The Prehistory of Community Forestry in India

Abstract

Liberty and forest laws are incompatible, remarked an English country vicar, speaking on behalf of villagers shut out of woodland reserved for the exclusive use of the king, in 1720.1 The history of state forestry is indeed a history of social conflict. In monarchies and in democracies, in metropolitan Europe as well as in colonial South Asia, the state management of forests has met bitter and continuous opposition. On the one side are the professional foresters who believe that timber production can be ensured only through the exclusion of humans and their animals from wooded areas; on the other, the peasants, pastoralists, charcoal ironmakers, basketweavers, and other such groups for whom access to forests and forest resources is crucial to economic survival. Environmentalists have added to the criticisms of these latter groups, charging foresters with simplifying complex ecosytems in the direction of commercially valuable but biologically impoverished monocultures. These contending parties have battled for more than two hundred years. In continental Europe, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were peppered with social protest movements against the state management of forests. These protests inspired, among other things, Karl Marx's first political writings and a memorable novel by Honore de Balzac capturing peasant hostility to forest officials.2 When the European model of strict state control over forests was exported to the colonies, the disaffected peasants and tribals responded with arson and violence. Movements over forest rights were a recurring phenomena in colonies ruled by the British, the Dutch, and the French. The conflicts persisted when the post-colonial governments of countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia followed the authoritarian model of forest management inherited from the colonizer.3 In recent decades, however, the global discourse on forestry has moved towards a more accommodationist perspective. Foresters and peasant protesters now seem to talk to, rather than talk past, each other. A willingness to listen to and at least partially incorporate the other point of view has replaced the rigid and uncompromising attitude of the past. Within the forestry profession itself, skeptics doubt the contemporary relevance of the custodial and policing approaches previously followed. A system of natural resource management crafted in absolutist and colonialist