An Environmental History of India

The great upsurge of research on the environmental history of South Asia over the past thirty years has begun to make possible a wider synthesis and a more nuanced understanding. Michael Fisher draws upon this extensive literature to survey more than five thousand years of environmental history, beginning with the geological and climatic features that first shaped, and continue to inform, the complex nature narrative of the region now comprising India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. He constructs his survey around two themes in particular—religious beliefs and the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires—in order to establish how these ‘altered, perceived, and adapted to the nonhuman world and tried to control it through their available technologies and ideologies’ (p. 1). His argument is that religions and states possessed the ‘coercive ideological power and large-scale organizational authority to affect most extensively the relationships among various people and diverse parts of the material world’ (p. 6). Six chapters carry the narrative through from the early Indus and Vedic civilisations to the Mughal era and the British Raj, while the last three chapters, occupying more than a third of the book, follow a substantially different approach. They concentrate in greater detail on developments since Indian independence in 1947, drawing parallels and contrasts between the policies pursued by the three countries and tracing the impact of globalisation as well as more specifically regional events. Throughout the book, Fisher addresses familiar environmental themes—the significance of water control and the reliance of agriculture on irrigation, the importance of the forests, their resources and inhabitants, the domestication of animals and the pursuit of hunting, the impact of changing technologies and, latterly, the rise of environmental movements. He alerts readers to the changing nature of the sources available to historians for different periods. Without being overly deterministic, he notes the influence of wider environmental forces acting on the subcontinent, such as El Niño events, in instigating short- or long-term climate change, their part in triggering drought and famine, and in favouring or undermining civilisations such as that of the ancient Indus or regimes such as the Mughals. The book gives some insight into the different understandings of the environment presented by Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, and by the developmental ethos and intensified exploitation of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Given the relative brevity of the earlier chapters and the greater detail afforded to the period after 1947, there is a sense in which Fisher is seeking to explain the present as much as to interrogate the past. As he notes, South Asia is now among the world’s most polluted regions and those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: Fisher provides some explanation as to why historically this is so. Part of the function of the later chapters is to assess how far the environmental legacies of the colonial era (and earlier) were carried forward into the post-colonial era, or whether the policies of the new states, their regional rivalries and competition for resources, as well as the rise of a new global environmental awareness manifested by the Stockholm and Rio conferences, created novel constraints and unprecedented compulsions. This presentist perspective is further suggested by the way in which, early in the work, Fisher moves, somewhat abruptly, from discussing forest-dwellers in the context of the archaeology and ethnology of the region to considering their recent history and current status

Ancient history · Genealogy · Sociology · Demography · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine