Fencing the Forest draws on archival and printed sources to shed fresh light on the ecological dimensions of the colonial impact on South Asia. The changing responses of rural forest users and the fortunes of the land they lived on are the key themes of this study.

This book demonstrates how varying levels of human disturbance manifested through different management regimes influence composition, richness, diversity and abundance of key mammal, bird and plant species, even within ecologically similar habitats. Based on our results, we show the critical importance of the ‘wildlife preservation’ approach for effective biodiversity conservation. The study also provides examples of a practical application of rigorous methods of quantitative sampling of different plant and animal taxa as well as human influences, thus serving as a useful manual for protected area managers. Protected areas of various kinds have been established in India with the goal of arresting decline in, and to provide for, recovery of biodiversity and ecosystem services. A model that targets ‘wildlife preservation’ under state ownership is practiced across the country. However, forests in India are under intensive human pressure and varying levels of protection; therefore, protected areas may also experience open-access resource use, a model that is being aggressively advocated as a viable alternative to ‘preservationism’. We have evaluated the conservation efficacy of alternative forest management models by quantifying levels of biodiversity under varied levels of access, resource extraction and degree of state-sponsored protection in the Nagarahole forest landscape of southwestern India.

Modern Forests is an environmental, institutional, and cultural history of forestry in colonial eastern India. By carefully examining the influence of regional political formations and biogeographic processes on land and forest management, this book offers an analysis of the interrelated social and biophysical factors that influenced landscape change. Through a cultural analysis of powerful landscape representations, Modern Forests reveals the contention, debates, and uncertainty that persisted for two hundred years of colonial rule as forests were identified, classified, and brought under different regimes of control and were transformed to serve a variety of imperial and local interests. The author examines the regionally varied conditions that generated widely different kinds of forest management systems, and the ways in which certain ideas and forces became dominant at various times. Through this emphasis on regional socio-political processes and ecologies, the author offers a new way to write environmental history. Instead of making a sharp distinction between third-world and first-world experiences in forest management, the book suggests a potential for cross-continental comparative studies through regional analyses. The book also offers an approach to historical anthropology that does not make apolitical separations between foreign and indigenous views of the world of nature, insisting instead that different cultural repertoires for discerning the natural, and using it, can be fashioned out of shared concerns within and across social groups. The politics of such cultural construction, the book argues, must be studied through institutional histories and ethnographies of statemaking. In conclusion, the author offers a genealogy of development as it can be traced from forest conservation in colonial eastern India.

The forest discourse in India has shifted decisively from questions of management to questions of governance. The essays in this book highlight and explore how this shift is occurring and what the challenges to democratic forest governance are. It covers questions of local management, wildlife conservation and forest conversion, as well as the changing socio-economic context of forestry in India.