India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History

Explore the rich, contested relationship between nature, power, and society with India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History, edited and authored by leading scholars Arupjyoti Saikia and Mahesh Rangarajan!

About the Book: Bringing together insightful essays by some of the country’s foremost scholars, India’s Forests offers a fresh, comprehensive view of environmental history, ecology, and forest communities. Moving beyond the traditional view of forests as passive, unchanging backdrops, this volume treats them as living, contested spaces shaped by culture, governance, and human conflict. Spanning from prehistory and ancient times through the colonial era into the present day, the book explores the changing fortunes of tribal and hill peoples, the legacy of imperial policy, and the role of forests as ecological lifelines, sites of legend, and repositories of scientific knowledge. Asking fundamental and unsettling questions about what forests are truly for, this essential collection informs and stimulates thought for anyone concerned with India’s past and ecological future.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Expert Editorship: Edited by distinguished historians and scholars Arupjyoti Saikia and Mahesh Rangarajan.

• Comprehensive Environmental History: Spans thousands of years of Indian history, examining prehistorical, colonial, and contemporary human-forest dynamics.

• Multidisciplinary Perspective: Highlights the voices of tribal and hill communities, blending ecological science with cultural memory, literature, and social politics.

• The Perfect Gift: An intellectually stimulating and vital present for environmentalists, historians, students of ecological studies, and lovers of non-fiction.