Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics

Abstract

Forests in India are at the center of highly charged conflicts. Use of the past by the different historical subjects engaged in these contests over forest lands in India results in several threads intertwined across a shared frame. I shall try to unravel only one strand in this essay, namely, the official ideologies implicated in colonial forestry and the technologies of power that it spawned. I will show how the colonial state, drawing on several pasts, constructed the question of forests in India.