Forestry in India

Colonial Perspectives

A Post-Graduate Dissertation Paper by

MOULINDRA SUNDAR DIRGHANGI

Roll No.76, PG-II
Department of HISTORY,
PRESIDENCY UNIVERSITY
In 1885, the Bombay Forests Inquiry Commission was established
to study tensions between the Government of Bombay and the
villagers of Thana district over control and use of forest resources.
It was a problem as acute as in any forested district of India that
was threatening to explode politically. While the villagers protested
that their immemorial right to use the forest was being illegally and
inexorably wrested away, the Forest Department had their reasons
in insisting that without systematic forest protection the hills
would soon be denuded and would no longer be able to sustain an
expanding population.
This controversy remains as one of the earliest and best
documented of a now very familiar struggle between long-range
maintenance and immediate subsistence needs…a conflict both
environmental and political. To Richard Tucker1 and a number of
historians of the empire, the ecological pressures of Thana district
were as much the result of passions of nationalist politics in a
colonial setting as the rate of deforestation. As an effective urban
elite took to back the villagers regarding increasing government
presence in the forests, the founders of the Indian National
Congress were to show that they had broader constituency than
their anglicized network in major cities in the face of challenges
posed by the aggressively imperialist Bombay governor, Richard
Temple.
***
Indeed Colonialism had been an ecological watershed in most
countries of the world. In fact as the historiography grows, it is
increasingly difficult to understand imperialism without reference
to environmental factors: climate, disease, water, natural resources,
or the disturbance on plants and animals besides the conventional
1
Richard P. Tucker, A Forest History of India (SAGE, 2012)
2
factors of capitalism, population, technologies of military conquest
and transport. In this regard, Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism2
provides the most influential analysis. He draws on the histories of
disease to explain the colonization of the New World and argues
the non-human auxiliaries that is a complex of alien weeds and
animals played a role in devastating the Flora, fauna and human
societies of the New World. In this respect, one may take Karl
Polanyi’s words that colonialism, following upon the
commercialization of the soil and increases in food production for
a growing domestic population was the third and final stage in the
subordination of the resources of the planet to the imperatives of
European industrialization. In time, however the combination of
natural resources and enterprising settlers provided an
autonomous process of industrialization in New World. Therefore
it was an organic link between two patterns of eco-cultural change;
thus leading to creation of Neo-Europes.3
To return to Crosby’s words, we find a variation in the ‘biological
expansion’ of Europe in case of Old World civilizations like
Middle-east, China and India,- the ones he says to be ‘within reach’
but ‘beyond grasp’ of Europe. He argues that population densities,
resistance to disease, agricultural technology and sophisticated
socio-political organizations made these areas more resistant to the
ecological imperialism of Europe. Here they had to adopt a
different strategy, one that though could not create any ‘Neo-
Europe’ but definitively altered the food production system and
their ecological basis. The most important aspect of this ecological
encounter between Britain and India were the forests.

2
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe (Cambridge
University Press, 1986)
3
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
3
It was in the year 1800, that East India Company appointed a
commission to enquire into the availability of Teak wood in the
Malabar forests. It could be the earliest incident of institutionalized
forestry in India although deforestation has been practiced in India
by successive regimes of pre-colonial society. During the early
period of period of British rule, large scale felling of forests were
carried out mainly for shipbuilding and later for railways without
any efforts for preservation and development.
The first half of nineteenth century was that of heavy onslaught on
forests. Following the defeat of the Marathas, the East India
Company razed to the ground the teak plantations in Ratnagiri
nurtured and grown by Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha admiral. The
vanishing of Oak forests in England was one backdrop to the
expanding use of Indian timber. To add to this was the growing
crescendo of conflicts in the mid-nineteenth century with wars in
Burma (1852-3), Crimea (1856-7), Iran (1856-7) and more
importantly the Indian Rebellion intensified the need. 4 The
Rebellion was itself a spur to railway building as it brought out the
dangers of isolation and poor communications. Also, rolling back
forests to make way for cultivation was seen as a means of
extending control. Also, more lands under cultivation meant more
lands under revenue.
Railways, in fact remained at the heart of domestic timber
manufacture. Each mile of railway devoured between 1760 and
2000 sleepers and by 1870s more than one million sleepers were
needed every year. While this wiped out great chunks of forests,
this fitted the bill perfectly for the British, as visualized by Lord
Dalhousie, in a minute in 1853, that this would open up vast
markets in for British manufactures in the most remote parts of
4
William Beinart, Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2007)
4
Indian countryside. The dominion enabled the railways to be built
at Indian cost.5 The sub-Himalayan forests of Garhwal and
Kumaon were all felled, for example, ‘in even to desolation’.
Private European as well as Indian contractors were mainly
responsible for these and estates of the native rajahs also did not
escape their hand.
Before the coal fields of Raniganj became operative, timber was
also used as fuel. Even after, it continued to be used as fuel in
Punjab as sea-borne coal from Bengal, England and Australia were
too expensive.
Ship-building, too had its share in the use of timber. It was said
that ‘the safety of the empire depended on its wooden walls’. 6 This
in fact saved England during the Napoleonic wars and later
maritime expansion. Ships were built in the dockyards of Surat and
on Malabar coast. An indication of the escalating demand is
provided by the increase in tonnage of British merchant ships
from 1,278,000 tonnes in 1778 to 4,937,000 tonnes. in 1860. For
this the Deodar (Cedrus deodara) which grew upto 200ft. and
made excellent masts and beams were used.
While the teak (Tectona grandis), a prized and ‘royal’ tree was used
for its durability and used for construction of bridges and houses
and even munition boxes and shell cases for military purposes. An
entire Army barrack in Bangalore was made out of teak! Fast
growing Sal (Shorea robusta) trees would provide strong hard and
heavy wood for sleepers. The Deodar also along with Chirpine
yielded resin which was in demand as varnish by the makers of
maps and cabinets and oil painters. Various species of Acacia also
produced gums used locally for red ink to medicines and
5
Ramachandra Guha, “Forestry in British and Post-British India” (1983)
6
Stebbing I, p 63)
5
sweetmeats and even for calicoes, shoemaking and tanning. The
Rubber trees of Assam imported produced exports worth nearly
109,000 pounds in 1881-2.
We also find traces of internal demands developing. The peasantry
of entire districts who have so long lived in measurable huts
suddenly desired good substantial houses and better furniture in
the wake of the liberal availability of timber brought about by rapid
deforestation.
***
This onslaught continued till about mid-nineteenth century and by
1860, Britain had emerged as the world leader in deforestation as
exclaimed by Gadgil and Guha. It not only devastated its own
woods but also that in Ireland, South Africa and north-eastern
USA other than India. Britain’s reaps in the forest along with other
natural products were shown as the ‘riches’ of provincial India. in
the Punjab Exhibition of 1864. Administrator, Baden-Powell
catalogued this items thought it would become a perfect history of
the social condition in India.7 Baden-Powell was obviously
concerned to illustrate these ‘riches’, but forests were by then
under threat and conservation was becoming a major British pre-
occupation in India. The profoundness of the threat is
demonstrated in a report dated 1851 that that the annual export of
teak was then running at 11,000 to 18,000 tons.
The consciousness was visible as early as 1842 when Conolly, the
collector of Malabar laid the foundation of the world famous teak
plantations in Nilambur in Kerala. B. Ribbentrop has said that, ‘the
necessity of a vigorous forest policy was… strongly indicated from
the earliest days of British occupation of India, but it was not
7
B. H. Baden-Powell, Handbook of the Economic Products of the Punjab, 2vols. (1868-72)
6
understood: and the questions which were considered of most
immediate importance pressed its claim to the background’8 The
British only realized late that the forests of the country were not so
extensive as to continue to meet the uninterrupted requirements of
the empire. Systematic working was introduced and steps were
taken to organize forest department in various states. Actually the
seeds of scientific forestry were sown during the British rule says,
M. D. Upadhyay.9 Though there were some attention given to the
preservation of forests through the unification of states in the
Mughal period, emphasis was still on agriculture and the Mughals
in case laid more stress on gardening!
In 1847, we find Gibson appointed as the conservator of the
Bombay Presidency in addition to his other duties. Hugh Cleghorn
was appointed as the first regular Conservator of Forests of
Madras Presidency. One of the vivid descriptions of the
transformation in the ecological landscape wrought is found in
Cleghorn’s work The Forests and Gardens of South India. Interestingly
Cleghorn complains about the ‘careless rapacity’ of native
population as a major reason for the exposure of valuable forest
tracts along with railways. Nevertheless, he founded an effective
system of forest conservancy in Madras. Quick growing species
such as Eucalyptus and Accacias were introduced resulting in their
large scale plantations in the Nilgiri hills.
The imperial forest department was formed in 1864 with the help
of experts from Germany. Before that, in 1856, Dietrich Brandis,
the first professionally qualified German forester was appointed as
the inspector-general of forests in India. The German contribution

8
B. Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India (Calcutta, 1900)
9
M. D. Upadhyay, Historical Background of Forest Management in Ajay S. Rawat ed. History of
Forestry in India (Indus Publishing Company, 1991)
7
is noteworthy since the study of forests through the actual
management of government forests evolved in Germany closely
followed by France who set up the French national forestry school
in 1824. French and German models with single-species
plantations and trees in straight lines were therefore adopted.
Brandis became the pioneer of joint forest management. Together
with Cleghorn, Brandis became known as the founding fathers of
Indian forestry in literature prior to the recent critiques. Under
them the Scientific forestry took shape. This came to be defined as
the systematic planting , cultivation and sustainable exploitation of
woodland effective protection , forest regeneration and methodical
working plans, ‘the Wirthschaft Plan, Their influence was broader in
so far as ideas and practices honed in India were exported to
Britain and other countries.
The implementation of these plans and curtailing of the previously
untouched access enjoyed by rural communities needed effective
legislation. The first attempt at state monopoly was through the
Indian Forest Act of 1865. This was hurriedly drafted and merely
sought to establish the claims of the state to the forests it
immediately required. This act had also left a few in the Indian
ranks unhappy. As a result, this was followed by a long debate that
finally laid to the drafting of the 1878 Act. The debate may be
elaborated a little. A preliminary draft was prepared by Brandis in
1869 and in 1874, a conference of forest officers went into defects
of the 1865 act abd details of a new one. It was aimed that the
existing ambiguity about the absolute proprietary right of the state.
Colonial officials perhaps willfully confused ‘open access’ with
‘common property’- for the peasantry’s customary rights of the
forests was not random but governed and regulated by community
sanctions. A firm settlement between the state and its subjects over
their respective rights in the forest was needed. In the heated
8
debate to accomplish the separation of rights, three distinct
positions emerged. The first , which we call ‘annexationist’, held
out for nothing less than total state control over all forest areas.
The second , which one may call ‘pragmatic’ argued in favour of
state management of only those areas that were ecologically
sensitive and strategically valuable forests. The third position can
be called ‘populist’ as it was a mirror image of the first. This
completely rejected state intervention, holding the tribals and
peasants must exercise sovereign rights over woodland. Rather
funnily these three views contributed to an act that provided for
three distinct classes of forests: (i) ‘Reserved forests’ consisted of
valuable and compact areas with a legal seperation of rights, (ii)
‘Protected forests’, those fully controlled by the state, (iii) ‘Village
forests’, an option supposed to benefit the masses but was not
exercised by the government in most parts of the subcontinent.
Finally, the new legislation enlarged the punitive sanctions at the
hands of the forest administration.
***
A few words may be added here regarding Shifting Cultivation.
Forests, as is very clear were contested social spaces which had
different meaning to different groups of people. These opposing
ideas clashed around kumri, an ancient form of cultivation in forest
clearings. This is an ecologically harmful method of cultivation
practiced by indigenous people of India and prevalent in many
agrarian societies outside South Asia. This involved slashing and
burning of trees and spreading of seeds on the ashes. Though a
major cause of deforestation and soil-exhaustion., it was less
labour intensive. Some officials also spoke up for local subsistence
needs. The Sub-Collector of Canara wrote, ‘to abolish this species
of cultivation would deprive a great number of persons of their
accustomed means of support.’ Cleghorn, who initially condemned
9
this method, admitted on confronting the reality that ‘strict
conservancy’ did not work if it were ‘too stringent’10 and too
oriented towards the interests of the state. However, Baden-Powell
believed otherwise and he put his stamp on the 1878 Act signifying
that the state with its sovereign right could withdraw these
privileges at will. Thus began a process of marginalization that was
to climax into major protest movements.
Intensive grazing, especially by goat or sheep, has been a key
contributing factor in non-tropical mountains in the developing
world, as it has over the centuries in many areas of the western
world. This is the way the changes caused by logging of
commercial timber have evolved in intricate counterpoint to
traditional local land-use systems which inhibit regeneration of the
forests. In temperate zone mountains, inexorable processes of soil
erosion and pasture degradation have resulted from interactions
between pastoral economy and colonial institutions. This has taken
place widely in region now known as Himachal Pradesh. Here, we
find a depletion of forests and pasture resources not due to timber
extraction but due to association with the livestock economy.
While sedentary farmers maintain their own mixed livestock at
lower elevations, migratory Gujar graziers take heir herds to
summer pastures at upper elevations. Nowhere else but in
Himachal do we see a grazing economy so complex, the profitsx
so bountiful and ecological implications so critical. This has
continued from pr-colonial era; the British administrators took to
channel and later to restrict grazing in government forests
primarily to preserve tracts for regeneration of trees but with
limited success.11

10
Cleghorn, Forests and Gardens.
11
Richard P. Tucker, A Forest History of India (SAGE, 2012)
10
Another very important facet of forestry is Hunting and
Wildlife. In India, unlike in Africa wildlife is concentrated in
forested areas. Hunting was ‘the standard recreation’ of the
foresters. Many British officials were part of this and some of the
memoirs of Englishmen stress more on hunting sidelining forestry.
Ribbentrop, the inspector-general speaks of this hunters as ‘some
were naturalists, others sportsmen as if both sides of a same coin.’
The British hunters from the viceroy down consciously sought to
inherit the mantle of the Mughals through an opulent and highly
visible command over the environment. They also wanted to use
this to create social bridges with the rulers of princely states. As far
as the princely states were concerned, forest management was only
existent in some of the big and progressive states or else they were
regarded as mere hunting grounds. A hunter who had later turned
a Inspector-General of Forests later on, Cumming referred to tiger
hunting as defensive of the ordinary Indian and their livelihood.
From his words we know, the British hunter often had to do a
‘social service’ of killing a wild animal to save the native Indian and
his livestock. We find the reflection of this sentiment in the
contemporary literature as well.
Though there is little true wilderness where wildlife does not co-
exist with human and domestic animal population, a systematic
integration of local people into wildlife planning is a relatively new
effort. The early conservationists of the imperial era favored only
wildlife and not until India became independent that resident
populations, either humans or livestock were considered in detail.
***
Thus were laid the foundation stones of a systematic forest
management in India. Though the Indian forests once again were
faced a heavy toll in the twentieth century due to the World Wars.
11
In the war of 1914-18, timber and bamboos had to be supplied for
several construction works. Fodder grass weighing 50,000 tonnes
were exported in Iraq and Egypt to aid military operations. The
impact of the second war was more severely felt on the forests. In
1940, a timber directorate was set up in Delhi to channelize forest
produce from the provinces. The cessation of the import of
structural steel too brought an urgent demand to wood
substitutes.. But still the new department willingly or unwillingly
had been able to bring about a separation between agriculture and
forests. The exclusion of the agrarian population from benefits of
forest management in the 1878 Act continue to invite criticism.
Gadgil and Guha have led the the field in arguing that British
colonial rule was the instigator of today’s ecological crisis, and in
human terms led to profound dislocation in the society. British
interference with the Indian environment, they insist, upset social
relations in the countryside. Some critics have even gone so far as
to claim that rural pre-colonial societies were naturally
conservationist. An author makes this indictment that there was
nothing ‘scientific’ about colonial scientific forestry. The faster
scientific knowledge grew, it is asserted deforestation accelerated.
One probably makes a decent point to say that biodiversity was
destroyed by introducing monocultures such as teak. It is claimed
that unlike religious or customary restraints associated with human
behavior, scientific intervention knows ‘no social restraints.’ They
conclude that state management of forests was not unknown in
pre-colonial times but restricted in scale and application.
More recent literature challenges rosy views of a pre-colonial
equilibrium. Mahesh Rangarajan asserts that pre-British regimes
had often encouraged clearance of woodlands to augment
revenues and secure military control. Rulers and landed elites of
Sindh and Awadh excluded local people from certain areas.
12
Williams concurs: ‘The pre-colonial forest … was not an
untouched pristine Eden nor a community resource shared
equitably’.
On hinsight it may be noted that British imperial controlhad a
major impact on the natural variety. It also restricted the forest for
the poor though not as rigorously as envisaged in the past as
William Beinart opines. The later exclusion of humans from
wildlife parks had to do with the colonial forest law that treated
the local people to be wasteful and destructive. With the
government of independent India passing its first forest act in
1952 much in the lines of the British imperialists, it can be
suggested that the tension faced by Cleghorn and his peers
continues to resonate in India.
***

13
BIBLIOGRAPHY:-
 Richard P. Tucker - A Forest history of India (SAGE, 2012)
 M. C. Gadgil, R. Guha – This Fissured Land ( University of
California Press, 1992)
 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes – Environment and
Empire (OUP, 2007)
 Ajay S. Rawat (ed.) – History of Forestry in India (Indus,
1991)
Alfred Crosby – Ecological Imperialism (CUP, 1986)
Karl Polanyi – The Great Transformation (Beacon Press,
1957)
 B. Ribbentrop – Forestry in British India (Calcutta, 1900)
 B. H. Baden-Powell – Handbook of the Economic Products
of the Punjab (1868-1872)
 Hugh Cleghorn – The Forests and Garden of South India.
 David Arnold, Ramachandra Guha – Nature, Culture and
Imperialism (OUP, 1998)
(Article) Ramachandra Guha – Forestry in British an Post-
British India: A Historical Analysis
(Article) Arun Bandopadhyay – The Colonial Legacies of
Forest Policies
(Article) K. Sivaramakrishnan – Colonialism and Forestry in
India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics

***
14