Ezra Rashkow | Montclair State University (original) (raw)
Books by Ezra Rashkow
Oxford University Press, 2023
Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to mo... more Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more conservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India's 'tribes' really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with rigorous theoretical interrogations, this book examines fears of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss-particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing conservation and development-induced displacement in western and central India. It also problematizes the frequent usage of dehumanizing animal analogies that carelessly equate the fates of endangered species and societies. In doing so, it offers a global intellectual history of the concepts of endangerment and extinction, demonstrating that anxieties over tribal extinction existed long before there was even scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. The book is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India, but rather a history of discourses-including Adivasis' own-about what is often perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival.
This book sheds new light on the dynamics of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. It... more This book sheds new light on the dynamics of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. It highlights how various analytical approaches to this encounter can be creatively mobilised to rethink entanglements of memory and identity emerging from British rule in the subcontinent. This volume reevaluates central, long-standing debates about the historical impact of the British Raj by deviating from hegemonic and top-down civilizational perspectives. It focuses on interactions, relations and underlying meanings of the colonial experience. The narratives of memory, identity and the legacy of the colonial encounter are woven together in a diverse range of essays on subjects such as colonial and nationalist memorials; British, Eurasian, Dalit and Adivasi identities; regional political configurations; and state initiatives and patterns of control.
By drawing on empirically rich, regional and chronological historical studies, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers of history, political science, colonial studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.
Papers by Ezra Rashkow
Rashkow E.D. (2022) Indian Sandalwood: A History of Overexploitation and Endangerment. In: Arunkumar A.N., Joshi G., Warrier R.R., Karaba N.N. (eds) Indian Sandalwood. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6565-3\_2
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2021
How can a jungle be domestic, and a camp servant be a domestic servant? This article argues for a... more How can a jungle be domestic, and a camp servant be a domestic servant? This article argues for a reconceptualisation of historical forests and jungles of India: spaces usually conceived of as wild and hostile in the popular imagination were also a domestic realm. Pushing the boundaries of traditional conceptualisations of both domestic and wild, I examine the lives of late nineteenth to early twentieth-century camp servants and colonial officers living and working in the central Indian hinterland. Building on my work on populations I have referred to as ‘subaltern shikaris’, typically ‘tribal’ employees in British big game hunting expeditions, and drawing from a vast literature left behind by European forest officers and big game hunters in central India, this article shows how servants and servitude were vital to establishing that jungle camps could indeed be quite domestic.
Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in Honour of Peter Robb, 2017
History Compass, 2014
Whereas most histories of national parks and indigenous peoples have largely focused on disposses... more Whereas most histories of national parks and indigenous peoples have largely focused on dispossession of resident populations in the making of uninhabited wilderness areas, this article surveys the perhaps equally problematic history of the idea of preserving human communities today referred to as ‘indigenous’ in parks. In the very first-ever call for a national park, as well as in frequent proposals for nation parks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and now the twenty-first century, protected areas have been envisioned as places of conservation, study and display not only of endangered species, but also of human groups perceived to be endangered. Drawing on cases from the early US, colonial Africa, Indonesia and India, as well as on histories of international conservation policies emerging around WWI, the article argues that this alternative conception of what national parks should look like has been pervasive, perennial, and deeply problematic. The problem is not only that indigenous groups have long been perceived as in danger of becoming extinct, and therefore paternalistically projected as in need of protection. It is also that these peoples, who have long suffered dehumanizing animal analogies, are envisioned as endangered like wildlife, and in need of protection in parks.
This article presents new evidence with which to evaluate the validity of the popular picture of ... more This article presents new evidence with which to evaluate the validity of the popular picture of religious environmentalism in India. It examines accounts of a large number of incidents described in Indian language newspapers, the colonial archive, and hunting literature published between the 1870s and 1940s, in which British and other sportsmen clashed with villagers in India while hunting. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the colonial sports-hunting obsession was in its heyday, but opposition to hunting across India was also mounting. Rural villagers, in particular, were often willing to lock into physical combat with hunters, apparently in order to protect local wildlife. Sportsmen often assumed that it was religious fanaticism that made Hindus defend the lives of what they saw as game animals, trophies, and specimens. The article provides evidence that in addition to religion, a mixture of other motivations explains Hindu interest in the conservation of certain species. Anti-colonial consciousness, assertions of local authority and territoriality, and an environmental ethic can all be identified as being at work. The end result was the increased conservation of certain species of wildlife.
Is Jainism an endangered religion? This article considers the various ways in which Jainism has b... more Is Jainism an endangered religion? This article considers the various ways in which Jainism has been projected to be in decline, under threat, and/or in need of protection; and it assesses the steps taken as a result of such perceptions. Examining Jainism’s position as a minority religion in India and abroad, this asks why authors and pundits have often expressed concern for the survival of the Jain community, and if such fears are at all founded. It will also look at some recent attempts at preservation.
Academic histories of hunting or shikar in India have almost entirely focused on the sports hunti... more Academic histories of hunting or shikar in India have almost entirely focused on the sports hunting of British colonists and Indian royalty. This article attempts to balance this elite bias by focusing on the meaning of shikar in the construction of the Gond ‘tribal’ identity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial central India. Coining the term ‘subaltern shikaris’ to refer to the class of poor, rural hunters, typically ignored in this historiography, the article explores how the British managed to use hunting as a means of state penetration into central India’s forest interior, where they came to regard their Gond forest-dwelling subjects as essentially and eternally primitive hunting tribes. Subaltern shikaris were employed by elite sportsmen, and were also paid to hunt in the colonial regime’s vermin eradication program, which targeted tigers, wolves, bears and other species identified by the state as ‘dangerous beasts’. When offered economic incentives, forest dwellers usually willingly participated in new modes of hunting, even as impact on wildlife rapidly accelerated and became unsustainable. Yet as non-indigenous approaches to nature became normative, there was sometimes also resistance from Gond communities. For as overkill accelerated, this led to exclusion of local peoples from natural resources, to their increasing incorporation into dominant political and economic systems, and to the eventual collapse of hunting as a livelihood. All of this raises the question: to what extent were subaltern subjects, like wildlife, ‘the hunted’ in colonial India?
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in South Asian History and Culture vol. 5, no. 3 (23 Apr 2014) [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19472498.2014.905324
Between 1950 and 1970, on average over 480,000 Indian sandalwood (Santalum album) trees were harv... more Between 1950 and 1970, on average over 480,000 Indian sandalwood (Santalum album) trees were harvested annually in the state of Karnataka in southern India. Then, in 1974, it was suddenly discovered that there were only approximately 350,000 standing trees left in the entire state. Overnight, India’s sandalwood industry ground to a halt. The species was on the brink of extinction. Harvesting and trade in Indian sandalwood, long considered the most precious wood in the world, was ineffectively banned. Smugglers could now make more money by felling sandal trees than by poaching elephants for ivory. This article uses the history of sandalwood to assess claims about the nature and impact of colonial and postcolonial forestry, arguing that at least when it came to Indian sandalwood, though European foresters did overexploit the species and also failed to conserve it, the real watershed moment for the species came not during the colonial period but rather in the independence period when industrialisation led to a major endangerment crisis for the tree.
Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies Occasional Papers 26 (2008): 28pp.
PhD Diss., SOAS, University of London, 2008
Book Reviews by Ezra Rashkow
The book presents the results of a comprehensive study of the impact of trade policy reforms in I... more The book presents the results of a comprehensive study of the impact of trade policy reforms in India during the quarter century 1975-99 on different dimensions of effi ciency and equity with special reference to the (organised) manufacturing sector. Substantive analyses and fi ndings are reported in chapters 4-8 and the relevant background material in chapters 1-3. The key fi ndings and policy implications are highlighted in the ninth and fi nal chapter. The data sources for the study are described in an appendix. In view of the space constraint, this review is quite selective and focuses on the econometric/empirical methodologies and key fi ndings.
Oxford University Press, 2023
Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to mo... more Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more conservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India's 'tribes' really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with rigorous theoretical interrogations, this book examines fears of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss-particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing conservation and development-induced displacement in western and central India. It also problematizes the frequent usage of dehumanizing animal analogies that carelessly equate the fates of endangered species and societies. In doing so, it offers a global intellectual history of the concepts of endangerment and extinction, demonstrating that anxieties over tribal extinction existed long before there was even scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. The book is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India, but rather a history of discourses-including Adivasis' own-about what is often perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival.
This book sheds new light on the dynamics of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. It... more This book sheds new light on the dynamics of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. It highlights how various analytical approaches to this encounter can be creatively mobilised to rethink entanglements of memory and identity emerging from British rule in the subcontinent. This volume reevaluates central, long-standing debates about the historical impact of the British Raj by deviating from hegemonic and top-down civilizational perspectives. It focuses on interactions, relations and underlying meanings of the colonial experience. The narratives of memory, identity and the legacy of the colonial encounter are woven together in a diverse range of essays on subjects such as colonial and nationalist memorials; British, Eurasian, Dalit and Adivasi identities; regional political configurations; and state initiatives and patterns of control.
By drawing on empirically rich, regional and chronological historical studies, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers of history, political science, colonial studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.
Rashkow E.D. (2022) Indian Sandalwood: A History of Overexploitation and Endangerment. In: Arunkumar A.N., Joshi G., Warrier R.R., Karaba N.N. (eds) Indian Sandalwood. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6565-3\_2
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2021
How can a jungle be domestic, and a camp servant be a domestic servant? This article argues for a... more How can a jungle be domestic, and a camp servant be a domestic servant? This article argues for a reconceptualisation of historical forests and jungles of India: spaces usually conceived of as wild and hostile in the popular imagination were also a domestic realm. Pushing the boundaries of traditional conceptualisations of both domestic and wild, I examine the lives of late nineteenth to early twentieth-century camp servants and colonial officers living and working in the central Indian hinterland. Building on my work on populations I have referred to as ‘subaltern shikaris’, typically ‘tribal’ employees in British big game hunting expeditions, and drawing from a vast literature left behind by European forest officers and big game hunters in central India, this article shows how servants and servitude were vital to establishing that jungle camps could indeed be quite domestic.
Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in Honour of Peter Robb, 2017
History Compass, 2014
Whereas most histories of national parks and indigenous peoples have largely focused on disposses... more Whereas most histories of national parks and indigenous peoples have largely focused on dispossession of resident populations in the making of uninhabited wilderness areas, this article surveys the perhaps equally problematic history of the idea of preserving human communities today referred to as ‘indigenous’ in parks. In the very first-ever call for a national park, as well as in frequent proposals for nation parks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and now the twenty-first century, protected areas have been envisioned as places of conservation, study and display not only of endangered species, but also of human groups perceived to be endangered. Drawing on cases from the early US, colonial Africa, Indonesia and India, as well as on histories of international conservation policies emerging around WWI, the article argues that this alternative conception of what national parks should look like has been pervasive, perennial, and deeply problematic. The problem is not only that indigenous groups have long been perceived as in danger of becoming extinct, and therefore paternalistically projected as in need of protection. It is also that these peoples, who have long suffered dehumanizing animal analogies, are envisioned as endangered like wildlife, and in need of protection in parks.
This article presents new evidence with which to evaluate the validity of the popular picture of ... more This article presents new evidence with which to evaluate the validity of the popular picture of religious environmentalism in India. It examines accounts of a large number of incidents described in Indian language newspapers, the colonial archive, and hunting literature published between the 1870s and 1940s, in which British and other sportsmen clashed with villagers in India while hunting. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the colonial sports-hunting obsession was in its heyday, but opposition to hunting across India was also mounting. Rural villagers, in particular, were often willing to lock into physical combat with hunters, apparently in order to protect local wildlife. Sportsmen often assumed that it was religious fanaticism that made Hindus defend the lives of what they saw as game animals, trophies, and specimens. The article provides evidence that in addition to religion, a mixture of other motivations explains Hindu interest in the conservation of certain species. Anti-colonial consciousness, assertions of local authority and territoriality, and an environmental ethic can all be identified as being at work. The end result was the increased conservation of certain species of wildlife.
Is Jainism an endangered religion? This article considers the various ways in which Jainism has b... more Is Jainism an endangered religion? This article considers the various ways in which Jainism has been projected to be in decline, under threat, and/or in need of protection; and it assesses the steps taken as a result of such perceptions. Examining Jainism’s position as a minority religion in India and abroad, this asks why authors and pundits have often expressed concern for the survival of the Jain community, and if such fears are at all founded. It will also look at some recent attempts at preservation.
Academic histories of hunting or shikar in India have almost entirely focused on the sports hunti... more Academic histories of hunting or shikar in India have almost entirely focused on the sports hunting of British colonists and Indian royalty. This article attempts to balance this elite bias by focusing on the meaning of shikar in the construction of the Gond ‘tribal’ identity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial central India. Coining the term ‘subaltern shikaris’ to refer to the class of poor, rural hunters, typically ignored in this historiography, the article explores how the British managed to use hunting as a means of state penetration into central India’s forest interior, where they came to regard their Gond forest-dwelling subjects as essentially and eternally primitive hunting tribes. Subaltern shikaris were employed by elite sportsmen, and were also paid to hunt in the colonial regime’s vermin eradication program, which targeted tigers, wolves, bears and other species identified by the state as ‘dangerous beasts’. When offered economic incentives, forest dwellers usually willingly participated in new modes of hunting, even as impact on wildlife rapidly accelerated and became unsustainable. Yet as non-indigenous approaches to nature became normative, there was sometimes also resistance from Gond communities. For as overkill accelerated, this led to exclusion of local peoples from natural resources, to their increasing incorporation into dominant political and economic systems, and to the eventual collapse of hunting as a livelihood. All of this raises the question: to what extent were subaltern subjects, like wildlife, ‘the hunted’ in colonial India?
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in South Asian History and Culture vol. 5, no. 3 (23 Apr 2014) [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19472498.2014.905324
Between 1950 and 1970, on average over 480,000 Indian sandalwood (Santalum album) trees were harv... more Between 1950 and 1970, on average over 480,000 Indian sandalwood (Santalum album) trees were harvested annually in the state of Karnataka in southern India. Then, in 1974, it was suddenly discovered that there were only approximately 350,000 standing trees left in the entire state. Overnight, India’s sandalwood industry ground to a halt. The species was on the brink of extinction. Harvesting and trade in Indian sandalwood, long considered the most precious wood in the world, was ineffectively banned. Smugglers could now make more money by felling sandal trees than by poaching elephants for ivory. This article uses the history of sandalwood to assess claims about the nature and impact of colonial and postcolonial forestry, arguing that at least when it came to Indian sandalwood, though European foresters did overexploit the species and also failed to conserve it, the real watershed moment for the species came not during the colonial period but rather in the independence period when industrialisation led to a major endangerment crisis for the tree.
Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies Occasional Papers 26 (2008): 28pp.
PhD Diss., SOAS, University of London, 2008
The book presents the results of a comprehensive study of the impact of trade policy reforms in I... more The book presents the results of a comprehensive study of the impact of trade policy reforms in India during the quarter century 1975-99 on different dimensions of effi ciency and equity with special reference to the (organised) manufacturing sector. Substantive analyses and fi ndings are reported in chapters 4-8 and the relevant background material in chapters 1-3. The key fi ndings and policy implications are highlighted in the ninth and fi nal chapter. The data sources for the study are described in an appendix. In view of the space constraint, this review is quite selective and focuses on the econometric/empirical methodologies and key fi ndings.