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Shifting Ground SHIFTING GROUND People, Mobility, and Animals in India’s Environmental Histories Mahesh Rangarajan & K. Sivaramakrishnan 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India © Oxford University Press 2014 Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN-13: 978-0-19-809895-9 ISBN-10: 0-19-809895-2 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.