helped to put the continuing legitimacy of colonialism more in doubt, not only among middle-class Indians, but perhaps even among some Britons. Development, in the sense of technological modernism in the command of non-human nature, strongly rooted in imperial domination though it was, had no need for the political forms specifi c to colonialism.

Notes

1 . Th e linking of political anxieties to concerns about nature was a widespread (if variegated) phenomenon during the period, not only in India and the rest of the British Empire, but also in other settings, including both the Germany of the Nazis and the United States of the New Deal. 2 . Th e question of how far colonialism represented an environmental water- shed in South Asia has generated a rich literature. Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, in their introduction to this volume, provide a useful sketch of the evolving context of this notion over the last few decades. Kathleen Morrison’s chapter in this volume argues cogently that the clear distinction between pre-colonial and colonial approaches to managing nature is in many cases not supported by archeological and other forms of evidence. Some important works in this debate 198 Shift ing Ground

include Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Th is Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), Ranjan Chakrabarti, Does Environmental History Matter? Shikar, Subsistence and the Sciences (Calcutta: Readers’ Service, 2006); Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Environmental Histories of South Asia: Of States, Landscapes and Ecologies’, in Th e Environment and World History, eds. E. Burke and K. Pomeranz (Berkley: University of California Press, 2009); and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 3 . See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 4 . See, for example, John MacKenzie, Th e Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester Uni- versity Press, 1988); William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Grove, Green Imperialism . 5 . ‘Floods in East Bengal, Assam and Burma’, Modern Review (July 1929): 106. Confi dence in fl ood control on the Ohio was premature, however, as the enormous fl ood of January 1937 revealed. 6 . On Saha’s interest in issues related to rivers, see Th e Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, vol. II (Calcutta (Kolkata): Orient Longman, 1986), and Daniel Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Th ousand’: Dams, Nationalism and Development (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7 . In his introduction to Haridhan Bandyopadhyay’s play Banglar Shatru (‘Th e Enemy of Bengal’); see Arabinda Samanta, Malarial Fever in Colonial Bengal, 1820–1939 (Kolkata: Firmal KLM Private Ltd, 2002). 8 . G.V. Jacks and R.O. Whyte, Th e Rape of the Earth: A Worldwide Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). Th e American title is Vanishing Lands , p. 76. 9 . Jacks and Whyte, Rape of the Earth, p. 76. 10 . Vasant Saberwal, Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats, and Conser- vation in the Western Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11 . On Howard in India, see Louise Howard, Sir Albert Howard in India (London: Faber and Faber 1953), and Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire . Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 199

12 . Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 10. 13 . Howard, Agricultural Testament , p. 11. 14 . Howard, Agricultural Testament , p. 144. 15 . G.T. Wrench, Reconstruction by Way of the Soil (London: Faber and Faber, 1946). 16 . Water hyacinth in Bengal destroyed rice lands, impinged on fi sh stocks, and hindered water transportation. See J.C. Bose, ‘Th e Menace of the Hyacinth’, Modern Review (1922): 345–52; P.K. Bose, ‘Water Hyacinth— Th e Terror of Bengal Waterways’, Modern Review (1933): 171–4; Ift ekhar Iqbal, Th e Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 17 . Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002); Saberwal, Pastoral Politics . 18 . On these movements and their complex relationship to the Congress, see Govind Ballabh Pant, Forest Problems in Kumaon (Nainital: Gyanodaya Prakashan, 1984 (1922)); David Baker, ‘A Serious Time”: Forest Satyagraha in Madhya Pradesh, 1930’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 21 (1984): 72–90; Ramachandra Guha, Th e Unquiet Woods, Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 19 . On hunting and wildlife conservation, see the contributions of Divyu- banusinh and Julie Hughes in this volume, as well as MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, and Mahesh Rangajan, India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Divyubanusinh’s reckoning of the impact of Mughal hunting on diff erent species adds an interesting per- spective to the attempt to understand the colonial impact on wildlife. 20 . Julie Hughes’ chapter in this volume comments on concerns about an important wildlife species in the princely state of Mewar during approxi- mately the same period. Mewari concern was with wild boar (which does not seem to have been of particular interest to British commen- tators), and with the quality of the animals as much as or more than the quantity. As in the case of British concern with tigers and leopards, Mewari concern about boar was rooted to a great degree in a political signifi cance imputed to their condition. 21 . On Champion, see Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History , on which this discussion is based. 200 Shift ing Ground

22 . Martin Booth, Carpet Sahib: A Life of Jim Corbett (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 180. 23 . Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1944). 24 . Charles A. Bentley, Malaria and Agriculture in Bengal: How to Reduce Malaria in Bengal by Irrigation (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1925), p. 102–3. 25 . William Willcocks, Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1930). 26 . Willcocks, Lectures , p. 7. 27 . Willcocks, Lectures , pp. 26–7. 28 . Willcocks, Lectures, pp. 26–7; also William Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems (Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1984 (1928)); ‘Bhagirath: Th e Grand Old Engineer of Bengal’, Viswa Bharati Quarterly (Sravan 1335/July 1928): 204–14. 29 . See Willcocks, Lectures , p. 14. 30 . See Willcocks, ‘Bhagirath’, and Lectures . 31 . On Willcocks’ life, see his autobiography, Sixty Years in the East (London: W. Blackwood 1935). On Willcocks in the larger context of impe- rial irrigation, see Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire ., and David Gilmartin, ‘Imperial Rivers: Irrigation and British Visions of Empire’ in Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, eds. D. Kennedy and D. Ghosh (London: Orient Longman, 2006), pp. 76–103. 32 . Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). On the history of agriculture in the Bengal delta, see Radhakamal Mukherjee, Th e Changing Face of Bengal: A Study in Riverine Economy (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1938); Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Iqbal, Bengal Delta. Iqbal describes the problems caused by embankments as a part of the ‘pre-history’ of the Bengal famine of 1943. 33 . Samanta, Malarial Fever and Kohei Wakimura, ‘Health and Economic History: Lessons from the Study of Famines, Epidemics and Colonial Development in British India, 1871–1920’. Conference paper, London School of Economics, available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 201

economicHistory/GEHN/GEHNPDF/HealthandEconomicHistory- Wakimura.pdf (accessed on 7 April 2009). 34 . Samanta, Malarial Fever . 35 . Government of Bengal, Irrigation Department, Report of the Irrigation Department Committee (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot), and Note by Mr C. Addams-Williams, CIE, Late Chief Engineer, Irrigation Department, Bengal, on the lectures of Sir William Willcocks, KCMG, on Irrigation in Bengal, Together with a Reply by Sir William Willcocks (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1931). 36 . See Bengal Irrigation Department, Note by C. Addams-Williams , p. 5. 37 . Mukherjee, Changing face of Bengal . 38 . More recent views have argued that the dynamics of fl ooding, sedi- mentation, and fertilization are compounded by torsions in the earth’s crust below the delta. See van Schendel, History of Bangladesh and Iqbal, Bengal Delta,. Agarwal and Narain, however, provide a summary of Willcocks’ views in their compendium of traditional water harvest- ing systems in India, Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1997). 39 . Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Th ousand’. 40 . An important legacy of the interwar discussion of overfl ow irrigation was its contribution to the Farakka Barrage, which, during the dry sea- son, diverts water from the Ganges into the Bhagirathi–Hooghly, but with serious consequences for areas of Bangladesh. While the idea did not originate with them, Willcocks and Mazumdar both promoted it as part of ‘restoring’ western Bengal. See Iqbal, Bengal Delta, 2010, on its eff ects on the delta, and on the impact the possibility of the barrage had on Partition. 41 . See Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire , p. 132–3. 42 . See Willcocks, Sixty Years , pp. 72–3. 43 . On Orientalist aspects of Willcocks’ ideology, see also Gilmartin, Bengal Delta , who sees Willcocks as more straightforwardly statist than I do. Willcocks’ Orientalist ‘neoclassicism’ could lead him to hydraulic solu- tions that were much less ecologically draconian than the large dams built since 1945—compare, for example, his design for the fi rst Aswan Dam, completed in 1902, with the second one built in the 1950s. 44 . See Bengal Irrigation Department, Report , p. 7. 45 . See Bengal Irrigation Department, Report , p. 10. 202 Shift ing Ground

46 . Government of Bengal, Irrigation Department, Th e Work of the Irriga- tion Department of the Government of Bengal in the Year 1932–1933, [n.p.], 1933; H.P.V. Townend, ‘Th e Development of the Decadent Areas of Bengal’, Calcutta, Government of Bengal, 1935. 47 . Buddadev Bhattacharya, Satyagrahas in Bengal, 1919–1939, quoted in I. Ganguly, Th e Social History of a Bengal Town, (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1987). See also commentary in the Modern Review of the late 1920s and early 1930s. 48 . Shrischandra Nandy, Bengal Rivers and Our Economic Welfare (Calcutta: Th e Book Company Ltd., 1948). 49 . Jawaharlal Nehru, Th e Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981(1946)), p. 405–6. 50 . Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Th ousand’. 51 . As for Willcocks and especially Bentley’s other priority, malaria control, DVC relied heavily on chemical suppression of mosquitoes instead of on regulating hydrology. 52 . Th is adapts and expands on Ift ekhar Iqbal’s ‘ecological imagination of the bhadralok ’ (Iqbal, Bengal Delta, p. 189). 53 . James Best, Forest Life in India (London: John Murray, 1935), p. 313. 54 . D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed , Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Th ousand’. Incidentally, though Nehru embraced such projects, he also promoted a number of conservation concerns, and published an eloquently romantic invocation of the psychologically healing proper- ties of wild nature in the Modern Review (‘Escape’, Modern Review (1938): 498–9). On Nehru’s environmental record, see Ramachandra Guha, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and the Environmental Movement’, in M. Rangarajan, Environmental Issues in India: A Reader . (Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2007), and Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Of Nature and Nationalism: Rethinking India’s Nehru’, in Environmental History as if Nature Existed , eds J. McNeill, J.A. Pádua, and M. Rangarajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). 55 . Sarala Devi (Katherine Heilman), Mira Behn (Madeline Slade), and Verrier Elwin were three politically less important fi gures, all of them British with some connection to Gandhi, who decried both colonial- ism and the ecological impacts of modernity. On Gandhi, Mira Behn, and Kumarappa, see Guha ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, and How Much should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); see also Mark Lindley, Nature and Politics at the End of the Raj 203

J.C. Kumarappa: Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2006); on Elwin, Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); on Sarala Devi, Rebecca Klenk, Educating Activists: Development and Gender in the Making of Modern Gandhians (New York: Lexington Books, 2010). 56 . On ‘ecological nationalism’ see G. Cederlof and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 57 . See for example, Kanwar Sain, America Th rough Indian Eyes (Lahore: Uttar Chand Kapur and Sons, 1943), a travelogue by an irrigation engi- neer who was later associated with most of the major large dam projects of the 1940s and 1950s. How to Be Hindu in 9 the Himalayas Confl icts over Animal Sacrifi ce in Uttarakhand

RADHIKA GOVINDRAJAN

Do Gods Eat Bali Defi ning the Role of Sacrifi ce in Worship

On a wintry day in 2004, the aft ernoon sun lit up the faces of a curious crowd that had gathered to watch a public jagar (possession ritual) in the courtyard of the Chitai Golu temple in the Almora district of Uttarakhand.1 Th is particular jagar had been organized by members of the All World Gayatri Pariwar (henceforth Gayatri Pariwar)2 to consult Golu Devta, a local deity hailed as nyay devta (the god of justice), on whether he considered animal sacrifi ce essential to his worship.3 Th e Gayatri Pariwar, which in 1958 had launched the Yug Nirman Yojana (Movement for the Reconstruction of the Era) with a view to ‘spiritual and moral regeneration in the light of hoary Indian tradition’, considers the practice of animal sacrifi ce a corrup- tion of moral principles laid down in ancient texts like the Vedas and How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 205

Puranas.4 Unable to make much headway amongst villagers who were rather unmoved by ‘hoary Indian traditions’, members of the Gayatri Pariwar in Almora decided to engage them on their own terms, by letting their god tell them that animal sacrifi ce was wrong. Th ey were joined by members of the Arya Samaj who had been waging their own battle against sacrifi ce in the region for several decades. In organizing this jagar, they hoped that Golu would publicly disavow the sacrifi ce of animals carried out in his name, fi nally convincing his worshippers to abandon this ‘barbaric’ practice. On that aft ernoon, the spirit medium or dangaria , a banker from the nearby city of Almora, was listening to the drumming and singing of the jagaria , the musician who manages the possession, a faraway look in his eyes. All of a sudden his limbs began to shake convulsively, and with a scream he started to dance frenziedly on his knees, hands raised above his head, signalling the awakening of Golu Devta in his body. When he indicated that he was ready to answer questions, a member of the Gayatri Pariwar requested the dangaria to ask Golu if he really ate the balidana (animal sacrifi ce) that was off ered to him. Th e devta picked up a handful of rice, threw it in the air, catching it on the way down, and then read the grains in his palm. What do you actually leave me aft er the balidana ?’ he asked angrily. Th e dan- garia’s voice was guttural, and for those in the audience, there was no doubt that it was the voice of Golu. ‘Some of the meat is given to my pujaris, the head (siree ) that is their traditional right. Th e rest is taken back to the village, and consumed with lots of alcohol to wash it down. Th e only thing that stays with me is an agarbatti (incense stick). And you still think that I eat the sacrifi ce?’ As onlookers debated the meaning of Golu’s words in excited whispers, another man in the audience was suddenly possessed. Th e markers of his possession showed that it was Golu who had entered his body. ‘I’ve come here to tell you that if the bali pratha (the tra- dition of sacrifi ce) is stopped, a terrible tragedy will be unleashed upon our Devbhoomi. 5 We will revert to narbali (human sacrifi ce), and each family will be faced with destruction’. Th e atmosphere was electric. Which of the two was the true Golu? Who was to be believed? Th e jagaria cleared his throat. One of his tasks was to estab- lish the authenticity of devta possession by exposing imposters. ‘It’ll 206 Shift ing Ground all be clear in a minute’’, he reassured the crowd. Leaning forward, he reached towards the sacred fi re ( dhuni) and picked up a pair of red hot iron tongs ( cimta) from amongst the coals. Th e crowd held its breath as he applied it fi rst to his tongue, and then his hands. He extended the cimta to the fi rst devta, his unburnt hand marking him as a true guru . Body still racked by the force of its possession, the fi rst devta took the tongs, and applied them to his tongue and the rest of his body, which remained unburned attesting to the genuine nature of his possession.6 It was now the turn of the second devta who was asked by the jagaria to come forward and apply the cimta to himself. He hesitated only a moment before bowing his head and stepping back into the crowd. I was told of the events of that day by Girish Pandey,7 one of the members of the Gayatri Pariwar who was at the jagar held at the Golu temple.8 His face was triumphant as he recalled the unmasking of the false Golu. ‘We wanted their gods to tell them that their beliefs are wrong’, he said with deliberate emphasis.

People oft en say that religious practices in the hills are diff erent from the plains. But we’re all Hindus. Our gods are Hindus. Golu is a local version of Shiva, aft er all. But people use diff erence as a pretext for all manner of beliefs and practices that have no roots in our ancient texts. For instance, some people, especially priests, have misinterpreted the concept of balidana (sacrifi ce) to justify their greed for meat when all bali means is tyaag (self-sacrifi ce).

His fi ngers were running restlessly over a glossy anti-sacrifi ce pamphlet published by the Gayatri Pariwar as he spoke.

Paharis are simple folk who have been misled by some opportunis- tic people. Th e problem here is superstition and ignorance. All these beliefs—pashubali (animal sacrifi ce), jagars (possession rituals), bhuts (ghosts)—have no basis whatsoever in the Vedas and Puranas. Our mission is to teach people the true meaning of Hinduism.

Pandey’s words vividly capture what is at stake in contemporary confl icts over the practice of balidana (sacrifi ce) in Uttarakhand. In the past few decades, animal sacrifi ce, an important part of the worship of local deities, has become an especially thorny issue, hotly How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 207 contested not only in temples and other community spaces, as in the case of the jagar described above, but also in legislative courts and public discourse in general. For revivalist groups such as the Arya Samaj and Gayatri Pariwar, the desire to standardize Hindu prac- tice, to cleanse it of ‘unorthodox’ infl uences and make it conform to Brahminical Sanskrit texts lies at the heart of their campaigns to stamp out sacrifi ce. Pahari (hill) religion is seen as a degraded form of Hinduism that must be returned to an original, pure form. Th e idea that Pahari religion is backward and dominated by supersti- tion has a long genealogy in the region, going back to the colonial period. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial administrators oft en commented on the unorthodox nature of beliefs and rituals in the hills, noting that ‘belief in demons and sprites, people’.9 Half a century later, the anthropologist Gerald Berreman who conducted fi eldwork in Garhwal observed that ‘ pahari Hinduism deviates from Hinduism in the plains and by plains standards is not only unorthodox but degraded’. 10 It is precisely this “unorthodoxy”, established in colonial and postcolonial discourse over a century, that revivalist groups seek to stamp out. Th ey are joined in their opposition by animal rights groups who articulate larger concerns about the ethical and loving treatment of animals in terms of what they see as the dominant heritage of nature stewardship in the hills, one that is shaped by Hindu ideals of non- violence and the worship of plants and animals. Movements like the Chipko, defi ned in the public imagination by powerful images of hill women clinging to trees as tractors bear down upon them, are hailed as evidence of the neo-traditionalist environmentalist leanings of hill people, of their natural inclination towards non-violence, and their desire to protect the environment at all costs. Th e humane treatment of animals, their argument goes, is part of this tradition of environ- mentalism that is rooted in centuries of Hindu belief and practice. Animal sacrifi ce, with its blood, violence, and wasteful excess, is seen as sullying this tradition even as it claims false sanction from Hindu scriptures. Environmental and ethical questions that emerge around the practice of sacrifi ce are thus framed as concerns about the corruption of Hindu ideals of nature love and worship, and as the weakening of a Hindu way of life. What counts as tradition, as Sivaramakrishnan and Rangarajan point out, comes to be at the 208 Shift ing Ground heart of these debates about people’s relationships with non-human animals (Introduction, this volume). Arrayed against this coalition are regionalist groups like the Gwal Sena who argue that the right to sacrifi ce is an inalienable part of the cultural and religious heritage of Paharis (hill people). Th e state of Uttarakhand was created only in 2000, the outcome of a mass regional mobilization in the 1990s that demanded political autonomy from the parent state of Uttar Pradesh Th e public discourse of this movement emphasized the chronic underdevelopment of the hills at the hands of a government situated in the plains and unable to understand the development needs of the hills and its people. Th is inability was attrib- uted to a more general and irreconcilable diff erence between upland and lowland regions, a diff erence that was framed as being simultane- ously geographical and cultural . Even aft er the establishment of the state marked the hills’ ( pahar ) political independence from the plains ( des), distinctive ritual practices of popular Hinduism such as animal sacrifi ce remain an important means of marking cultural diff erence. Cultural regionalism, the idea that regional diff erence is marked by distinctive cultural practices, resonates in the politics of regional groups that are engaged in an ongoing project of constructing and maintaining diff erence vis-à-vis the north Indian plains. 11 A s p a r t o f that project, the continued right to perform certain ritual practices, especially animal sacrifi ce, has become a central demand of these regionalist cultural and political groups. Th is is an example of wider processes noted by Sivaramakrishnan and Rangarajan (Introduction, this volume) whereby shift ing political trends since the 1990s have played an important role in shaping relationships between people and animals, and ideas about nature and the environment.12 Given these broad-ranging concerns with religious and regional identity, these debates over sacrifi ce can be read as confl icts between differing conceptions of what it means to live as a Hindu in the Himalayas. While some groups and individuals preach a Brahminical and Sanskritic Hinduism as the ideal form of Hinduism in the hills where more than 80 per cent of the population is upper-caste, others favour more locally meaningful forms of Hindu belief and practice that reinforce the cultural distinctiveness of the region. Diff ering ideas about what constitutes love for animals, whether love is incompat- ible with killing and feasting, are also up for debate in this broader How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 209 conversation about sacrifi ce. Th ose who support the practice argue that it is out of love that the animal is sacrifi ced, love for the deity and its creations, whereas those who oppose the practice argue that sacrifi ce is off ered to satisfy abnormal urges for violence and for the meat. In the end, the participants in this debate over animal sacri- fi ce are able to draw on all these diff erent identities simultaneously, producing sometimes competing, sometimes convergent understand- ings of what it means to be Hindu, Pahari, a Hindu Pahari, and an animal lover.

Ecologists or Barbarians Nature Love in the Mountains

Animal rights groups working in Uttarakhand oft en argue that the violence of animal sacrifi ce is entirely at odds with the inherently nature-loving character of villagers from the mountains. Members of animal rights organizations, for instance, point to the Chipko move- ment, arguably the most iconic socio-environmental mobilization in South Asia, as an exemplar of the tradition of nature stewardship in the region and of the nature-love preached by Hinduism, and contrast it with the senseless overkill of sacrifi ce, where hundreds of animals are killed on the same day.13 Th is is a more extreme form of the narrative produced by environmentalists, academics, and policy- makers alike who have hailed the Chipko movement that emerged in the Garhwal region more than 35 years ago as evidence of the neo- traditional environmentalist leanings of hill people. Th e romantic vision of the ecological history of pre-colonial India that Kathleen Morrison so eff ectively critiques, has been as powerful in describing the relationship of ‘subaltern’ groups to their environment in colo- nial and postcolonial South Asia (Morrison, this volume). Studies of Chipko, such as that of Ramachandra Guha, evoke images of hill villagers living in harmony with their environment until the destruc- tive intrusions of the colonial and postcolonial state force them to defend traditional forms of forest management and governance.14 A s Haripriya Rangan points out, ‘the Chipko movement has been pro- duced and authenticated in environmental and political discourses.… It is the guiding light showing the path towards a “green earth and a true civilization”; the symbol of “non-violent protest”; the vanguard for “ecologically sustainable development”; a nation’s “civilizational 210 Shift ing Ground response to the environmental crisis”; a symbol of the “feminine principle in nature”’.15 More than three decades later, the legacies of this particular framing of the Chipko movement continue to shape the lives of the people who live here. In its most extreme form, the power of the Chipko narrative has incarcerated villagers as peace-loving ecologists. Any actions that call this image into question are seen as anomalous. Th is is especially the case with the practice of animal sacrifi ce, which is held up by animal rights groups as an aberration that goes against this long tradition of nature-love grounded in Hindu ethics and philosophy. When I spoke with Deepa Sati, an animal rights activist in Uttarakhand, she expressed shock and anguish that the practice was still so deeply entrenched in hill society.

Th ere’s a crisis of masculinity here. Young boys without jobs under the sway of alcohol feel manly when they kill innocent animals. But tell me, where are the women? Can’t the same women who came running out to save trees protect these animals? Animals breathe and birth like us? Shouldn’t we feel more of an affi nity with them? It makes it much worse. All this talk of sacrifi ce as a tradition when the real tradition of protecting nature and being kind to all living beings is dying out. 16

Her words are a stark reminder of the power of the Chipko narrative that has established certain forms of life and conduct as normative while dismissing everything else as an aberration. However, those who support the practice of bali argue that it is precisely in sacrifi ce that love for nature and animals is revealed. Th e process of rearing a goat for sacrifi ce creates an intimate bond between the animal and the human responsible for its care, a bond that is oft en described as being one of mamta, of maternal love. Th is bond emerges from the daily routine of nurturing and raising an animal much as one would raise a child. Th e abrupt end to mamta brought about through the death of the animal in sacrifi ce causes them great peedha , a term usually employed to indicate pain but used specifi cally in this case to signal an ache of the heart. On many occ- asions, women would burst into tears when they saw their goats being sacrifi ced. Even though they ate its meat as prasad , they would refuse to eat anything else for a few days. Th e loneliness they described How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 211 in seeing an empty goth (shed) would linger for months until new animals were brought into it. When speaking of sacrifi ce, many vil- lagers argue that balidana is truly a sacrifi ce only if one lives through this cycle of emotions, of feeling mamta and then peedha . Th ose who brought goats to temples for sacrifi ce, pointed out that this bond between the sacrifi cial animal and those who sacrifi ced it was only strengthened by the process preceding the killing. Prior to the actual beheading, the animal, usually a male goat, is worshipped and invested with the family’s gotra, also absorbing their sins. 17 He is then asked to give his consent to the sacrifi ce through a ritual that involves sprinkling a mixture of rice and water on his back. If he shakes his body to remove the water, it is taken as an indication that both he and the deity to whom he is being sacrifi ced have accepted the balidana. When the sacrifi cial goat shakes its consent, people see it as a public expression of its acknowledgement of and gratitude for the care and mamta it has received. Indeed, many women speak of it as being akin to the sacrifi ces children make to repay the debt they owe their parents for the care they received in childhood. However, if a goat doesn’t shake, it is seen as a sign that there was inadequacy in the care it received. Th e active consent of a sacrifi cial being is seen as validating the bonds of aff ect that are not only crucial to the success of a sacrifi ce, but also complicate the portrayal of sacrifi ce as bloody and violent. ‘If asking an animal for its consent is not love, then what is?’ I was asked by a devotee at a festival. ‘Not only do we pray to the goat before killing it, but we also give it our family name. And the meat is shared as prasad, holy food blessed by God’. A common complaint voiced by villagers is that animal rights activists devalue this expres- sion of love, rejecting the idea that people can simultaneously love, kill, and eat an animal. Even for those who express ambiguity regarding the killing, sacrifi ce is justifi ed on the grounds that it is essential to prevent a return to the days when narbali (human sacrifi ce) was de rigueur . It is believed that in the not-so-distant past, devi s would demand a male sacrifi ce from families dedicated to the maintenance of their temples. It was only when families who could not bear to lose a son prayed fervently to these goddesses for mercy that they relented, demanding instead for the sacrifi ce of seven goats and one buff alo (athwar ). Th e belief in the existence of human sacrifi ce was at one 212 Shift ing Ground point so pervasive that the prominent historian of Kumaon, Badri Dutt Pande, writing in the 1930s, noted that the practice had to be prohibited by colonial legislation.18 Animal sacrifi ce is thus seen as necessary to prevent a return to the dark days when every family had to give up a son. By taking the place of a cherished son on the sacrifi cial altar, the sacrifi cial animal leaves the family in its debt, a debt that is preemptively paid off during the animal’s lifetime in the form of special care and nurture. For those who sacrifi ce animals, it is only the co-existence of love and death that make sacrifi ce accept- able, to humans, to animals, and to deities. It is this dualism in the sacrifi cer–sacrifi ced relationship, the mutuality of love and death, subjection and veneration, that animal rights groups reject entirely in their challenge to the practice of sacrifi ce.

Envisioning Religious Futures: Is There a Pahari Hinduness?

In the case of the contemporary confl ict over animal sacrifi ce, the fi rst blow was struck by People for Animals (henceforth PFA), arguably the most prominent animal rights organization in the region. In the fall of 2010, members of the Uttarakhand wing of PFA travelled to temples around Uttarakhand, convincing priests and worshippers to forgo the ritual of animal sacrifi ce during the festival season that year. Emboldened by the PFA, Beejal, an animal rights organization with a long history in the area, also stepped up their campaign to raise public awareness amongst the ‘uneducated and superstitious popu- lation’ of the hills. Support for the awareness drive against animal sacrifi ce came from unexpected quarters, ranging from members of yoga groups to crowds of school children in the state capital who questioned the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand as to why he could not enact a blanket ban on sacrifi ce in the state. 19 Riding this wave of popular opinion, PFA fi led a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Uttarakhand High Court late that year, seeking a blanket ban on pashubali (animal sacrifi ce) across the state of Uttarakhand on the grounds that it was a social evil and not required by the ‘Hindu reli- gion’ (Public Interest Litigation 73 of 2010, fi led in the Uttarakhand High Court at Nainital, henceforth PIL 73).20 While citing the usual objections to animal sacrifi ce (the violation of public nuisance laws How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 213 as well as the contravention of laws related to the spread of infection and disease), the PIL also claimed that animal sacrifi ce was against the provisions of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (2001), an act that had not been invoked thus far in debates over animal sac- rifi ce. Listing the major centres of “mass butchery”, the PIL argued that “regard for all life forms and ahimsa is the foundation of Hindu religion and Devbhoomi Uttarakhand must make every eff ort to preserve and enhance the heritage of the oldest religion mankind has known and not let it be held to ransom” (PIL 73).21 In its December 2010 ruling on the PIL, the Uttarakhand High Court directed the State Government to ensure that animal sacrifi ce could occur only if two specifi c conditions were met: fi rstly, that the sacrifi ce of animals could not take place in public view; and secondly, to ensure that any animal sacrifi ced should be immediately removed by the owner, and taken away for his or her personal use.22 While far from the blanket ban requested by the PFA, the High Court’s decision provoked outrage from various quarters across the state, both individual and political. In January 2011, the district administration of Chamoli district, acting on the HC’s orders, pre- vented devotees, who had brought with them goats and buff aloes, from sacrificing these animals at the Chandika Devi temple in Simli.23 Enraged devis and devtas possessed villagers and danced with weapons outside the temple to protest the administration’s decision. In April 2011, during the Chait Navratri when animal sac- rifi ce increases dramatically, the district administration of Almora prevented villagers from sacrifi cing buff aloes at the Deoghat temple in Salt. Some of those who were turned away retaliated by taking their animals to the forest below the temple. Here they proceeded to slaughter the buff aloes themselves while a priest from the temple looked on. Despite the district administration’s best eff orts, eight out of twenty-eight buff aloes were sacrifi ced, alongside hundreds of goats.24 Pahari regionalist and Hindu nationalist organizations have also entered the fray in support of people’s rights to sacrifi ce animals in temples. In Nainital district, the Gwal Sena, a regionalist group declared that they would not tolerate this attack on ancient Kumauni religious and cultural beliefs, and would respond to any attempt to implement the court order with violence. Th e Bajrang Dal has, 214 Shift ing Ground in Uttarakhand at least, come out in fervent support of the average Hindu’s right to sacrifi ce, stating that the organization is not against animal rights per se, but could not afford ‘to let police loose on religious fairs and harass devotees’.25 Both sides involved in these debates over animal sacrifi ce have kept away from the liberal Western concept of ‘animal rights’.26 E v e n organizations like the PFA, which, of all the actors in the fray, has raised the issue of ethical treatment of animals most, frame argu- ments about ecological balance and animal cruelty in religious and spiritual terms, as a misreading of Hinduism. 27 Attached to the PFA’s PIL were copies of Vedic texts along with interpretations by spiritual gurus, who had been ‘helping create awareness among people to give up the unwanted and needless cruel practice in the name of religion’. ‘Unfortunately’, the petition went on, ‘our spiritual gurus and the civil society has [ sic] not been able to make a dent on the religious fanaticism of the uneducated few and the opportunistic class i.e. the benefi ciary priests, money lenders and the designated butchers of the temples. Th e misinterpretation of an opportunistic few causes the faith to get maligned’ (PIL 73). When members of the PFA travelled to temples across Uttarakhand in 2010 with a view to discouraging ani- mal sacrifi ce, they took with them DVDs of spiritual gurus explaining that sacrifi ce has no place in Hinduism. At the Naina Devi temple in Nainital, I was told, members of the temple committee, the Ram Sevak Sabha (a Hindu cultural institution which is responsible for organizing the annual Nanda Devi festival where pilgrims sacrifi ce goats by the hundreds) and the district administration were shown a DVD clip of a guru declaring that animal sacrifi ce was a corruption of Hinduism. Th us these debates over animal sacrifi ce can be read as debates on how to be Hindu. In Kumaun, a purifi ed, high Hinduism based on ritual Sanskrit texts interpreted by spiritual gurus and socio-religious organizations like the Arya Samaj and the Gayatri Pariwar is coming increasingly into confl ict with local interpretations of Hinduism that favour cultural and regional specifi cities. 28 A s Th omas Blom Hansen has pointed out, “Th e Hindu nationalist discourse on … patriotic selfl essness and devotion, recuperation of ancient values and prides has [sic ] an unmistakable Brahminical accent, not least in its pater- nalistic monopolization of the true Hindu culture”. 29 It is no surprise How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 215 that followers of the purifi ed and textualized Hinduism, idealized by those not in favour of animal sacrifi ce, hail almost exclusively from the so called upper castes. At the same time, it must be noted that a large number of the Savarna people in the region still support animal sacrifi ce. Th ose who support sacrifi ce see it as a keystone of Kumauni Hindu culture. In this way, their position dovetails with that of explic- itly cultural regionalist groups like the Gwal Sena, formed in 2009 with the aim of defending ‘the rights and opportunities of people from the hills’. For members and followers of the Gwal Sena, the homog- enized Hinduism held up by neo-traditionalist groups threatens to eff ace their distinct identity as Pahari Hindus. When asked why the organization was in favour of animal sacrifi ce, one of its members had this to say:

Th ese things [sacrifi ces] have been happening here for centuries ( sadiyan). It’s a fundamental part of our tradition, pleasing our gods and ancestors with a sacrifi ce. It’s also the only time when families scattered across India and abroad come together. So it’s not just tradi- tion (aastha ), it’s the Pahari way of life (jeevan) . It’s not as if we want to kill animals either. But this is not about the animals, it is about Paharis and the attempt to destroy their culture (sanskriti) . What we ask is why pick on us? What about other groups who slaughter thousands of goats and cows in a day?

* * *

Twentieth-Century Histories of Sacrifi ce in the Mountains

As disputes over religious and cultural identity, contemporary debates on animal sacrifi ce in north India have deep historical roots. Th e Arya Samaj, established by Swami Dayanand Saraswati in Punjab in 1875, came to the Central Himalayas in the late nineteenth cen- tury, opening its fi rst centre in Nainital in 1882. Around the same time cow protection movements, consisting of campaigns to stop the slaughter of cows in India were launched across north India.30 Dayanand Saraswati’s Gokarunanidhi , fi rst published in 1881, and available in Kumaun soon aft er, was one of the founding texts of 216 Shift ing Ground the cow protection movement, and was widely circulated in the vernacular press. In this pamphlet, Dayanand made a case for cow protection on the basis of the cow’s economic utility, which also encompassed buff aloes, goats, and other domestic animals.31 Th e cow protection movement soon gained widespread following across northern India, encompassing Hindus of reformist and ortho- dox persuasions, wealthy and upper-caste elites, and lower castes seeking to improve their ritual status through association with the movement.32 From the late nineteenth century onwards, historians of colonial India argue, the signifi cance of the cow as a symbol of Hindu piety and strength that required protection from Muslims and lower- caste Hindus alike led to a series of communal riots across northern India. 33 Cow slaughter came to be seen as inherently anti-Hindu, whether its practitioners came from outside the Hindu fold or within it. Alongside enforcing caste sanctions to prevent people from selling cows to Muslim butchers, gaurakshini sabha s (cow protection associa- tions) in the United Provinces (the colonial administrative division of which Kumaun was part) also declared that cows were not to be sold to the Depressed Classes and to the so-called low-caste groups associated with beef-eating or trade in animal hides. 34 In the Central Himalayas, it was within this wider context of cow protectionism in north India that the consumption of buff alo meat aft er a sacrifi ce, though not as great a sin as the eating of beef, came to be looked down upon as defi ling and polluting. In the 1930s, Pande noted that the Depressed Classes who would usually carry away the sacrifi ced buff alo and eat it were now beginning to abstain from the practice. 35 Indeed, by the 1940s, Scheduled Castes, who made buff alo-skin drums for the Gangoli Haat temple in Kumaun, and had a traditional claim to the sacrifi ced buff alo’s head (siree), were no longer claiming this right,36 they were also eschewing the public consumption of buff alo meat, even though some of the older genera- tion acknowledge that they continued eating it in secret. 37 From the 1930s onwards, the spread of Gandhian social reformist programmes in the region, especially the breaking down of barriers between caste Hindus ad those from the Depressed Classes also played an important role in the growing stigma that came to be attached to the consumption of buff alo meat. In 1934, following Gandhiji’s plea How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 217 that Depressed Classes be given the right to temple entry and the use of water ponds, Pandit Hriday Nath Kunjru and Seth Jaman Lal Bajaj made a request that the Nanda Devi temple in Almora be opened to Scheduled Castes. During the same period, Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, the most well-known Kumauni nationalist leader, passed a resolution calling for communal eating and drinking between the so-called twice-born castes and Depressed Classes at a meeting in Badrishwar.38 Such programmes and campaigns for the social uplift were signifi cant in motivating the Depressed Classes, especially in Almora and Nainital districts, to abandon practices that marked them as ritually impure and distinct from the upper-castes.39 As the public consumption of sacrifi cial buff alo meat declined signifi cantly from the post-Independence period, the number of buff aloes sacrifi ced in temples across Kumaun and Garhwal also reduced noticeably. One of the head priests at the Haat Kalika temple in Pithoragarh district told me that the number of buff aloes sacrifi ced at the temple, perhaps the most important Kali temple in Kumaun, had reduced signifi cantly over the past four or fi ve decades primarily because local Scheduled Castes who used to eat the meat were no longer willing to publicly claim the meat. Buff alo sacrifi ce remains a contentious issue in Kumaun, especially as the pressure to abandon Pahari ritual practices in favour of more orthodox Sanskritic rituals grows. Unlike Nepal, where the consump- tion of buff alo meat continues to be an important part of festivals like Dasain, people in Uttarakhand will no longer publicly admit to eat- ing buff alo meat. In fact, some temples have stopped buff alo sacrifi ce on their premises simply by refusing to make arrangements for the disposal of the carcass, thereby putting the onus on the person who brings the sacrifi ce. At the Naina Devi temple in Nainital, buff alo sac- rifi ce on the occasion of the Nanda Ashtami was stopped in the 1970s, when a buff alo carcass was dumped in a gadhera (a water channel) from where it fl owed down into the celebrated Nainital Lake, turning its waters red and shocking tourists. Especially aft er the Uttarakhand High Court ruling of December 2010, temples have become increas- ingly reluctant to permit buff alo sacrifi ce, oft en siding with district administrations in their attempt to stop it. As a result, many people have no option but to dedicate live buff aloes to the goddess, which must then be taken home and raised with special care. 40 A t t h e 218 Shift ing Ground

Purnagiri temple in Champawat district, priests and shopkeepers supported the district administration’s decision to put a complete stop to animal sacrifi ce from 2011 onwards. During the Chait Navratri celebrations in April 2011, villagers who were stopped from off ering the Devi buff alo sacrifi ces had to content themselves with off ering a coconut instead. 41 While confl icts and questions regarding buff alo sacrifi ce in Kumaun emerged from the early twentieth century itself, protests over the practice of animal sacrifi ce in general are of a more recent vintage. It was only from the 1990s that the Arya Samaj in Kumaun began to protest in any signifi cant way against the practice. Early attempts to criticize balidana in temples across Nainital and Almora districts met with threats of violence from temple functionaries and villagers, and ended in a tactical retreat. Th e movement against animal sacrifi ce gained ground only when the Arya Samaj joined hands with the Gayatri Pariwar and the PFA to organize a more systematized struc- ture of protest.42 Educational literature was handed out at the Chitai, Ghodakhal (a Golu temple in Bhowali), and Naina Devi temples in Kumaun. During the Nanda Devi festival in Nainital in 2010, for instance, the Arya Samaj distributed pamphlets urging people to forgo animal sacrifi ce that year and focus instead on sacrifi cing the animal within. ‘We are living in the twenty fi rst century now’, reads the pamphlet.

Th is is a scientifi c age with no place for blind superstition and irratio- nality.… Th ere is no mention of sacrifi ce in the Vedas, Puranas or the Mahabharat. In fact, the Mahabharat says that only that which has ab- solutely no power to regenerate should be sacrifi ced. So let us instead sacrifi ce our inner animals—alcohol, thieving, gambling, smoking—and rid the Devhbhoomi of the sin of animal sacrifi ce’.43 In addition to dis- tributing educational literature, the Arya Samaj and Gayatri Pariwar in particular, have focused on raising awareness (jan jagrukta), going vil- lage to village with a view to convincing people that animal sacrifi ce goes against the basic tenets of Hinduism as outlined in its sacred texts. At panchayat ghars, hospitals and schools across Nainital and Almora districts, members of these organizations have delivered lectures pro- moting vegetarianism, and pleading with people to desist from bloody sacrifi ces even if they do consume meat.44 How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 219

A further strategy employed by the animal rights movement has been the organization of meetings with temple functionaries and district administrators prior to major festivals celebrated by sacrifi c- ing animals. In 2010, the PFA held a meeting with the Devidhura Temple Committee and the Champawat Zila Panchayat, at which it was agreed that the practice of animal sacrifi ce would be ‘discouraged’ from then on. Th e chairman of the Zila Panchayat went so far as to say the popular belief that local deities were pleased only by pashu- bali (animal sacrifi ce) was erroneous, and that they would be just as pleased with the sacrifi ce of a coconut.45 However, just a few weeks later, the temple committee made no attempts to stop the sacrifi ce of hundreds of goats and several buff aloes on the occasion of the annual Bagwal Mela in honour of Bairahi Devi. In response, the PFA fi led a police report against them citing their violation of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, Slaughter House Rules. Th is was the fi rst time in Kumaun’s history that a police report had been fi led against a tem- ple for allowing animal sacrifi ce, and the Devidhura Mela Committee reacted with fury, accusing the PFA of attacking ‘local religious beliefs that had been practiced since ancient times’. 46 A month later, the PFA fi led a second police report, this time against the Naina Devi Temple Committee in Nainital, which, like the Devidhura Temple Committee, had gone back on its word to stop animal sacrifi ce.47 In the immediate aft ermath of the police report, I spoke with Madan Mohan Dutt, an acquaintance who happens to be a member of the Ram Sevak Sabha, one of the institutions that are responsible for the organization of the Nanda Devi Ashtami Mela, who scoff ed at the PFA’s stand against animal sacrifi ce, saying simply that ‘plains people’ did not understand Pahari sentiments and beliefs. He said:

If we stop balidana , our rituals and traditions will soon die out, and there will be nothing called Pahari culture. Th ese misguided people’s at- tacks on animal sacrifi ce are an attack on our very roots (jad) , our very culture. Th e Mahabharat and the Puranas are nothing for us compared to the legends of Golu and Nanda, and it is belief in those which make us truly Paharis .

His words, echoing those of the Devidhura Temple Committee, were a vivid reminder of how much the battle over animal sacrifi ce 220 Shift ing Ground strikes at the heart of confl icts over what it means to be a Hindu in the Himalayas.

* * *

‘Our Faith Will Be the Weakest’: Sacrifi ce and an Islamic Other

Opponents of animal sacrifi ce in Uttarakhand, whether Hindu reform organizations or animal rights groups, have, at least thus far, based their challenge to this practice largely on neo-traditionalist read- ings and interpretations of the ancient texts and epics of Hinduism, especially the Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, and the Mahabharata. Th e objection to balidana is framed within a narrative that bemoans the corruption of Hinduism and the loss of Hindu morality. 48 Th is Brahminical Hinduism is rejected by those who base their support for animal sacrifi ce in a celebration of the cultural and ritual unique- ness of Pahari Hinduism, whether temple committees across the state or cultural regionalist organizations like the Gwal Sena. For these actors, the emphasis on Sanskrit texts produces a homogenized ver- sion of Hinduism that obliterates the regional distinctiveness of local beliefs and practices. A further point of contention between these two groups is the role of sacrifi ce in Islam. For instance, when asked by villagers why Muslims are allowed to sacrifi ce animals when Hindus are being attacked for the same, an animal rights activist responded saying ‘you can’t pervert Hinduism into a pale shadow of Islam. In any case, we are here to inform you about laws. Muslims have legal and religious sanction to kill. You do not’. 49 For Pahari cultural regionalists, the perceived distinction between how sacrifi ce in Islam and sacrifi ce in Hinduism are treated is impor- tant in their continued support for the practice of sacrifi ce. When the PFA fi led a police report against the Naina Devi temple in Nainital in 2010, Madan Mohan Dutt wondered aloud as to why it was always Hinduism and Hindus who were attacked fi rst. 50 ‘It’s not that I sup- port or oppose the practice’, he said to me, ‘but it’s a matter of belief’.

If you want to oppose the practice, why not start at the very root ( jad) . Butcher shops run by Muslims massacre animals 365 days in a year. How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 221

In fact, halal is incredibly cruel, they bleed an animal to death while it screams piteously. Here we worship the goat before killing it. Sacrifi ce is part of our Hindu tradition, but these Arya Samajis and PFA people are too busy demonstrating their secularism by criticizing the Hindu religion. Th e problem with us Hindus is that we’re afraid to show our strength.

Th e confl ict over animal sacrifi ce in Uttarakhand serves to illu- minate the nature of debates over Hindu identity, especially in rela- tion to Islam. For those who advocate a ban on balidana, purging Hinduism of practices that give off a whiff of Islam and returning it to the ideal state envisioned in Sanskrit texts like the Vedas, the Puranas, and the Upanishads is the only way to equip Hinduism to deal with the perceived threat of Islamist assertion. On the other hand, for cultural regionalists, a muscular Hinduism which embraces its diverse ritual heritage unashamedly is the only fi tting response to the growing strength and audacity of Islamist assertion. Either way, the disagreement over whether to end pashubali (animal sacrifi ce) or not is not so much about whether animals are entitled to certain basic rights, but over diff erent ways of being Hindu in the Himalayas. In addition, public debates over animal sacrifi ce in Uttarakhand are useful in revealing the ways in which people’s relationships with animals are inextricably bound up with ideas about their cultural, religious, political, and regional identities. What is striking is the ease with which diff erent groups involved in the confl ict are able to articulate a variety of diff erent and oft en mutually contradictory posi- tions that trouble the unity and coherence of categories like Hindu and non-Hindu, hill and plain, animal lover and animal killer. Th us, Pahari regionalists who vehemently oppose attempts to Sanskritize Himalayan Hinduism draw almost seamlessly on orthodox Hindutva doctrines when privileging their identity as Hindus against a robust Muslim other, just as Hindu nationalist groups like the Bajrang Dal, as distinct from like-minded formations, take a cultural regionalist stance that supports local ritual practices. Meanwhile, opponents of sacrifi ce oft en turn to scriptures to make a case against animal cruelty, whereas those who support the practice base its existence in local ideas about the unique nature of love between humans and domesti- cated animals, a love predicated in the mutuality of nourishment and 222 Shift ing Ground killing. What this confl ict over animal sacrifi ce draws attention to is the ongoing evolution of and challenges to these groups of categories that derive their meaning from the divergent ways in which they are deployed in contemporary discourse and practice in Uttarakhand.

Notes

1 . Ubiquitous across Uttarakhand, a jagar is a collective possession ritual whereby spirits and/or deities are called upon to appear in the bodies of human mediums (in cases where a medium is possessed by a deity , he/she acts as an oracle, and is known as a dangaria, devta ka ghoda (the deity’s horse), nachnewala (the one who dances), or simply as devta (god). Th e term jagar itself refers to the songs that induce the devi or devta (goddess or god) to possess the oracle. Jagars can be either public in nature, performed for a village deity for the benefi t of the entire village; or they can be personal, performed in the house of an individual, usually to cure illness or possession by an evil spirit, or to request the blessings of the household deity. See A. Fanger, ‘Th e Jagar: Spirit Possession Seance Among the Rajputs and Silpakars of Kumaon’, in Himalaya: Past and Present, ed. Maheshwar Joshi, Allan Fanger, and Charles Brown(Almora: Shree Almora Book Depot, 1990), pp. 173–91; C.M. Agrawal, Golu Devta: Th e God of Justice of Kumaun Himalayas (Almora: Shree Almora Book Depot, 1992); A. Alter, Dancing with Devtas: Drums, Power, and Possession in the Music of Garhwal, North India (Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2008); W. Sax, God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in the Central Himalayas (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009); S. Fiol, ‘Dual Framing: Locating Authenticities in the Music Videos of Himalayan Possession Rituals’ Ethnomusicology 54., no. 1 (2010): 28–53. 2 . Th e All World Gayatri Pariwar was set up by Pandit Shriram Shukla in 1953. One of Shukla’s lifelong tasks was the translation of the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, and other Hindu texts which were to serve as the model for a reformed society, free of misconceptions and supersti- tions based on misinterpretations of Hindu scriptures. 3 . Golu, also called Gwall, Goril, Goria, or Narsingh, is arguably the most popular village and household deity in Kumaun, an erstwhile Hindu kingdom and now the eastern division of Uttarakhand state. Despite diverging legends as to his origin and background, it is generally How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 223

believed that Golu was one of the Katyuri kings of Champawat, known for delivering justice to the oppressed. Even today, thousands of sup- plicants come to Golu temples across Kumaun with written petitions (manauti s ) requesting his advice and intervention on particularly fraught issues. Animal sacrifi ce is an integral part of rituals performed in honour of Golu Devta. In Chitai temple, hundreds of goats are sacri- fi ced regularly on Tuesdays and Saturdays, with the number rising dra- matically on festival days. See E.T. Atkinson, Th e Himalayan Gazetteer , vol. II (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2002). Badri Dutt Pande, History of Kumaun , vols. I and II, trans. C.M. Agrawal (Almora: Shree Almora Book Depot, 1993); C.M. Agrawal, Golu Devta: Th e God of Justice of Kumaun Himalaya , (Almora: Shree Almora Book Depot, 1992). Th e head, and sometimes a leg, is taken by the priest, while the rest is taken back to the village and consumed as prasad . 4 . In Pashubali: Hindu Dharm aur Vishwa Manavta par ek Kalank (Animal Sacrifi ce: A blot on Hindu Religion and World Humanity), an educa- tional booklet commissioned by the Gayatri Pariwar, it is argued that pashubali is the worst of the blots on Hinduism as it was originally envisioned by the gods and sages. ‘Th e killing of mute animals in the name of devis and devtas not only diminishes the glory of these gods but depicts them as hateful, crude low down murderers.… Th ose gods who drink the blood of helpless, innocent animals are not worthy of being called gods at all’. (Acharya Shriram Sharma, Pashubali: Hindu Dharm Avam Vishwa Manavta par ek Kalank (Mathura: Yug Nirman Yojana, Gayatri Tapobhumi, 2006), pp. 6–7. 5 . Devbhoomi , literally land of gods, is another name for Uttarakhand. 6 . Anoop Chandola describes the licking of the hot ladle as a test of faith. If the person undertaking the test is burnt, then it is a sign of the devta’s wrath. If the person does not suff er burns, then it is a sign of the sakti (power) of the devta who has possessed him. A. Chandola, ‘Symbolism and Myth in Garhwali Religion: Th e Hot Ladle Licking Ritual’, in Th e Himalayan Heritage , ed. M.K. Raha (Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1987), pp. 189–99. 7 . All names used in this article are aliases except in the case of well- known personalities. 8 . Interview on 14 June 2011. 9 . E.T. Atkinson, Th e Himalayan Gazetteer , vol. II (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2002), p. 815. 224 Shift ing Ground

10 . G. Berreman, Hindus of the Himalayas . (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 64. 11 . For more on the concept of cultural regionalism, see S. Fiol, ‘Dual Framing’, 2010. 12 . On how sociopolitical concerns constructed and engaged with the issue of human–animal relationships during the colonial period, see Divyabhanusinh, Saikia, and Hughes (this volume). 13 . Th e Chipko movement refers to the large-scale protests against logging by villagers in the region that is now known as Uttarakhand. For more on the Chipko movement, see R. Guha, Th e Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); H. Rangan, Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History (Verso, 2001). 14 . Guha, Unquiet Woods , 1989. 15 . Rangan, Myths and Movements , 2001, p. 20. 16 . Interview on 7 September 2010. 17 . Th e term gotra refers to exogamous kin groups who can trace their lineage back through an unbroken male line to a common male ancestor. Th e assumption is that all members of a single gotra, even if territorially dispersed, are related to one another through shared blood of a single male ancestor. 18 . Pande, History of Kumaun , 1993, p. 643. 19 . ‘End Animal Sacrifi ce in State, Students to CM’, Th e Tribune , Dehradun, 10 October 2010. 20 . Th is was a follow up to the 2008 public interest litigation fi led by the Gayatri Pragya Mandal (also part of the Gayatri Pariwar), which requested a ban on animal slaughter in the Devi Temple at Deoghat in Almora district. 21 . http://iyc.in/sns/pg/openforum/nareshkadyan/read/589523/pil-moved- ban-animal-sacrifi ce-in-all-hindus-temples-in-india-abhishek-kadyan- media-adviser-oipa-in-india (last accessed 4 May 2014). 22 . ‘HC directs Govt. to Allow Ritual Sacrifi ce only as Per Guidelines’, Daily Pioneer , Dehradun, Wednesday, 8 December 2010. 23 . ‘Rang layee prashasan ki muhim, nahi hui pashu bali’, Amar Ujala , Chamoli, 13 January 2011. 24 . ‘Chaitashtami par di gayee aath bhainson ki bali’, Dainik Jagran , Nainital, 12 April 2011. 25 . ‘Horses and sheep drag Maneka from House’, Th e Telegraph , Calcutta, 29 July 2010. How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 225

26 . For the classic account of the animal rights movement in the West, see Singer, 2002. 27 . In an article on Hindu nationalism, neo-traditionalism, and environmen- tal discourses in India, Emma Mawdsley argues that ‘neo-traditionalist theories of environmental history and contemporary environment– livelihood struggles have signifi cant parallels with Hindu nationalist readings of history and change’ (Mawdsley, 2006: 382). For more on Hindutva ideology, see C. Jaff relot, Th e Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst & Co, 1996); T.B. Hansen, Th e Saff ron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); S. Corbridge, ‘Th e Militarization of All Hindudom? Th e Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bomb and the Political Spaces of Hindu Nationalism’, Economy and Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 222–55; J. Zavos, Th e Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); R. Datta, ‘Hindu Nationalism or Pragmatic Party Politics? A Study of India’s Hindu Party’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (1999): 573–88; Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, and History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). 28 . Th is is, in no way, to suggest that these two conceptions of Hinduism are mutually exclusive or internally homogenous. People in the hills might worship Vishnu and Golu with equal fervour in their daily lives. However, in public debates over animal sacrifi ce in Uttarakhand, these two Hinduisms are presented as distinct monolithic entities opposed to one another. 29 . Th omas Blom Hansen, ‘Globalisation and Nationalist Imaginations: Hindutva’s Promise of Equality through Diff erence’, Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 10 (March 9, 1996): 603–5 and 607–16: 612. 30 . C.S. Adcock, ‘Sacred Cows and Secular History: Cow Protection Debates in Colonial North India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 30, no. 2 (2010): 297–311. 31 . It should be noted that while the Arya Samajists made a case for cow protection because of the material benefi t that the living cow would bring the nation, the cow, unlike other domestic animals, was seen as uniquely useful. More importantly, the cow was seen as the source of the development of Hindu dharma (Adcock, 2010: 309). 32 . G. Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, c. 1888–1917’ in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society , ed. R. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 226 Shift ing Ground

33 . Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow’; K. Prior, ‘Making History: Th e State’s Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North-West Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 179–203; A. Yang, ‘Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilisation in the “Anti-Cow Killing” Riot of 1893’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 4 (1980): 576–96; P. Robb, ‘Th e Challenge of Gau Mata: British Policy and Religious Change in India, 1880–1916’, Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 2 (1986): 285–319. 34 . Adcock, ‘Sacred Cows and Secular History’, 297–311; Charu Gupta, ‘Th e Icon of Mother in Late Colonial North India: “Bharat Mata”, “Matri Bhasha” and “Gau Mata”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36, no. 45 (10–16 November, 2001): 4291–9. 35 . Pande, History of Kumaun , p. 643. 36 . In the course of conversation with a priest at the Haat Kalika Mandir at Gangolihat, I was told that upper caste priests would lay claim to the head of the goat while lower castes associated with the temple would claim the head of the buff alo, seen as an impure, savage creature, pow- erful precisely because it was polluting, much like the Dalit himself/ herself. 37 . Interview with Dewan Ram, 14 April 2011, Punoli. 38 . Pande, History of Kumaun , p. 477. 39 . Th is was especially the case in Nainital and Almora districts of Kumaun where the nationalist movement and social reform programmes had a much wider organizational network than in other districts. 40 . ‘Chaitashtami par di gayee aath bhainson ki bali’, Dainik Jagran , Nainital, 12 April 2011. 41 . ‘Kali mandir me nahi chadhegi pashuon ki bali’, Amar Ujala, Champawat, Friday, 18 March 2011. 42 . I use the term movement to indicate the distinct nature of contemporary protest against the practice of balidana. Led by the PFA, protestors have been able to eff ectively use print and electronic media to mobilize larger numbers than ever before, mostly from the urban middle-classes, who disown such practices as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘unworthy’ of a developing state like Uttarakhand. What also distinguishes this new generation of protestors is its willingness to appeal to legislative action when concilia- tion and compromise fail. 43 . ‘Ma Nanda Devi mele ki shubhkamnayein’, Educational pamphlets dis- tributed by the Arya Samaj, Nainital. How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas 227

44 . ‘Arya Samaj Holds Drive against Animal Sacrifi ce’, Th e Tribune , Nainital, 20 August 2010. 45 . ‘No More Sacrifi ce at Bagwal Fair’, Th e Tribune , Pithoragarh, 21 August 2010. 46 . ‘FIR against animal sacrifi ce: Devidhura mela committee threatens to launch stir’, Th e Tribune , Dehradun 26 August 2010. 47 . ‘FIR fi led against Naina Devi Temple’, Th e Tribune , Dehradun, 24 September 2010. 48 . An online petition against animal sacrifi ce, circulated by a member of PFA Uttarakhand, states that ‘the most ancient of all religions, Hinduism, is woven around the thought that the supreme power, Th e Almighty, manifests itself in each life and the same soul resides in all living beings. A unique feature of Indian culture is its self rejuvenating capacity. Th e massacres at Kamakhya, Boonkhal, Mundeshwar, Champawat and many other parts of the country are a blot on our 5000 year old culture and tradition.… Help preserve the true cultural heritage and ethos of an ancient land’, http://www.myonlinepetition.com/petition/422/STOP+A nimal+Sacrifi ce+Save+India’s+Heritage// (accessed 6 November 2011). Th is petition is an apt example of the manner in which the issue of animal rights dovetails with discussions over the place of sacrifi ce in Hinduism and other religions. 49 . ‘It’s No Sacrifi ce’, Kathmandu Post, 24 August 2010, http://www.ekantipur. com/the-kathmandu-post/2010/08/24/oped/its-no-sacrifice/211963/ (accessed 4 June 2014). 50 . Interview with Madan Mohan Dutt, 30 September 2010. Logjam: Loss of Commons in 1 0 Mewas from 1930 Onwards*

VIKRAMADITYA THAKUR

Around the month of September in the middle of the kharif-sowing season, hundreds of families belonging to various subgroups of the Bhil tribe from the villages around the Narmada valley in Maharashtra leave their own land and move to the neighbouring districts of Gujarat to work as farm labourers on sugarcane and banana planta- tions for up to seven months. A few individuals stay back to take care of their own crops and of those that leave, and are paid in cash and

* I thank Anjan-da (Prof. Anjan Ghosh) who fi rst suggested I systemati- cally pursue the story of the deforestation, but did not live to see it in print. Th e constant support of the hundreds of villagers: fellow comrades from Nandurbar district who have hosted me for over a decade, too many to be named individually, made this research possible. I appreciate the help of my activist friends: Lok Sangharsh Morcha’s Pratibha-tai Shinde and Sanjay Mahajan, and comrade Kishore Dhamale. I thank the faculty of Centre for Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 229 other favours upon the return of the seasonal migrants. Th e exodus from the Satpura Hills involves entire families including children, who carry with them plastic sacks containing utensils and grains. Th ese families return in March just before Holi, the most important festival for the Bhil community. Th ough the phenomenon is quite old for the neighbouring areas of the district that are closer to the plains,1 the seasonal migration around the valley’s villages like Danel and Bamani is barely a decade old with the lake formed by the gigantic Sardar Sarovar dam in Gujarat acting as the waterway allowing for the movement of small diesel-operated boats to Kevadia colony situated next to the dam site. Th e waterway is the only means of transport for the area due to the absence of roads in the hills. Th e same people had ironically worked to cut down the forests around their hills for various timber merchants, who then transported huge logs from the hills to the plains. Th e Bhils had cut down the forest in the hope of securing rights to the land marking a decisive move towards settled agriculture roughly around the middle of the twentieth century. What was the reason behind this move and what had gone wrong now that they had to leave the same farms and work elsewhere? How had the timber merchants managed to clear entire forest in the remote hills despite the absence of roads? Th is chapter studies the transition of Bhils, in and around the Narmada valley, over the last century from a sustenance model based primarily on hunting and gathering along with subsistence farming to one based solely on settled agriculture. By showing that the hill-based communities underwent a drastic change in their livelihood model brought about not just by various political institutions governing them but also due to religious movements that arose within, it argues that modernity as a historical phenomenon

Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Ashish Chadha, James Scott, the editors of this volume and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the various draft s. I off er my special thanks to Sadan Jha for a close reading of the fi nal draft , Gopal-bhaiya for editorial help and Pallavi Das for help with secondary literature. I express my gratitude to my parents for their constant encouragement and funding my fi eldwork from 2003–7, Yale Agrarian Studies Department, Yale MacMillan Center and the American Institute of Indian Studies for funding my fi eldwork and archival research in 2010–11. 230 Shift ing Ground does not have space for traditional forms of survival strategies that were practised in the hills until very recently. Sudipta Kaviraj’s analysis of the discourse of state and society in India argues that a distinct logic of modernity was unleashed by the colonial rule in the subcontinent that was unprecedented in terms of its qualitative nature, scale, and impact. 2 Unlike the previ- ous regimes, it was marked by drastic institutional transformation, including economic and legal reforms. 3 An important portion of the social rearrangement undertaken included the process of peasanti- zation where the British rule, during the period of 1820–70, forced large groups of pastoralist and nomadic communities to settle down in one place and cultivate a given piece of land. 4 Th e chapter shows a similar development in an area that was under indirect colonial rule though the changes described take place during the late colonial and early post-colonial period. A crucial diff erence here is that the subjects themselves make decisive moves towards peasantization. Without ignoring the wider imperial context, this specifi c dimension of agency of subordinated groups in bringing about agro-ecological change in the colonial period and aft er needs careful study and emphasis. Th e study of the impact of colonial scientifi c forestry practices during the nineteenth and the fi rst half of the twentieth century has shown persuasively how large groups of people across the Indian sub- continent were deprived of access to their local resources including minor forest produce that formed a crucial part of their subsistence strategy.5 Th is created a deep sense of alienation among the locals whose organic relation with their natural environment was dam- aged. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the forest in numerous princely states and jagirdaris (land-holders of a certain ter- ritory bestowed by the ruler) of the subcontinent. Th e Bhils described earlier, belonging to six minor princely chieft aincies collectively called Mewas estates, were categorized as ‘aboriginal tribes’ during the colonial regime and are now part of Scheduled Tribes in the post- colonial period. To appreciate the changes being recounted below, it would be more useful to describe them as hill communities. Th is would help in analyzing their unique geographical habitat, marked by village faliya s (hamlets) sparsely spread across the hills, and live- lihood model, based on a mixture of hunting–gathering along with Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 231 subsistence agriculture—oft en a single crop of various coarse grains during monsoon—that is distinct from the neighbouring plains. Th e section below outlines the study area’s history from the early colonial period followed by the topography, fl ora, fauna, and the sub- sistence model in Mewas. Th e core of the chapter covers the period from 1920s to the present. It deals with the advent of peasantization in the late colonial period, marked by the changing attitude of the Mewasi chieft ains, religion-based social reforms among the Bhils, the subsequent deforestation, and the advent of hybrid varieties of crops during the early post-colonial period. Th e study is brought to the present, that is, the twenty-fi rst century, to show the impact of the changes in the last 100 years.

The Mewasi Chieftaincies

Th e focus of study here is an area identifi ed as Mewasi chieft aincies during the colonial period that lasted from 1818–1947. Mewas, a thickly forested part of Taloda taluka during the British rule, com- prised six petty estates ruled by chieft ains: Chikhli (locally called Gangtha), Kathi, Raisingpur, Singpur, Nala, and Nawalpur (locally called Sojnan). Th eir cumulative area was 1,463 square miles (see Table 10.1).6 Of these, Kathi on the eastern side was the largest and covered most of the hills as well as the Narmada valley. Moving towards the west, Raisingpur, situated in the foothills, and Chikhli, closer to the Tapi River on the plains, were equal in area while the rest were very small comprising a few villages each. Th ey were part of Khandesh district

Table 10.1 Mewas Estates in 19268

Estate Area in miles 1 Chikhali 200 2 Kathi 1000 3 Raisingpur 200 4 Singpur 20 5Nal 23 6 Nawapur 20 Total 1,463 232 Shift ing Ground in the Central Division of Bombay Province and got subsequently divided into smaller districts. 7 Th e estates were assimilated to form Akkalkuwa taluka of Dhule district in the post-colonial period, now part of the northern and western portions of Nandurbar district carved in 1998. Nandurbar is criss-crossed by the Tapi that cuts it across from east to west right in the centre while the northern and eastern portions are marked by the Satpura Hills and the Narmada River, forming its natural boundary with Gujarat. Th e terrain just north of the Tapi is marked by rich black soil in the plains that give way to the Satpura Hills, covering most of Akkalkuwa except in the southern portion. Khandesh district was largely depopulated owing to long interne- cine battles between the various Maratha sardars and overgrown with dense forest when the British took control in 1818 aft er defeating the Peshwa. 9 By 1852, the East India Company had established its fi rm control using military force and undertook the fi rst revenue survey. While the plains were taken over for direct rule, the hilly parts con- trolled by various Bhil chieft ains were left semi-independent under the supervision of political agents as part of various Bhil Agencies, with the Mewasi chieft aincies retaining formal control till the end of the colonial rule. Settled agriculture was vigorously pursued in the plains to maximize revenue and tillage was pushed right up to the Satpura Hills. 10 Th e plains witnessed the rise of a huge economy of cash crops, the fi rst being the cotton boom of 1850s that was primar- ily achieved through the settling of peasant castes including Gujars who migrated from Gujarat and took control of most of the farms.11 Politically, the district can thus be divided into two parts and the focus here is on the part that remained under the rule of the Bhil chieft ains. Besides agricultural expansion, the other important items of colonial revenue policy were timber and abkari, that is, excise duty on alcohol. To support their need for timber towards shipbuilding and later the expansion of railways, the colonial administration took over large parts of the forest in Khandesh under their direct control in several phases. Th e process began around the 1840s and reached its climax in 1901 with the demarcation of a large portion of western Khandesh as Reserved Forest. 12 Th e case of private estates and jagirdaris of western India diff ers in signifi cant ways from the Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 233 developments in the areas directly ruled by the British imperial administration.13 Th e local rulers were allowed to retain control over the forests in their respective areas.14 In Mewas as well, the chieft ains were ‘left free to dispose of their forest produce, export great quanti- ties, west to the coast, and east of Khandesh’.15

Hills’ Ecology and Economy

Mewas is inhabited by Bhils whose various subgroups are spread over the central uplands of the Indian peninsula, ranging from southern Rajasthan in the north down to the eastern districts of Gujarat, west- ern Madhya Pradesh in the east and Maharashtra in the south. In the six estates, the numerically superior subgroups of Bhils include Padwi, Tadwi, Vadwi, Vasave, Gavit, and Pawra. Within themselves, the common term jati is used for referring to each of these groups. Over fi ve diff erent dialects are spoken in the hills so the term Bhili would be used as the marker of language continuum. 16 Swidden, that is, shifting agriculture, the traditional mode of farming in large parts of the hill and forested regions of the Indian subcontinent, was systematically discouraged under the colonial forestry regime as it was perceived to cause damage to the growth of good quality timber. 17 Th e communities were instead granted alienable title to land made out in the name of men during the land settlements. Th e Bhils had earlier practised shift ing-agriculture by burning a part of the woods. Aft er two or three years, they would shift to a new area and let the soil used earlier regain its fertility. Given a vast forest area and sparse population, there was no scarcity of land. Th e Mewasi Bhils were able to persist with this mode of agriculture till very recent times. For example, in Kathi estate, samat (swidden in Noyri dialect spoken around the Narmada valley) continued till the 1960s in large parts of the hills before the forest ‘disappeared’.18 Besides rice, the crops grown during the kharip (monsoon agricul- tural season) were predominantly local varieties of coarse grains including jowari (Sorghum vulgare ), mor (Panicum miliaceum ), bauti ( Echinochloa frutmentacea), and nagli (Eleusine coracana ).19 Th ese were suited for the hills where water fl owed down and did not accu- mulate in the agricultural plot. Th e method of sowing in most cases 234 Shift ing Ground is through broadcasting. Some of these are still grown but the hybrid varieties of jowar and maize have mostly replaced them. Th e kharip crops, however, formed only a portion of the Mewasi Bhils’ diet. Th e colonial record gives a clue about this saying, ‘[T]he people live on wild fruits of the forest and are supported by the profi ts of wood-cutting’. 20 Th e Bhils relied heavily on a host of vegetables, roots, bulbs, and leaves of trees and shrubs that were boiled and con- sumed along with fruits that grew in various seasons in the forest and the numerous mountain rivulets. Even during the worst of droughts, they were assured of janglomayon kandu ( Costus spacious ), a bitter- tasting poisonous bulb that is kept under running water overnight for detoxifi cation, boiled, cut into thin wafers, and then consumed. Th is was a vital source of nutrition during late summer and early mon- soon when crops were not yet ripe. For surviving summer, mahua tree (Madhuca latifolia) was critical. In March, it bore fl owers that were distilled to make alcohol, a major source of nutrition and an important component for all life-cycle rituals of the Bhils from birth, when a few drops were touched to the infant’s lips, till death, where the dead was symbolically off ered the drink and others consumed it for his/her well-being in the next world. Tolambi fruit followed on the same tree and its oil was used as a cooking medium besides lighting earthen lamps. Th e Bhils also grew fruit trees like mango in large numbers. Th e deciduous forest of the hills had a number of species including haldu (Adina cardifolia ), tivas (Ooginia dalbergioides ), arjun ( Terminalia arjuna), and kalam (Mitragyna parvifolia) besides some of the best teak (Tectona grandis ) in India. Th ese were not merely sources of timber but also useful for general and medicinal purposes with various parts including bark and leaves being employed.21 Th ey were also sources of sik (wax), la-aa (gum), and madh (honey), col- lected for consumption and sale in the weekly market of Taloda in the plains. Th e forest also harboured a wide variety of fauna including mega carnivores like vagh (tiger) and sloth bear. Animals like chital or spotted deer ( Axis axis ), harin or sambhar (Survus unicolor ), and ranti dukkar (wild boar) were an important part of the Bhils’ diet. Th e close relation of the Bhils with their forest, its plants and animals, and indeed its wider ecological milieu was signifi cantly altered due to the processes unleashed by the colonial regime. Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 235

The Colonial Rajas

Traditionally, the tribal-based kingdoms played the double role of buff ers and mediators between the tribesmen and state systems as well as civilizations of the plains, and were seen as the representa- tives of the hill groups.22 Th e rulers were the leaders who led the people in the raids on the plains’ villages for cattle and grains, with the hills and the thick forest also serving as the retreat of the ‘aspirant chiefs’ seeking to extend their control in the plains.23 Th is process continued till the early colonial period when, for example, the ruler of Chikhli estate, Jiva Vasava ‘taking advantage of the turbulent times established his power over the surrounding district’.24 Th e colonial power, however, subjugated all the Mewasi chieft ains by forming Bhil Corps, an armed unit consisting of Bhils themselves, and by 1846, each of them had been subdued.25 Th eir periodic raids to the plains were stopped, yearly pensions granted instead, and their estate boundaries were clearly demarcated.26 Th ey were formally left with only the power to settle petty cases by imposing fi nes and whipping and maintain 10 to 15 irregular troops, who collected revenue and attended on the chiefs.27 Deprived of the larger political role they had played in the region and confi ned to their small estates, the chieft ains now turned upon their own subjects. From their original role as indigenous leaders of people heading tribal and caste associations of autonomous hill polities they increas- ingly became more and more exploitative as collectors of rents and veth (gratis) from the Bhils during the British rule.28 Interviews in several villages that were part of Kathi and Raisingpur informed of similar tales in the period from the 1920s—summary beating by the chieft ains and their men even for the most frivolous of reasons.29 Ramya Vadvi of village Bharadipadar described how he, as a teen- ager, was thrashed badly by the Raisingpur chieft ain for wearing ‘nice clothes’ even as he kept pleading ‘bas bahka’ (enough father)—Bhils of the area usually wore only a loin cloth called khoita around their waist.30 Supported by the feared Makranis like Abdul Rahman Beg, the chiefs were seen as aloof despots.31 Deprived of their periodic loot from the plains, the chieft ains did take steps to augment their revenue base. By 1924, they had enforced strict control on the cutting of trees by ordinary Bhils except for 236 Shift ing Ground personal use, claiming their exclusive right to the forest.32 S o m e of the employees were trained in forestry by the colonial regime and doubled as foresters. Another step taken by the rulers was to increase settled agriculture that gets mentioned in the records of the early twentieth century. A report by the karbhari (manager) of Kathi to the West Khandesh collector in 1930 confi rms that while the numerous bhauband s (a form of consanguineous kinship) and servants of the Kathi chieft ain enjoyed rent-free land, the rest all paid their dues to the estate under the autbandi tenure system.33 In autbandi— aut means plough in Marathi—around 10 to 12 acres of land was taken as a unit, determined by nazarbandi , that is, eye- estimation for a plough—oft en a symbolic unit rather than literally involving plough cultivation—and assessed at Rs 6 and 8 annas in Kathi. 34 Monetary transaction on a regular basis and the need to move beyond subsistence agriculture had thus made its foray in Mewas, albeit delayed from the neighbouring plains. As the daya s shared, they oft en paid the tax by selling increasing amounts of forest produce in the plains’ market while persisting with their traditional farming methods. Despite attempts and plans during the colonial and post-colonial periods, a complete survey of the Mewasi estates was never com- pleted.35 Th e karbhari’s report of 1930 confi rms a partial survey of lands that were not under autbandi and assessed at a higher rate.36 Th e survey was probably done in 1910 though it remained unpublished.37 Tadvis, most of whom had moved from Gujarat a few years earlier, were already practising settled agriculture. Th ey were given control of some of the best lands and ensured higher revenue for the chieft ains by growing a wide range of pulses that fetched good prices in the plains. Th e rulers also encouraged vermin eradication, recalled Bhana Tadvi, a shipai (foot soldier) for the Raisingpur chieft ain and a famous shikari (hunter) of Mewas who had killed a dozen tigers in his youth. 38 Around the 1920s, the rulers of Chikhli/Gangtha introduced Dadar ( Sorghum vulgare Pers. Graminacae), a rebbi (winter sowing season) crop that does not require irrigation. Dadar caught the fancy of entire Mewas, remaining the sole rebbi crop in the non-irrigated fi elds of Akkalkuwa and the adjoining areas till date, and is a major source of subsistence. All along, the chieft ains were the sole legal owners of the estates, leasing it to the tenants for 11-month periods for farming. Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 237

A crucial point that emerged from the testimonies of erstwhile rulers, the villagers of Mewas, and the forest contractors is that the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial rule was not abrupt. On paper, these principalities may have been absorbed in the Indian union but that did not bring about change in the power structure at the local level. It would be erroneous to assume that the feudal structure gave way to a new political order at the stroke of the mid- night on 14 August 1947 or to an egalitarian democratic society with the fi rst general elections of 1952. In fact, there was no signifi cant change as far as the internal organization of the estates is concerned aft er 1947. Th e chieft ains’ writ continued to hold sway. Absence of connectivity by roads till the end of the 1970s added to the remoteness of this hilly area. Changes were however taking place in the lives of the ordinary Bhils through other socio-cultural means from the colonial period itself.

Bhakti Cult and Peasantization

Religion has historically served as a powerful vehicle for social change among rural communities across the Indian subcontinent. Th is holds true for the hill communities of western India as well. In the adjacent plains of Nandurbar district’s Taloda and Shahada talukas, as well as the neighbouring area of Gujarat’s Surat district that were under direct British rule, colonial agrarian and excise policy from the middle of the nineteenth century had a huge detrimental impact on the Bhils as they lost large tracts of agricultural land to caste-Hindus. Th ose that benefi tted most from the land settlement of the colonial regime at their expense included the merchant caste of Vanis (Baniya) and peas- ant castes like Patels and Gujjars, as well as Parsi traders dealing in alcohol. 39 Th e major causes included the Bhils’ economic mode being quite self-suffi cient and based mostly on barter, and the absence of a regular revenue system in their areas till then. Hence, they were not adept at dealing with a monetized economy. Religion-based movements arose in the early twentieth century in various areas that stressed on changes in social practices and hygiene as the Bhils made a concerted attempt to adjust to the new socio-political situation brought about during the colonial rule. Devi movement during the early 1920s was a major social-reform 238 Shift ing Ground drive that took place among the Bhils mainly in the district of Surat wherein otherwise ordinary and normal people would get possessed by a Devi and then voice her commands to fellow tribe-folks, that included changes in the hygiene practices and boycott of Parsi mer- chants among other issues.40 About a decade and a half later, the plains of Taloda adjacent to the Mewas estates saw the dramatic rise of Gula maharaj (maharaj here means ascetic) and his Arti move- ment as part of a new sect called ‘Aap Mandal’ that began with a similar agenda. 41 Gula, an illiterate Bhil who worked as a cowherd for a caste-Hindu, started the Bhakti movement in his youth with its centre at village Morvad—renamed Ranjanpur by him—that was part of the British- ruled territory but had a great impact in Mewas estates too due to close proximity.42 Santoji maharaj, a caste-Hindu of Pandharpur, inculcated Gula in the Bhakti tradition but the latter’s drive took the form of a mass movement.43 Th e main feature of the campaign was the weekly arti held every Monday that began in1937 and was soon attracting thousands of followers who hailed Gula as ‘Gulam Bhagwan’. 44 He also gave a 10-point programme to his adherents that dealt with hygiene practices including daily bathes, vegetarianism, and prohibition along with emphasis on a patriarchal system simi- lar to the peasant castes in place of the relatively egalitarian gender equation among the Bhils. Th e movement’s objective was transform- ing the lives of Bhils who were disparagingly called bhiltya by the sha- hus , that is, caste-Hindus. In the words of Gula’s successor Ramdas, ‘As Sri Gulam [sic ] Maharaj introduced the practice of singing from 1937, whereby ignorant people became conscious of their progress and true religion’.45 Gula maharaj died soon thereaft er in 1938 and his brother Ramdas, with a more militant political agenda, antagonized the chieft ains, alarmed the British, and faced police repression.46 Th e movement declined subsequently but was followed by many other maharajs over the coming decades with a similar reform programme. If one examines the reform agenda of movements like the Devi or the Aap Mandal later vis-à-vis the changes in the Bhils of that time, a clear pattern emerges: the former weremost powerful in tribal areas of the plains that had been deforested and the Bhils were forced to change their way of life due to exploitation including debts, bond- age, and land-grabbing by peasant and merchant castes. Th e reforms Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 239 in the form of religious movements were for the transformation of the part-hunters, part-farmer Bhils and initiating the onset of peasantization along with social changes to empower the com- munity. Th ese very elements were at the centre of Gula maharaj’s cult too. Its tirade against liquor and eating of meat appeared rel- evant to the Bhils as they were now dealing with a property-based agriculture-centred life retreating from the forest-centred existence that they had led thus far. Gula’s infl uence has waned in the present but the older people still have a deep attachment to his teachings. Bokhya-daya, a septuagenarian from the village Bamani, part of the erstwhile Kathi estate, recalled in 2002, ‘Gulam Bhagwan taught us to use water, and not stone, to cleanse ourselves aft er defecation’. Th is was an important issue for the Bhils as it made them impure in the eyes of the caste-Hindus.47 Jacque Pouchepdass’ study of shift - ing cultivation in colonial India’s South Kanara district during the nineteenth and early twentieth century sums this process: in the for- est, the shift ing cultivator came to appear as the last remnant of an uncivilized past. 48

Post-colonial Logging

Studies dealing with deforestation in the erstwhile princely states have tended to take a simplistic stand that it was the work of the respective rulers.49 A vital issue is the inaction of the locals, Bhils in this case, in opposing the loss of their own resource base. As the developments above have shown dramatic transformation had taken place in the outlook of both the rulers and the ruled. Th is section reconstructs the process of deforestation in Mewas to show that the locals were willing participants—‘jhade kapayla maja vataychi ’, (we enjoyed cutting the trees) to quote Ajabsing of village Gorjabari, part of Raisingpur—in the process and had compelling reasons for doing so.50 In the undivided state of Bombay Province—bifurcated into Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960—the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Land Act, 1948, was introduced with the objective of providing land to the tiller … and enable the government to take over the management of the land that was kept fallow.51 In 1951, the Mewasi estates were merged to form the newly created taluka of Akkalkuwa.52 O c c u p a n c y 240 Shift ing Ground rights were to be conferred on inferior landholders and tenants from 1961.53 However, one of the chieft ains successfully challenged the validity of this regulation in the Bombay High Court and the mat- ter moved to the Supreme Court.54 By the time the Government of Maharashtra passed another ordinance in 1975 to acquire the forest of Mewas, it had been logged away by the timber merchants.55 A remarkable deforestation took place in a span of two decades during 1955–75. Th e government records show that the forest owned by the Mewasi chieft ains stood at 330,461 acres. 56 Th e fi gure is merely an indica- tion and the actual value may diff er. A consistent feature of Indian Forest Department statistics was their unreliability that stemmed from the extent of unrecorded felling. 57 Hence, oral accounts from varied sources become crucial. As one of the employees of Raisingpur shared, the reason for the Mewasi jungle being intact was the avail- ability of equally good forests in the plains obviating the need to log and transport trees from the hills. Th e Forest Department record, while referring to the acquisition process of the ‘private forests’ of the chieft ains, concurs: ‘Th ese [Mewas] forests are not to be acquired on the ground that this would be uneconomical’.58 However, once the state passed legislations for assimilating the princely chieft aincies, the rulers got alarmed and sold their entire forest to the timber merchants working in the region for lump sum payment. All the timber merchants of the region belonged to the various trading castes hailing from the plains. During the colonial period, the chief timber dealers [were] Muslims, settled mostly at Taloda and Nandurbar. 59 According to Habib Gani Memon, a timber mer- chant who logged the Raisingpur forests in the post-colonial period, the ones who operated in the area from the 1930s to 1975 included Manga Mohammed, Usman Kadu, Sheikh Adamji, Vedu Govinda, and Nadershah, followed by his sons; Nasarwan worked in Kathi and Habib Nathani operated in Navalpur from 1957–60. Nadershah, a Parsee, was a liquor merchant who later came into the timber busi- ness. Th e villagers of the chieft aincies came up with the same names: ‘Parshi seth (Nadershah) followed by his poyro (sons), Veda seth (Vedu Govinda), Piru seth (Pir Mohammed), followed by his overseer Habib seth (Habib Gani Memon)’. When tenders were fl oated for the logging of a particular section of the forest, they would go and bid for Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 241 it. Beginning from the early 1950s, however, logging did not remain confi ned to specifi c forest-coups. An interesting phenomenon pertaining to the region is the existence of numerous forest-based industries, a development that gathered momentum in the post-Independence period.60 One of them was Petco in south Gujarat that made carbon from charoli-kolsa (teak- fi red charcoal), the owners being one of the contractors working in Mewas. Others included Narmada Valley Chemical Industries, New Laxmi Chemical Works Limited, and West End Works.61 Th ere was a political nexus too: Habib Memon paid money to the Raisingpur chieft ain in 1973 for a fi ve-year logging contract but the forests were taken over by the government in 1975. However, he was back in busi- ness in 1978, cutting bamboo in the same forest. By his own admis- sion, he had been awarded that contract by Dilversing Padwi, hailing from one of the chieft ains’ families, member of the state legislature from that area and the forest minister in the state government at that time. Th us, numerous external infl uences ensured that the logging operation continued without much interruption. Th e timber and charcoal, baked in the hills, were taken to the depots situated in Nandurbar town and Netrang, Gujarat. While the teak-fi red charcoal was sold to Petco factory, the charcoal from other timber was supplied to cities for domestic-consumption. As a timber merchant shared, ‘It was sold to restaurants and households. Aft er all, people in villages won’t need charcoal to cook, right!’ Th e mode of transportation kept changing as the speed and scale of opera- tions increased. Banjaras, a nomadic community who have been the traditional supplier of goods and merchandise of all kinds in western India, moved the logs from the hills down to the depots in the plains initially using bullock-carts. Th e traders introduced mules and don- keys to transport the charcoal. A major change came in 1961 with the building of roads—they were not macadamized and practically rebuilt every year—right into the hills and trucks being introduced. A timber merchant said, ‘Th ere was bonus for the drivers who could drive the Mercedes trucks through the treacherous hills’. ‘Th at was the fi rst time we saw a truck: ‘that is called a dravher (driver), he uses that round device to move the big gaadi (vehicle) … and were amazed’, Ranchod Tadvi of village Ambabari in Raisingpur added. 62 Th ese developments came to the state’s notice as well: ‘Irregularities have been noticed in 242 Shift ing Ground the working of Raisingpur forests and the question of taking over these forests [by the government] has been fi nally decided’.63 Th e merchants’ scrambling was thus entirely justifi ed. Th e system of supervision by the government was practically non-existent. ‘As regards Kathi forest, services of one ranger has been lent to the Estate since 1956 … with a single ranger, enforcement is not possible’.64 For making the charcoal, labour was brought from other tribal areas that had witnessed deforestation earlier and the people from those areas were skilled in baking it. Kathode, a nomadic community, was brought from Th ane district, Maharashtra. 65 Th e knowledge and the ability to procure skilled labourers also refl ect on the proximity as well as links between timber merchants. Th e same set of merchants oft en worked in all these areas. For cutting the woods, local labour was used. In 1963, they were paid Rupee 1 for cutting wood the entire day. Women and men below the age of 16 were paid Rupee 0.60, the same wages which labourers brought from outside were given. A day consisted of over 12–14 hours of tough manual work. Later, as trees became scarce, it had to be procured from almost inaccessible ravines. Th e contractors introduced a new system around 1971–2: the Bhils got a lump sum amount of Rs 2 for getting a cartful of logs. Th e wages kept rising as the wood supply dwindled. Th e primary objective of the Bhils’ participation in the logging was to secure individual farming lands on the deforested area using the money they earned from the timber merchants. Th ey had been told by their respective chieft ains in the 1960s itself: ami dekhe maan raj salti oy (now my rule will be over), so you can have your own land by paying me. However, the rulers oft en did not keep their word despite being paid, and still claimed the right to the land contend- ing it to be forestland that was legally theirs till 1975. When in a few cases, one being Karsan Bechar Tadvi and 13 other appellants against Mansing Padvi, the ruler of Raisingpur, the illiterate villagers man- aged to appeal to the court of law claiming to have farmed the land in question for years, they were unable to prove their point for want of any documentary evidence.66 Except for a few Bhils in some villages that did get legal titles, most others kept waiting for the mamlatdar s (revenue surveyors) to visit their hamlets, conduct cadastral survey and confer land titles but they never turned up in the hills. Forest guards knocked on the Bhils’ doors instead. Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 243

Failure of Farming and Thereafter

The events after 1975 unfolded in a rapid succession that paints a picture of overall misery. With the formation of the Mewasi Van Vibhag (forest division), most of the Bhils of Mewas technically became encroachers in their own villages. Th e petty shipai (guard) of the faris khata (Forest Department) replaced the hegemony of the erstwhile chieft ains’ men. Th ey had to pay periodic bribes along with kukdi– bukdi (chicken and goats) and mohu horo (mahua liquor) to the shipais instead of the annual autbandi fees to the chieft ains, while the women bore harassment. New areas were tilled as population rose dramatically (see Table 10.2). Th ese too were technically under the Forest Department and the Bhils continued to pay fi nes but most of them never got any dand-pavti (penalty tickets) to prove later that they had illegally farmed the state’s forestland for years. Th is status quo was disturbed periodically—enforcement of the Indian Forest Conservation Act 1980 being a notable example—when the villages faced police attacks, arrests, and cutting of standing crops in an attempt to remove encroachment. But, in general, the Bhils of vari- ous villages were free to keep bringing new areas under cultivation through the negotiations of periodic bribes by their pudhari s (leaders) with the forest guards. In the words of Jatna Padvi, a septuagenarian, ‘We never owned any land as it fi rst belonged to the chieft ains and later the forest department’.

Table 10.2 Mewas Population Over Time67

Year Number of Villages Population 1901 217 14,639 1911 217 23,624 1921 217 28,580 1941 202 44,140 1951 198 58,561 1961 166 (Akkalkuwa taluka) 57,357 1971 173 (Akkalkuwa taluka) 78,707 1981 187 (Akkalkuwa taluka) 100,237 1991 185 (Akkalkuwa taluka) 133,880 244 Shift ing Ground

Almost the entire erstwhile chieft aincy of Chikhli/Gangtha, ceded to Gujarat during the bifurcation of Mumbai Province, got submerged in the large Ukai dam on the Tapi River around 1972 for providing year-round irrigation to southern Gujarat, particularly in the Surat district.68 Cash crops like sugarcane and banana plantations came up in the command area of the dam. Th e Bhils from Mewas as well as the neighbouring talukas of Taloda and Navapur started to move there en masse as seasonal migrants to work in these farms. Th ese talukas lacked alternative employment opportunities while the farms in Gujarat off ered the only means to earn money. Th ere is little change in the situation even today. Later, from the 1980s, as the urban parts of Gujarat expanded at a rapid rate, there was plenty of work as unskilled labourers on construction sites too. Th e money earned was brought back to survive during the summer months and for life-cycle rituals, including marriages. Th e situation was slightly diff erent for the inhabitants of Kathi estate, deeper in the hills, and the Narmada valley. Th ey were largely able to avoid this fate of seasonal migration for about another decade. Large-scale changes in the crop pattern, which came in the 1960s in parts of Mewas closer to the plains, reached here by the early 1970s. Punaji Vasave, one of the fi rst Bhils to complete matriculation from the area and now a retired schoolteacher, recollected that when he fi rst introduced habrid (hybrid jowar) in his father’s fi eld having learnt about it from the farmers in the plains, the others in the hills protested saying he is out to kill his bahka (father). On seeing the high yield for two successive years, the doubting Th omases took to the new breed. Th ey asked the teacher about the use and doses of pesticides, fertilizers, and discontinued growing the local varieties of jowar. 69 Th e hybrid variety of maize, shorter in size and able to withstand the strong winds in the hills, was another success. Khurchani (Sesamum indicum ), a major cash crop sold in the plains’ for money, was now given increased acreage while sayyabin (Glycine max ) is the latest addition in the last few years. Th rough the 1980s the intensifi cation of agriculture and the loss of forests started unravelling its impact. Th e small streams in the hills that used to fl ow most of the year dried up and the water table started falling dramatically. Th e subsistence model of farming earlier had ensured a greater degree of self-suffi ciency in terms of food grains along with fruits and roots from the forest to Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 245 sustain them. Despite the intensifi cation of agriculture the much larger population was fi nding it diffi cult to sustain itself with the for- est gone. Th e crisis deepened with every passing year. Th e attempt at farming the hills had neither brought them legal rights nor was it able to sustain them. It was around this time that the government started constructing the Sardar Sarovar dam that submerged the entire Narmada valley beginning from 1992. 70 Except for the Tadvis and a few others who occupied the fertile land next to the river and had legal rights to their farmland, most of those facing displacement by the dam did not have any documentary evidence to establish that they had been tilling the land presently under the Forest Department or earlier under the autbandi regime of the chieft ains.71 A ft er a sustained campaign, the state recognized the claims of those with no proof of having farmed the hills. 72 It set up fi ve Resettlement Colonies in the plains for the aff ected families. Th e fi rst all-weather road was constructed up to the hills to move them down beginning from 1989, in turn, giving a fi llip to seasonal migration from the villages deeper in the hills too. The taluka of Akkalkuwa as a whole witnesses huge seasonal migration every year for work in Gujarat’s plantations. Th e Sardar Sarovar dam provides a convenient and cheap mode of transport for those in the villages closer to the Narmada valley to move across to the neighbouring state. According to a rough estimate by the district administration, the fi gure of seasonal migrants from the district stood at about 100,000 people in 2010. 73 With the forest cover gone, the thin layer of topsoil gets washed in the dam making farming a more diffi cult proposition even for the rain-fed crops of kharif. In the absence of any systematic attempt to check this erosion on the part of the locals as well as non-governmental agencies working in the area and the state, the bare hills may be unable to yield even one crop in the coming decades.

* * *

For the hill community of Mewas chieft aincies the march towards modernity has been a treacherous climb. Th e transformation in the socio-economics of the area refl ects a complex amalgam of the state’s policies and decisions of the rulers along with initiatives by the 246 Shift ing Ground locals themselves using religion as a vehicle in an attempt to blend with those in the neighbouring plains. In the process they abandoned their traditional mode of subsistence that relied on a combination of shift ing agriculture along with forest produce making a vital contribu- tion, believing it to be ‘primitive’. Th e chieft ains who chose to exploit their own subjects short-changed them. Th e community simultane- ously suff ered the adverse impact of colonial rule that hemmed them in from all sides even as they were left untouched. Th e post-colonial regime that followed showed a consistently callous attitude for over six decades in its inability to save the forests through timely action and later failed to confer land rights to the hill villages. Th e Bhils nevertheless took inspiration from the changes in the region at large attempting to modify their way of life in tune with those in the plains beginning from the colonial period itself. Unfortunately, fast-growing numbers and a fragile ecology spoilt their quest to embrace moder- nity in the same manner as those around them in the plains. Th e developments in general that impacted Mewas also raise some bigger questions. One of these centres on how those in the plains view the hills and its people. For the former, Mewas was fi rst a cheap source of timber and charcoal, and later an area that could be sub- merged twice in span of two decades to support cash crop economy. Th e majority of the Bhils moved from being bhilati to being a cheap source of labour for the farms and the cities. Th e other issue relates to limitation of land availability and confl ict over the possibilities of its alternative utilization. Whether it is the case of Mewasi Bhils cutting their forest in search of land rights, Gujjar pastoralists pitted against tigers in north India’s Sariska Tiger Reserve shown by Shahabuddin or the dispute between competing sets of peasants on the one hand and Nepali herders on the other in north-eastern India that Saikia’s chapter describes, contesting claims over forest land have sharpened through the twentieth century. Given the limited availability of land, the present century would probably witness the worsening of hostility over its ownership and use in the coming years.

Notes

1 . Jan Breman, ‘Seasonal Migration and Co-operative Capitalism’, Economic and Political Weekly 13, no. 31–3 (1978): 1317–60, has studied this Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 247

phenomenon just aft er the completion of Ukai dam on the Tapi River that gave rise to the cash crop economy in south Gujarat. 2 . Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’, in Rethinking Third World Politics, ed. James Manor (New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 73–99. 3 . Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’. 4 . Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Creating a Colonial Peasantry: India and Java c. 1820–1880’, Itinerario 11, no. 1 (1987): 93–106. 5 . See Ramchandra Guha, ‘Forestry in British and Post British India’, Economic and Political Weekly , 18, no. 44, 1983: 1882–96, fi rst drew attention to this issue. 6 . Gazetteer of the Bombay Province, Khandesh District (henceforth GBPK ) lXII, 1880: 606–11. Raisingpur is referred as Gawhali in the 1880 gazetteer. 7 . Th e district was divided into East and West Khandesh in 1906 (GBPK- XII-B, 1926: i) and they were renamed Jalgoan and Dhule respectively in the post-colonial period. 8 . GBPK XII-B, 1926: 127. 9 . See Arvind M. Deshpande, John Briggs in Maharashtra: A Study of District Administration Under Early British Rule (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1987). 10 . GBPK XII, 1880: 297. 11 . See Suhas Paranjape, ‘Kulaks and Adivasis: Th e Formation of Classes in Maharashtra’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 13, no. 1 (1981): 2–20, for the Gujar–Bhil relations. 12 . Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 219–220; also David Hardiman, ‘Farming in the Forests: Th e Dangs 1830–1992’ in Village Voices, Forest Choices: Joint Forest Management in India, eds. Mark Poff enberg and Betsy McGean (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 101–31. 13 . Th e Dangs ruled by various Bhil chieft ains, situated on the west of the Mewasi estates, did witness large parts of the forest being taken over for commercial exploitation. See Skaria, Hybrid Histories , 1999; Hardiman, ‘Farming in the Forests’, 1996. 14 . See Sudarshan Iyengar, ‘Common Property Land Resources in Gujarat: Some Findings about their Size, Status and Use’, Economic and Political Weekly 24, no. 25 (1989): 464–97, A-72, A-74. 248 Shift ing Ground

15 . GBPK XII, 1880: 21. 16 . I am grateful to Ashwini Deo for helping resolve this linguistic conundrum. 17 . See Skaria, Hybrid Histories , p. 201. 18 . Jalpa Padvi, village Bamani, 19/12/2010 and Nurji Padvi, village Danel, 18/09/2010. ‘Tillage is carried on partly by the plough and partly by the wood-ash tillage, locally known as jamti ’, (GBPK XII, 1880: 607). 19 . I thank Madhukar Patil for providing the botanical names. 20 . GBPK , XII-B 1914: 226. 21 . I thank Nishikant Jadhav for providing the botanical names. 22 . Surajit Sinha, Tribal Polities and State Systems in Pre-Colonial Eastern and North Eastern India (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1987). 23 . Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India: 1200–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 44. 24 . GBPK XII, 1880: 608; also see Sumit Guha, ‘Forest Polities and Agrarian Empires: Th e Khandesh Bhils, c. 1700–1850’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 33, no. 2 (1986): 133–53. 25 . GBPK XII, 1880: 259–60. 26 . GBPK XII, 1880: 606–11. 27 . GBPK XII, 1880: 4, 21. 28 . Sinha, 1987: xx, based on extensive fi eldwork in eastern India, has made a similar point using the term corvee [gratis]. 29 . Besides the employees of the various chieft ains, villagers from Danel, Bamani, Bardi, and Dab-Dahel of Kathi estate and Ambabari, Raisingpur, Bharadipadar, and Andharbari of Raisingpur estates were interviewed in 2002–3 and 2007–11. Th e old men, called daya in Bhili, were interviewed individually or in groups. Given the absence of registration of births, near total illiteracy, and unfamiliarity with the Gregorian calendar, it is impossible to determine their exact ages. Most of them claimed they were of the time when the silver coinage was in circulation and had been used to pay the bride price during their vehval (marriage). Silver coins of George VI series were issued and in circulation till 1940. (Personal correspondence with Amiteshwar Jha, Indian Institute of Research in Numismatic Studies, Nasik). 30 . ‘Th e hill Bhil has seldom any clothing but a piece of cloth round his loins …’ (GBPK XII, 1880: 84). 31 . Afghan mercenaries, rampant in the region during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Skaria, Hybrid Histories, p. 129), were employed Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 249

by the chieft ains. Beg, an octogenarian when I met him in 2003, was a hawaldar (constable) of Raisingpur. 32 . Kathi Estate Proclamation of 1924 stating that cutting of trees without prior permission was a punishable off ence. Copy of the Marathi docu- ment provided by Ghulam Hussain Makrani, who served Kathi and Raisingpur following his father Rahmat Kadu; all Marathi translations are mine. 33 . Nandurbar District Record Room (henceforth NDRR), revenue depart- ment fi le no. MRD 16/30. Autbandi villages were common in other parts of Khandesh too. See GBPK XII 1880: 292. 34 . Maharashtra State Archives (henceforth MSA), File no. R 5387, Original Settlement of the Akrani Mahal of the West Khandesh District, 1930, Bombay Selections (Old Series). 35 . District Census Handbook (henceforth DCH): Dhule district 1965: 4. 36 . NDRR, revenue department File no. MRD 16; Akrani Settlement Survey 1930. 37 . S.D. Kulkarni, ‘Laws and the Adivasi: Story of the Peasants of Akkalkuwa’, Economic and Political Weekly 10, no. 35 (1974): 974. 38 . Interviewed on 30/12/2002. He performed the barma (twelft h) ritual to appease vagh dev (tiger spirit, considered divine by the Bhils) to atone for his sins. 39 . See Paranjape, ‘Kulaks and Adivasis’ for the impact of peasant castes on the Bhils; David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 40 . David Hardiman, Th e Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 41 . Shankar Vinayak Th akar, Gula Maharaj (Pune: Adivasi Vikas Pratishthan, 1937); book in Marathi. 42 . MSA, Home Special fi le no. 982 mentions his name as Gula Bhamla. Several pages are partially torn including the one about ‘prominent local citizens including Mehwasi [sic ] chieft ains for banning Arti’. 43 . Dattu Jatu Padvi, village Navagoan, 07/07/2007. 44 . Th akar, 1937: 13. He mentions that in an arti attended by him on 8/8/1938, about twenty thousand people were present (p. 22). 45 . Ramdas’ statement was recorded aft er his arrested in 1941 along with 12 other followers including Dattu Jatru Padvi (MSA, Home Special, fi le 982). 46 . Padvi (MSA, Home Specia, fi le 982). Th e entire movement is a complex issue that needs a separate study. 250 Shift ing Ground

47 . G.S. Aurora, Tribe-Caste Encounters: Some Aspects of Folk-Urban Relations in Alirajpur Tehsil (Hyderabad: Administrative Staff College, 1972), p. 159. 48 . Jacques Pouchepadass, ‘British Attitude Towards Shift ing Cultivation in Colonial South India: A Case Study of South Canara District 1800–1920’, in Nature, Culture and Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia , eds. David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 148. 49 . K.P. Sagreiya, Forests and Forestry (Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 1994); see Iyengar, ‘Common Property Land Resources’, 1989. 50. Besides the villagers mentioned earlier, interviews were conducted separately with two timber merchants who worked in the area during 1958–78, their employees, erstwhile chieft ains and their servants in 2002–3. 51 . R.V. Bhuskute, ‘Overview of Land Reforms in Maharashtra’, in Land Reform in India Volume 8: Performance of Gujarat and Maharashtra, eds. G. Shah and D.C. Sah (New Delhi: Sage, 2002), p. 48. 52 . Govind Gare, Satpudyatil Bhill (Aurangabad: Amrut Prakashan, 1997), pp. 82–3; book in Marathi. 53 . Th e West Khandesh Mehwassi Estates (Proprietary Rights Abolition, etc.) Regulation, 1961, Law and Judicial Department, Government of Maharashtra (henceforth, LJD, GoM). 54 . NDRR, Tenancy case no. 39/74. For details of the complexity of the tenancy issue, the attitude of the former chieft ains and state personnel see Vasudha Dhagamwar, Role and Image of Law in India: Th e Tribal Experience (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), pp. 221–40. 55 . Th e Maharashtra Private Forests (Acquisition) Act, 1975, LJD, GoM. 56 . Th e Annual Administration Report of Maharashtra—Forests, 1959–60: 74. 57 . Guha, ‘Forestry in British and Post British India’, p. 1888. 58 . Th e Annual Administration Report of Maharashtra—Forests, 1959–60: 73. 59 . GBPK XII 1880: 22. 60 . Guha, ‘Forestry in British and Post British India’, p. 1890. 61 . Th e Annual Administration Report of Maharashtra—Forests, 1955–6: 3, 28. 62 . I saw the remains of those roads while trekking the hills as a political activist in 2001. On enquiring about its origins, I heard the story of the logging for the fi rst time. 63 . Th e Annual Administration Report of Maharashtra-Forests, 1959–60: 75. 64 . Annual Adminitration Report of Maharashtra-Forests: 74. Logjam: Loss of Commons in Mewas from 1930 Onwards 251

65 . Sachchidanand, ‘Tribal Studies’ in ICSSR Survey of Research in Sociology and Social-Anthropology 1969–79 Vol. 1, ed. S.C. Dube (New Delhi: Satavahan, 1985), p. 83; Kathode specialize in occupations such as cutting bamboo and felling trees, and are considered by Bhils to be inferior. 66 . NDRR, tenancy case no. TNC 6/74. 67 . Figures for 1901 and 1911 from GBPK XII-B, 1914: 61; for 1921 from GBPK XII-B, 1926: 127; 1941 from Village Handbook West Khandesh district: 35; 1951 from West Khandesh DCH: 5; 1961 from DCH Dhule: 3, 18–19; 1971 from DCH Dhule: 54–55; 1981 from DCH: 18; 1991 from DCH Dhule: 19. 68 . DCH, Dhule 1960: 2. 37 villages from Akkalkuwa merged with Gujarat, (Marathi edition). 69 . Conversation recorded on 4 October 2011, Kanjani pada, village Molgi. 70 . Narmada Vikas Vibhag, Government of Maharashtra data. 71 . NDRR, Sardar Sarovar Project Land Acquisition, village Manibeli; vil- lage Chimalkhedi, fi le no. LAQSR-N-4/80. 72 . Ranjit Dwivedi, ‘Resisting Dams and “Development”: Contemporary Signifi cance of the Campaign against the Narmada Projects in India’, European Journal of Development Research 10, no. 2 (1998): 135–83. 73 . Figure provided by the deputy collector, Nandurbar district, heading the Employment Guarantee Scheme of the Maharashtra Government (9 August 2011). Journalists and social activists of the district claimed the actual fi gure is several times higher though no one had a defi nite n u m b e r . Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and 1 1 the Response * Reclaiming the Wilderness in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan

GHAZALA SHAHABUDDIN

Globally, the wildlife conservation establishment has been led by a strong belief that the creation of people-free wildernesses, such as National Parks, is really the best if not the only viable way to signifi - cantly control biodiversity loss.1 In this perspective, while the weak- nesses of state governance institutions are recognized, policing of ecosystems and their strict protection from local use gets the most importance and attention.2 E ff orts to develop modes of sustainable extraction are thought of as being misguided and impractical. 3 S u c h a worldview, still dominant over most of the developing world, has little place for traditional knowledge, or local participation as pos- sible tools of improving Protected Area management.4 Th is view,

* Th is essay is adapted from the fi rst chapter of my book Conservation at the Crossroads: Science, Society and the Future of India’s Wildlife published by New India Foundation and Permanent Black in 2010. Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 253 is however, countered by the other extreme position that emphasizes the role and importance of ecosystem-dependent people in biodiver- sity conservation. 5 In particular, the political ecologist emphasizes the exclusion of people from natural resources and the colonial subversion of the ‘conservation agenda’, which is, in many cases, perpetuated by the current wildlife establishment.6 Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (this volume) also point to the recent debates on exclusivist ideas involving displacement and restriction of forest access particularly in the context of emerging and strengthening democratic practice in the global South. Th ey have shown how fi eld-based ecology, environ- mental history, and socio-economic analysis in and around Protected Areas have led to a far more nuanced understanding of (and possibly less confl ictual approaches to) complex conservation issues. An examination of how science is used or abused in the service of conservation is central to this debate, though not oft en recognized as such. Th e constituency of biologists has been perceived to have traditionally supported authoritarian management by the Forest Department.7 Science is oft en used to suit the ends of exclusivist con- servation and for supporting preconceived management agendas of forest managers.8 However, some recent experiences indicate that it is possible for ecological sciences to strengthen equitable conservation, when it is socially sensitive and when local perceptions and informa- tion are given as much importance as externally generated ‘expert’ knowledge. 9 Furthermore, long-term scientifi c knowledge of ecologi- cal dynamics, has the potential to become an instrument of inclusion rather than exclusion, if a holistic approach is taken.10 Th e role of science in conservation and politics is fi ercely debated, yet critiques of contemporary conservation rarely explore the role of scientists, who play a dominant role along with the other actors—the government and the governed. Field studies are particularly rare in this context. Th is chapter is principally an attempt to explore the debate on sci- ence and conservation, that is, the linkages among nature, scientifi c knowledge and power, and their interaction to produce conservation policy in India. I do this through an analysis of conservation in prac- tice spanning over several decades. Sariska Tiger Reserve in the state of Rajasthan is the canvas and the Bengal tiger is central in the rich cast of characters that inhabit it. Using a historical brush, I attempt to explore how conservation policies are formulated and translated from 254 Shift ing Ground the drawing board to the fi eld. What has been the role of biologists and science, governments and civil society? Who, really, are the play- ers—visible and invisible—in contemporary conservation?

‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response

The local extinction of the Bengal tiger from the Sariska Tiger Reserve,11 located in Rajasthan, India, in February 2005 made news paper headlines more prominently than any other happening related to wildlife in post-Independence India.12 Biologists, wildlife- lovers, social activists, and the public were united in their shock and indignation. Aft er all, the tiger has been the prime fl agship species for conservation in India since the 1970s when Project Tiger was initiated. 13 In the aft ermath of this revelation, most commentators attributed the tiger’s local extinction in Sariska to poaching. 14 However, biolo- gists familiar with Sariska maintained that the tiger had been bound to disappear sooner or later, given the visible degradation of forests in the Reserve and the fact that the tiger population had reached an all-time low at the time. 15 Th e failure of the Reserve in other ways was also obvious: the local people had, over the years, largely been alienated from the cause of tiger conservation. Th ey had probably ignored or worse, abetted, in the poaching of the last-remaining cats. Th us, for many conservationists, this event was just a dramatic mani- festation of the overall failure of India’s Protected Area network rather than simply a law enforcement issue. As the eventful year of 2005 wore on, the State Forest Department of Rajasthan took steps to increase armed protection of the Reserve using paramilitary and police forces.16 Since commercial poaching was thought to be the primary cause behind the disappearance of the tiger, villagers suspected to be part of the tiger-poaching ring were arrested.17 Soon aft er, in July 2005, a three-year-old dormant plan for vil- lage relocation was revived by the Reserve managers, proposing to move out all of the 27 villages located in Sariska. Coming close on the heels of the news of tiger disappearance, the obvious assumption was that the local residents were the primary cause of Sariska’s mani- fest failure as a Tiger Reserve. Th e relocation package was critiqued Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 255 by conservationists, as it was riddled with problems, not the least being the lack of fi nancial allocation for irrigation and or of avail- ability of fuelwood in the new site. 18 However, the Reserve managers indicated their eagerness to push ahead with this plan. To further explore the causes for the ‘tiger crisis’, the Indian gov- ernment set up an expert panel, the Tiger Task Force (TTF). In July 2005, the Task Force suggested a far more rational and equitable approach to resolve this crisis.19 It advocated planning carefully for habitat improvement in each Tiger Reserve, based on scientifi c studies of habitats, including possibilities for controlled extraction of forest products by locals. It also emphasized improvement of park–people relations through various schemes, without which tiger conservation appeared doomed. Th e response to the TTF report was lukewarm. Poaching, seen as the primary cause for the tiger extermination from Sariska and other Tiger Reserves, became the principal target for longer-term action. Th e National Tiger Conservation Authority was set up in New Delhi, which heavily delegated powers to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests to make decisions on management issues related to Tiger Reserves. 20 In November 2006, legal amendments to the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 were passed in Parliament, increasing punish- ment for poaching. In July 2007, fresh fi nancial provisions were made to establish an elite Tiger Protection Force, comprising ex-servicemen that would be active around Tiger Reserves. 21 In November 2005, another important recommendation of the TTF was taken up for action: a mammoth proposal to re-census the tiger all over the country with the aim of establishing more accurate numbers. One of the failings in Reserve management had been thought to be the pugmark-based technique, which had long been widely criticized as leading to over-reporting of tiger numbers in Tiger Reserves and which was likely to have obscured declining tiger numbers.22 During the proposed new census of tigers, the pugmark method was to be fi nally phased out and replaced by an apparently rigorous process involving intensive camera-trapping. During 2005, a rather bold governmental decision had been pub- licly announced: to reintroduce tigers in Sariska as soon as possible.23 Th e Wildlife Institute recommended shift ing adult tigers from the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve located approximately 200 kilometres 256 Shift ing Ground away, and carried out a feasibility study in 2007. However, the reintroduction of tigers without the necessary improvements in Reserve management seemed doomed to failure. Th e viable habitat for tigers within the Reserve was 70 square kilometres at the most, because one had to discount the large areas degraded by forest over-exploitation within the Core Area I. Such a small area confi ned to the centrally located Sariska valley was unlikely to maintain a signifi cant tiger pop- ulation for too long, although it did harbour artifi cially high densities of ungulates. In the meantime, the Reserve managers pressed ahead with the relocation plan for the villages located inside the core area. Relocation began in September 2007 with the small village of Bhagani, com- prising 20 households, being moved out to a de-notifi ed forest site 70 kilometres away from the Reserve. Th us, since the disappearance of the tiger from Sariska in 2005, the government acted in uncharacteristic haste to implement a few of the many recommendations that the Tiger Task Force made in July 2005. Th e recommendations it chose to implement were mainly related to the deployment of additional protection forces against poachers,24 creation of a department specializing in wildlife crime, displacement of villagers, and the fresh estimation of the number of tigers. Th e lack of initiation of activities related to the improvement of park–people relations seemed certain to stymie any future attempts at biological conservation. To study the underlying processes in detail, it is neces- sary to make a foray into the history of Reserve management as well as that of its people and its wildlife. 25

Diversity at the Edge of the Desert

Nestled in the ancient Aravalli Hills, the Sariska Tiger Reserve has been an important area for conservation of the Bengal tiger in Rajasthan in post-Independence India.26 While the Reserve is located near the edge of the historical tiger range in India 27, Sariska has the potential for sustaining a high density of tigers, being similar in habitat to the better-known Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve. 28 Favourableness of the habitat for the tiger in this semi-arid terrain is at least partially attri- butable to anthropogenic modifi cations over the last century such as creation of waterholes. Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 257

The Reserve harbours a high diversity of plants and animals that are all uniquely adapted to the extremes of temperature and drought conditions experienced in this semi-arid part of north- western India. 29 Th e most widespread forest type in Sariska is dry deciduous, 30 dominated by trees of dhok (Anogeissuspendula ), salai ( Boswelliaserrata ), gular (Ficusinfectoria ), khair (Acacia catechu ), and palash (Buteamonosperma ). Along with tigers, smaller carnivores such as leopard (Pantherapardus ) and jungle cat (Felischaus ) were commonly seen in Sariska.31 Th e rich mammalian diversity in this semi-arid Reserve, despite the low rainfall conditions and extreme temperatures, is at least partly attributable to the presence of several permanent springs. 32 Sariska is rich in bird species too, rivalling many of the other Tiger Reserves in India. 33 Current-day Sariska Tiger Reserve and its surroundings comprised a game reserve for the Maharajah Jaisingh of Alwar since the early twentieth century. Th e Rajputs have historically been avid game hunters. In contrast to southern parts of the Aravallis in Mewar and Marwar, where the hunting of the male wild boar oft en took primacy over even tiger shooting due to the greater risk involved, the Alwar area saw frequent tiger hunts (Hughes, this volume). Th ere are avail- able photographs of the Maharajah with a dead tiger, surrounded by as many as a hundred game beaters, testifying to the grand scale of hunting operations in this part of the Aravallis. During this period, while there was closure of portions for grazing and wood-cutting, parts of the central valley were opened for com- mercial sale of forest produce in order to raise state revenues. 34 Th e astronomical revenues collected by the princely state prove the economic signifi cance of the area during Alwar State.35 Sariska was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary with an area of 492 square kilometres on 18 September 1958 on the recommendatory report of the well-known naturalist Dharmakumarsinhji. 36 However, there was no process of settlement of rights of local residents, which is required for the formal establishment of Reserved Forests or Wildlife Sanctuaries. Th e villages and cattle-camps, which were scantily popu- lated at the time, continued to remain inside even aft er sanctuary notifi cation. In the 1960s, measures were taken to shift out cattle camps, referred to as guadas by the Forest Department, between 1966–7 258 Shift ing Ground from Kalighati and Slopka, today part of the core area. Later, village relocation from the Reserve took a more organized form when the department attempted to move two villages, Karnakawas and Kiraska, during 1976–7, in which it was not very successful. In 1979, Sariska was offi cially declared a Project Tiger Reserve with a total area of 866 square kilometres. Th e years 1980–2 proved to be the beginning of an era of rapidly tightening controls on forest use by local people. Th e intention to declare a part of the Core Zone of Sariska Tiger Reserve as a National Park was issued in 1982. Following this, in 1987, the Forest Department issued a statement declaring as illegal all activities related to forest use and agriculture by locals. As a result, people were left with mainly informal rights of forest use, which are utilized at the discretion of the forest guards. Sariska today refers to the Tiger Reserve of 866 square kilometres. Th e core area of the Reserve itself is divided into three parts: Core Area I, II, and III covering areas, respectively, of 400.14 square kilo- metres, 126.50 square kilometres, and 97.50 square kilometres which are not continuous with each other. Additionally, the buff er area of the Reserve covers 241.86 square kilometres. While the declared buff er zone today has 16 villages, the core area harboured 11 in 2005.

The People and their Economy

Inside the core area37 of Sariska, the villages tend to be rather small, having between 15 to 100 households. All the villages in the core area are inhabited primarily by Gujjars (87 per cent) who belong to the category of Other Backward Classes (OBC) but demand re- classifi cation as a Scheduled Tribe. 38 Gujjars are traditionally associ- ated with pastoralism and dairy activities. Since the declaration of the Wildlife Sanctuary, the villagers have faced an uncertain existence full of hardships. Since the declaration of Sariska as a wildlife sanctuary, all develop- mental activity such as building of permanent structures, including roads and wells, had been halted. Villagers need to walk anywhere between 2 to 14 kilometres to reach a bus-stop, that too over fairly rough terrain, from where they can get transport to local health cen- tres, schools or markets. Our surveys in 2005 revealed that the average literacy rate among the local people was a poor 32 per cent. 39 M a n y o f Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 259 the villagers do not have access to potable water for most of the year. Without exception, people are completely dependent on fuelwood, collected from the forest, for cooking. Th e Sariska villagers depend heavily on forests for grazing their livestock which are their main source of income. Several people, however, additionally engage in daily wage labour in and out of the Reserve. People in only a few villages had agricultural land within the boundaries of the core area. People possess buff aloes, cows, and goats, having small holdings of 10 to 20 animals per household. 40 Th e economic status and degree of indebtedness of the majority of households entails a high dependence upon quantum of rain each year that, in turn, determines the quality and quantity of green fod- der available. While livestock loss to leopards and tigers (up to 2004) were commonly reported inside the core area, there are indications that these losses are very much a part of the calculations in a Gujjar’s grazing economy. Rough estimates during 2004–5 indicate that up to 33 per cent of households reported livestock loss to large carnivores in the villages of the core area, although the proportion of livestock lost was reported to be low, near 1–2 per cent. Th e average annual income of a household is Rs 48,175 for a fam- ily of six members. However, a large share of this is spent on com- mercial cattle feed (about Rs 18,000 annually). Our surveys revealed that about 50 per cent of household expenditure was calculated to be on food, 21 per cent on commercial fodder, 11 per cent on farm fodder, and 16 per cent on medical care. Th us, the economy of the average household is quite precariously balanced, subject to complete devastation in the event of natural disasters such as drought. Supplies for livestock and household consumption are oft en bought on credit, paid back with the advent of the monsoon when milk sales typically go up. Due to increasingly frequent droughts, the level of indebted- ness is extremely high. Our interviews with local people revealed a high degree of dis- content about livelihood opportunities. Many people believed that the area has suff ered a steep decline in average rainfall 41 d u r i n g the last 10 years that has resulted in severe decline in forest fodder availability. Many believe that other employment opportunities that were available locally in the past have also declined. For instance, the employment off ered by the Forest Department such as in road works 260 Shift ing Ground and weed eradication is also limited.42 While there was a steep rise in tourism activities in the Reserve from 1990 to 2005, local villagers have benefi ted only marginally.

Discourses around Degradation

For several years now, ever since ecological research began in Sariska, biologists have been concerned about habitat degradation, particu- larly the impact of intensive biomass extraction such as fi rewood and fodder collection and livestock-grazing. 43 Severe lack of tree regen- eration was noted in Sariska almost 19 years ago. By 2004, tigers had become quite uncommon according to both biologists’ and villagers’ accounts. According to biologists, no more than 10 adult tigers survived in the remaining fragment of forest habi- tat in Sariska in 1997.44 During 2004, at the end of which the reports of the tiger’s extinction were brought to light, the number was likely to be much lower, possibly seven or eight, and the viable habitat reduced to as little as 20 per cent of the Core Area I of 400 square kilometres ( personal observation ). While there was agreement across the board regarding the trends in biodiversity loss, its causes were far more debatable. Th e documents of the Forest Department reveal a strong conviction that biodiversity decline in Sariska is solely because of forest resource extraction by local villagers. 45 My ecological research since 2003 corroborates such visual evidence that intensive biomass extraction has caused signifi cant changes in forest vegetation structure and species com- position. 46 Th ere has been an observed shift ing of tree height-classes and girth-classes towards lower values due to extraction—large trees are rarely seen. Further, tree species that are not preferred for fodder, such as Balanites aegyptiaca , have increased in density around the forests surrounding villages. A number of exotic invasive species have become common in the livestock-grazed areas of the Reserve such as the annual herb chakunda (Cassia tora ). In a related study on the bird communities of Sariska during 2003 to 2005, we have found that intensive human use was beginning to aff ect avian diversity as well.47 Yet, there are also persistent signatures of historic anthropogenic change in fl ora and fauna in Sariska that cannot be attributed solely to current forest dependencies. Morrison (this volume) has emphasized Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 261 the important role of environmental history in understanding vegetation change and its imprint upon the present landscape. Recent studies have cast serious doubt on ideas of pristine nature as in the case of ‘deforestation’ of the Gangetic Plains as a result of human settlement (Morrison, this volume). While systematic studies have not been carried out on vegetation history in Sariska, there is much evidence of persistent eff ects of past timber extraction and other state-sponsored commercial activities during the past century, all of which have contributed to loss of tree species diversity and grow- ing abundance of invasives. However, such historical imprints have regularly been ignored by the forest managers who continue to solely blame current forest dependencies for the current degraded state of the forest. On their part, villagers blamed the forest personnel for their poor management and protection of the Reserve and alleged that much of the degradation was due to timber cutting and grazing by outsiders, possibly with abetment from the forest establishment. Rumours of infl uential politicians involved in timber-smuggling were common. It was also common to see headloaders and fodder collectors coming in from towns and villages as far away as 14 kilometres. Prevalence of poaching incidents also indicate that forest protection is highly inad- equate in the Reserve, as forest guards were not equipped to prevent armed intruders. Th e emphasis on reducing local forest dependency, as evidenced by the relocation plans, has also historically obscured the fact that there are several other pressures originating from tourism, the eff ects of which have not been considered in management planning. 48 W i t h i n the proposed National Park, there are two temples, located in the prime wildlife habitat in the Core Zone, which are frequently visited by religious people and other tourists from outside Alwar. Pressure from tourism is unmanageably high to say the least. Heavy tourist loads visibly disturb wildlife, create solid waste, and pollute the critical perennial springs that provide water for wildlife during the dry season.

Displacement in the Past and the New Relocation

Earlier displacement episodes from 1976–7 had caused much unrest among the local population who alleged that the promises made to them 262 Shift ing Ground regarding the new site were not fulfi lled by the Forest Department. For instance, they were not provided basic amenities at the site such as electricity and road connectivity. Nor was the land fi t for cultivation when they arrived there. From all accounts, force was used to evict them from Sariska and they were forced to accept whatever meagre compensation was provided. Several of the oustees from the village of Karnakawas continue to have a harsh existence in terms of access to water and development infrastructure, even 28 years aft er relocation. Several of the families have returned to the outskirts of Sariska. Such instances of failed displacement have been reported from other sites in the developing world. 49 As mentioned earlier, the relocation package prepared for the 11 villages in the core area, in 2002, was revived soon aft er the tiger crisis. According to the relocation package for Bhagani village of 20 households, the fi rst to be targeted, a cash compensation of Rs16,000 was provided. Th is allotment was rather meagre, considering that the local people would have been forced to change their primary occu- pation from livestock grazing to cultivation. Construction of a house, a cattle-shed, and fences around each homestead was allotted a sum of Rs 40,000–54,000 per family. 50 In terms of land allotment, however, the proposed relocation was rather progressive in historical terms with each household receiving land entitlement of 2.1 hectares each even if they did not possess for- mal land titles inside the Reserve. Th e relocation site was located on the State Highway to Jaipur, off ering easy access to markets and other facilities. School and health facilities were present in Badhod, barely fi ve kilometres away. However, in the resettlement plan, not even one borewell had been budgeted for the two villages (approximately 120 households from two villages) proposed to be moved here in the initial phase, an especially serious concern in the semi-arid terrain. In 2005, therefore, the plan for relocation of two villages from Sariska was riddled with problems. Two years later, in September 2007, the fi rst set of 20 households from the village Bhagani had begun their move to the relocation site. When I visited the resettlement site just a few weeks aft er the relocation had begun, only 7 houses out of the 20 required had been completed. As was expected, the fi nancial allotment for house construction in the relocation site (Rs 84,000) had turned out to be too low for the Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 263 kind of housing expected by the villagers, so additional fi nances had to be diverted from other development projects and further house construction was underway. Also road connections, agricultural land, and electricity connections had been developed satisfactorily. A single deep borewell had fi nally been made that supplied drinking water and some irrigation. Further, the fi nancial allocation for resettlement of families from core areas of Tiger Reserves had been recently increased by a factor of 10 by the government (from Rs 100,000 to Rs 1,000,000) to encourage people to move.51 Consequently, a certain degree of optimism was now visible among the oustees. Th us, the village displacement process, while it had started with several problems, had been considerably improved upon over the following few years (2007–9), perhaps in response to an increasingly active village representation. At least some of the villagers seemed satisfi ed since the move to the relocation site represented for them a major step up the social ladder due to the land entitlement. Th ere was still, however, considerable resistance from the other villages slated to be displaced, as admitted by the forest guards.

Reclaiming the Wilderness

In February 2008, the fi nal report52 on the national tiger population was publicly released by the Wildlife Institute of India, which con- firmed dwindling tiger numbers in the country. The estimate of the number of tigers in the country had gone down to 1,411 from the nearly 3,600 counted in 2003, a period of just fi ve years. 53 Yet, there were doubts as to the accuracy of the new census, given that several Tiger Reserves and known habitats outside of Protected Areas could not be surveyed for logistical reasons. Despite international peer review of the adopted methodology (which took place much aft er the census was well underway), the census suff ered from several short- comings54 which considerably reduced its credibility. For instance, extrapolation of tiger densities from the small areas that were sampled (and that had the highest tiger densities) could have been a major source of error. Th e plan for relocation of tigers into Sariska was pushed by the Rajasthan State Forest Department, with the fi rst pair of tigers being reintroduced in June 2008.55 Th e relocation took place under heavy 264 Shift ing Ground secrecy, with only a few media persons being allowed inside the Reserve during the period. An expenditure of Rs 150,000,000 was reported to have been incurred which included transport of the tigers from Ranthambhore by an Indian Air Force helicopter and their radio collaring. Th e Wildlife Institute, Rajasthan Forest Department, and the Indian Air Force were involved in the tranquilization and trans- port of tigers, which soon turned into a media event. 56 Th e tigers were fi tted with state-of-the-art satellite-monitored radio-collars, each worth Rs 800,000, that were intended to intensively monitor the big cats, particularly to reduce risk of poaching. 57 As reported in December 2008, the two reintroduced tigers were ‘guarded’ closely by forest personnel, their every move being reported each day by the Reserve managers. Th e media played along, report- ing on every move, and every kill of the animals. 58 In some cases, the reports became painfully ridiculous, such as a report on the male tiger being shooed away from a village it had strayed to at the south- ern edge of the Reserve. A senior forest offi cer was quoted as saying upon the successful transport of the fi rst tiger to Sariska forest:

‘It is a historic moment. Th e country has done it while others have failed. Th is kind of wild-to-wild relocation has not taken place anywhere else’.59

He continued on to say that Sariska Tiger Reserve could ‘hold up to 50 tigers’, ignoring the fact that a large part of the Reserve was depleted of both forests and prey. Aft er the relocation of the two tigers to Sariska, the National Tiger Conservation Authority said that it planned to reintroduce three more tigers to Sariska over the following three years.60 A fi eld visit to Sariska in December 2008 revealed that apart from the reappearance of the big cat, not much had changed in Sariska Tiger Reserve in terms of governance or forest condition, almost four years aft er the reported extinction crisis of 2005. Forest habitat was continuing to degrade further, particularly in the buff er zone where management was still restricted to simply policing. Th ere was no reason to believe that the threat of poaching had receded, given the palpable hostility towards the Forest Department, among most of the people living around the Reserve. It is important to note that people not just within Sariska but also from outside, continued to be Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 265 highly dependent on the Reserve for fodder and fuelwood. Complete relocation of the rest of the core area villages was obviously years away, given the diffi culties in successful resettlement of the fi rst village and the evident resistance in the next. Nor has much headway been made in improving the capacity of the forest staff for apprehending poaching and timber theft inside the Reserve. While additional forces of retired army men have been placed at key entry points into the Sariska valley, 61 little has been done to improve the lot of the forest guards. Th e Reserve managers have failed to implement the court decision on the closure of a state highway62 that cuts through the Reserve and that is responsible for several road kills each year. Lesser still has been achieved in regu- lating the burgeoning pilgrim and tourist traffi c into the Reserve,63 with senior forest offi cers stating their helplessness in the face of religious sentiments. Th e current conservation crisis in Sariska exemplifi es the continu- ance of top-down and unscientifi c approach of the Forest Department that gave short shrift to the more democratic recommendations of the TTF. In analysing the causes for tiger disappearance, the historical legacy of commercial forest use, external biotic pressures, tourism, and mining on local ecology or tiger numbers have been continually ignored. From the start, the relocation of villages was made a prior- ity in Protected Area management.64 Flimsy science has been used to support the reintroduction of the tiger in a bid, as it were, to ‘reclaim the wilderness’, however reduced and fragmented that ‘wilderness’ might currently be.

* * *

In this chapter, based on a micro-study over fi ve years (2003–8), I have examined in detail the ways in which science is manipulated by the government to manage a prominent Tiger Reserve in India. Earlier authors have questioned the methodology used to study human impact in natural landscapes as well as the basis for ‘sustain- ability’ science, which they say, is oft en based on subjective a priori decisions about which variables matter in social-ecological systems 65 . Others have found that poor science and offi cial machinery oft en come together to perpetuate the existing social hierarchies in access 266 Shift ing Ground to natural resources 66 . Th is study of Sariska supports the view that faulty science is, more oft en than not, used to support preconceived notions of the politically powerful on how nature should be governed and used. As Hughes (this volume) states:

As human societies struggle to preserve what they have identifi ed as the appropriate numbers, preferred distributions, and most essential char- acteristics of the species they most admire, their patronage factors into processes of natural selection, adapting wild animals and wild places to suit their own environmental ideals, reifi ed as ‘natural’ character- istics of a ‘natural’ environment. Perhaps people have been protect- ing something of themselves all along, and not (just) wild animals or environments.

Notes

1 . R. Leakey and R. Lewin, Th e Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (New York: Anchor Books, 1995); K.U. Karanth, View from the Machan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006) 2 . R. Kramer, C. van Schaik, and J. Johnson, Last Stand, Protected Areas and the Defense of Tropical Biodiversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); J. Terborgh and C. Van Schaik, ‘Why the World Needs Parks ,’ in Making Parks Work: Strategies for Preserving Tropical Nature , eds J. Terborgh, C. van Schaik, L. Davenport, and M. Rao (USA: Island Press, 2002), pp. 3–14. 3 . For instance, see V. Th apar, ‘Note of Dissent,’ in Joining the Dots: Th e Report of the Tiger Task Force (New Delhi: Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, New Delhi, 2005), pp. 163–80; K.U. Karanth, View from the Machan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006); J. Terborgh, Requiem for Nature (Washington DC and Covelo: Island Press, 1999). 4 . See R. Guha, ‘Th e Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti- Humanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Th ird World’ in Battles Over Nature: Science and the Politics of Conservation, eds V.K. Saberwal and M. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 139–57; P.R. Wilshusen, S.R. Brechin, C.L. Fortwangler and P.C. West, ‘Reinventing a Square Wheel: Critique of a Resurgent “Protection Paradigm” in International Biodiversity Conservation,’ Society and Natural Resources Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 267

15 (2002): 17–40; D. Brockington, ‘Community Conservation, Inequality and Injustice: Myths of Power in Protected Area Management,’ Conservation and Society 2, no. 2 (2004): 411–32. 5 . A. Kothari, N. Pathak, and F. Vania, Where Communities Care: Community Based Wildlife and Ecosystem Management in South Asia , (New Delhi: Kalpavriksh, 2000) and (London: International Institute of Environment and Development, 2000); D.B. Bray, L. Merino-Perez, P. Negreros-castillo, G. Segura-Warnholtz, J.M. Torres-Rojo, and H.F.M. Vester, ‘Mexico’s Community-managed Forests as a Global Model for Sustainable Landscapes,’ Conservation Biology 17, no. 3 (2003): 672–7; D.S. Nepstad, Schwartzman, B. Bamberger, M. Santilli, D. Ray, P. Schlesinger, P. Lefebvre, A. Alencar, E. Prinz, G. Fiske, and A. Rolla, ‘Inhibition of Amazon Deforestation and Fire by Parks and Indigenous Lands,’ Conservation Biology 20, no. 1 (2006): 65–73. 6 . See M. Gadgil and R. Guha, Th is Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); M. Rangarajan, ‘Parks, Politics and History: Conservation Dilemmas in Africa,’ Conservation and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 77–98; A. Chhatre and V.K. Saberwal, Democratizing Nature, Politics, Conservation and Development in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); V.K. Saberwal and M. Rangarajan, eds, Battles Over Nature: Science and the Politics of Conservation (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 7 . Guha, ‘Authoritarian Biologist’; also see Saberwal and Rangarajan, Battles Over Nature, and Lewis, ‘Cattle and Conservation: A Case Study in Science and Advocacy,’ Conservation and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–21. 8 . See Lewis, ‘Cattle and Conservation’. 9 . See D. Western, In the Dust of Kilimanjaro (USA: Shearwater Books, 2002); D. Sheil, R. Puri, M. Wan, I. Basuki, M. van Heist, N. Liswanti, Rukmiyati, I. Rachmatikaand I. Samsoedin,‘Recognizing Local People’s Priorities for Tropical Forest Biodiversity,’ Ambio 35, no. 1 (2006): 17–24. 10 . B. Middleton, ‘Ecology and Objective-based Management: Case Study of the Keoladeo National Park, Bharatpur, Rajasthan,’ in Battles Over Nature: Science and the Politics of Conservation, eds V.K. Saberwal and M. Rangarajan (Delhi: Permanent Blackand Bangalore: New India Foundation, 2003), pp. 86–116; B. Weber and A. Vedder, In the Kingdom of Gorillas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 11 . Tiger Reserve is a category of Protected Area of which there are 39 in India, covering a total of approximately 54,000 square kilometres. 268 Shift ing Ground

A Tiger Reserve usually comprises a combination of the legal categories Wildlife Sanctuary and National Park, not being a legal category on its own. 12 . ‘No Evidence of Tigers in Sariska-WWF-India,’ Indian Express, 15 Feb- ruary 2005, p. 1; ‘Big Cat Vanishes from Sariska: Will Ranthambore be Next?,’ Th e Times of India , 30 January 2005. 13 . As of now there are 39 declared Tiger Reserves in India, covering an area of 53,547 square kilometres. Tiger Reserve itself is not a legal cat- egory but comprises a mix of offi cial protection categories-National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary. 14 . B. Wright, ‘Too Little, Too Late,’ Indian Express , 13 February, 2005; ‘Deathtraps in Place, Ranthambhore Gets Sariska Feeling,’ Indian Express , 7 February 2005, p. 2; ‘Sariska Flouted Norms,’ Hindustan Times , 9 February 2005. 15 . A.J.T. Johnsingh, K. Sankar, and S. Mukherjee, ‘Saving Prime Tiger Habitat in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Cat News 27, no. 3 (1997). However, the offi cial fi gure, based on the offi cially conducted annual tiger census, had fl uctuated between 16 and 25 animals from 1991 to 2004. In 2004, the last season when tigers were spotted in Sariska, the offi cial fi gure was 16–8. 16 . ‘Roar Like a Tiger, Mr. Prime Minister,’ Indian Express , 18 May 2005. 17 . R. Gupta, ‘Maneaten,’ Down to Earth , 15 March 2005, pp. 26–8. 18 . G. Shahabuddin, R. Kumar, and M. Shrivastava, ‘Creation of Inviolate Space: Lives, Livelihoods and Conflict in Sariska Tiger Reserve,’ Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 20 (2007): 1855–62. 19 . Ministry of Environment and Forests, Joining the Dots . 20 . ‘Tiger Protection: Centre Th reatens to Block State Funds,’ Th e Times of India , 22 March 2008. 21 . ‘Exclusive Space for Tigers Soon,’ Th e Times of India , 23 July 2007, p. 9. 22 . K.U. Karanth, J.D. Nichols, J. Seidenstricker, E. Dinerstein, J.L.D. Smith, C. McDougal, A.J.T. Johnsingh, R.S. Chundawat, and V. Thapar, ‘Science Deficiency in Conservation Practice: The Monitoring of Tiger Populations in India,’ Animal Conservation 6 (2003): 141–6. 23 . ‘Rajasthan Panel Wants Tigers Relocated,’ Indian Express , 8 September 2005. 24 . ‘India to Spend $13.15 mn to Protect Tigers,’ Th e Times of India , 2 March 2008. 25 . R. Johari, ‘Of Paper Tigers and Invisible People: Th e Cultural Politics of Nature in Sariska,’ in Making Conservation Work: Securing Biodiversity Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 269

in this New Century, eds G. Shahabuddin and M. Rangarajan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 1987): pp. 48–80. 26 . Divyabhanusinh, ‘Sariska Tiger Reserve,’ in Indian Wildlife, eds S. Israel and T. Sinclair (Singapore: APA Publications, 1987): pp. 236–7. 27 . Divyabhanusinh, this volume. 28 . K.S. Sankhala, ‘Wildlife Sanctuaries of Rajasthan,’ Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 61, no. 1 (1964): 27–34; K.S. Sankhala, ‘Th e Tiger in Rajasthan—A Study of its Habitat, Distribution and Status,’ Indian Forester 95 (1969): 763–70. 29 . See for instance, studies and notes by G.V. Reddy, ‘Painted Spurfowl in Sariska,’ Newsletter for Birdwatchers 34, no. 2 (1994): 38; K. Sankar and A.J.T. Johnsingh, ‘Food Habits of Tiger (Panthera tigris ) and Leopard ( Panthera pardus) in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, India, as Shown by Scat Analysis,’ Mammalia 66, no. 2 (2002): 285–9; K. Sankar, ‘Th e Ecology of Th ree Large Sympatric Herbivores (Chital, Sambar and Nilgai) With Special Reference for Reserve Management in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan’ (PhD diss., Department of Zoology, University of Rajasthan, 1994); K. Sankar, D. Mohan, and S. Pandey, ‘Birds of Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, India,’ Forktail , 8 February 1993, pp. 133–41; A.K. Sharma, ‘Birds of Sariska Tiger Reserve,’ Newsletter for Birdwatchers 21, no. 5 (1981): 7–10; V.D. Sharma, ‘Sariska: Jewel of the Aravallis,’ Sanctuary 6, no. 2 (1986): 143, 164–9; D. Sharma, ‘Estimating the Density of Porcupines in Semi-arid Sariska Valley, Western India,’ Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 98, no. 2 (2001): 161–8. 30 . A type of forest located in a region where there is less than 2,000 mm of rainfall annually. Most trees shed their leaves synchronously so that the forest appears leafl ess at a particular time of the year, usually early spring in northern Indian plains. 31 . S. Mukherjee, Habitat Use by Sympatric Small Carnivores in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, Western India , (PhD Th esis, Saurashtra University, Gujarat, 2000. 32 . W.A. Rodgers, ‘A Preliminary Ecological Survey of Algual Spring, Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan,’ Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 87, no. 2 (1990): 201–9. 33 . G. Shahabuddin, R. Kumar, and A. Verma, ‘Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan,’ Indian Birds 2, no. 3 (2006): 71–6. 270 Shift ing Ground

34 . R. Johari, ‘Of Sanctions and Sanctuary-Making: Th e Cultural Politics of Nature in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, India, 1850–2000’ (MS Th esis, York University, 2003). 35 . S. Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 36 . K.S. Dharmakumarsinhji, Report on Rapid Survey of Wildlife and Game in Rajasthan , in Offi ce of Regional Commissioner and Advisor, Rajasthan, Jaipur File 47/G/52, 1952, National Archives, New Delhi. 37 . While there are 37 villages in all within the Sariska Tiger Reserve, my research was restricted to the 11 villages inside the core area. However, these are the villages that have historically experienced most confl ict with the reserve managers due to the fact that the best wildlife was to be found here. 38 . Other Backward Classes in India are a group of castes (as defi ned in Hindu society) that have been historically disadvantaged and therefore found deserving of positive discrimination through reservations and protective legislation to ensure equality. However, they tend not to be as underprivileged as Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes. 39 . Shahabuddin et al., ‘Creation of Inviolate Space’. 40 . Earlier there were signifi cant holdings of cows but these were consider- ably decimated during droughts from 2001–3. 41. This is also borne out by the rainfall records kept by the Office of Deputy Director of Agriculture (Extension), Alwar. 42 . Th e general complaint of the people was that the works are contracted out mainly to the people who are Forest Department employees. 43 . Rodgers, ‘Survey of Algual Spring’; Johnsingh et al., ‘Saving Prime Tiger Habitat’. 44 . A.J.T. Johnsingh, personal communication. 45 . Government of Rajasthan, Management Plan for Sariska Tiger Reserve (2004–14) (Rajasthan: Project Tiger Offi ce, Sariska, 2004); Johnsingh et al. ‘Saving Prime Tiger Habitat’. 46. R. Kumar and G. Shahabuddin, ‘Effects of Biomass Extraction on Vegetation Structure, Diversity and Composition of an Indian Tropical Dry Forest,’ Environmental Conservation 32, no. 3 (2005): 1–12. 47 . G. Shahabuddin and R. Kumar, ‘Infl uence of Anthropogenic Disturbance on Birds of Tropical Dry Forest: Th e Role of Vegetation Structure,’ Animal Conservation 9 (2006): 404–13. 48 . Government of Rajasthan, Management Plan . Th e ‘Tiger Crisis’ and the Response 271

49 . ee case studies of displacement in A. Sharma and A. Kabra, ‘Displacement as a Conservation Tool: Lessons From the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary, Madhya Pradesh,’ in Making Conservation Work: Securing Biodiversity in Th is New Century, eds G. Shahabuddin and M. Rangarajan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 21–47; K. Choudhary, ‘Development Dilemma: Resettlement of Gir Maldharis,’ Economic and Political Weekly (22 July 2000): 2662–8. 50 . G. Shahabuddin, R. Kumar, and M. Shrivastava, ‘Pushed Over the Edge: Relocation From Sariska,’ Economic and Political Weekly (6 August 2005): 3563–4. 51 . ‘Rs 600 cr. For Tiger Protection,’ Indian Express , 31 January 2008. 52 . National Tiger Conservation Authority and Wildlife Institute of India, Status of Tigers: Co-predators and Prey in India (New Delhi: Government of India, 2008). 53 . ‘Just 1411 Tigers in India,’ Th e Times of India , 13 February 2008. 54 . R. Maraj and J. Seidensticker, ‘Assessment of a Framework for Monitor ing Tiger Population Trends in India,’ Report to IUCN, World Conservation Union and Project Tiger, 2006. 55 . ‘Aft er 4 years, Sariska Gets a Tiger,’ Th e Times of India , 29 June 2008. 56 . ‘Selection of Tigers For Sariska Begins,’ Th e Times of India , 24 June 2008. 57 . ‘Satellite to Keep Eye on Tiger Cubs,’ Times of India , 23 June 2008. 58 . ‘Tiger Adapts to Sariska, Makes First Kill,’ Th e Times of India , 30 June 2008; ‘Sariska Tiger Couple at Home, Getting Closer,’ Hindustan Times , 8 August 2008. 59 . ‘History Made at Sariska,’ Th e Times of India , 29 June 2008. 60 . xxxx. 61 . ‘Centre Puts Tiger Reserves on Alert,’ Th e Times of India , 27 June 2008. 6 2 . ‘ Sariska Villagers Protest Blocking of Highway,’ The Times of India , 26 June 2008. 63 . But check current position in Sariska: ‘Sariska to Ban Private Vehicles,’ Th e Times of India , 13February 2008. 64 . Government of Rajasthan, Report of the State Empowered Committee on Forest and Wildlife Management (Jaipur, Rajasthan: Government of Rajasthan, 2005). 65 . Chhatre and Saberwal, S. Lele, and R.B. Norgaard, ‘Sustainability and the Scientist’s Burden, in Battles over Nature: Science and Politics of Wildlife Conservation , eds V.K. Saberwal and M. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003): 158–88. 272 Shift ing Ground

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