‘From rhinos in Harappa to ancient war elephants, forests and their beings shaped India’s historical identity’

Mahesh Rangarajan is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. He speaks with Srijana Mitra Das in TE about the great Indian forest — and how this and its many beings have survived:

Mahesh Rangarajan recently co-edited ‘India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History’ with Arupjyoti Saikia. What do forests mean, TE asks the environmental historian, at a time when many people have not directly experienced one? Rangarajan replies, ‘In most countries, forests are much less than they once were but forests mean different things to different people. It depends on the individual, group, time and larger context. Our new book travels from a prehistory of India to the contemporary period — over that time, the meaning of ‘the forest’ changed considerably.’

At first, there was great closeness between human existence and what is now considered ‘the wild’. Rangarajan says, ‘In prehistory, there was intensive contact between humans, forests and large animals. Think of the rock art of Bhimbetka, the Paleolithic and Mesolithic Vindhyan cave paintings in Madhya Pradesh. These show a tiger in close proximity to human beings. You could not separate the habitations of large forest animals from humans situated on the edges of thickets. Imagine how ‘the forest’ changed for these animals, particularly in the Indian subcontinent where the density of humans to land area rose dramatically. A paper in our book refers to lions and ‘unicorns’ in India, meaning the rhinoceros unicornis which even showed up on Harappan seals in 2500 BC. The lion was very widespread in its forest range until the 19 th century, spread from far south to the east. Now, lions are mostly found in Gujarat while the rhino exists only in Assam and Bengal. The forest homes of these animals have shrunk while the habitations of humans have expanded.’

Rangarajan adds, ‘However, it’s not like the forest has ended. There are still liminal spaces shared between flora, fauna and humans. There are regions in India where the forest remains part of human experience and sensibility, continuing to play a very important ecological and economic role, often most directly experienced by the poor.’

Are there different kinds of Indian forests? Rangarajan explains, ‘There are diverse understandings. The Forest Act of 1878, for instance, officially defined government-owned forest land as ‘forest’. This government category also has distinctions, such as places the government has full property rights or reserved forests, unclassed forests and civil or revenue lands handed over for cultivation versus protected forests where some rights are defined and some aren’t.’ There are also botanical descriptions. Rangarajan says, ‘The 1968 book ‘A Revised Survey of the Forest Types of India’, by Sir Harry Champion and Shiam Kishore Seth, offered some interesting categories, such as ‘dry deciduous forests’ and ‘moist deciduous forests’. There are also ‘wet evergreen forests’, now called ‘rainforests’, in places where it rains 200 centimetres a year, like the Western Ghats and parts of the Northeast.’

However, Rangarajan mentions, ‘This categorisation looks at forests only in terms of trees though. Both authors were foresters and forestry then was largely about timber and wood. So, many areas they classified as ‘wastelands’ would now actually be called ‘thorn forests’ — Jayashree Ratnam of the National Centre for Biological Sciences argues they could be called savannah. Hence, we need to be broader in our classifications, looking perhaps at uncultivated land, grassland to treedotted savannah to mature tree forest.’

The forest is also not the impenetrable mass some imagine. Rangarajan says, ‘A common urban misapprehension now is that the forest is a tangle, a puzzle of vines and vegetation, primeval or untouched. However, it is crucial to remember humans have been in these areas for a very long time. We used fire — and many of these forests were sculpted by this over millennia. Just as India has about 35,000 types of flowering plants, it has huge diversity in jungles, forest floors and microclimates. There is a saying in Rajasthan about the difference between Marwar and Mewar being babul in the first area to amla in the second — you’d know the boundary of the two microclimates upon crossing from woods of babul into amla. The forest here is mapped both by folk and state memory.’

Foresters in India classified thickets largely by looking at the rich troves of trees — timber, teak, sal, sheesham, pine, deodar, etc. — found in distinct regions. Rangarajan points out, ‘Today, notions of the forest include more — flora, herbs, shrubs and grasses also compose these.

Think of the wild buffalo, ancestor of our domestic buffalos, and rhino, both grasseaters. The blackbuck or ‘krishna mrigha’ also eats grass in forests. Each of these animals has a relationship with human life, in ceremonial, religious, livelihood or regal ways. So, the forest and its many elements form part of Indian daily life.’ Was there a rupture when colonialism arrived? Rangarajan considers, ‘There was certainly a colonial phase which looms large over us. The Forest Department itself was created in 1864. Many of our forest laws derecognised property rights. The zamindari abolition debate was a big question into the 1950s, around the issue of land to the tiller — the equivalent did not take place with forests though. Many people resided there without land rights — the forest department sought their labour as forest products became a valued commercial resource. Hence, an entirely different way of life continued in forests.’

However, strong state laws governed forests even in pre-colonised India. ‘The Arthashastra, which dates around the 3rd century BC, has important notions of forests. There is the ‘mrigavana’ or forest area for the recreation of the king and the ‘gajavana’ for resources — this included the all-important war elephant. There was a complex power structure and sets of rules involving kings, forests, people, products and animals. The forest was very much a part of the kingly state. Hunting was important to rulers, from Rani Durgawati to Jahangir, to show their power over territory, protect their citizens and distribute gains, creating circles of resources, extraction, domination and protection.’

So, what does ‘the forest’ mean in contemporary India? Rangarajan says, ‘It is, of course, a huge economic resource — and far more. It is a place of imagination and discovery for many. There are regions where the sense of a forest is critical to a sense of self. The Chipko Andolan of 1973, just some decades ago, showed how important forests were to hill people. One aspect of being Uttarakhandi was the power of the village to decide what happened to forests. A sense of community stemming from forests still exists. For many, the forest remains part of a historically evolved identity.’ TE hopes that rootedness, binding people and animals, from lush grasses to swaying canopies, will always prevail.