In 1906 the Imperial Forest Research Institute was established with 6 officers – the Silviculturist, Superintendent of Forest Working Plans, Forest Zoologist, Forest Botanist, Forest Chemist and Forest Economist. According to Richard Tucker, the pattern of foreign training followed by British and urban Indian elite's dislike of wandering on remote mountains for several months at a time resulted into the fact that even in 1906 only two Indians had entered training for the professional ranks. It was then suggested that as in other departments certain number of direct appointments should be reserved for the natives of India, trained in India and those who had not served in the inferior grades. The experience of the Government of India was that “the life of the junior Forest Officer, it was observed, was a very trying one, involving considerable amount of exposure and fatigue if he really does his duty in forests. Native gentlemen in 9 cases out of 10 found the work quite uncongenial to their tastes and they would at best perform the duties in a perfunctory manner”. This route towards making the forest management localised was not promising and it led to further widening of the gap between the British forest management and the subsistence practices of the villagers.

The attitude of the British government towards the villages and their understanding of the subsistence agricultural practices did not change all through their administration in India. The Imperial Gazetteer of Bombay in 1909, is an example where it was stated that in spite of the great care taken by the Forest Department to control forest operations in the interests of the people, these operations did not become popular.

Human life being closely dependent on the natural resource base for its survival, conservation and exploitation of natural resources have been an age-old phenomena. Consequently, every society has a natural resource use strategy that has evolved over thousands of years. The natural resource use strategy that evolved in India before the pre-colonial period had some distinct features specific to the region, the same being a derivative of factors such as the level of contemporary technology, population, demand pattern, political conditions and socio-cultural attitudes of the society towards nature. A number of foreign invasions and the consequent integration of migrant groups from other civilisations into Indian society as well as the changing ecological realities of the region influenced and altered these strategies time and again.

This book also traces strategies in the specific geographical region of Maharashtra, which was a part of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency. It further analyses the change in these strategies during the British colonial period and the impact on the people of this region, which gave rise to discontent in society. The colonial history is grounded in the socio-economic conditions of rural Maharashtra during the eighteenth century, particularly the nature of the relationship between rural communities and their living environment, the customary rights of the community, the usage pattern of natural resources such as forests and the cultural attitudes of people.

The study of evolution of colonial forest policies is the basic thrust of the book, especially British forest policies and their influence on the rural communities in Maharashtra. The ideological underpinnings that influenced colonial forest policies have been examined in detail.

Sacred Plants of Bombay Presidency

Botany Gazeteer of Bombay Presidency Volume XXV Government Central Press, 1886.

Sacred Plants

Plants mentioned in the religious books and used in religious ceremonies of the Hindus.

The Hindus hold the belief that the Gods inhabit or frequent all sweet-scented or flowering plants; as such are never haunted by evil spirits. Therefore, a good member of plants are worshipped or used in some of their religious ceremonies. The most important are the following:

1. i. Butea Frondosa (Palas)

2. ii. Prosopis Spicigera (Shami)

3. iii. Bauhinia Racemosa (Apta)

4. iv. Calotropis Gigantea (Rui)

5. v. Achyranthes Aspera (Agarah)

6. vi. F. Glomerata (Umbar)

7. vii. Ficus Bengalensis (Vad)

8. viii. F. Religiosa (Pipal)

9. ix. Cynodon Dactylon (Dub)

10. x. Eragrostis Cynosuroides (Kush)

11. xi. Eugenia Jambolana (Jambul)

12. xii. Mangifera Indica (Amb)

13. xiii. F. Cordifolia (Pair)

14. xiv. Ocymum Sanctum (Tulus)

15. xv. Phyllanthus Emblica (Aula)

16. xvi. Musa Paradisiaca (Kela)

17. xvii. Aegle Marmelos (Bel)

18. xviii. Saraca Indica (Jassundi Ashok)

19. xix. Rbita Pepo (Kohala)

20. xx. Mus Sativus (Kakdi)

21. xxi. Anus Odoratissimus (Keuda)

22. xxii. Azadirachta (Nim)

Butea frondosa(Palas)

The leaves of this plant are trifoliate: the middle leaflet is supposed to represent Vishnu, the left Brahma and the right Shiv. Hence, its worship is enjoined in Chaturmas Mahatma. It is used in the following three great ceremonies:

1. The leaves are used as platters on the occasion of the investiture of the sacred thread, when a particular part of the ceremony, called chewul (that is when the barber removes the last tuft of hair from the head of the child to be invested), is being performed.

Minutes of Mr. Nulkar, Member of the Bombay Forest Commission 1887, recorded during the enquiry

In his minutes Nulkar said “When a strong and stable foreign government succeeds an indigenous one, in comparatively unsettled parts of the country, extreme measures of settlement at the earliest stages of the new administration are not frequently resorted to; but it is difficult to imagine a greater degree of oscillation of policy as regards the various agricultural interests, than is to be met within the different administrative measures taken at different epochs of the history of these districts, during the past 80 years. Beginning with the policy of putting every acre under cultivation and ending with the absorption of every inch that could be laid hands upon with impunity in the name of forest conservancy, a succession of extreme measures ran in opposite directions, inevitably resulting in the present chronic antagonism between the true interests of agriculture and a sound forest conservancy.”

On the acquisition of these territories, their first want was found to be population, the country being for the most part a ‘thinly inhabited forest’ The gradual settlement in it of the respectable and opulent natives of Mumbai and even the importation of Chinese emigrants were looked as possible means of bringing the land under cultivation.

Human life being closely dependent on the natural resource base for its survival, conservation and exploitation of natural resources has been an age-old phenomenon. However, the quality and magnitude of this exploitation is a derivative of factors such as the level of contemporary technology, population, demand pattern, and socio-cultural attitudes of the society towards nature at different points of time. Indian society has not been an exception to this. A number of foreign invasions and the consequent integration of migrant groups from other civilisations into Indian society influenced and altered its approach towards the exploitation of its natural resource base.

However, the real transformation of the use of resource base on an unprecedented scale and magnitude began with the advent of British modern times. With the Industrial Revolution in their homeland, the main task of British administrators in India was to expropriate India's natural resources for their own imperial demands that were dictated by their military and commercial interests. A revolution in the use of resources following industrialisation enormously enlarged the possibilities of resource transformation from one form to another and their transportation over long distances. The Industrial Revolution created a zest among human beings, particularly from the West, to conquer nature. India being one of the richest colonies of the British in terms of its natural resources was an obvious target for the fulfillment of their rapacious greed. The legitimacy needed to appropriate the resources in the colonies was secured by passing several laws. The constitution of the Forest Department and the enactment of several Forest Acts were part of such attempts in colonial India.

The British systematically and legitimately exploited India's forests.

In August 1990, when V.P. Singh, the Prime Minister of India, announced the partial implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations, large-scale student protests erupted in many campuses of North India. These protests challenged the move to reserve a chunk of government jobs for candidates from, what were called, the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs), based on the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. While these student protestors received much support from the urban middle classes of North India, no political party came out in formal support, nor did any institution of the State or Government. This was primarily because the OBCs represented the large mass of agriculturalists, artisans and rural service providers – the Shudras according to Hindu caste hierarchy – who more often than not constituted a clear demographic majority in any given geographical region. In the context of universal suffrage, it would have been electoral suicide to oppose a move which purportedly benefited them.

Except in Himachal Pradesh. The Himachal Pradesh Government seemed to fly in the face of such basic political logic and filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the implementation of these OBC reservations. These reservations also evoked strong protests in the neighbouring regions of Garhwal and Kumaon and fed into their longstanding demand for a state separate from OBC-dominated Uttar Pradesh. What was striking was that in these Himalayan regions, the muscle of the anti-reservation protests was provided by the agriculturalists. It was perhaps the only part of India where one could say with some certainty that a majority of the people opposed reservation.

The Himalayas have been an integral part of the geographical knowledge of Indian civilisations since at least the Vedic period. Their significance as cultural and religious icons and as the source of the perennial rivers of the North Indian plains, which sustained its agriculture and human settlements, was recognised from the earliest times. Their importance as a line of defence and as a defining physical boundary separating India from its neighbours to the north and the east was also acknowledged. This knowledge of the Himalayas was not confined to the peoples of the Indo-Gangetic plains but got diffused till the southern most corner of the peninsula as early as the period of the Sangam Literature. This knowledge remained for most of the historical period merely as ‘knowledge of the Himalayas’ and could not become ‘knowledge about the Himalayas’ till the coming of the British and their conquest of the Western Himalayas in 1815. Even after so many years ‘knowledge about the Himalayas’ has remained perfunctory, scattered and slow in its spread within the educational and policy-making institutions of India. It is still common to find generalisations made on the basis of geographical contexts which are alien to the region.

Therefore, this chapter has two purposes. The first is to describe and define the topographical, climatic and other natural aspects of the Western Himalayas, which make it a unique ecological niche of the South Asian region. This will enable a fuller understanding of the various social and economic processes, which followed the consolidation of British rule.

This chapter is divided into two parts, the sphere of production and the sphere of politics, which could also be called the processes and institutions of appropriation. It begins by an attempt at quantifying the productive percentage of the population of the Western Himalayas, in reference to the specificity of their village communities. This would enable a better understanding of the nature of production, the social context of appropriation and the working of political processes, which were strongly conditioned by the unique constraints that were imposed by a combination of geography (discussed in the previous chapter) and demography. The discussion on production first deals with the forms of labour in the various productive processes and moves on to study these different productive processes separately – agriculture, pastoralism, artisan manufacture and trade. The discussion on the sphere of politics focuses on the two main methods of surplus appropriation employed – begar labour and rent-in-kind, as well as the constraints on accumulation that can be identified. The two main centres of power, the lineage-based clans and the Hill State, and their interrelations with each other will subsequently be studied.

It will be one of the contentions of this book that the interdependence of production, the demographic and geographic constraints on the intensification and expansion of production and the exceptional marginality, both economic and spatial, of monetisation, even among the trading groups, holds the key to understanding the uniqueness of the Western Himalayan political economy before the intrusion of the British.

On 20 May 1946 the Cabinet Mission published its recommendations, which made it apparent that British rule was soon to end in the Indian subcontinent, even though the exact manner of its end was still intensely disputed. The consequences of these Cabinet Mission proposals were as momentous in the Western Himalayas as in other parts of this vast British colony. As a result of these proposals political activity revived in the Punjab Hill States. Praja Mandals were formed where none existed and older ones were reactivated. More importantly, conflicts within the leadership of these Praja Mandals became apparent and came to the fore in many organisations. This development was directly related to the clash between two different political agendas for guiding the Praja Mandal movement, which were themselves based on divergent class and ideological locations of the contending groups. The immediacy of independence and the possibility of gaining political power in real terms lent a certain bitterness and rancour to these struggles within the Praja Mandals and their umbrella organisation, the Himalayan Hill States' Regional Council.

Right from the beginning of the encounter with British colonialism, the peasantry of the Western Himalayas had attempted to come to terms with these conflicts. During the first few decades, the impact of British presence was relatively marginal and therefore, did not greatly strain the traditional economic and political institutions of the people.

This book has been about the story of the colonial encounter in the Western Himalayas, a region which has mostly remained outside conventional historical accounts of colonialism in India. It has tried to argue that it is not possible to understand the history of the Western Himalayas under British rule as merely a sub-set of the larger story of how India coped with colonialism. Rather than being viewed as a region within the Indian civilisational expanse, this book suggests that the Western Himalayas represented a border region between India and China and it was colonialism which integrated it with the Indian nation. Through its account of the colonialencounter in the Western Himalayas, it has tried to show that there could be an alternative way of studying colonialism and modern Indian history.

It has been a central argument of this book that it is not possible to study the Western Himalayas as a part of the historical processes of the Indian subcontinent till after decades into British rule. The region followed a historical path which was removed from the rhythms of the Indo-Gangetic cultures, though it imbibed some features from the latter – both material and ideological – like it also did from Tibet. The integration of the Himalayas into the Indian nation was a specific feature of colonial rule and it is methodologically impermissible to extrapolate the social features, which are markers of this successful integration, to a period when this process had not even begun.

The predominant tendency in contemporary historiography has been to study colonialism as a pan-Indian phenomenon.

British Conquest of the Western Himalayas

The main causes for British engagement with, and final conquest of, the Western Himalayas need to be spelled out in some detail before it is possible to discuss either the nature or phases of British rule or the response to it by the local population. The generic causes of territorial conquest by the British East India Company can be understood and explained through the global context of colonialism based on the requirements of ascendant British capital, which first needed to monopolise trade and later the sources of raw material and captive markets for emergent industries. Any account of colonial conquests in one particular region needs to base itself on these in the first instance, otherwise it has a tendency to become a study of colonialism without perceiving colonialism. But equally important, for a comprehensive historical account, is the study of the specificities of the particular region. The nature and condition of local social and political structures, military strengths and strategies of the different players, the historical relation of this region with other areas both neighbouring and distant, the natural and economic resources of the region and many other such factors need to be given attention.

Three broad concerns got the British interested in the region of the Western Himalayas. It was a major policy concern of the British in India both to curtail the power of the independent rulers and to extend their sway to the ‘natural’ limits of India as quickly as feasible. They had little knowledge about the trans-Himalayan tracts apart from the fact that some form of Chinese, and possibly Russian influence existed there.