From forest to delta: recent themes in South Asian environmental history

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article will follow the field of South Asian environmental history from its insular beginnings in the 1980s and 1990s, through its initial contact with other fields, to its current integration into the heart of contemporary South Asian historiography. It will argue that 1999 represented a turning point in the field. Three works published that year – S. Sivaramakrishnan’s Modern Forests, Sumit Guha’s Environment and Ethnicity in India, and Ajay Skaria’s Hybrid Histories – reached out from environmental history to incorporate a diverse range of theoretical and methodological influences. Since then, environmental historians have become more geographically and intellectually eclectic, just as historians from other fields have begun to borrow and incorporate environmental optics into other historical work. This new work, both that which takes the environment as the central focus of analysis, and that which draws on environmental optics in writing other histories, highlights the breakdown of an epistemology in which the environment was only visible or important in a limited range of social geographies. Through this process of integration, environmental historians have also begun to re-incorporate the environmentalist ethic which in many ways propelled the field’s beginnings, but which was eclipsed by the intellectual imperative to complicate the simplistic blame-narratives of many early environmental and anti-colonial histories.