Table of Contents

Foreword / James C. Scott vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Agrarian Environments / Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan 1
State Economic Policies and Changing Regional Landscapes in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, 1818–1947 / Haripriya Rangan 23
Colonial Influences on Property, Community, and Land Use in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh / J. Mark Baker 47
Environmental Alarm and Institutionalized Conservation in Himachal Pradesh, 1865–1994 / Vasant K. Saberwal 68
State Power and Agricultural Transformation in Tamil Nadu / Jenny Springer 86
Famine in the Landscape: Imagining Hunger in South Asian History, 1860–1990 / Darren C. Zook 107
Economic Rents and Natural Resources: Common Conflicts in Premodern India / Sumit Guha 132
Identities and Livelihoods: Gender, Ethnicity, and Nature in a South Bihar Village / Cecile Jackson and Molly Chattopadhyay 147
Regimes of Control, Strategies of Access: Politics of Forest Use in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, India / Shubhra Gururani 170
Pastoralism and Community in Rajasthan: Interrogating Categories of Arid Lands Development / Paul Robbins 191
Labored Landscapes: Agro-ecological Change in Central Gujarat, India / Vinay Gidwani 216
Reflections
Agrarian Histories and Grassroots Development in South Asia / David Ludden 251
Cathecting the Natural / Ajay Skaria 265
Bibliography 277
Contributors 303
Index 307

Promotional Information

An interdisciplinary exploration of the connections between the politics of environmental degradation and agrarian life in India.

About the Author

Arun Agrawal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People, also published by Duke University Press.

K. Sivaramakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and author of Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India.

Reviews

"This volume brings a remarkable maturity of vision to the study of the environmental history and politics of India. Departing from the tired nature/culture dichotomy, it offers a fresh approach that situates the environment, agriculture, and politics within a single field. With a deft combination of rich empirical material and conceptual sophistication, the contributors treat nature, climate, forests, pasture, irrigation, cultivation, political movements and state policies as aspects of a single reality, and show that their separation is not just a scholarly misconception but an artifice of colonial and postcolonial history. Our understanding of the politics of Indian environment and the academic field of environmental studies will never be the same after Agrarian Environments." - Gyan Prakash, Princeton University "Agrarian Environments is a volume of historically and empirically informed essays that represents a new generation of scholarship that promises to reshape the fields of agrarian and environmental studies. By confronting some of the received wisdoms that have separated the study of agriculture from that of the environment, this book opens up a whole range of new and refreshing questions that will be of relevance to scholars and policy makers in all parts of the world." - Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India