Foreword
Forests are connected to these both directly and indirectly. Forests, therefore, can be seen as green glaciers and diverse lands. At the same time, they are also associated with wilderness, tranquillity and natural beauty. Our deities, along with thousands of characters from our myths, dwell there, as do our ancestors and community memories.
The centrality and contribution of forests to soil and fertility, economy and ecology, poetry and aesthetics, humans and wildlife, particularly in mountainous and in broad global contexts, is no longer in doubt. The Himalayan forests determine in significant ways the well-being of the entire northern plains of the Indian subcontinent, like the other forests of India do in every region stretching from the central Indian forests to the central and the western parts and from the Western Ghats to the coastal regions. It has now become clear that the Amazon's forests influence global climate, including the behaviour of the Indian monsoons.
Forests intimately connect various constituents of nature and human society. The connections among/between agriculture, animal husbandry, medicinal herbs, wildlife, timber extraction, cottage industries, cultural and religious pilgrimages, folklore, the flow of rivers, groundwater harvesting, soil erosion control, carbon emissions, wilderness creation and sustenance have been a part of community legends, parables and lore for a long time; lately, modern sciences also confirm them. Saving the forests means saving the soil along with the civilization it has nurtured. Chipko and every such movement is primarily about the imperative of balancing the use and conservation of nature, the complex differentiations between need and greed. The overuse and destruction of nature is suicidal.
Communities have always opposed such a mentality and have developed safeguards or safety valves. One of the expressions of this is seen in the idea of sacred (groves, lakes, rivers, pastures, mountains, forests, passes). This idea articulated ways of judicious and just use of natural resources. Trees are worshipped, but they are more than abstract notions. They are a living, spiritual representation of a dynamic harmony, heritage and life systems. Consequently, it is natural that every encroachment into the rights of a community who live using natural resources for survival is bound to be opposed.
There ere have been protests against feudal, colonial and post-colonial state systems, and national/global corporations for encroaching and hijacking people's right on forests and commons. The fight continues. Sometime communities fought among themselves for the use and access to such resources. It may be pasture, forest or the land space meant for medicinal herbs or as currently, for mobilizing the potential of Keera Jadi or Yarsha Gumba. The global state systems, and especially the state in India, remain focused on economic gain via the exploitation of natural resources and prefer to be blind to long-term sustainability, to the difference between renewable and non-renewable resources.
INTRODUCTION
What could be the themes around a volume on India's Forest Pasts, and especially at this juncture? Locating the context in which Ramachandra Guha's landmark work The Unquiet Woods was written can help give us a perspective. It was first published just over thirty-five years ago and based on a thesis done nearly four decades ago. The book came at a time of intense debates on forests but also the ways in which these spaces fitted into the wider model of development. There were a host of concerns, environmental and social, that were centre stage at the time the work took shape. Many of the key insights of the book are still useful in looking at how history remade the forest in complex, often unexpected ways, but with short and long-term consequences. At the same time, much later work critically re-examines many aspects of questions raised by him. This volume is thus an appreciation of his monograph and his work as an environmental historian, and yet also critical in its hope to suggest new tracks into the forest and cast fresh light on the peoples, species and land, and the ways states, societies and nature shaped each other over time.
Guha placed material, ecological and environmental transformations at the very centre of his analysis, emphasizing how new modes of forest appropriation, control and management had far-reaching implications for those reliant on forests-directly or indirectly-not only as spaces and resources but also for a host of cultural reasons too numerous to enumerate yet essential to acknowledge. Often, centuries-even many millennia-of history and ecology were collapsed into terms like pre-colonial or pre-modern, which hardly do justice to the complexity of earlier epochs. Further, as we shall see in the volume, many ideas originating in the last two to three centuries, as with the preceding early modern era, have undergone changes and these too have affected the way we look at forests. In a sense, changing the ways of looking at the dynamics of state making and social change as much as at ecological transformations lead us to a far more nuanced picture than was perhaps conceived of in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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