Forests and the environmental history of modern India

This essay explores how the definition and management of boundaries between wildness and civility in Indian society and the relation of ideas of nature to different aspects of social life – labour, aesthetics, politics, commerce, or agriculture – are interconnected historical processes that inform environmental history. Admittedly written from the vantage point of forest history, the domain of environmental history in which the most robust body of scholarly debate exists in India, the essay uses this rich literature to ask questions that newer and emerging environmental histories of India, especially as they deal with questions of water, air, industry, and climate change, may find generative for their own development.