Territories of conquest, landscapes of resistance: the political ecology of peasant cultivation in Dharwar, western India, 1818–1840 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Modernity and its Discontents: Studying Environmental History of Colonial and Postcolonial
In the cont* of rapid environrnental changes in modern Bengl and Bangladesh, ds paper susssrs thar the problen of well-being-eg. availabiliry of and entitlement r: food, nutririon and social and economic stabiliry-in the region hro beeo inrimaah related to declining ecological condidons. The paper rhen offem a critique of an rl' pervrsive modern krowledge and moderniation proces that conrributed rowards rh:: ecological decline. Referring to the fact that the onmlogical connoation of modernin excluded environmental considerations, this paper argues that conrempor:n environmental crisis can be effctiveLy dolr with by an holistic approach rhrougl: fostering 'ontological unity which refers to a state ofinternally coherent relation bemeer various branches of knowledge.
Studies in History, 2008
The complexities associated with interactions of various components of environment have not been examined in historical narratives of pre-colonial India. An important consideration for any agrarian society has been the availability of water for irrigation, and in arid and semi-arid regions-with unequal annual distribution of rains and low water table-often saline water is used even for the potable purposes. This article elucidates various systems of water management developed and maintained by the local/individual initiatives as well as those developed by the state at a larger scale for irrigation and potable purposes. It is argued here that the pre-colonial states in Rajasthan had to ensure continuity of habitation by offering concessions and support to protect the revenue base. It was a difficult act of balance in a society where political and social orders were integrated into a single complex web. The article argues that the same complex web endowed the state with an all-pervasive administrative apparatus. It questions the dominant assumption(s) centring on the relative apathy of the state towards agricultural production and resultant immunity enjoyed by the local magnates of socio-political power and even cultivators. The article also examines the nature of intricate interventions of the above-mentioned socio-political web to underline the prominent considerations enjoyed by the environment-related uncertainties. 4 The Rajputana Gazetteer (1879: 20). 5 On his way, Babur realized that northeast Rajasthan was extremely hot (Babur 1970: 577); Abul Fazl and Jahangir placed it in the second of the seven categories in which the whole world was traditionally divided. The second category implied equitive heat and winter.
BECOMING COMMON – ECOLOGICAL RESISTANCE, REFUSAL, REPARATION
2023
This chapter thinks through international law and posthuman theory by way of an example of ‘posthumanist commoning’. It explores the posthumanist and the commoning dimensions of the legal and political collective actions at hand. It does so by telling the story of the ‘insurgent lake’ of Rome – the ‘lago bullicante’. Bullicante is an archaic Italian term that signifies both ‘to boil’ (bollire) and ‘to get agitated’ (agitarsi). The ‘lake that boils and gets agitated’ refers to the artificial/natural lake that was accidentally created in 1992, when an underground parking lot was illegally constructed and inadvertently hit an aquifer, thereby flooding the construction site and nearby area, creating a one-hectare large lake in the heart of the city. With the lake, an insurgent political subjectivity emerged to resist and care for its preservation. Both the subjectivity and the struggle are articulated and practiced in non-liberal, non-individualistic, and in-human (or more and less than ‘human’) terms, thereby giving rise to a distinctive mode of ‘becoming common’. Drawing on the lago bullicante, I argue that this mode of ‘posthumanist commoning’ enacts particular practices of ecological resistance, refusal, and reparation. The transversal alliances forged within networks of transnational resisting collectives help exploring how posthuman theory can inform international law. It does so by availing methods of reconfiguring the categories of the human, the land, and its living ecology, while also revealing critical blind-spots and methodological/conceptual limitations of both posthuman theory and international law.
This paper deals with the Tana Bhagat movement in the period between 1914 and 1919 in order to argue against the existing historiography that sees adivasi protest in Jharkhand as an inevitable struggle of ‘insiders’ against ‘outsiders’, or of ‘indigenous’ people for their immemorial rights over their lands. By discussing the relationship of the Oraons and the Tana Bhagats with the lands and forests of Chhotanagpur, while recognizing the differentiated and changing landscape of the region, and by analyzing the hierarchies within Oraon society, I suggest an alternate reading of adivasi protest in colonial India. I use the stories of the Tana Bhagats, however, to make a larger point as well, a tangential one, as I outline in this paper some of the limitations of the ever-expanding field of ‘Indian’ environmental history. Though environmental history is a well-established field/discipline in the academia today, the previously etched boundaries of ‘Indian’ environmental history are becoming increasingly fluid; we need therefore to understand the shifting terrains of the field. My argument, that discusses some of the ways in which adivasis were framed in the environmental discourse, is intended to be a part of the ongoing dialogue amongst those who write the environment into the larger project of history-writing.