India’s Forests brings together essays by some of the country’s leading scholars with a fresh view of nature and history. These reappraisals of Indian forests and their many lives in past and present matter more than ever today. Born of years of sustained reflection, the essays here view forests not as passive unchanging backdrops to the past but as living, contested spaces. Forests were shaped and in turn deeply influenced by power, culture and society. They could mean very different things to different people who often were in contest over meaning as much as control of the space or the resource. The volume spans from prehistory through ancient and early modern India into the present. It is also alive to the impact of the colonial era while tracing the changing fortunes of tribal and hill peoples. They are ecological lifelines and sites of legend, memory, and scientific knowledge. Material remains and life cycles of animals and plants matter, so too do social and literary imaginations. Forests have been continually redefined through conflict, negotiation, and care. Attentive to the changing meanings across time and place, the book asks us fundamental and unsettling questions: what are forests for? India’s Forests will inform as well as stimulate thought for all who are concerned with the fate of forests now as much as about the country’s past.

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