Environmental History in India: Part I: Ecology and Society in Pre-Colonial India
Contents
- Introduction
- Ecology and Society in Pre-colonial India
- Mediaeval Period (c. 700 – AD 1750)
Introduction
The history of the environment in India is examined in this article. It would define the term "environmental history" and outline the issues raised in various anthologies that have been published to date. We will discuss how environmental historians have viewed the era before the arrival of colonialism in this first part. The writing on environmental history from 1750 to 1947 will be covered in the second part. The third part focuses on worries expressed by environmental historians regarding the development model embraced by post-colonial India. While a lot of environmental history writing has emerged in the last three decades, the final part will discuss postcolonial events up until the worst industrial disaster, the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal in December 1984. In this post where we talk about contemporary social movements, we look at the period from 1985 to the present as contemporary social and environmental movements.
Ecology and Society in Pre-colonial India
Environmental history is described as a "relatively recent innovation, compared to political history, economic history, and the history of cultural institutions and practices" in the introduction to the Center for Science and Environment's Environmental History Reader, which was just published in New Delhi. This introduction traces the term's history in the United States, attributing its first use to historian Roderick Nash in the early 1970s and viewing "the popularity of environmentalist movements in the 1960s" as "fostering investigations into ecological aspects of the past.". It lists "environmental historians like Alfred Crosby, Donald Worster, Carolyn Merchant, and William Cronon" as pioneers in the developing field who "gave the new field of enquiry direction by asking key questions about relations between humans and nature, while they tried to understand transformations of the world's ecology through imperialism, exploration, agricultural change, technological innovations, and urban expansion".
Among the various historical writing styles, this branch of ecological or environmental history has emerged. According to Rangrajan and Sivramkrishnan (2014: 01), Ramchandra Guha's 1989 book Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas is "the first full-length monograph on India's environmental history," but Sivramkrishnan (2003) had noted that this style of history writing in India can be traced to "the critique of nationalized economic development that gathered momentum in the wake of Jay Prakash Naray. They advised their peers who were also studying environmental history to pay close attention to "changes in the physical status of forests and pastures, as well as changes in the social institutions governing their use.". They had bemoaned the lack of scholarly attention given to the great rivers of this subcontinent, which "exercised such a definitive influence on the natural environment.".
In Man and Environment: The Ecological History of India, Irfan Habib writes about how Gujarat's ports during the medieval period demonstrated the influence of seashore changes, however slight they may have been. According to Habib (2011: 76), "the earliest known port of Gujarat was Bhrigukachchha, the 'Barygaza' of the Periplus (first century AD), medieval, and modern Bharuch (Broach), situated near the mouth of the Narmada river. The trade apparently shifted to Khambayat (Cambay, modern-day Khambhat), which is located at the head of the Gulf of Cambay, by the end of the fourteenth century as a result of the sea's passage becoming clogged with silt. With time, the sea started to recede from this area as well, and Gogha on the Saurashtra coast started to be used as the anchorage from which the cargo of the seaships was transported to Khambaayat. In the seventeenth century, Surat, which is close to the Tapti (Tapi) river's mouth, finally decisively replaced Khambaayat as Gujarat's principal port. The Swally Hole, which was formed or discovered nearby the coastal community of Suhali near Surat and is now a place where large ships can drop anchor, strengthened its position. Irfan Habib (2011: 76) uses the Kosi river in Bihar as an example to show how "the great expanse of northern alluvial plains, themselves created by millions of years of silt deposition by rivers" and "myriad channels in which the rivers flow remaining subject to immense changes.". While the Kosi must have changed its channels unchecked during the Middle Ages, Habib continues, "the history of those events is not traceable in our records.". Irfarn Habib (2011: 77–78) traces changes in river course relative to the Indus basin and identifies the main river courses in Punjab in 1400 and 1970 using written sources. Irfan Habib also mentions "an example of the practical disappearance of a river through a substantial change in course of its main feeder, in what happened to the Jamuna river in Bengal, which carried the main waters of the current Tista as it entered the plains and after a course directly southward across northern and central Bengal, debauched into the Ganges.". Habib describes the abrupt changes in this way: "In 1787, the Tista completely abandoned the Jamuna and turned southeast, running into the Brahmaputra, shortening its own course in the plain to a third of its former length.".
Likewise, Dasgupta (2015: 120–124) elaborates on Shereen Ratnagar's research, which suggested that "lift irrigation may have resulted in an over-reaching of its ecological limits" and notes that "the death of the Indus valley civilization was not caused by a single dramatic event.". He also quotes M. H. Raval, a former director of Gujarat's department of archaeology, who claimed in 1989 that "since animal herding was a major form of subsistence in Harappa, large populations of goat and sheep would also have led to overgrazing.".
By urging their fellow travelers to "open up the time-frame for the discussion of environmental change to take long-term developments into account, rather than merely to concentrate upon the developments of the past century or so," David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha had also described the urgent task for their fellow travelers. By presenting South Asia's landscape as a treasure trove of biological diversity inhabited by hunter-gatherers, jhumiyas or swidden agriculturists, nomadic pastoralists, sea-faring traders, and fisherfolk who practice both inland and coastal fishing, Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha make the first attempt to accomplish this task. Their groundbreaking work, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of. In addition to paying close attention to pre-colonial India, this work "drew on a variety of archaeological and literary evidence to evolve a larger framework to approach patterns of ecological change in the past.". It has also been argued that "most subsequent collections and anthologies on India's environmental pasts barely take notice of the era prior to 1800"6. Rangarajan and Sivramkrishnan (2012: 05) note that this is because "sources for pre-modern and early modern forest and environmental history are indeed scarce.". An edited collection of essays from prehistoric India to the middle of the nineteenth century CE is presented by Rangarajan and Sivramakrishnan (2014: 07) to address this anomaly. Four of the 16 essays attempt to combine archaeology and ecology, and another four use literary texts to create "imageries and states of nature.". They note that "excellent works such as Environment and Empire in 2007 and Imperial Encounters in 2012 accomplish much by tracing the complex relationships between British imperialism and ecological processes, but they hardly even glance at, let alone critically engage with the longer-range histories of the lands or people, even in terms of perspective, let alone rigorous treatment.".
In a sub-continent where archaeologists have done so much research, a trend like that shown by environmental history anthologies must be hard to believe. If environmental history were to use the knowledge it provides to reconstruct the social and ecological structures of Neolithic and Mesolithic India as well as the climatic changes that occurred during the Ancient and Medieval periods in India, wouldn't the study of literary texts like Meghdootam or Abhigyaan Shakuntalam by Kalidas provide certain avenues through which to comprehend the climatic functions?
There isn't a single book published that covers the ecological history of all of ancient or medieval India, as Irfan Habib notes in his book Man and Environment: The Ecological History of India9. Since Kosambi has given considerable consideration to ecological factors while analyzing historical developments, his 1956 book An Introduction to the Study of India History is significant for a student of environmental history. Sayan Bhattacharya (2014) examines ancient Indian literary works like the Arthashastra, Satpath Brahmanas, Vedas, Manusmriti, Brihat Samhita, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Rajtarangini as well as archaeological evidence to elaborate on how these texts reflected the concepts of forest ecology and conservation in a sustainable manner10. Rice was first cultivated in the Ganga basin about 3000 years after wheat and barley, according to Irfan Habib (2011: 28), but he surmises that "the cultivated area in relation to the whole area must still have been extremely small.". He also discusses the Mehrgarh archaeological site's discoveries, which indicate that "bread wheat and shot wheat were added to the races of wheat cultivated in Period II (5000 to 4000 BC)". The domestication of cotton at this location is another example of the first domestication of a significant fiber plant in the Old World. Alongside these archaeological findings that indicated agriculture, there were those that suggested pastoralism was a key element of the Neolithic revolution. According to Irfan Habib (2011: 22), "the earliest evidence of goat domestication at Levant (Syria and Palestine), datable to before 8000 BC; and the domesticated sheep appearing there around 7000 BC." Similarly, "in the Indian sub-continent, at Mehrgarh in Period I (7000-5000 BC), both the wild goat and wild sheep, apparently captured from the nearby hills, are represented in the bone remains, as well as domesticated goat.". According to Habib, there is also strong evidence that the sheep was domesticated in this area due to a gradual decline in the size of its skeleton. The domestication of cattle, however, proved to be the more significant advancement. However, bones of the humped or zebu cattle are also found; and there is, in succeeding phases, a growth in their number and a diminution in their individual size - a characteristic mark of the process of domestication. Habib (2011: 30) discusses the evidence at Mehrgarh in its Period I (7000-5000 BC) and claims that "the remains of bones, in large proportion, are those of wild species only, and among these the wild ox (bos primige. Regarding the other Indian bovine, the water buffalo, Habib (2011: 31) notes that "curiously, the early archaeological evidence for buffalo domestication does not come from the Gangetic basin, where from the conditions of natural environment one would have expected it, but from northwestern India: from Kashmir neolithic, 2500-2000 BC, and from the Indus culture sites of Balakot (near Karachi) and Dholavira in Kachchh, of about the same date.".
Considering two Mesolithic sites (Adamgarh in the Narmada valley, c. 6000 BC and Bagor in the Aravallis (Mewar), Phase I (5365-2650 BC), Habib (2011: 31) contends that the animal bone remains there point to an exclusive pastoral diffusion process. Habib (2011: 32) argues that a number of innovations between 3300 BC and 3000 BC, such as castration as a means of making the male ox, or bull, tractable enough to be controlled by man, so that it could be made to carry loads and draw the plough, and the vertical cart wheel, made the bullock-driven transportation possible. These innovations trace how the exclusive pastoral diffusion would have come to merge with cultivation creating a symbiosis.
Following that (c. 1500 BC–AD 700) in the narrative on our understanding of India's environmental history because we are no longer solely dependent on archaeological evidence and are instead turning to texts. According to Habib (2011: 48), "the growing corpus of texts, such as the Rigveda, supplements the findings of archaeology, and later reinforced by inscriptions, ultimately relegates archaeology to a secondary, though not unimportant position.". Irfan Habib thus cites passages from the Rigveda's ode to Aranyani, Rigveda's Pillar Edict V: On Animals to be Protected, and BaaNa's Harshacharita (seventh century): On Borders of the Vindhya forests, among other sources.
Mediaeval Period (c. 700 – AD 1750)
Irfan Habib contends that significant variations in rainfall during the Middle Ages began to have a significant impact once cultivation became the primary human endeavor because "the seasonal crops could simply be destroyed, if the rains arrived late, or fell at the wrong time,". According to Habib, "with the help of narrative histories, we can build a better famine record for the medieval period than for the ancient period, however incomplete it may be). Agrarian System of Mughal India is his book, and on page. Irfan Habib creates a thorough table of famines that occurred in the seventeenth century (pages 112–22). The Mughal period's narrative history also reveals a great deal about India's irrigation system, wildlife, and domesticated animals.
According to Irfan Habib (2011: 89), "stone and earthern dams were built in peninsular India, where natural undulations suit their construction, to create irrigation tanks of different sizes, with sluices and canals laid out to irrigate peasant fields in fairly large areas.". Additionally, he discusses "inscriptions from the Vijayanagara era (fourteenth to sixteenth century) containing references to the construction and repair of irrigation tanks.". According to Habib (2011: 89), who describes the construction of canals during the Mughal era, "in northern India, canals were excavated Firoz Tughlaq (1351-88) from the Yamuna and Sutlej rivers to irrigate waterless tracts in Haryana and eastern Punjab, and later Shahjahan (1628-58) laid out the great West Yamuna canal with a sophisticated system of distributaries to irrigate surrounding lands.
While noting that "South Asia has a long and developed history of irrigation and urban settlement," David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha (2011: 07) raise the concern that "as yet we know relatively little about how these modified the surrounding environment, or gave rise to adverse environmental effects.". They assert that "cities in South Asia over time have produced a substantial modifications to the environment over a wide area" due to their significant consumption of fuel, fodder, building materials, and foodstuffs.
The first group of researchers who have looked into pre-colonial India from the perspective of environmental history have been those who attempt to engage with the narrative that frequently portrays pre-agrarian resource use as a culture that was in danger of extinction due to agricultural expansion. As an example of a sensitive depiction of the early 20th century conquest of the forest by the arable, of nature by culture, Rangrajan and Sivramakrishnan (2012: 01) cite Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya's Bangla text, Aranyak of the Forest. They also mention D. D. Kosambi would have imagined himself as "chronicler of the demise of the older ways," according to Kosambi's writings, which assume "that pre-agricultural cultures and ways of life could not but be subjugated and absorbed into the wider, more "advanced" milieu". Certain colonial experts who misunderstood the rhythms of pastoral mobility and confused it with vagrancy and attempted to launch a "modernizing" mission with a traditional law and order approach shared similar values. There have been some writings that discuss pastoralism in South Asia's past from protohistoric times and gradually becomes more and more scarce as we move into later times, though the majority of the focus has remained on the forests and agrarian landscape within environmental history. Therefore, in 1991, Professor Shereen Ratnagar of the JNU Center for History Studies and her colleagues held a workshop on exploring pastoralism as a theme in history. Historical moments like permanent settlement, the consolidation of colonial policies, and control over forests have frequently been depicted in environmental history as a dramatic rupture. However, it would be necessary to think of the discourse about disappearing pastures, settled agriculture encroaching on pastoral resource use patterns, and migrations brought on by a catastrophic redrawing of client-patron relationships as existing before colonialism.
According to Shereen Ratnagar's introductory essay for that workshop, "an inscription of about AD 860 from the vicinity of Jodhpur, about a village previously "infested by Abhiras" (a pastoral group) being rehabilitated and rebuilt.". She draws our attention to a doctoral thesis by N., but she also quickly reminds her readers that "occasionally, the reverse process is documented: occupied lands are turned over to pastures.". Vairavel's 1989 essay for Madurai Kamraj University was titled "History of Pastoral Communities of Ancient and Medieval Tamil Nadu.". Likewise, Supriya Verma discussed the sparse belongings that herdsmen in Gujarat carried with them in her paper, "Villages Abandoned: The Case for Mobile Pastoralism in Post-Harappan Gujarat.". According to Ratnagar (2004: 97), "interdigitation and complementarity" (between settled cultivators and pastoral people) "do not mean that only mixed farming prevailed" and pastoral modes gradually disappeared. She claims that "we need to consider pastoral nomadism as well as 'agropastoralism'," as the latter "can prevail in zones which cannot support successful agriculture or pastoralism exclusively; those who depend more on herds for their livelihood spend less time and labor on fields, and vice versa." 12 Dot It would also be incorrect to assume a perfectly harmonious symbiosis between mobile pastoralists and sedentary cultivators, as Daniel Ballard's paper "Nomadis.
Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2012) question three presumptions about the pre-colonial period in the subcontinent: "the first was the limited reach of states beyond the cultivable arable," "the second was the virtual eclipse of states as actors in the arena of landscape change," and "the tendency to overstate the self-governing nature of village societies at the cost of ignoring the wider power relations within which these societies existed.".
They caution us to be aware of how, in recent years, "the popular notion regarding this has moved from one extreme - as in the nationalist histories of early India, where the power of states was seen as omnipotent - to the other - of exaggerating the reach and role of local history.". Remind us of the passionate plea made by historian Neeladri Bhattacharya in 1997 at a conference titled Ecological History and Traditions organized by the Centre for Science and Environment, wherein Bhattacharya "argue[s] strongly against taking on board a view of the state as invisible or absent and of local elements being the prime players.". A primeval forest is something that Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan (2014: 08) encourage environmental history scholars to critically unpack because "where, when, and how it begins to exercise such a hold on imaginations does matter.".
There have also been narratives that attempt to imagine and portray a glorious past when resource use stayed within the bounds of nature emerge in recent years. However, recent literary and mythological studies present accounts of the relationship between humans and nature, which may not always have been peaceful or environmentally conscious. A Whitney Sanford (2012) tells the mythological tale of Krishna's older brother Balram to show how he was connected to the Yamuna River and the agro-pastoral region around Mathura and Vrindavan.
References
- D. D. Kosambi’s book An Introduction to the Study of India History (1956)
- Daniel Ballard’s paper ‘Nomadism and Politics: The Case of Afghan nomads in the Indian subcontinent’
- Sumant Mehta’s speech at the first convention of Gujarat Kisan Parishad
- Sumit Guha’s book, Environment and Ethnicity in India (1200-1991)
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