K. Sivaramakrishnan
Showing all 8 books
The essays in the volume analyse India’s environmental past and the way it has been viewed by scholars. They debunk the idea of a primeval, pristine forest cover in India and delve into the past and its traditions that are invoked when debating contemporary conflicts. They examine the dynamics that shape human-animal relations and the conflicts resulting from post-independence projects of rural development and conservation. They touch upon aspects of ...
Environmental history of India has developed as an important field of inquiry in the last twenty-five years. While providing major insights, the existing scholarship has primarily focused on drawing sharp lines of distinction—those between geographical spaces (forest, rivers, farms), people (herders, farmers, townspeople), eras (colonial, post-colonial), and so on. The limitations of these sharp divides are brought to the forefront when there is a critical ...
Even if a profusion of writings exists on India’s rich, widely varied ecological past, there is hardly any significant work that takes notice of the eras prior to 1800. There are, say the editors, valuable specific studies giving insights into forest frictions and water disputes, the contests over urban or rural spaces between rival claimants to water or land, animal, plant, or mineral wealth, and many other aspects. Re-interrogating the source materials on ...
Modern Forests combines perspectives from environmental history, political anthropology, science studies, and cultural geography to evaluate transformations in Bengal forest use and management in the light of colonial practices, imaginations, and institutions. It describes conflicts over conservation, development, and governance in different bio-georaphic regions and argues that key variations emerged in patterns of land management that reflected the operation of ...
This book is a timely study on the dichotomies that have shaped the analysis of environmental processes in India. Drawing on wide-ranging field and archival research, the contributors to this volume. Offer a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change. Explain the dynamics of environmental conflicts in terms of mobilization and organization of cultural representations. Examine how environmental ...
This book brings together essays that critique entrenched discourses on development. Using culturalist frameworks, the essays advance public and scholarly debates on development that move beyond globally dominant and homogenized views of modernity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic treatments, the contributors to the volume point out the diversity of both the development experience, and the nature of modernities that development puts in place. The essays ...
How do we recognize and understand the interactions between nature, nationness, and nationalism? How is nature appropriated by politics when asserting identity, interests, and rights? Drawing from South Asia's varying regions, the essays in this pathbreaking volume answer such questions. They range in time from early colonial history to the ends of the twentieth century, and their research locations extend from north-west Pakistan to eastern Bangladesh, and from ...