A Forest History of India

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
A Forest History of India

Richard P. Tucker
Copyright © Richard P. Tucker, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
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First published in 2012 by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tucker, Richard P., 1938–
A forest history of India / Richard P. Tucker.
    p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Forest policy—India—History. 2. Forests and forestry—India—History. 3. Forests
and forestry—Economic aspects—India—History. 4. Forests and forestry—Social as-
pects—India—History. I. Title.

SD645.T83      333.750954—dc23      2011      2011041477

ISBN: 978-81-321-0693-7 (HB)

The SAGE Team: Gayeti Singh, Arpita Dasgupta and Rajib Chatterjee

Disclaimer: This volume largely comprises pre-published material which has been presented
in its original form. The publisher shall not be held responsible for any discrepancies in lan-
guage or content in this volume.
 Contents

Acknowledgments
ix

Introduction
xi

Chapter I
Forest Management and Imperial Politics:
Thana District, Bombay, 1823–1887
1

Chapter II
The Forests of the Western Himalayas:
The Legacy of British Colonial Administration
35

Chapter III
The British Colonial System and the Forests
of the Western Himalayas, 1815–1914

60

v
a forest history of india

Chapter IV
The Historical Context of Social Forestry in the
Kumaon Himalayas
92

Chapter V
The Evolution of Transhumant Grazing in the
Punjab Himalaya
115

Chapter VI
The British Empire and India’s Forest Resources:
The Timberlands of Assam and Kumaon, 1914–1950
142

Chapter VII
The Depletion of India’s Forests under British Imperialism:
Planters, Foresters, and Peasants in Assam and Kerala
166

Chapter VIII
The Commercial Timber Economy under Two Colonial
Regimes in Asia
191

Chapter IX
Resident Peoples and Wildlife Reserves in India:
The Prehistory of a Strategy
204

vi
 contents

Chapter X
Non-timber Forest Products Policy in the Western
Himalayas under British Rule
217

Index
242

About the Author

249

vii
viii
 Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Mahesh Rangarajan for originally suggesting that a

collection of these papers would be valuable for researchers, students,
and resource managers who work on the history of forest use in India.
I am equally grateful to the many environmental historians and others
who have contributed to my understanding of this history over the years.
Finally, I am grateful to Rekha Natarajan, Sugata Ghosh, and other staff
members at SAGE Publications for believing that this collection can be
beneficial for our understanding of India’s past dynamics and present
situation.

ix
x
 Introduction

T he field of forest history developed in Europe in the early twentieth

century. Not surprisingly, it emerged in Germany and France, since these
studies arose out of the actual management of government forests, which
had evolved first in Germany, followed by France after the establishment
of the French national forestry school in 1824, in the city of Nancy near
the German border.
In 1979, that research center was host to an international conference
sponsored by the venerable International Union of Forest Research Or-
ganizations (IUFRO), the research association of the world’s forestry
profession with close links to the timber products industry. By then the
academic discipline of forest history was recognized in most countries
of western and central Europe, and Americans and Canadians had also
become active in IUFRO. Its North American affiliate, the Forest His-
tory Society (FHS), had been founded in the United States in 1946, as a
meeting place for historically minded members of the timber industry as
well as academic specialists. Some of the latter were also working on the
history of the wildlife conservation movement.
Along with several Americans connected to the FHS, I attended the
1979 conference in Nancy. None of the participants had paid any attention
to the exploitation and management of the colonial and tropical posses-
sions of the West, but they were generally receptive to seeing that work
begin. I had spent the summer at the India Office Library in London and
the Commonwealth Forestry Library in Oxford discovering the riches of
colonial India’s forestry archives. I had learned that the National Archives

xi
a forest history of india

in New Delhi and the Forestry Library at Forest Research Institute (FRI)
in Dehradun also held large collections of records from the years of the
Raj. It was clear that historians of India under the Raj (and continuing
after Independence) could learn greatly from these hitherto neglected
materials, about the reduction of forest cover in the subcontinent and the
rise of forest management as a major element of colonial administration,
changing land use, and social conflict.
At the time, I was turning away from the political focus of my previous
work on the early nationalist response to the Raj in Maharashtra, toward the
environmental underpinnings of confrontations between British officials
and Indian nationalists. In particular, I had been alerted to the late 1870s,
when Bombay Presidency was under the authoritarian thumb of the Tory
Governor, Richard Temple, who challenged the founders of the Indian
National Congress to show that they had a broader constituency than
just their anglicized social network in major cities. Simultaneously, the
Government of India (GOI) had adopted the Forest Law of 1878, which
placed major restrictions on the traditional uses of forests in rural areas.
Historians of the freedom movement had generally failed to notice that
the leaders of Congress in Bombay and Poona found that they could begin
to build a rural constituency by connecting to the rural resistance that
was emerging against the new forest restrictions. That led to my first essay
(in 1979) on India’s forest history, which primarily traced the politics of
the forest law controversy. When they read the article, forest historians
in the West (more firmly grounded in forest ecology and economy than
I was) noted that this essay was weak in its treatment of the actual changes
in forest composition that were emerging under the new forest law. The
work on India had just begun; it would require a wider range of partici-
pant scholars who could apply the insights of social history, land- and
water-use history, and local history. As the following decade revealed, the
work also brought out our political and ideological commitments.
In India and internationally, most of us who call ourselves environmen-
tal historians in our professional lives are also active environmentalists as
public citizens. My own work at the time with the Sierra Club, both in
the United States and in its emerging international awareness, reinforced
my conviction that environmental issues in India’s history were closely
analogous with issues in North America and elsewhere. Simultaneously,
the years around 1980 were a turning point in public controversy over

xii
 introduction

environmental legislation and its social impacts in India. The fledgling

GOI Ministry of Environment was feeling its way into working relations
with other government agencies and also nongovernmental represen-
tatives. The abortive Forest Bill of 1980 helped coalesce a (sometimes
uneasy or fragile) alliance between emerging environmental activists
and the proponents of rural low-caste and Adivasi rights, whose ances-
try traced back at least to protests such as the movement in Kumaon in
1919–21. It was clear that the State’s management of forest resources
had not changed much since the British had left India—and that similar
challenges to the production-oriented priorities of the timber prod-
ucts profession and industry were occurring throughout the English-
speaking world.
At the first national conference of environmental nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), in New Delhi in 1980, the controversy over access
to forest resources was galvanizing social movements from Assam to
Himachal Pradesh to Kerala. Chipko activists from Uttarakhand were there
to present their case with their student allies from New Delhi. On the pro-
fessional front, for one prominent example, Anil Agarwal was returning
from London to establish the Centre for Science and Environment in
New Delhi which quickly became internationally recognized for its sys-
tematic studies of a wide range of environmental issues, including forests.
Closely parallel to this, outstanding environmental investigative journalism
was appearing in the public press. In the early 1980s, India emerged
almost overnight as a leader in the global movement of citizens’ environ-
mental activism.
In this public setting, it was vital to establish a rigorous historical
perspective on the contemporary debate. By 1980, I was turning my at-
tention from the hinterland of Bombay to India’s segment of the great
watershed of the Ganges, the vast forest region of the western Himalayas,
from the border of Nepal to Kashmir. The colonial forest records of
Kumaon, Garhwal, and the then Punjab Hill States (roughly, today’s
Himachal Pradesh) were largely intact in Dehradun and the forest de-
partment offices of the various districts. Over several years, I probed the
substance and limitations of those records, suffering the endless flow of
bureaucratic language and noting the conventional stereotypes of official
discourse. Several of my articles on that mountain region appeared in
the 1980s, but until now most of them have not been readily available
in India.

xiii
a forest history of india

One of the great limitations of British foresters in India, when it came

to understanding the social dimension of forest administration, was their
limited, though widely varying knowledge of local languages. Their Indian
subordinates in the forest service could help to correct this in the flow
of actual administration. But they were trained in a highly defined and
prestigious professional subculture, which resulted in great continuity of
law and administration after 1947. In my own work, in the 1980s, the
same linguistic limitation held true. My 1984 article on social forestry in
Kumaon addressed an important subject, but its perspective was limited,
for I did not yet have access to Shekhar Pathak’s important Hindi-based
work on the social impact of colonial forest administration in Kumaon.
At the same time, Ramachandra Guha was studying social resistance
to British as well as princely rule in Kumaon, extending the analytical
tools of subaltern studies into questions of environmental change in The
Unquiet Woods (1989). He used Pathak’s work and other Hindi material
in broadening the scope of forest history to the inclusion of the history of
marginal social groups. In the same years, Ajay Rawat was contributing
varied work on the forest history of Kumaon and Garhwal.
Then and since, studies of India’s forest history, from the time it be-
came more market-oriented in the 1800s, have continued to be weak in
their treatment of the private sector—the timber merchants who worked
with and against foresters and villagers in an intricate triangle that con-
tinues today. In this respect, the field of Indian forest history is very
different from its counterpart in Europe and especially North America,
where the private sector timber industry has played a more prominent
role in forest management and reduction of biodiversity. My 1989 essay
was a probe of that issue, in comparison with the more readily accessible
parallel in the American colony of Philippines.
In the mid-1980s, my perspectives expanded to include a different
social dimension of environmental stress in mountain environments: pas-
toralism. From the beginning of colonial administration, a major dimension
of the forest departments’ work had been the effort to codify and regulate
the intricate, intensive livestock pressures on hill lands. In a pattern that
long predated British rule in the Punjab hills (and had close parallels
in mountain regions elsewhere), transhumant shepherds guided their
flocks from high pastures in the summer to the foothills of pine forests

xiv
 introduction

in the winter. Gaddis and other pastoral groups played an intricate game
of evasion and resistance against forest officers, even becoming one of
the most powerful political lobbies in the post-Independence years. This
work was preliminary to Vasant Saberwal’s intensive study of transhu-
mance and its political dimension in Himachal, Pastoral Politics (1999),
which in turn was complemented by the broad environmental context
surveyed in Chetan Singh’s Natural Premises (1998).
For another angle of vision on the northern mountain region under
British rule, I turned to Assam and Kerala, where plantation agricul-
ture for export (especially tea and coffee) replaced natural forests in
hill regions to a far greater extent than in the western Himalayas. In
those regions the literature on commodity production for export locates
environmental change in the broader context of the world market and
imperial centers of consumption.
In the early 1990s, additional studies of the forest history of the sub-
continent were appearing, by then enriched by new studies of other
dimensions of environmental history. In 1992, two conferences demon-
strated the rapidly increasing depth and range of India’s environmental
historiography. Several scholars at the first conference, organized by David
Arnold and Ramachandra Guha, brought water resources to the fore as a
key factor in environmental history. (Its papers were published in 1995
as Nature, Culture, Imperialism, edited by Arnold and Guha.) The second
conference resulted in the publication of Nature and the Orient (1998),
edited by Richard Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan. (Their
“Introduction” defines in detail its place in the rapidly developing field.)
My contribution, “Forests Are More Than Trees,” was an attempt to ex-
tend the discussion into considering non-timber forest products, reveal-
ingly called Minor Forest Products in the colonial era. Minor they might
be, for the priorities and preoccupations of the forest department and the
timber economy, but they have always been major in the rural household
economy and in terms of overall biodiversity.
The diverse faunal riches of the subcontinent’s forests were under
different pressures during the Raj. Wild game—mammals, birds, and
fish—were prized by both British officers and Indian aristocrats as tro-
phies, both hunted and protected. Just as with other forest products,
colonial practice gave elites privileged access to game, restricting local

xv
a forest history of india

people’s traditional rights. My 1991 essay, “Resident Peoples and Wild-

life Reserves,” appeared along with Shishir Raval’s study of the Maldhari
tribals in the Gir Forest, in an international anthology that placed India
in global perspective regarding the pervasive tensions between rural
communities and wildlife protection areas. Mahesh Rangarajan’s pub-
lications on the history of hunting and wildlife reserves in India greatly
augmented that subject. This has been followed by the work of Anand
Pandian and others.
This turn toward a geographically broader vision influenced the turn
of my own primary attention in the 1990s from the British Empire to the
American Empire. On the history of tropical forest depletion, I published
articles on American foresters and lumbermen in Latin America, in con-
junction with other writers on Latin America, colonial Africa, and Southeast
Asia. My synthesis on American colonial and neocolonial operations
appeared as a chapter in my book, Insatiable Appetite (2000).
The turn of the new century saw rapidly enriching studies of the
Indian subcontinent in the broader contexts of British Empire history
and global change in modern times. The pioneer work was Richard
Grove’s Green Imperialism (1995). It has been followed by Ravi Rajan’s
Modernizing Nature (2008), on forestry around the British Empire, and
in a different vein, William Beinart and Lotte Hughes’ Environment and
Empire (2007), especially its survey chapter on India’s forests.
Several survey articles on the state of environmental history research
within India and beyond have been invaluable in tracking the condition
of the field, and putting forest history in its wider analytical context.
See the introductory essays in Arnold and Guha (1995) and Grove et al.
(1998), as well as an essay added to the 2000 revised edition of Guha’s
The Unquiet Woods. They are complemented by separately published
essays by Rangarajan (1996 and 2009), D’Souza (2003), Grove and
Damodaran (2006), and Sivaramakrishnan (2008). Finally, the new
volume edited by Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damodaran, and Rohan D’Souza,
The British Empire and the Natural World (2011), brings the subject to the
present, indicating the rich variety and depth that the field has come to
represent.
In sum, the emergence of the field of Indian forest history in the 1980s,
including its intricate contradance between scholarship and public

xvi
 introduction

controversies, now seems like receding history itself, as we take for

granted a wide range of topics that we had hardly begun to identify
30 years ago. But the issues themselves have only partially changed,
reflecting the intransigent continuities of our times and the difficulties of
resolving competition over access to natural resources.

References

Arnold, David and Ramachandra Guha. 1995. “Introduction: Themes and

Issues in the Environmental History of South Asia,” in David Arnold and
Ramachandra Guha (eds), Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environ-
mental History of South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–20.
Beinart, William and Lotte Hughes. 2007. Environment and Empire. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
D’Souza, Rohan. 2003. “Nature, Conservation and Environmental History: A
Review of Some Recent Environmental Writings on South Asia,” Conserva-
tion and Society, 1 (2, July–December): 317–32.
Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens,
and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grove, Richard H. and Vinita Damodaran. 2006. “Imperialism, Intellectual Net-
works and Environmental Change: Origins and Evolution of Global Environ-
mental History, 1676–2000” (Parts I and II), Economic and Political Weekly,
41–42 (October 14 and 21): 4345–54 and 4497–505.
Grove, Richard H., Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (eds). 1998. Nature
and the Orient. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant
Resistance in the Himalayas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Expanded
edition, 2000, pp. 211–22.
Kumar, Deepak, Vinita Damodaran, and Rohan D’Souza (eds). 2011. The British
Empire and the Natural World. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Pandian, Anand. 2001. “Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British
India,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 14 (1): 79–107.
Rajan, S. Ravi. 2008. Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-development,
1800–1950. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
Rangarajan, Mahesh. 1996. “Environmental Histories of South Asia: A Review
Essay,” Environment and History, 2: 129–43.
———. 2001. India’s Wildlife History. Delhi: Permanent Black.

xvii
a forest history of india

Rangarajan, Mahesh. 2009. “Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Land-

scapes, and Ecologies,” in Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds),
The Environment and World History. Berkeley: University of California Press,
pp. 229–54.
Rawat, Ajay S. (ed.). 1991. History of Forestry in India. New Delhi: Indus Publish-
ing Company.
Saberwal, Vasant. 1999. Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats, and Conservation
in the Western Himalaya. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Singh, Chetan. 1998. Natural Premises: Ecology and Peasant Life in the Western
Himalaya, 1800–1950. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2008. “Science, Environment and Empire History: Compar-
ative Perspectives from Forests in Colonial India,” Environment and History
14 (1): 41–65.
Tucker, Richard P. 2000. Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological
Degradation of the Tropical World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

xviii
 I
Forest Management and Imperial Politics:
Thana District, Bombay, 1823–1887∗

Introduction

I n 1885 the Government of British India established the Bombay Forests

Inquiry Commission to study acute tensions between the Government of
Bombay and villagers in the immediate hinterland of Bombay city, and
to recommend remedies which the local government seemed incapable
of devising. A struggle between the Bombay Presidency government and
the villagers of Thana District over control and use of forest resources,
as acute as in any forested district of India, was threatening to explode
politically. The villagers protested that their immemorial right to use forest
products had been inexorably and illegally wrested from them by an
alien government. On the other side, Forest Department professionals
insisted that without systematic forest protection the hills would soon be
so denuded that they could no longer sustain an expanding population.
The controversy in Thana was one of the earliest and best documented
examples of the now familiar struggle between long-range maintenance
of natural resources, and economic development or the immediate sub-
sistence needs of rural society. The conflict was both environmental and
political: ecological pressures in Thana in the 1870s and 1880s reflected

∗ Originally published in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 39,
and No. 2–3. Copyright © The Indian Economic and Social History Association,
New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright
holders and the publisher, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.

1
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

the rate of nationalist political development in a colonial setting as much

as the rate of deforestation. Therefore, though the commission of 1885
attempted to resolve the environmental issues which still haunt us today,
the political heart of the conflict was very different from what it became
after Independence in 1947. Ecological dilemmas had become caught in
the polarization of interests between the imperial bureaucracy and the
newly articulate nationalist elite. In that setting all combatants’ vision
of the issues became limited by the overriding political issues, whether
Indians or foreigners would control administrative policies. As a result
the commission’s work, and the work of others after it, produced almost
no innovation in policy throughout the British era. The losers were those
whose true survival interests were at stake: the forests and the villagers.
As early as the 1860s, most stakeholders in the controversy over the
forests of Thana District were visible and vocal. On one side were the
government officials. These included the revenue officers who exercised
primary jurisdiction over the district and its talukas or subdivisions; their
major interest was to increase revenue from agriculture. To them were
added the Forest Department professionals, a newer, smaller and always
weaker service committed primarily to preserving the forests. Within the
government the two groups were often at odds, and the implementation
of forest policy in the talukas reflected that tension. On the other side
were the villagers themselves, represented by major landholders and the
village headmen. The rural populace was also divided into two major
groups, the caste-Hindu agriculturalists and the tribal groups who were
only partly assimilated into the agricultural life of the region. Both the
majority population and the British regime considered that the tribes
required special treatment. Finally, the merchants from the towns brought
a commercial and urban interest into the villages. Village landholders and
government officers disagreed on rates of taxation and patterns of access to
the forests, but both agreed that the subsistence needs of the villages
required higher priority than the disruptive presence of the contractors’
money economy. If trees were to be preserved, the contractors’ interests
should be the first to be curtailed.
One crucial catalytic force did not appear until the 1870s, an effective
urban elite to represent the villagers against the increasing governmen-
tal presence in the forests. In Thana most village leaders were illiter-
ate and few landholders held large-enough tracts to make them wealthy

2
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

and influential. Necessary skills of political organization appeared with

the new class of Western-educated lawyers, who, by 1870, began to
articulate nationalist political demands against the British. The Bombay
Association and, even more, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha or People’s
Association of Poona were a new elite looking for a mass constituency
in the 1870s. In inland agricultural districts they found a constituency
among small farmers in the poor crop years of the early 1870s. In forest
districts they found another population to defend among tribal groups
in the late 1870s. In cooperation with the Thana Forest Association, they
articulated these grievances in the late 1870s, when the Bombay gov-
ernment was headed by the aggressively imperialist Governor Richard
Temple. The destiny of the Thana forests then became inextricably linked
to the passions of nationalist politics.

Thana’s Forests in the Early Nineteenth Century

Thana District lies immediately east of Bombay city. Its narrow coastal
plain stretches eastward from Bombay, then gives way to the ghats, the
steep Sahyadri hills which rise to nearly 3,000 feet and then roll off
eastward into the 2,000 feet high Deccan plateau, or Desh. From June to
September the ghats bear the full brunt of the monsoon, which deposits
up to 200 inches of rain. The other eight months are virtually cloudless.
In the early nineteenth century Thana was one of the most heavily
forested districts in the Bombay Presidency. Over 33 per cent of its land
was government-held forests, a high percentage for any part of British
India. Another 30 per cent of Thana’s land was classed as “wastelands,”
or untilled land not privately owned, mostly in small tracts of semi-
forested and controlled by villages through their elders.1 The district’s
total population, nearly all rural, passed 900,000 by the early 1880s, or
212 per square mile.2

1
Government of India, Bombay Forests Inquiry Commission, 4 vols., Govern-
ment Press, Calcutta, 1887, I, 12. Hereafter cited as Inquiry Commission.
2
Bombay Presidency Gazetteer, Vol. 13, Part 1, Thana District, Government
Press, Bombay, 1882, pp. 1–3. Hereafter cited as Thana Gazetteer.

3
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Agriculture dominated the economy along the coast; in the hills it

was more mixed, with subsistence farming, livestock grazing, and the
harvesting of forest products. In the coastal tract rain-irrigated rice was
a principal crop by the mid-nineteenth century. In the ghats, wherever
small plots were flat or could be terraced, dry rice, other grains, and
legumes were the chief crops.3
The subsistence economy rested on its forest resources in many ways.
Firewood was a major energy resource: most cooking was still done with
firewood, and to a lesser extent wood provided heat in the cold months.
Timber, especially hardwood, was also needed for rural building, since
the abundant stone of the ghats was too expensive for all but the most
affluent to use for construction. Beyond this, leaves from forest trees
were essential as enrichment for the rice fields of Thana and adjacent
districts. The thin soil of the hills4 lacked the adequate nutrients to sus-
tain rice farming in the laboriously levelled and banked rice paddies. The
forests provided essential fertilizer supplements. Villagers went to near-
by woods, lopped the branches, dried them, and burned the leaves on
the fields.5 Even more important to the village economy was the forests’
support of grazing for cattle, sheep, and goats. In these open subtropical
forests the lush growth of grasses and young leaves between June and
January was the almost exclusive food base for all grazing animals; very
few even now are stall-fed. Cattle were essential for milk products, the
bullocks for ploughing and pulling carts, and all the grazers for their
production of dung as a second source of fertilizer. Essential to grazing
patterns were the Dhangars and other shepherd castes, whose semi-
nomadic subsistence depended on farmers periodically welcoming flocks
onto their land for the animals’ production of dung. Unless all of these
mechanisms of village life could be reconciled with long-range manage-
ment of the forests, the rural economy and government–peasant rela-
tions were in danger.
In Thana District the forest tribes, who made up one-third of its popu-
lation, presented particularly difficult problems, especially because they

3
Ibid., pp. 286–300.
4
Ibid., pp. 280–82.
5
Harold Mann, The Social Framework of Agriculture, Vora, Bombay, 1967,
pp. 395–401.

4
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

were the chief inhabitants of some of the larger Reserved forests.6 Varlis,
Thakurs,7 and other tribes traditionally did little farming, depending
more than caste-Hindu farmers on fruits, tubers and other vegetation
for food. Moreover, like tribals in many parts of the subcontinent, they
traditionally practiced temporary or slash-and-burn tilling for hill tracts.
In the tinder-dry months before the onset of monsoon they set fire to
pasture and forest tracts, either to encourage maximum growth of tender
new grass for their animals’ forage, or to clear and fertilize the land. As
the thin soil of the higher hillsides declined in fertility, they would move
on after a few seasons and clear new tracts in the manner of shifting cul-
tivators throughout the tropical and subtropical world. The fires which
were their standard method of clearing often went out of control, for the
climate in April and May is very hot, very dry, and increasingly windy as
the pre-monsoon breezes develop. The early nineteenth-century spread
of lumbered tracts, in most of which the remains from harvesting were
left as vast brushy tangles, saw a steady increase of devastating forest fires.
From nearly the beginning of British rule, revenue officials and others
pressed the tribals to change to settled farming and cattle raising; shift-
ing cultivation was outlawed in 1863 in Thana District.8 But this left the
tribals more dependent on grazing rights in government forests and on
day labor for landlords, merchants, or the forest service. They gradually
took up employment as forest guards as a substitute for their traditional
occupations because they knew the upper hills better than anyone, and
because they would work for very low wages.9
Nonetheless, the village population, which was relatively sparse early
in the century, might still have been in balance with its forest resources
in the 1880s. But new outside forces were applied on the land as the
century wore on.
The British imperial machine placed severe pressure on the teak forests
in the early nineteenth century, for the Royal Navy badly needed timber.

6
Thana Gazetteer, pp. 153–89.
7
L.N. Chapekar, Thakurs of the Sahyadris, Oxford, Bombay, 1960, Chaps 2–3,
gives a detailed account of the Thakurs for the 1940s.
8
Inquiry Commission, I, 115 f.; E.P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, 3 vols.,
London, 1926, I, 351.
9
See Inquiry Commission, III, passim, for various opinions on their work.

5
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

English oak, formerly the staple source of spars and beams for warships,
was almost entirely depleted before 1800.10 Hence, until the 1840s the
navy led the effort to explore and exploit the hardwood forests of the
entire west coast of India. In the same period, Bombay’s port facili-
ties developed as a major shipyard for southern Asia, spurred on by
the shift in Parsi-controlled capital from Surat.11 By the early 1800s
British merchants were active in teak marketing; they included both pri-
vate firms and East India Company officials in their private capacity,
profiting rapidly in the age of the nabobs. By 1850, with the decline of
wooden ships, this factor ceased to be significant for the coastal forests,
and British timber merchants were no longer active in the trade.12
The government’s need for timber did not slacken yet, however, for
the 1840s saw the start of the great railway-building era in India.13 In
the short run, over the following two decades the railroads’ first impact
on the forests was their consumption of many millions of sleepers or
railroad ties, taken from the coastal hardwoods.
In the long run, the railroads’ major impact on the forests was their
provision of transport for wood products to urban markets. From the
start of British rule there was a steady expansion of urban centers. By
far the most important was Bombay city, the Presidency capital, which
by 1800 had become the largest port on India’s west coast. Bombay’s
market was expanding as rapidly as any urban market near dense forests
in India. Several smaller towns added to the rising urban demand. These
included Surat, the port on the coast to the north, Thana town at the
upper end of Bombay harbor, Kalyan inland at the foot of the ghats, and
finally Poona, the center for the western Deccan plateau beyond the hills.
10
R.G. Albion, Forests and Sea-Power, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1926, Chaps 3 and 9.
11
Pamela Nightingale,Trade and Empire in Western India, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, New York, 1970.
12
Bombay Forest Reports, 1850–51, p. 92.
13
See John Hurd II, “Railways and the Expansion of Markets in India,
1861–1921,” Explorations in Economic History, 1975, pp. 263–88; John M. Hurd,
“Irrigation and Railways: Railways,” in Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (eds),
The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume II, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1983.

6
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

Most towns of Thana District lay along the main road from Bombay to
Poona and the Deccan. Their growth was further stimulated in the 1850s
when the Peninsular Railway, the major line from the west coast toward
southeastern India, was completed on the same route through Thana,
the ghats, and Poona. These tracks became the principal local line from
the hills to Bombay.
British officials’ reports from the 1830s onward regularly mention the
expansion of the forest-product trade with the towns. Fluctuations in the
market price of wood had only temporary impacts on this expansion.
The chief beneficiaries of this expansion, and the chief carriers of the
urban market to the villages, were small-scale timber merchants most
of whom were based in Bombay and the coastal towns at the mouths of
the many short rivers from the ghats to the sea. They represented several
mercantile communities. Many were Memon Muslims, never politically
powerful; others included Marwari traders from farther north, and Parsi
merchants from Bombay.14 By the 1830s the Parsis were purchas-
ing large tracts of land in the villages of Salsette, the portion of Thana
District directly across the harbor from Bombay. Their interests in timber
were somewhat different from the other local traders, since their primary
interest was the land; profits from timber sales were a secondary element
of their investment. The other groups were rarely landholders.
By mid-1800s commercial contractors became an important link be-
tween towns and forests and between government and villagers. In Thana
District, unlike Kanara to the south, the forests and topography have
never enabled traders to develop large-scale commercial forestry such
as teak plantations. The contractors remained a disparate urban group
in Bombay and the smaller towns. As commercial middlemen they often
were direct employers of day labor in tribal and agricultural villages,
offering subsistence wages for gathering timber and other forest prod-
ucts. Alternatively they negotiated with government officers at timber
depots, buying wood from the government for resale in the towns. In both
systems they developed a reputation, which they still hold today, for
ruthless dealings at the expense of both government and villagers.
The cumulative effect of these commercial forces was the precipit-
ous deforestation of much of the Bombay coast in the first half of the
14
Thana Gazetteer, pp. 28–39.

7
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

nineteenth century, long before the colonial administration was able to

regulate the forest economy, and even before the British were aware that
the process had reached dangerous proportions. The story of forest man-
agement in the latter half of the century is one of belated and inadequate
efforts to restrain the impact of overwhelming pressures on forest lands.

Early Forest Management in Bombay

The forests of the coastal range might have been more nearly adequate
for subsistence had they not come under pressure from expanding ag-
riculture as well. There is little evidence of conflict between agricul-
ture and forests in pre-British times, for the land’s resources were more
than adequate for a sparse population. But British policy from the start
advocated opening new lands for agriculture, first as a source of increased
revenue, and later as a recognition of the needs of a growing population.
When the British assumed control of the coastal districts, including
Thana, the hills and ravines of the ghats were heavily forested and lightly
populated. One officer’s early report indicated that

The whole country was lying waste and unpopulated. That up to about 1850
wasteland was everywhere so abundant as to create a feeling of despair as to the
future of the district, that the increase of cultivation was so much desired that
the poorest people were allowed to cut down as many trees as they liked merely for
the purpose of clearing the land, and that wood itself was so abundant that every
one cut where and as he liked.15

Early British agricultural and forestry policy was thus set in seemingly
unlimited forest reserves and a sparsely settled, largely poverty-stricken
rural population.
No one as yet foresaw any danger to the land’s resources if revenue,
commerce, and food production were all encouraged. From the 1820s
the government’s approach to forest lands was based on the laissez-faire
principle of maximum private harvesting, especially of teak.
In order to maintain the loyalty of the newly conquered populace,
the new regime impinged on existing social and economic rights as little

15
Inquiry Commission, I, 21.

8
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

as possible. Furthermore, the Raj was committed in principle to private

property. It encouraged private ownership of economic resources, espe-
cially land, in the belief that this would lead to innovation and prosperity
in agriculture.16 All these factors reinforced its early forest policy.
Teak forests in the coastal districts held the greatest commercial
potential, and pre-British regimes had often asserted the government’s
ownership of teak on all land, whatever the ownership of the land itself.
The British regime at first rejected even this claim, but, like other aspects
of environmentally significant policy, this was done piecemeal and in-
consistently. The first British precedent was set in 1823 in two talukas of
Thana, when the Bombay government declared that owners of privately
held lands had full rights to standing teak, as well as other species.17
Officials in other districts disagreed, however, and it took years to de-
termine a consistent policy. After 1837 the government slowly extended
its asserted forest rights, and the courts became elaborately involved in
litigating conflicts between private owners and the government. This
halting start guaranteed that the process of expanding government con-
trol over the forests would be slow and expensive, and that it would
result in widespread hostility among the landed elite.
In addition to the question of forest ownership, the early British had
only one other interest: to maximize revenue collection from the trade in
forest products, especially the teak harvest. In the 1820s they levied a tax
on timber and firewood as one of several transit duties. But when these

16
For the strategic aspect of this policy, see Kenneth Ballhatchet, Social Policy
and Social Change in Western India, 1817–1830, Oxford University Press, London,
1957, part 1; and Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1968, Chap. 2. The ideological commitment
to private ownership of private lands also reflected governmental policy regard-
ing land use during the nineteenth century in other parts of the English-speaking
world: governments should not own vast stretches of forest land. In the United
States, for example, government policy until after 1900 was to divest itself of
forested lands. See Roy Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 2nd edn., University of
Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1976, Part 3.
17
Inquiry Commission, I, 21; Stebbing, I, 35. For parallel policies in north
India, see B. Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India, Government Printing Office,
Calcutta, 1900, pp. 60–65.

9
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

transit taxes were abolished in 1838, the wood tax was also abolished in
places where it had been placed on the transit rather than the cutting of
wood. This left a confused and inconsistent system until a uniform wood
tax was decreed for all of Thana in 1851.
This uncertain path reflected the fact that the new government was
understaffed, poorly financed, and inexperienced. In particular there was
as yet no organized forestry administration anywhere in India. Bombay,
like other provinces, left the rural economy to the Revenue Department,
which was absorbed in surveying agricultural lands. No forest surveys
were undertaken in Bombay Presidency before 1840, nor did anyone
there have any understanding of subtropical silviculture, the science of
forest biology.18
Twenty years into the British era, revenue surveys first indicated the
extent of destruction in the teak forests. In 1841 the government took its
initial protective step by prohibiting further teak cutting in government-
owned forests in Kalyan taluka, just inland from Bombay city. They
knew they were operating largely from ignorance, so in the same year
Dr Gibson, Curator of the Bombay Botanical Garden, was asked to begin
surveys of the existing condition of the Sahyadri forests. Gibson could
hardly be called a professional forester, but as a respected botanist he
was the best-qualified man available. His first tours around the hills
confirmed the alarming state of the teak,19 and established him as the

18
Modern forestry management was still in its infancy in England as well. See
Colin R. Tubbs, The New Forest: An Ecological History, David & Charles Publishers,
Newton Abbott, Devon, 1968, Chap. 4. The South Germans, and to a lesser
extent the French, had almost the only trained foresters in the world. Through-
out most of the nineteenth century the British in India turned to Germany for
recruits to their forestry service, men such as Brandis and Ribbentrop. It was
nearly 1900 before these men added to their experience of European climate
and botany a systematic understanding of the monsoon climate and India’s
subtropical vegetation. For broader perspectives on the history of forest man-
agement in Europe, see Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Univer-
sity of California Press, Berkeley, 1967, pp. 318–40; and Bernard E. Fernow,
A Brief History of Forestry in Europe, the United States and Other Countries, 2nd edn.,
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1911.
19
Stebbing, I, 111–14.

10
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

leading authority on the Bombay forests. In 1847 he was appointed Con-

servator of Forests for Bombay Presidency, the first position of its kind
in India.
The following twenty years witnessed the steady development of ex-
perience, competence, and ambition in the Bombay forest service, under
increasing political and environmental pressure. Systematic surveys not
only of forest resources but also of legal rights to forest products had
to be initiated; these took decades to complete. Simultaneously, con-
trol over the day-to-day use of the forests had to be attempted, and this
somewhat haphazard process left the foresters with few friends, many
critics. Gibson established high standards of professionalism before his
retirement in 1860. But his successors were not as universally praised,
perhaps because they were less diplomatic, perhaps because the contra-
diction between preserving the forests and meeting the people’s needs
was becoming more acute. The demands of forest work always exceeded
their resources. N.A. Dalzell,20 Chief Conservator from 1860 to 1869,
was administratively responsible for the entire Presidency, a vast terri-
tory, and his staff was inadequate both in numbers and training.
During Dalzell’s tenure forestry was organized as an all-India ser-
vice under an inspector general. The first inspector general, Dietrich
Brandis, knew from his early tours of Bombay and other provinces that
the size of the service must be expanded and its technical capacities
greatly improved. As his successor Ribbentrop later wrote, new recruits
were chosen not on the basis of effective prior training but on vague
indications of aptitude for the work. “Officers were as a rule chosen who
had previously shown qualifications for forest life and forest manage-
ment. In some instances they were naturalists, in others sportsmen.”21
None of them had any training in the legal complexities they would face,
or necessarily any capacity for the delicate diplomacy of negotiating with

20
For their technical work, see N.A. Dalzell and A. Gibson, The Bombay Flora,
Education Society’s Press, Bombay, 1861; and A. Gibson, Handbook to the Forests
of the Bombay Presidency, Bombay Government Press, Bombay, 1863.
21
Ribbentrop, p. 78; Stebbing, II, 82–89. See also the brief biography of
Brandis: Anon., “Dietrich Brandis, the Founder of Forestry in India,” Indian
Forester, August 1884, pp. 343–57.

11
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

village landholders and peasants. Even in their technical work of forest

management it would be another generation before the first true profes-
sional foresters were trained at the forestry institute which opened in
1906 at Dehra Dun in the Himalayan foothills.22
Slowly, though, the Bombay service was expanded. In 1873 the
Presidency was divided into three Circles, each covering several districts.
Dalzell’s successor, A.T. Shuttleworth, a zealous conservationist with
little patience for villagers’ traditional rights, became Conservator for
the Northern Circle. Although this did not include Thana, his influence
was felt there for another decade.23 By 1883 the Bombay service had
expanded to three conservators and an additional professional staff of
twenty-four.24
By the 1860s the forest departments of Bombay and other provinces
became committed to preservation of existing forests as their fundamen-
tal reason for existense. From then onward, all other functions of forestry
were strictly secondary to the defense of the remaining woodlands. Suc-
cessive secretaries of state for India, to whom the Government of India
was ultimately responsible in London, made this principle unequivocally
clear, as in the 1863 statement of policy which insisted that

… the proper growth and preservation of the Forests is as important to Govern-

ment as the cultivation of any other crop which the soil produces, and in some
instances more important, since the destruction of the Forests would affect most
injuriously the climate, and perhaps the fertility of the soil.25

The basis of all forest administration had to be detailed surveys of

forest lands. Dalzell and his staff pursued this work, using a system which
distinguished among government, waste, and private lands. After 1865
government lands were categorized as Reserved or Protected; in Reserved
forests the government held full rights of ownership; their products
were not to be used without specific official approval. Protected forests
were in a temporary category: these forests were owned by the govern-
ment but had not yet been systematically surveyed for the character
22
Stebbing, III, Chap. 12.
23
See Stebbing, I, 330 for data on the staff in 1860, and III, 48, for 1890.
24
Ribbentrop, p. 82.
25
Stebbing, I, 350.

12
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

of the vegetation or the pattern of users’ rights. By the later years of the
century most of the Protected forests were studied and reclassified, many
of them becoming Reserved.
This process was complicated by the fact that many government for-
ests were in small tracts in the hills, alternating with equally small tracts
of privately owned land. The ownership pattern was too fragmented for
effective land management, and the department faced many years of
effort and litigation in its attempts to consolidate its lands before they
could be effectively reserved and managed. This process, in India as else-
where, produced lengthy disputes and friction between government and
landowners.
During the 1860s, while the surveys were proceeding and consolida-
tion and legal controls were being put in place, the forest officials were
hampered by several additional factors that intensified their impatience
with obstacles. They were understaffed partly because their departmental
budget was required to be met entirely by revenues from the collection
of forest fees. As tax collectors they became a reluctant extension of the
Revenue Department, which was rarely popular with the rural popu-
lace. New regulations of 1861 and 1862 first explicitly subordinated
the conservators to the collectors, the revenue officials who dominated
district-level government. All official communications among forest offi-
cials were henceforth to be channelled through the collector’s office; this
gave him effective oversight of the foresters’ work but identified them
more than ever as tax collectors and enemies, especially in the timber
merchants’ eyes.
Gibson, always outspoken in favoring the villagers’ subsistence needs
over the profits of the contractors, had begun systematizing the collec-
tion of forest duties from the merchants in the early 1850s. The immedi-
ate result was that the merchants in the Surat area organized Varli tribals
to march on government offices to protest the infringement of private
commercial rights.26 The protest gained them nothing, for the forest ser-
vice had begun to assert its own interests. But from that time onward the
government was wary of the danger of urban interests organizing peasant
protests, even though, for the rest of the century, the timber merchants

26
Inquiry Commission, I, 26.

13
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

failed to organize as an effective lobby. Despite their occasional protests,

they may have had enough access to timber to satisfy their ambitions.
The government’s pressure on the merchants increased in variety and
intensity as the century wore on. In the early years, before there were
adequate resources in the forest department, the government had sold
all rights to timber harvesting on specified tracts for specified periods of
time; the merchants then hired day labor and chose which trees to cut.
This system was at the heart of the devastating damage done to the forests
in the 1830s and 1840s. As the government began exercising the right
to designate which trees to cut in any timber concession, the merchants
began to evade the new governmental controls, in pursuit of maximum
short-run spoils. They learned to follow several strategies, most of them
illegal, in their evolving battle of wits against the British.
At times when the foresters experimented with rules allowing the har-
vest of dead but not live trees, presumably for firewood, they found that
by a year after the rules were announced, many trees had been discreetly
girdled, killed and sold.27 Another experimental rule allowed villagers to
take firewood, brush and fodder from lands newly declared Reserved if
their own property’s produce was inadequate.28 This system in practice
encouraged landowners to sell their own trees to merchants and then
apply for access to Reserved forests. At other times, when government
forests were not yet clearly demarcated and patrolled, the rate of de-
struction in border areas suddenly rose.29 Borderlands between British
districts and the small Princely States in the hills where British law did
not extend, were subject to devastating attacks by merchants’ crews.
Most common of all, a phenomenon with which everyone is still familiar
today, those with adequate funds could easily persuade forest guards
and local officials to look the other way when the saws and axes set to
work.
In all these strategies the townsmen and traders were central actors;
they had built up over the years ties with village society which British
officials found extremely difficult to regulate. The most important of
these ties was that the merchants, in their search for day labor, frequently
27
Ibid., I, 121.
28
Ibid., II, 349.
29
Bombay Forest Reports, 1850, p. 77.

14
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

hired tribal men from hill tracts which the tribals knew far better than
anyone else. For increasing numbers of tribals these wages made the dif-
ference between surviving and not surviving on a meager resource base
which shrank as the British reserved more and more government forests.
Fortunately for the British this tie was offset by the merchant’s reputation
for promising the lowest possible wage rates and then often failing to pay
even the agreed rates. The British administration was able to turn most
of its attention to the intricacies of regulating the villagers’ subsistence
economy in the forests. This the forest department eagerly attempted,
for it was officially pledged both to preserve trees and to harvest enough
forest products to meet the villagers’ complex needs.
This task was far more complex than it seemed at first. As the 1860s
wore on, an organizational issue emerged, which entangled the foresters
in the conflicts of rural society far more than the department ever admit-
ted publicly. At the upper levels of administration, which were entirely
staffed by Europeans, the forest and revenue departments were often
at odds because they championed forests and agriculture respectively.
Among their Indian subordinates at the taluka and village levels a similar
tension developed, this time with a social component. The mamlatdars,
local revenue officers feeling that they embodied the most powerful wing
of government in the villages, were high-caste men, often Brahmins.
Their work included supervising the rural police. In the younger and
lower-status forest service the forest guards were required to prevent
illegal use of government forest lands. For many years it was considered
impossible to recruit high-caste men for this work, since it entailed ardu-
ous trips through forested tracts which only peasants and tribals knew
well. Forest guards could arrest lawbreakers, but if their social superiors,
the mamlatdars, did not support them when it was time to coordinate
with rural police, control of the forests was vitiated. This tension between
administrative and social patterns led by 1880 to massive bribery of rural
officials; the more their responsibilities expanded, the more widespread
the corruption became.
Village-level authority was lodged in the patils or headmen, who
were usually leading landowners and the most influential members of
the dominant local farming caste. They were responsible for regulating
the “wastelands” or old forest lands which the villages owned collectively
and used primarily for firewood and grazing. If disputes arose among

15
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

the villagers, the headmen were expected to resolve them, often with
information gathered by low-caste watchmen. By the late nineteenth
century the forest department was convinced that village officials could
not understand the need for long-range conservation and systematic ap-
plication of the forest regulations. The department began pressing more
insistently to have professional foresters and their staff of forest guards
supplant the headmen in this work.
In this regard too, the village elites came into increasing friction
with the forest managers by the 1870s, though they had not yet learned
to coordinate their efforts to resist bureaucratic encroachments. The
combination of new forest legislation in 1878 and a decisive change in
political conditions during that decade brought the struggle over the
forests of Thana to a head.

Maharashtrian Politics in the 1870s

Until the early 1870s conflict between forest officials and villagers regis-
tered in the outside world largely through bureaucratic channels. The
villages had no formal voice at any higher level of government, and their
elders lacked the literacy and experience which might have enabled them
to pursue their interests even as far as the district towns, to say nothing
of remote Bombay. Beyond this, there was no tradition of open disputa-
tion between villagers and imperial officials. The only rural resistance to
British rule since 1818 had been occasional armed revolts led mostly by
remnants of the old Maratha regime. The British dealt uncompromis-
ingly with these, especially after they succeeded in keeping the north
Indian revolt of 1857 from spreading into Bombay Presidency. The only
effective resistance to the growing governmental controls on forests was
individual: either to evade the regulations by working at night, or to
bribe local officials and forest guards.
The political context changed all of this after 1870. The catalyst which
had been lacking until then was an indigenous intelligentsia, based in
the cities, trained in Western ways of politics and administration, and
looking for a way of representing the masses’ interests in Bombay.
Western-style politics had actually begun in the early 1850s, both in
the formalities of municipal government and in the establishment of

16
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

voluntary organizations as pressure groups. By the mid-1850s the

major towns and cities of the Presidency established municipal advisory
boards, which included Indian members. More years passed before the
Indian members were elected; as yet they were restricted to conservative
local luminaries named by the British head of the municipal govern-
ment. But the principle of active Indian participation in local affairs was
established. It was strengthened in 1870 when the Government of India
passed a landmark Local Self-Government Act which, for both towns
and rural districts, began the long evolution toward full-government in
India.
These fledgling institutions of local government would have meant
little for natural resource issues, but they were paralleled by the begin-
nings of non-official political protest movements. In 1852, when the
charter of the Government of India was to be renewed, political as-
sociations were formed in Calcutta, Bombay, Poona and elsewhere to
articulate the interests of both local financial elites and the English-
educated young professionals who were beginning to staff the lower
ranks of government. Within two years, after the charter renewal debate
was completed, these associations fell into quiescence for fifteen years.
But by 1870 the Bombay Association and the new People’s Association
of Poona were ready to represent popular grievances to a government
which was in principle prepared to read the memorials.30
During the 1870s the Poona People’s Association took the major role
in a variety of agitations, because of effective leadership by G.V. Joshi,
M.G. Ranade and others. The literati of Poona were actively looking for a
broad constituency, in contrast to the Bombay Association, which repre-
sented more narrowly Bombay’s commercial and professional interests.
Many of the new college graduates in Poona came from rural Brahmin
families. They were a small minority of even the Brahmin elite in a city
of only 100,000, and they maintained close personal ties to the villages
where their fathers were influential, especially the coast-and-hill district

30
J.C. Masselos, Towards Nationalism, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1974,
Chaps 1–2; S.R. Mehrotra, The Emergence of the Indian National Congress, Barnes
& Noble, New York, 1971, Chap. 4; and Richard Tucker, Ranade and the Rise of
Indian Nationalism, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1977, Chap. 3.

17
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

of Ratnagiri, just south of Thana and Kolaba. If they were to exercise the
influence which their British mentors had promised them, they had to
establish their place as the proper spokesmen for the rural populace, a
role to which Brahmins had long been accustomed in pre-British times.
The climate in the 1870s, both political and meteorological, was
prepared for this new assertiveness. The level of conflict between rev-
enue officials and villagers tended to rise and fall in rhythm with each
year’s monsoon rains. If the monsoon from June through September was
timely and brought enough rain for the crops but not enough to flood
the fields, farms prospered, moneylenders were held at bay, and the rev-
enue was usually paid. Severe flooding was rarely a problem in western
India, unlike some regions of the subcontinent. But periodic droughts
were the scourge of the countryside of Maharashtra and of its socioeco-
nomic balances. Peasants relied on moneylenders for loans at planting
time and at revenue time; and the level of rural indebtedness had been
rising inexorably under British rule as a money economy penetrated out-
ward from the cities. Tension between peasants and moneylenders was
exacerbated because many moneylenders in rural towns were not mem-
bers of local society but recent arrivals, members of commercial castes
from farther north with a reputation for ruthlessness. These Marwaris
and Vanis came from tightly knit interloper groups similar to the Hindu
timber merchants. It is possible that in districts like Thana close to the
coast, some were active in both moneylending and local marketing of
rural products.
Beginning in 1873 the monsoon rains fell short. By 1875 the peasants
of several inland districts attacked the moneylenders in many villages
and towns, killing few but destroying their loan and debt records. The
British reimposed order after a few weeks, but the riots left scars, ten-
sion and, among the British, heightened distrust of the Poona Brahmins,
who disclaimed any role in fomenting the violence.31 Then from 1876
until 1879 western Maharashtra suffered its worst drought and famine of
the century.32 Food supplies, always the first issue in times of drought,

31
Kumar, Chap. 5.
32
Tucker, Ranade and the Rise of Indian Nationlism, pp. 83–85.

18
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

began to vanish in the dry upland districts. As local wells and water sup-
plies dried up, villagers and their grazing animals migrated either toward
urban areas or less desiccated districts.
The resulting political tensions were presided over by the new
Governor of Bombay, Sir Richard Temple. Temple, a career India ad-
ministrator, had begun a brilliant career in the 1850s in the newly con-
quered northern province of Punjab. He had extensive experience with
famine relief, and had helped design early forestry practices for the sub-
Himalayan forest areas of Punjab.33 He was efficient and absolutely
decisive. Unfortunately for the villagers of the famine districts, Temple
by now hoped to become Viceroy of all India or enter the House of Lords.
He was determined to “make the famine pay its own way,” to expend
only as much as a balanced provincial budget would allow and to require
in return that the displaced peasants work on emergency public works,
such as irrigation canals, in return for minimal food rations. In this way,
one drought could help reduce the likelihood of future water shortages.34
Long-range objectives, which hardly mattered to desperate villagers,
struck the politicians of Poona as whimsical ruthlessness on the part of
an arrogant government which could not yet be forced to meet the imme-
diate needs of the people. Each side accused the other of self-interested
arrogance. Temple took personal control of the famine relief campaign,
certain that he understood the long-range needs of the populace and the
resources available far better than they or their self-appointed leaders.
The Poona People’s Association responded by amassing data concern-
ing social conditions in the drought areas, continuing the work well into
1879. It perfected a network of school teachers, retired civil servants and
others throughout the dry districts, which gave it in some areas better
data faster than the government could produce. The association used this
information to plead the position that the drought was causing far more
widespread dislocation than Temple would admit, and by implication
that it was better informed and more responsive to the villagers’ subsist-
ence needs than the alien government. Politically, this was a dangerous
strategy. When a new armed revolt flared quixotically in the dry districts

33
Ribbentrop, p. 75.
34
Tucker, Ranade and the Rise of Indian Nationalism, p. 84.

19
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

in 1879, Temple held the association responsible for a seditious plot and
attempted to intimidate its leadership. This, the sharpest confrontation
yet between the British and Indians in Bombay Presidency, was resolved
only by a combination of good crop seasons beginning in 1880 and new
parliamentary elections in England that year. A Liberal victory resulted
in Temple’s replacement by Sir James Fergusson, who proved nearly as
popular as his predecessor had been hated.
What relevance did these events have for the natural resource base of
society and politics in western Maharashtra, and especially for its forests?
The ecological dimension is unclear: no one has yet attempted to ascer-
tain what impact the famine years had on the forests of the Sahyadris and
the consumption of forest products. This drought’s effect was at most
indirect. Forest department records hardly mention the drought because
minimally adequate moisture fell as it does every year on the coastal
plain and the hills; the famine region was only the rain-shadow region
of the Deccan to the east. Fiscally, though, there were budgetary effects
over the entire Presidency. The middle and late 1870s were a period of
lower general productivity, lower revenue, intense pressures on the gov-
ernment’s financial resources, and hardened relations between British
officials and Indian subjects. Clearly the most important effect of the
famine was political. The Poona People’s Association established itself as
the most articulate and aggressive spokesman for the rural population in
the upland districts; it had been born with close ties to Ratnagiri District
on the south coast. Its claim to be the proper representative of the masses
was resisted by most British officials, and since there were as yet no
formal elections at any level of the government, there was no clear way
of resolving the issue. The association was rapidly learning how to or-
ganize in the districts, leaving the metropolitan center of Bombay to the
Bombay Association and the new Bombay Presidency Association. The
Poona group’s strategy depended on representing the most urgent and
concrete needs of rural society; the association had neither a British con-
stituency nor any love for the commercial interlopers, the moneylenders
and traders who had moved into the districts in tandem with modern
bureaucracy. This pattern of politics was applied again in the early 1880s
when the forestry controversy reached a peak, this time centering on
Kolaba and Thana districts where the association’s influence had not yet
been clearly established.

20
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

In forested lands tensions between the forest department and the

populace had been slowly building since the early 1860s, independently
of the politics of the early nationalists. The forest law of 1865 had been
implemented hesitantly in the provinces because of inadequate depart-
mental staffing and low priority on the agendas of the Presidency gov-
ernments, and because it was too general to meet the specific needs of
individual provinces. Although the law did provide the legal basis for
systematic forestry in British India, it would have to be revised and elab-
orated in greater detail in each local setting. It took thirteen years before
the Bombay government was ready for that additional legislation. In the
conflict-ridden year of 1878 a new forest law was passed for Bombay
Presidency which precipitated the sharp crisis of the following decade
in northern Konkan.35 It went beyond the earlier law in two crucially
important ways.36 First, under the pressure of continuing deforestation it
systematized the division of government-held lands into Reserved and
Protected forests. After reaffirming the legal validity of the villagers’ trad-
itional usufruct rights on public lands, it also repeated that the govern-
ment held fundamental rights of ownership; in Reserved forests both
private and public rights would henceforth be preserved. Protected for-
ests were to be under forest department management; there the various
government and private rights still had to be studied. When these could
be clarified (and the work should be done as quickly as possible), they
should be absorbed into the system of Reserved forests until only one
class of government forests remained.
The second major feature of the law proved even more controversial.
It declared that unoccupied or wastelands belonging to villages should
now be taken into the Reserved forest system and administered by the
forest department. This was implemented in Thana District beginning in
1882, generating a widespread fear among the villagers that their trad-
itional rights were being abrogated.
Long before 1882, however, conflict between the villagers and the
forest department had been rising in relation to the Reserved forests. The
central issue was what responsibilities and powers the department had

35
For the condition of the teak forests by the early 1880s, see Thana Gezetteer,
pp. 36–37.
36
Stebbing, II, 469–71.

21
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

in limiting the harvest of forest products so as to sustain the forests in

the long run, and whether the villagers could still meet their subsistence
needs without undue harassment from the forest administration. The
department had developed a system, and was now implementing it from
one forest to another, of closing some portions to harvesting or grazing
so as to allow effective regeneration of young trees, especially teak. Other
areas were declared open for harvesting and grazing, but villagers had
to buy permits for grazing, firewood, building timber, and other for-
est products. They were required to collect these at specified times and
remove them only on certain routes marked by official checkpoints. The
department, moreover, now supervised all commercial cutting and sale
of wood, eliminating the timber merchants’ freedom of movement in
the forests. The forest service also had established local timber depots
where they sold or auctioned timber and other forest produce. This was
the only system that would give them enough control to assure both
effective forest management and a subsistence income for the depart-
ment. But the more this system was enforced, the more intense was the
friction with the villagers. The system of forest preservation had become
elaborately bureaucratic, open to massive petty abuse, and often confus-
ing to villagers unaware of the changes in regulatory detail.
The most controversial regulation of all was one which the depart-
ment imposed as its only adequate means of preventing forest fires. Since
it was rarely possible to discover who had set a fire, and whole villages
suffered from fires which leapt out of control, the department now not
only required villagers to help fight fires but established the principle of
collective responsibility for fires. Whole villages were fined for fires set
by an individual, a mechanism which probably violated basic principles
of criminal law, though its constitutionality was yet to be tested in the
courts.
The unavoidable effect of implementing this system was that trad-
itional social conflict in forest villages was heightened and rampant
bribery and intimidation occurred. The most notorious practice was a
blackmail system in which forest guards threatened poor villagers with
fines or imprisonment for imaginary violations of the new regulations.
As early as 1875 the Bombay government reacted to charges of this sys-
tem with a sharply worded directive to the forest department:

22
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

Government are bound to pay due regard to the habits and wants of perhaps the
poorest class of the population, and they strongly deprecate vexatious and oppres-
sive interference with their daily life for the purpose of enforcing in petty details the
so-called rights of the forest Department.37

This plea had little effect, for the government itself had set in motion
a system which could not be implemented at the village level without
encouraging petty abuse and conflict. The forest officials were turning
from technical specialists into police who, spending much of their time
in local courts, came to be hated by the village elders whom they were
displacing, and were feared by the poor villagers whose very survival
might be at stake. With too many people now subsisting on the available
resources of the land, it was extremely difficult on a sociological level to
create more effective systems of land and forest management.
From 1880 onward this task also proved extremely difficult in its
political implications. Poor villagers, whether tribals or low-caste farm
laborers, humbled by the social system and illiterate, were in no position
to protest publicly. But well-to-do landowners and village officials led
by the patils or headmen were in a potentially stronger position. They
were linked by ties of caste, wealth, and education with the new political
elite of the cities, especially Poona. Beginning in 1880, two organizations
championed their case against the forest department: the Poona People’s
Association and the Thana Forest Association. The two were in fact a
close alliance, quietly but effectively controlled by the Poona group in
its long-range effort to become the dominant spokesman for the rural
elites of western Maharashtra. The Thana Forest Association generally
preferred to remain anonymous and speak collectively in its appeals to
the government. The only name to appear on its documents in the 1880s
was that of its secretary, S.H. Chiplunkar, the well-known permanent
secretary of the Poona organization and a respectable Brahmin member
of Poona society. Whether, like other leading Brahmins of Poona, he
held land in the districts, even perhaps in Thana, is unknown. What is
clear is that he provided a direct link between the leading interests of
villages in Thana and the leading nationalist organization of its time in
western India.

37
Quoted in Inquiry Commission, I, 204.

23
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

The Forest Act of 1878 was published in the Bombay government’s

Gazette in August 1880. The Poona organization immediately drafted a
memorial to the government, published in January 1881,38 which granted
in principle that the forests had to be more carefully controlled if they
were to survive into the coming century. (This admission of the long-
range environmental problem was rarely stated even as a vague principle
in subsequent public protests against the forest department.) More severe
regulations might well be necessary and appropriate in Reserved forests,
but only there and only for the cutting of commercial timber. On all other
land, and for all other forest produce including grazing rights, there
should be no detailed system of permits and fees. The Revenue Depart-
ment’s promiscuous desire for income had been largely responsible for
deforestation early in the century; the new forest fees would only follow
the same trend. This meant increasing oppression of the rural populace
and increasing deprivation of the rights of private property.
Notwithstanding, the department shortly put into effect most of
these regulations and licensing requirements for timber, firewood, even
bundles of dry grass. In 1882 it extended the system to cover unculti-
vated village wastelands. Discontent in the districts intensified, until in
1885 the Government of India in Calcutta announced the formation of
a special commission, the Bombay Forest Inquiry Commission, to study
the controversy in Thana and Kolaba districts. Its members were four
British officials representing the revenue and forest departments, and
three Indians, including K.L. Nulkar. Nulkar, a Chitpavan Brahmin and
an early law graduate of Bombay University, was a close associate of the
leaders of the Poona organization; when the commission’s exhaustive
final report and recommendations were issued two years later, it lay with
Nulkar to make fundamental exceptions to major elements of the report.
Even with Nulkar on the commission, the Indian-owned news-
papers of Poona, Thana, and Bombay immediately expressec grave skep-
ticism that its work would amount to much. In the name of free trade
and a minimum of government interference, the financially conservative
Native Opinion of Bombay argued that the “industries of the people”
were being strangulated by excessive regulation.39 Mahratta, a leading
38
Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, III ( January 1881), 3.
39
Bombay Presidency, Reports on the Native Papers, July 11, 1885, p. 5.

24
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

nationalist newspaper in Poona, ominously argued that though the gov-

ernment had insisted that deforestation changes climate and rainfall and
intensifies the impact of famines, the people were convinced that this
was just an excuse to increase revenue.40 Arunodaya, the leading news-
paper in Thana, suggested an important insight into local social con-
ditions by insisting that the peasants, untouchables and tribals should
have free access to timber, and the mamlatdars should have no powers
to regulate this system.41 In village society the mamlatdars, of course,
were usually Brahmins at the apex of social hierarchy; the other three
groups were at the bottom. It was evident that the new forest system
had reinforced the exploitative social hierarchy of the villages, and thus
could hardly avoid entanglement in pre-existing patterns of rural social
conflict.
Both Arunodaya in Thana and Kesari, the militant nationalist news-
paper in Poona, proposed a new strategy which had far-reaching polit-
ical implications. Arunodaya wanted the local wood depots run not by the
forest officers but by citizens’ committees elected by local populations.
Implicitly, this would lead to socially influential local men controlling
the distribution and costs of wood products. Kesari extended the concept
of local control, asserting that village patils should control village waste-
lands, since they were responsible for the collective affairs of the villages.
And rural district boards (which under local self-government laws were
evolving toward Indian control), rather than the Revenue Department,
should oversee the work of the forest department.42 These newspaper
editorials showed elite opinion on ways to undermine the forest depart-
ment’s powers; there were no indications in any of these editorials that
the department had a necessary or legitimate task to perform.
The Indian counteroffensive against the department was developed
further by the Thana Forest Association whose views were systematically
expressed in their full testimony to the Forest Commission. The associ-
ation’s principal goal was to strip the forest department of the power to
interfere in the traditional forest rights of the people; in other words, to
turn the clock back far beyond 1878. In the preface to its recommenda-
tions it asserted that the British regime had claimed no right to own or
40
Ibid., September 26, 1885, p. 5.
41
Ibid., August 1, 1885, p. 7.
42
Ibid., 11 July 1885, pp. 4–5.

25
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

regulate forest production before 1862. For the following sixteen years,
after the formal establishment of the forest department, it had gradually
expanded its revenue function and curtailed the people’s rights. But since
1878 it had perpetrated a “sudden and violent confiscation of the long
cherished and traditional rights of the people.”43 This aggression had
been so massive that the department had forfeited any right to formal
executive power. Its proper role must be purely technical and advisory.
The department should merely advise the taluka boards which had been
established in 1870. The boards, which already had significant represen-
tation from men of local influence, were becoming a genuinely representa-
tive system of local government. These boards, the association argued,
should take full control over management of communal forests. Only
they could inspire the villagers’ confidence, and only that confidence
could save the forests. The boards would also be in a strong position to
curtail the power of outside merchants, by working with the department
to channel all shipment of timber through government-run depots.
The association was patently representing the interests of the larger
local landowners against both the department and the urban merchants.
Its views were supported by other groups of Thana landowners in simi-
lar petitions to the inquiry commission. One group proposed that all
private and communal lands, even small tracts of presently government-
owned land, should be removed from the department’s jurisdiction, and
that whenever these lands proved insufficient for the villager’s needs, the
peasants should have free access to Reserved forests for their subsistence
needs. Urban timber contractors, referred to as “in the habit of not always
keeping themselves within the limits of their contract terms,”44 should
have access to the forests only through government depots. Another
lengthy memorial, submitted by a group identified only as “the inhabit-
ants of the Thana District,” agreed that no land should be classified as
Reserved or Protected if its area was less than 1,500 acres or within a
specified distance of any village. Subsistence needs should have full pre-
cedence over forest protection; villagers should have unrestricted rights
to all forest products in much the same terms that had existed prior to

43
Inquiry Commission, II, 149.
44
Ibid., IV, 49.

26
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

the establishment of the forest service. Timber contractors should be

restricted to buying all forest products from local landowners and peas-
ants, whose control would be guaranteed by local officials.45 The gov-
ernment, in other words, should give local villages full priority over all
outsiders, whether British officials or urban Indian interests.
When the exhaustive survey of opinion, official and non-official,
British and Indian, was completed in 1887, the commissioners submit-
ted their proposals for the revised system.46 Their package of strategies
amounted to the most systematic and far-reaching system yet envisioned
for Bombay forests. The fact that, as we shall see, most of the proposals
were not implemented, indicates the intensity of cross-cutting pressures
which by then bore on forested lands and peoples.
To the commissioners the village economy was the key to both the
legal and ecological systems. Commercial marketing of forest products
had been so destructive to the forests, with seemingly little benefit to the
villagers, that it should be tolerated only when it did not impinge on the
two poles of forest policy: preserving the forests over the long run, and
meeting the immediate subsistence needs of the villagers. All govern-
ment forests should be moved as rapidly as possible into a single system
of Reserved forests, including village lands. By now it was established
that full legal control over these lands was vested in the government, or,
as the commission called it, “the people as a whole.” These lands should
be used to meet subsistence needs as little as possible; those uses should
come on private lands to the maximum. If private owners sold any trees
commercially, they would forfeit all access to government trees. But in
return they must be given maximum rights to trees on their own land
to encourage better management. Government should release to them
the rights to teak and blackwood trees. (This proposal ran against the
grain of decades of forestry policy.) And any land which a private owner
returned from cultivation to growing trees for mulch leaves should have
its revenue rate reduced by three-quarters in compensation.
This system should reduce pressure for wood products and grazing
on government lands, the commission asserted. As the Reserved forest

45
Ibid., IV, 59–60.
46
Ibid., I, Chap. 12.

27
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

system was more fully implemented in each district, the forests should
continue to be regulated by closing large portions to grazing and cutting
for the ten-year minimum necessary to grow new stands of trees. And
forest officers should continue to have full control over harvesting of
trees and grazing in the portions declared open. Under their supervision,
annual cuttings would provide firewood and other wood products for all
villagers. Branches under two inches in diameter would be free to all, as
would leaves for fertilization. Villagers would be allowed to graze their
animals without charge in the cutting areas, and they could buy building
wood either at periodic auctions run by the department or at standard
rates set well below commercial prices. As part of the streamlined sys-
tem, the “wild tribes” would have no special rights beyond those of other
poor villagers, except for continuing their first priority as day laborers
and forest guards in the department’s employ.
The commission’s view of the department’s recent work became clear
in its position on the most controversial subject: the department’s take-
over of village common or wastelands in 1882. The commission reaf-
firmed this system in principle but sharply criticized the department for
heavy-handed and unrealistically sudden imposition of restrictions on
subsistence use. They agreed with department’s critics in charging that
many villages had suddenly been deprived of large portions of their sub-
sistence base. The system must be introduced to village wastelands, but
it must be done patiently and deliberately, with full acknowledgment of
the villagers’ minimal needs.
This system should be simple and consistent enough for villagers
to comprehend, and simple enough to administer, so that friction be-
tween officials and villagers would be minimized. Bribery and corruption
would be reduced; forest guards would no longer intimidate or be in-
timidated by villagers; and professional foresters would stop functioning
as police and prosecutors. Sanguine as they were, the commissioners
had hoped in this way to safeguard both forests and villagers, and by
further implication to nullify the nationalists’ pressures to have local
committees take an official role in regulating the system on the ground,
an approach which from that time administrators consistently viewed
with horror.

28
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

The leading Indian member of the commission, K.L. Nulkar,

appended an extensive minute of criticism to the final conclusions.47
While generally supporting the recommendations as the package of
compromises most likely to ease the burden on the people, he insisted
on going beyond them to lodge an impassioned attack on the forest de-
partment’s work. The heart of Nulkar’s case was the twin charges that
the department had achieved a massive confiscation of land rights since
1878 and that in the process it had become riddled with corruption.
For decades before, the Revenue Department had encouraged all pos-
sible settlement of wastelands, he asserted, in the great task of opening
additional soil to agriculture. In the process, and backed by the courts,
the Revenue Department had granted industrious landholders and peas-
ants a range of right of ownership and usage. Then suddenly, on the basis
of the 1878 forest law, the forest department had counterattacked with a
panoply of restrictions on both individuals and villages. The whole range
of rights to forest produce which had made forest villages viable over
the years was suddenly cancelled or severely limited. As an immediate
consequence, “the people were reduced to a choice between starvation
and bribery.”48
In villages throughout Thana District, Nulkar continued, forest guards
discovered they had in the fee system a new set of weapons with which
to intimidate poor villagers. Not only could they blackmail the laborers
with threats of imprisonment on trivial charges; they also connived with
contractors to harvest teak illegally, often in broad daylight, for they
quickly learned that their British superiors, whether through ignorance
of local ways, overwork, or simply departmental loyalties, would not
investigate situations which compromised their Indian subordinates.
The commissions’ new proposal were the very least which might be done
to curb the foresters’ rapacity and avert grave danger of defensive vio-
lence from the peasants. Nulkar concluded by praising the selfless work
of the larger landholders of Thana for representing the peasants’ griev-
ances and compelling the appointment of the inquiry commission; the

47
Ibid., I, 213–18.
48
Ibid., I, 215.

29
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

landholders deserved credit for avoiding a wave of desperate violence.

He did not have to remind anyone explicitly of the Deccan Riots of a
decade earlier.

The Aftermath

The commission and its critics had worked for nearly two years, but
the government largely ignored their recommendations. Over the fol-
lowing decades the many levels of difficulty in reconciling the forests’
long-range needs with the villagers’ immediate needs were not resolved,
nor were patterns of social and political influence significantly changed
by the grand debate. The forest service of British India remained central-
ized in structure until 1935; it did not become either more responsive
or more subordinate to local interests, and it remained the opponent of
nationalist pressures. Its professional staff were all Europeans, trained
in France until 1885, then in England until 1920, and only thereafter at
the Indian Forestry Institute which was established at Dehra Dun in the
Himalayan foothills in 1906.49 Both this pattern of foreign training and
the urban Indian elites’ dislike of wandering on remote mountainsides for
several months at a time meant that even in 1906 only two Indians had
entered training for the professional ranks. This route toward making
forest management localized was not promising. And as the service be-
came more sophisticated in forestry science, its hostility to commercial
forestry hardened. An 1894 law encouraged replanting forests and at-
tempting to expand revenue from later harvests in the plantations; but
this was to be entirely controlled by the forest service, not by timber
merchants, who had shown no ability or interest in sustained manage-
ment of the forests which they rarely owned. Most fundamental, in India
the acreage under forests of even the poorest quality did not expand, but
the population with its inexorable minimum needs did.
The official perspective of the government on this massive dilemma
was evident in the Imperial Gazetteer of 1909, whose volume on Bombay

49
W.F. Perree, “Indian Forest Administration,” Journal of the East India Asso-
ciation, January 1927, pp. 69–70.

30
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

commented in discouragement on what it perceived as the peasants’

wanton destructiveness.
In spite of the care which is taken to control forest operations in the
interests of the people, these operations are not popular, as the mass of
the population are unable to comprehend the necessity of foresight in
forest utilization. The peasant is as a rule wasteful in the extreme: he will
not hesitate to burn a valuable forest for the sake of a temporary supply
of green fodder or to lop and fell trees in order to provide manure for his
crops, without thought as to whether the supply of forest produce will
continue to meet the needs of his successors. In the same way, accus-
tomed as he is to permit his cattle to graze at will throughout the whole
forest area, he resents measures taken to protect the regrowth from their
depredations, while ignorance of the rights or privileges that have been
accorded to him by Government too often places him at the mercy of the
members of the subordinate forest staff, whom it is at times impossible
to restrain from taking advantage of their official position.50
The gap between systematic forest management and the subsistence
practices of the villagers had widened, and nothing had been learned
about methods of social communication necessary in order to bridge
that gap. The forest service, proud of its high standards of specializa-
tion and professionalism, maintained its imperial paternalism toward the
villagers: the peasants seemed incapable of acting responsibly or intelli-
gently. They would have to be coerced by bureaucratic methods, if there
was to be any hope for long-range survival.
The results of these hardening trends were painfully evident in 1927,
forty years after the publication of the earlier commission’s report, when
another Bombay Forest Committee reported. Its membership included as
chairman the Chief Conservator of Bombay, the three conservators of the
three Circles, and five Indian members of the now expanded Legislative
Council in Bombay. The official report and the Indian members’ dissent-
ing report revealed a further polarization along the old lines, powerfully
influenced by the vastly increased political tensions between the colonial
administrators and the Indian nationalist movement.

50
Imperial Gazetteer of India, Bombay, I, 64–65.

31
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

The official report opened with the familiar basic principles of the
forest service:

To allow the present generation to derive the maximum possible legitimate benefit
from the forests; to ensure that the forests are not laid waste by the present genera-
tion but are preserved for the benefit of posterity; [and] to secure as high a legiti-
mate revenue from the forests as possible.51

The British commissioners defended the system of permits and fees, in-
cluding a more recent additional fee for any villager grazing his ani-
mals on government land, a fee which was by now bringing in well over
` 300,000 per year in revenue. They considered that it might be appro-
priate for forest villagers to take without charge the remains of trees cut
by contractors, as well as the remains of systematic thinning in young
reforestation tracts. But they rejected the villagers’ complaint that mer-
chants were selling these leftovers at cutting sites for exorbitant rates.
Villagers could always go to government fuel depots, where firewood
was sold at cost, they blandly asserted. As for commercially valuable
hardwood on private land, the government had not followed the 1887
proposal to turn it over to private landowners. Rather, under financial
pressure beginning in another devastating drought period in the late
1890s, the government by 1910 had cut and sold most standing teak
from private lands in Thana for a handsome profit of ` 2,300,000 of
which they passed on 20 percent to the landowners. It seemed self-
evident that the government would be foolish to pass up the right to
future cutting of more scientifically grown teak.
Nowhere in this report did the British commissioners indicate any
sympathy with the villagers. On the most controversial issue, the fines
levied on villages that failed to fight forest fires enthusiastically, they con-
cluded that rural opinion must be aroused, coerced if necessary, against
setting forest fires; no less rigorous system could prevent major damage
by fire. Finally, in response to the continuing flow of complaints that
forest officials oppressed villagers with their varied petty powers, they re-
sponded blandly that these assertions must be grossly exaggerated, since
the forest guards were after all local men known to their neighbors.
51
Government of India, Bombay Forest Committee Report, Government Press,
New Delhi, 1927, I, 4.

32
 FOREST MANAGEMENT AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

It is curious that the mere fact of a man being appointed as Forest Guard should
at once change him from down-trodden uncomplaining serf to an arrogant
oppressor....On the other hand cases of assault and even of murder of Forest Guards
are not at all uncommon.52

By implication the motives of the department’s critics were suspect. This

being the case, proposals to appoint committees of locally influential
residents empowered to oversee the work of the foresters were hardly
even worth a rebuttal. “If adopted in practice it would lead to endless
trivial complaints against local forest officials calculated to deter them
from the performance of their duty.”53
The dissenting report by the Indian members of the commission
could hardly have been a sharper contrast, lobbying as it did for the im-
mediate interests of the peasants. It reported that peasants everywhere
were intimidated by the forest officials to the point where they hardly
dared testify before the commission. But it was “common knowledge”
that in every district there was a severe shortage of both timber products
and grazing areas, while the administration insisted on closing exten-
sive tracts even to grazing. Landowners as well as the poverty-stricken
had their grievances, familiar from decades past. They had formed For-
est Grievance Committees in two talukas of Thana, reminiscent of the
old Thana Forest Association, to demand the right to 100 percent, not
20 percent, of the sale price of teak grown on their lands. And it seemed
outrageous to this view that the public was not given full and free rights
to all remnants of controlled felling of trees even on government land.
The only way to reverse these self-aggrandizing trends of the administra-
tors would be to hand over local administration of permits and fees to
village patils, and establish local taluka committees, with local citizens
a controlling majority, to oversee the foresters’ work. Finally, wherever
the need for more agricultural land conflicted with the preservation of
forests, the plow should take priority.
This last principle, reflecting the interests of their largely agricultural
constituency, was emphatic in the Indian report, which buttressed it
by references to the government resolution of 1881 that had asserted

52
Ibid., I, 18.
53
Ibid.

33
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

the primacy of agriculture. The Indian non-officials in 1927 expressed

the interests of a growing and politically rising agricultural populace.
Whether it was as politically opportunistic as the officials’ position was
politically rigid, or just a consistent reflection of the increasingly urgent
subsistence needs of the peasants, is a matter of interpretation.
Clearly, though, Indian protest against the foresters’ efforts had
lost the awareness of long-term environmental issues which the Poona
People’s Association had expressed in 1880. After nearly a century’s
accumulated experience with the problems of maintaining forest re-
sources, Bombay Presidency was in a worse position than at the begin-
ning, and not only because population pressure had increased. Political
polarization had worsened between the British rulers, who saw Indian
criticism of forest policy as veiled political self-interest, and the Indians,
who perceived long-range resource management as only a cover for per-
petuating foreign control of the government.

34
 II
The Forests of the Western Himalayas:
The Legacy of British Colonial
Administration∗

A lthough our understanding of forest use in industrialized countries

is relatively well developed, we still know little about the history of for-
ested regions and forest management in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
We are only beginning to analyze the impact that the era of colonialism
has had upon the natural resources of present-day developing nations.
Numerous local examples from a broad range of colonial settings must
be explored before historians can generalize with any confidence about
the patterns of resource use in the non-Western world. Because colonial
forest management was born in British India and was transferred from
there to other parts of the British Empire, an appropriate starting point
might be the development of forest management in one ecological region
of the Indian subcontinent. Nowhere were the problems of forest man-
agement in India more intricate or the ecological stakes higher than in
the vast forests of the Himalayas.

∗Reprinted with permissions from the Forest History Society, Durham, NC;
www.foresthistory.org. First published as “The Forests of the Western Himalayas:
The Legacy of British Colonial Administration,” Journal of Forest History, 26:3
( July 1982), pp. 122–23. Durhan, NC: Forest History Society.

35
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Early History of the Himalayan Forests

Although Nepal, in the central Himalayas, retained its political autonomy

throughout the nineteenth century, the mountainous region of north-
western India came under direct or indirect British control between 1815
and 1849. During the early nineteenth century this region was virtually
unknown to Westerners. Following the fabled pilgrimage routes that had
carried devout Hindus toward the headwaters of the Ganges for centur-
ies, British explorers, traders, and geographers discovered vast stands of
forest covering most of the Himalayan hills.1 In some of the more fertile
river valleys that penetrated far into the high mountains, they found agri-
cultural terraces and grazing lands that had been carved out of steep hill-
sides above the torrents. But overall, the population seemed sparse and
the forest almost endless. For centuries the West had cultivated visions
of north India’s vast wealth of agriculture and luxury goods. In the years
after 1800, a new dimension of that myth emerged: the mountains that
towered above the plains promised boundless mineral and timber wealth
to those who exploited them.
Of the early travelers, only one voice dissented from this romantic
vision. Bishop Reginald Heber, head of the Church of England for India,
traveled through north India and observed as early as 1823–24:

Great devastations are generally made in these woods, partly by the increase of
population, building, and agriculture, partly by the wasteful habits of travelers,
who cut down multitudes of young trees to make temporary huts, and for fuel,
while the cattle and goats which browse on the mountains prevent a great part of
the seedlings from rising. Unless some precautions are taken the inhabited parts of
Kemaoon will soon be wretchedly bare of wood, and the country, already too arid,
will not only lose its beauty, but its small space of fertility.2

Bishop Heber foreshadowed the lengthy debate that emerged later

over how carefully the forest resources of the Himalayas should be
1
See especially F.V. Raper, “Narrative of a Survey for the Purpose of Discover-
ing the Sources of the Ganges,” Asiatic Researches 11 (1810): 446–563. For a
recent overview, see John Keay, When Men and Mountain Meet, pt. 1 (London:
John Murray, 1977).
2
Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India,
2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1849), 1: 274.

36
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

husbanded. But by later standards, the hills of the western Himalayas

had seen only limited human penetration in the 1820s. Isolated moun-
tain valleys had been settled by hill men under local rajas for up to 1,700
years.3 In the more fertile low valleys near the plains, a few kingdoms
ruled by Rajput princes had reached a high degree of prosperity, power,
and culture. Despite internecine battles that left the royal houses peren-
nially unstable, for the most part the kingdoms managed to remain at
arm’s length from the far greater political powers of the Ganges basin
below. Even the great imperial Mughals of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries paid little active attention to the hill rajas and their estates.
Once the rajas accepted formal subordination to the Mughal emperors,
the Mughals were content to spend their energies organizing the econ-
omy of the plains and constructing a few elegant retreats, such as the
Shalimar gardens in the hills of Kashmir. Other than that, their need
for timber and tribute was supplied well enough from the still-lush re-
sources of the Gangetic basin.4
The eighteenth century saw more complex and destructive events
in both the lowlands and the hills. After emperor Aurangzeb died in
1707, Mughal power crumbled and north India experienced a century
of political decentralization and shifting military campaigns. Although
the remote hill rajas attempted to remain aloof, several military forays
penetrated the outer hill states in the late eighteenth century, disrupt-
ing agriculture and stripping some of the wealth. The last of these ad-
venturers were the Gurkhas, who controlled the central valley of Nepal
and its capital, Katmandu. Entering the turmoil, the Gurkhas expanded
their power westward beyond modern Nepal’s borders to conquer the
Hindu hills of Kumaon and Garhwal in 1803. For the next twelve years,
until their defeat by British regiments in 1815, the Gurkhas extracted
whatever wealth they could from the conquered territories.5 Heavy tax
3
For the pre-British history of Kumaon and Garhwal, see E.T. Atkinson,
The Himalayan Gazetteer, vol. 2 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1882), chaps
3–7. For pre-British Himachal, see John Hutchison and J.P. Vogel, History of the
Punjab Hill States (Lahore: Government Press, 1933).
4
W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar (reprint ed., New Delhi: Atma
Ram, 1962), pp. 20–21, 134–35.
5
G.W. Traill, “Statistical Sketch of Kumaon,” Asiatic Researches 16 (1828):
137–234.

37
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

tributes forced many villagers to desert their old terraced fields, which
began washing into the riverbeds below. Some of the finest timber of
the lower hill region was cut and sold to extract further wealth from the
region. What sort of forest wealth were the Gurkhas and their prede-
cessors exploiting as they prepared a legacy for more systematic British
forces?

The Forest Cover of the Western Himalayas

The distribution of timber species in the western Himalayas depended

primarily on the factor of elevation.6 Along the southern edge of the
mountains, the Siwalik Range of foothills rises abruptly from the alluvial
plains to heights of 2,000 to 3,000 feet. At the base of the Siwaliks runs
the bhabar, a line of talus gravel slopes deposited by the Himalayan
rivers over the millennia. For much of the year, the streams subside
beneath the bhabar, only to emerge again some ten to twenty miles down-
stream carrying alluvial silts more slowly into the plains. On the north-
western out-reaches of the Siwaliks, the lowest hills are composed of a
deep and highly unstable alluvium, susceptible to severe, rapid erosion
when their forest cover is removed. Farther southeast where the rivers
emerge, they form the tarai—a marshy, malarial belt of dense jungle
that resisted most human exploitation until after Indian independence
in 1947. Except along major river channels, the tarai formed the moun-
tains’ most effective defense against overuse until the arrival of the United
Nations’ malaria eradication campaign of the 1950s.
North of the Siwaliks lie fertile low valleys, including Dehra Dun and
Kangra, and at their backs the Outer Himalayas rise abruptly to 8,000
feet and more. Deep gorges cut by the northern rivers provide a few dif-
ficult access routes into the inner mountains. Beyond lie the glaciers and
permanent snows of the Great Himalaya, whose 16,000- to 25,000-foot
peaks are the highest in India.

6
For the geological setting, see Augusto Gansser, Geology of the Himalayas
(London: Interscience Publishers, 1964).

38
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

The historical pattern of timber operations has reflected the distribu-

tion of tree species in the hills.7 In the tropical moist deciduous zone of
the foothills and tarai, dense thickets of bamboo became commercially
important for many small traders in the nineteenth century, but this was
timber only in a very limited sense. The most desirable hardwood was sal
(Shorea robusta), then and now the great timber tree of the submontane
tracts. Its fine grain and hardy resistance to the ravages of white ants
placed it in prime demand for most timber purposes. As the century
wore on, overcutting of sal in the lowland districts stimulated a search
for other hardwoods in the mountains.
In the subtropical pine zone of the Outer Himalayan ranges, from
3,300 to 6,200 feet, the chir pine (Pinus longifolia) dominated many
slopes. Like most other conifers, its wood was unsuitable for use as rail-
way sleepers (crossties). Though relatively accessible to rivers, it did not
become an important commercial tree until after 1900, when it became
the chief plantation tree for the resin industry of the foothills in Kumaon.
The great tree of the mountains was the deodar (Cedrus deodara),
whose dense and elegant wood was ideal for construction and railway
use. It grows at elevations from 6,000 to 8,000 feet in the moist temper-
ate zone. Most of the massive cuttings of the nineteenth century were in
the deodar forests. Silviculturists gradually learned that the deodar is not
only slow growing but difficult to propagate. Unfortunately it had no
ready substitute, for the other conifers, though faster growing, were all
far less durable. Mixed with the deodar, and increasingly dominant in
the middle ranges at 6,000 to 8,500 feet in recent decades, is the kail or
blue pine (Pinus excelsa or wallichiana). Higher yet, the Himalayan spruce
(Picea smithiana) and the Himalayan silver fir (Abies pindrow) growing to
elevations of nearly 11,000 feet, were not under severe commercial pres-
sure until the advent of a new road system in the high mountains after
independence.
Oak (Quercus) was the only broadleaf genus to become commercially
valuable in the nineteenth century. Several species of oak grow at widely
ranging elevations in open stands. Oaks supplied material for building

7
For fuller detail, see G.S. Puri, Indian Forest Ecology, 2 vols. (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1960), and H.G. Champion, Manual of Indian
Silviculture, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1938).

39
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

and furniture, although commercial exploitation conflicted increasingly

with villagers’ need for oak leaves as fodder and mulch. Some of the
most severe soil erosion in the region resulted from deforestation on dry
south-facing slopes where only oaks grow well.

Early Colonial Forest Use

When the first British administrators settled in the Kumaon hills after
1815, they reported being welcomed by the hill people as liberators from
Gurkha oppression. In the low valley called Dehra Dun (where India’s
Forest Research Institute now stands), they found villages deserted,
local irrigation canals crumbling, fields returning to scrub vegetation,
and some of the woodlands randomly damaged in the social upheavals
of the previous years. There, as so often happens in human history, the
fields and forests had paid the price of military and political turmoil.
Determined to reclaim the fertility and prosperity of the Kumaon
hills, the British appointed Commissioner G.W. Traill in 1815 to oversee
the reconstruction of the region. Over the following eighteen years Traill
surveyed the land and laid the foundation for colonial administration
and revenue management in Kumaon.8 Under his aggressive energy the
Revenue Department assumed the dominant place in the colonial system
that it held until England left India in 1947. The history of forest man-
agement and exploitation cannot be understood except as it functioned
under the influence of revenue administration.
The British gradually extended their rule northwestward across the
Ganges basin and into the hills on its northern borders. Some areas
they left by treaty to autonomous Indian princes and rajas; others they
annexed one by one. Kumaon Division was linked with the adjacent
plains as the North-West Province, and in 1849 the British defeated the
king of Punjab in the northwest, the region drained by the Indus River
system. They annexed the Punjab plains and part of the hills above them;
the rest they left as Princely States, including Kashmir. Turning eastward

8
Traill, “Statistical Sketch,” gives his full analysis. For a more accessible sum-
mary, see Atkinson, Gazetteer, 3: 463–87.

40
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

again, they completed stabilization of north India in 1855 by annexing

Oudh and shortly thereafter combining it with the North-West Province
as the United Provinces, or U.P., as this north Indian heartland has been
called since that time.
Throughout the region the Revenue Department moved in immedi-
ately behind the army, surveying land records and setting up fiscal ad-
ministration, district by district. Almost without exception, the colonial
officials were passionately committed to a dream of a prosperous peas-
antry, productive cash crops, and growing cities and towns.9 In the
1830s they began a massive network of canals to divert the flow of Indus
and Ganges waters into some of the drier districts.10 From the late 1850s
onward they laced a network of railways across northern India. These
policies rapidly transformed vast regions from forest to tilled fields. Early
Revenue Department settlement reports, and then forest surveys from
the 1850s onward, document this process in richer detail than we have
for any other colonized country in that century.
Under conditions of peace, the population of the rural Ganges and
Indus lowlands rose steadily. The Gangetic forests were rapidly becom-
ing the Gangetic plains as agriculture and forest clearing expanded in the
region. Any generalization about such an intricate and locally varying
process runs the risk of serious distortion, but a few general trends can
be indicated. In order to stimulate agriculture, colonial policymakers in
nearly every district gave title to large amounts of fallow or untilled land
to any farmer willing to plow it. Woodcutters under no direction or
planning removed the best quality trees for charcoal, building timber,
and furniture; they were followed by villagers gathering firewood, grazing

9
For a fuller analysis, see Richard P. Tucker, “The British Colonial System
and the Forests of the Western Himalayas, 1815–1914,” and J.F. Richards and
Michelle B. McAlpin, “Cotton Cultivating and Land Clearing in the Bombay
Deccan and Karnatak, 1818–1920,” in Richard P. Tucker and J.F. Richards, eds.,
Deforestation and the Nineteenth Century World Economy (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1982).
10
Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, vol. 1, The
United Provinces under British Rule, 1860–1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1972). Also see Ian Stone, “Canal Irrigation and Agrarian Change: The
Ganges Canal Tract, Muzaffarnagar, 1840–1900,” in K.N. Chaudhuri and Clive
Dewey, eds., Economy and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979).

41
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

livestock, and burning the dry season’s grasses to make way for the
lush new growth following the monsoon rains. These annual fires often
spread to nearby woodlands and did serious damage, especially to
younger tree growth. It would be years before any systematic fire protec-
tion was organized. By the 1850s district officials were reporting that
forests in the lowlands had lost their best timber to this small-scale but
widespread practice of woodcutting and forest clearing. Although im-
possible to quantify, the spread of commercial agriculture was undoubt-
edly the most important single element of changing forest conditions in
those decades.

Timber and the Market Economy

Woodcutters first encroached in the lower Siwalik hills, especially the

area between the plains and the first valley of the U.P. hills, Dehra Dun.
Sal forests there, continuous with the vast sal stands in the adjacent
plains, were initially cut in the 1820s both for building materials and
to make way for the plow. Local timber merchants working on an in-
dividual basis brought their bullock carts to the clearing sites, much as
small-scale wood merchants do today, and hauled sal trunks away for
construction timber in the towns of the plains.11 By the 1840s British
entrepreneurs began to penetrate much higher into the mountain valleys.
A major escalation came in the mid-1840s when an improved system of
floating logs down the Ganges tributaries extended timber harvests to the
deodar forests in the mountains of the Princely State of Tehri-Garhwal,
far beyond Dehra Dun.12 By 1850 some of the region’s prime sal and
deodar tracts, both below the hills and in the higher valleys, were already
cleared of their marketable trees.13
11
Survey Report on the Forests and Swamps of Pileebheet, in the Province of
Rohilcund (Allahabad, 1854), pp. 1–6; E.F. Pearson, “Sub-Himalayan Forests of
Kumaon and Garhwal,” Selections from the Records of the North-Western Provinces,
2nd ser., no. 5 (1869), pp. 125–52.
12
V.B. Singh, Working Plan of the Uttarkashi Forest Division, Uttar Pradesh,
1961–62 to 1975–76, p. 43.
13
Papers Regarding the Forests and Iron Mines in Kumaon (Allahabad, 1855),
pp. 14–15. For the broader context of the period, see the standard history of

42
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

In the hill districts of the U.P. and the Punjab, forest clearing initially
moved at a slower pace. But beginning in the 1840s the development
of plantation crops and experiments in small-scale mining accelerated
the process of deforestation. Tea estates were introduced in the Kangra
valley after 1850 in hopes of rivaling the lucrative tea plantations of
Darjeeling farther east.14 The northern tea, generally referred to as
Palampur tea after the central town of the district, became an important
cash crop for the area. But its markets even today remain regional rather
than international.
More devastating to local forests were the smelting facilities opened
by British developers in the mid-nineteenth century. Iron and copper
were mined and smelted in the Kumaon hills on a primitive scale before
the British arrived, and the products of those mines tantalized British
developers with a vision of massive mineral deposits. Although leading
engineers were recruited from England to survey mining locations, the
effort failed for two reasons. First, the extent and quality of the ores dis-
appointed the developers. More important, the smelting operations soon
devastated the forests on the steep mountain slopes of the region as far as
fifteen miles from the smelting sites, making the cost of fuel prohibitive.
After a few decades of operation, the experiments in mineral exploitation
were brought to a halt.15
As early as the 1850s doubts were raised about the impact of these
numerous unregulated pressures on the supposedly inexhaustible
Himalayan forests. Such fears, however, were not effectively commu-
nicated to those in power. Commissioner J.H. Batten, Traill’s successor

forestry in India, E.P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, 3 vols. (London: John Lane,
1922–26), 2: 264–90.
14
Robert Fortune, “Report upon the Tea Plantation of Dehra, Kumaon and
Gurhwal . . . 1851,” and W. Jameson, “Government Tea Plantations,” both in
Selections from the Records of Government, North-Western Provinces (Allahabad,
1869), 5: 401–29.
15
J.D. Herbert, “Report of the Mineralogical Survey of the Himalaya
Mountains Lying between the Rivers Sutlej and Kalee,” Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal 11 (1842): xxxiv; G.S. Lushington, “Account of the Experiment Carried
on at the Pokree Copper Mine, Ghurwal,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
12 (June 1843): 454.

43
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

in Kumaon, noted in 1851 that fuelwood cutting in the sal forests had
opened up the tarai forests to settlement. Unrestricted fuelwood harvests
left little commercially valuable timber below the hills, but that hardly
mattered, he insisted, because in the lower slopes of the Outer Himalayas
“the extension of the timber trade one hundred-fold would hardly make
any visible impression,” and the terrain of outer Kumaon was too rough
for cutting on a scale that would threaten the forests.16
Batten however, could not have anticipated in the early 1850s the
transformation of the Himalayan forests soon to be brought on by the
railways. Beginning with the first track in India, laid from Bombay into
the coastal hills in 1853, the forest resources of the subcontinent were
mined in vast quantities to link India’s natural resources with the ex-
panding world economy.17 The railway construction of the next few
decades provided India with by far the finest rail network in the non-
Western world. The system’s many purposes included military security
and the transport of grain throughout India and to the European markets.
The railways built in the Bombay region in the 1850s initially used
teak from the west coast, but by the 1860s teak supplies were severely
depleted.18 The cost of transporting the wood from Bombay to the north
was in any case prohibitive. To construct the network of lines across the
north Indian plains, the railway builders turned to the timber resources
of north India, which by then were primarily in the Outer Himalayas.
After the rebellion of 1857–58, which nearly destroyed the colonial sys-
tem in north India, the British returned to the plains districts of the
region with renewed enthusiasm.19 By 1870 the principal towns of U.P.
and Punjab were linked by rail lines, and the first spur to the foot of the
mountains was opened in 1872 to Bareilly, a fast-growing timber pro-
cessing center.

16
J.H. Batten, “Minute on Iron Mines in Kumaon,” August 1855, Papers
Regarding the Forests and Iron Mines in Kumaon, pp. 7–9.
17
See footnote 9.
18
Richard Tucker, “Forest Management and Imperial Politics: Thana District,
Bombay 1823–87,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 16, no. 3
(September 1979): 273–300.
19
Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chaps 6–8.

44
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

Modern Forest Management

As soon as the search for railway timber began, the government of British
India realized that more systematic surveys of forest resources and man-
agement of timber harvest would be essential. Officials reasoned that the
profits generated from sales of timber to the Railway Department would
cover the costs of forest management and even the replanting of de-
graded forest tracts. After some tentative surveys in the 1850s carried out
by heads of the regional botanical gardens or the commissioners them-
selves, the government turned to the forestry schools of Germany and
France, recruited the best foresters available, and established a formal
Forest Department for India. In 1865 Dietrich Brandis became India’s
first inspector general of forests.20 In the following years one of his staff’s
major tasks was to provide massive supplies of sleepers to the railways.
This operation was to be managed for sustained yield and for the ultim-
ate improvement in the quality of the forest.
The ideal species for sleepers might have been sal, but by then the
sal forests of U.P. were considerably depleted and the major supply was
on the Nepal side of the tarai border.21 Hence most north Indian rail
lines were built with deodar, growing in the higher mountains farther
west in both British and princely districts. Beginning with the Princely
States of Chamba and Tehri in the early 1860s, British officials struck
contracts with the rajas, usually of twenty years’ duration and usually
renewed. Under the contracts, British foresters managed princely forests
for maximum deodar yield, and a large and increasing portion of the
profits went directly into princely coffers. This system was maintained
with only minor variations as long as the princes’ autonomy lasted—
until India won independence in 1947. For the most part, the distinction
between princely forests and those of British India need not concern us

20
Stebbing, Forests of India, vol. 2, chaps 1–2; Robert K. Winters, “Forestry
Beginnings in India,” Journal of Forest History 19 (April 1975): 82–90.
21
Some detail on this situation is indicated in C.M. Johri, Working Plan for
the Gorakhpur Forest Division, United Provinces, 1944–45 to 1953–54 (Lucknow,
1949).

45
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

here, because the principles of forest exploitation were nearly identical

in both areas.
Throughout the nineteenth century the new Forest Department con-
centrated on cutting in the deodar forests, providing more than 100,000
sleepers annually. With such heavy pressure on the increasingly limited
deodar forests, Brandis and his men attempted from the 1860s onward
to diversify the range of timbers they might use, hoping to find adequate
and inexpensive methods of creosoting to preserve chir and kail pine,
Himalayan spruce, and silver fir.22 But the technical problems remained
insurmountable for decades, leaving the hardwoods under pressure of
insatiable demand throughout the railway-building era before World
War I.

Foresters versus Villagers

The drive to maintain high levels of timber production increased the

urgency of defining rights of forest ownership and use. This process
began under Revenue Department auspices in each British Indian dis-
trict shortly after it was annexed, although in the remote mountainous
districts officials either left vast areas legally undefined or allotted them
to local villagers’ control. Beginning in the mid-1860s the Forest Depart-
ment brought together a body of legislation, refined it through practice
and experience, and finally achieved the Indian Forest Law of 1878.23
This law defined several legal categories of forests, the most important
of which was “Reserved Forests,” which would be managed by the For-
est Department for timber production and silvicultural improvement. A
second category, “Protected Forests,” was to be largely a temporary

22
Dietrich Brandis, “Memorandum on the Supply of Railway Sleepers of the
Himalayan Pines Impregnated in India,” October 1878. For his retrospective
views on north India’s forestry, see Brandis, “Progress of Forestry in India,”
Indian Forester 10 (September 1884): 399–410, and subsequent issues. By 1900
some industrial uses of the forests were expanding. See George Watt, Commercial
Products of India (London, 1908), and R.S. Troup, Indian Forest Utilization, 2nd
rev. ed. (Calcutta, 1913).
23
Stebbing, Forests of India, vol. 2, chap. 14.

46
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

designation; these forests were to be taken out of general use until they
could be assessed and planned. Other categories of forested land were
left to the Revenue Department, private owners, or village communities.
An enormous task remained—applying the general terms of the 1878
law to specific villages, timber stands, and watersheds. Until well after
1900, a major portion of the Forest Department’s energies was absorbed
in developing detailed working plans for each reserved or protected for-
est. This meant designing fire controls, regulating grazing, and control-
ling villagers’ access to forests, especially in newly replanted forests.24
The 1878 law quickly brought to light a deep-seated conflict between
the subsistence patterns of traditional village life and the colonial sys-
tem’s methods of timber management. When the law was introduced
into the districts, villagers evaded en masse the fee-payment system that
regulated their use of government forests. Forest guards hired by the
British functioned as little else but rural police, often in competition with
officers of the Revenue Department. Voices outside the Forest Depart-
ment charged that the forest guards were either harassing the villagers
or were allied with the timber traders from outside the hills. Kumaon
illustrates the severity of these dilemmas.
Under the 1878 law several areas of Kumaon, especially in the
Siwalik foothills, were set aside as reserved forests by the 1890s and
later produced some of the finest sal timber in the subcontinent. Many
of the sal stands had been systematically replanted by the Forest Depart-
ment.25 Seeing rapid depletion of adjacent protected forests, which had
not yet been provided full working plans, they added to the so-called old
reserves extensive new reserves that would provide similarly rigorous

24
Ibid., chap. 19.
25
Ibid., chap. 18. For further detail, see working plans: Gopal Singh, Work-
ing Plan for the Naini Tal Forest Division, Kumaon Circle, Uttar Pradesh, 1968–69
to 1977–78; Manohar Singh, Working Plan for the Tarai and Bhabar Forest Divi-
sion, Western Circle, Uttar Pradesh, 1965–66 to 1974–75; S.S. Srivastava, Working
Plan for the Lansdowne Forest Division, Western Circle, Uttar Pradesh, 1964–65 to
1973–74; and their predecessors, at the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun.
Later reports on sal plantations include E.A. Smythies, Note on the Miscellaneous
Forests of Kumaon Bhabar, Forest Bulletin no. 45 (Calcutta, 1921), and C.G. Trevor,
Note on a Tour of Inspection in the Forests of the United Provinces, March 1936.

47
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

restrictions on grazing, fires, and fuelwood gathering. The new reserves

were brought under this administration between 1911 and 1916.26
It was already evident that whenever any area was declared a reserved
forest, the transition to the new management system was a time of very
delicate tensions between foresters and villagers. Unfortunately, in the
prime sal forests of Kumaon’s new reserves, the many economic pressures
resulting from World War I coincided with this transition. Furthermore,
shortly after the end of the war, India’s first nationwide Non-Cooperation
Campaign under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership brought modern polit-
ical conflict to the hills. In a number of ways Kumaon was suddenly and
tragically catapulted into national and worldwide affairs.
Increased British travel in the hills, both for administration and tourism,
had also strained local transport capacities by 1914. Since few trails were
usable even as cart tracks in the region, village men were traditionally
required to provide unpaid labor, begar, to transport officials and their
goods. The war brought this system to a breaking point. Recruitment
for the colonial army, coupled with expanded labor demands to meet
the wartime timber needs, brought on acute labor shortages. Villagers
also needed, as always, to tend to the crop-growing cycle. Under all these
pressures, they began in 1916 to resist the government’s demands for
unpaid coolie labor. Their protests were directed against the Revenue
and Forest departments, their chief employers. Represented by leading
townsmen of the region, they demanded an end to the unpaid labor
system and forced the issue by 1919 into full discussion in the pro-
vincial legislature. Fortunately, District Commissioner Wyndham was
highly respected on all sides, and through his work a system was devised
that introduced regular wages for the workers in the early 1920s. Never-
theless, resentment focused on the Forest Department in the hills devel-
oped into an organized system of political protest in the ensuing years.
The sal forests became the chief victims of the tension.
Every year from February into May, mountain villagers had burned
their grasslands to encourage vigorous new growth for grazing during
26
For a fuller analysis of the ensuing conflict, see Richard P. Tucker, “The His-
torical Context of Social Forestry in Kumaon, Himalayas,” Journal of Developing
Areas, 18: 3 (April 1984), pp. 341–56; Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods:
Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989).

48
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

the following monsoon season. Since these fires sometimes spread to sal
and coniferous forests, the Forest Department had long tried to limit the
burning. The dry season of early 1921 was one of the hottest in many
years, and in March the situation became totally unmanageable. To com-
pound the department’s problems, 1921 was the year of the nationwide
protest movement against all reputedly arbitrary or repressive actions of
the colonial regime, and in the hills resentment was centered primarily
on the forest regulations. In Kumaon, which had previously been un-
touched by nationalist politics, several towns witnessed protest meetings
between January and March, and suddenly the sal forests were ablaze
across the Siwalik hills, even into Punjab. Thousands of acres burned
in less than a month in what the colonial press and officials condemned
as political incendiarism. No Congress nationalist leaders of Kumaon
were arrested; in fact, they too were appalled at the damage. But popular
sentiment in the hills had been at flash point; the blazes were evidently a
tragic example of “spontaneous” peasant protest.
The U.P. government responded by conciliating the hill people, and
doing so provided the greatest policy defeat the Forest Department has
ever suffered in that region. A fact-finding commission chaired by Com-
missioner Wyndham recommended that the new reserves be removed
from Forest Department jurisdiction because popular opposition could
not be otherwise contained.27 The provincial government adopted the
plan in early 1923, concluding that unless local villagers supported for-
estry policies actively, no sustained management or reforestation would
be possible. Although the old reserves remained under Forest Depart-
ment management, the new reserves reverted either to the Revenue
Department as civil forests—meaning no silvicultural management at
all—or to the village councils themselves. The effect was to condemn
many of Kumaon’s forests to denudation.
Concessions to hill people were designed to bring political benefits to
the government in a period of high political tension. A related element
of the government’s strategy was to generate money incomes for hill men
through commercial utilization of the forests. Though the timber mar-
ket, reflecting the general economy of north India, was soft in the 1920s
and then depressed in the 1930s, there was hope that increased timber
27
Report of the Kumaon Forests Grievances Committee (Lucknow, 1922).

49
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

sales would mean rising cash incomes for logging contractors’ crews.
As the system developed, however, it brought little benefit to the work-
ers of Kumaon and therefore little political benefit to the Forest Depart-
ment or the government in general. In the timber auctions held every few
months in foothills timber depots like Bareilly, the Forest Department
auctioned the right to harvest marked trees at stipulated sites in the hills.
Competition among investors was usually intense, and winning bidders
became determined to squeeze maximum profit from their coupes. As
the system matured, the hill people charged that contractors often cut
many more trees than they had legally purchased, either by stealth or
by bribing foresters. The extent of this corruption is of course impos-
sible to measure, but widespread complaints suggest that there was some
truth to the charges. Senior officials of the Forest Department, like their
counterparts in other agencies of the colonial regime, were never able to
effectively monitor their chronically underpaid subordinates.
As nationalist resentment against the colonial regime deepened, the
hill people protested the alleged collusion between foresters and con-
tractors. Morover, they charged that wages were going primarily to out-
siders imported into the Kumaon hills by the contractors. Documentary
evidence that local villagers were indeed being bypassed by the labor
bosses is substantial. Specialized skills such as sawing were controlled by
specific groups from Mandi and other districts farther to the northwest,
and as the years went on, menial labor increasingly went to Dotiyals,
landless villagers from western Nepal.28 Hence the government failed to
convince the villagers that its commercial operations were bringing new
income to the hills, even though the case was backed by impressive stat-
istics in the annual forest reports of each north Indian state.
In another move designed to harmonize the wider market economy
with hill villagers’ interests, the Forest Department after World War I
fostered the resin industry in the chir pine forests. Under department
guidance new processing facilities were opened at Clutterbuckganj,
the timber center near Bareilly.29 But the resin industry suffered from a
number of disadvantages until after independence. Private capital was
28
Working Plans for each forest division give details.
29
E.A. Smythies, The Resin Industry in Kumaon, Forest Bulletin no. 26 (Calcutta,
1914); United Provinces Forest Department, Progress Report on the Resin Industry
in the Kumaon and Utilization Circles, annual publication beginning in 1918.

50
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

Map 1: Mountain Region of United Provinces and Punjab

Map Courtesy: Richard P. Tucker

not available in significant amounts. The provincial government, which

reviewed the Forest Department’s commercial operations, demonstrated
the usual reluctance of a colonial regime to invest revenue-derived funds
in industrial ventures. Furthermore, the foresters themselves were often
cautious in expanding industrial demands on the Himalayan forests,
fearing that this could easily lead to still further depletion of the reserves.
They did attempt to convince the rural populace of Kumaon that resin
tapping in the chir forests was an important source of wages for them.
But the move did little to mitigate the political tensions of the era.

51
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

In the next nationwide Non-Cooperation Campaign, in 1931, Gandhi

and the Congress again urged local organizers to initiate nonviolent
resistance against arbitrary laws. Again there were protest fires in the
Siwaliks, though not nearly on the scale of those that had destroyed the
half-grown sal plantations a decade earlier.30 The late 1930s and 1942
saw repetitions of these protests, with further injury to the mountain
ecology and to relations between villagers and foresters.
This is not to say that Congress Party organizers were merely using
the hill people’s resentment against the Forest Department as leverage
for nationalist organizing. As in all matters in the hills, the politics of for-
est protest was more intricate than that. On the one hand, political griev-
ances were real and were spearheaded by local leaders in the hill towns.
On the other hand, some of the Congress organizers in the 1930s were
plainsmen from the more highly politicized districts below the hills; as
such they tended to be distrusted by the hill people as interlopers.31
It would be a mistake, then, to assume that organized nationalist
politics was the only important element of the hill people’s response to
official forestry efforts in the twenty years before independence. Equally
important were the subsistence needs of the villagers, which is to say
their access to forests and grazing lands for daily fuelwood, fodder, and
other products. As early as 1922, the Wyndham Committee had recom-
mended that woodlands removed from Forest Department control be
turned over to villagers for management wherever they were able to elect
councils or panchayats to administer them. This was the beginning of
the social forestry movement that has been so intensively discussed in
recent decades. The forest panchayat movement in Kumaon was one of
the earliest in India, setting precedents that were reflected later in other
areas under British colonial forest management.
The principle of establishing forest panchayats was not implemented
until 1929, when the U.P. government formally set up procedures for
election of panchayat officers by villagers and designated professional
foresters to advise them. Before the outbreak of World War II, several

30
Annual Report on the Forests of the United Provinces for 1931–32.
31
Personal communication from Philip Mason, who was commissioner of
Garhwal in the late 1930s, September 1980.

52
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

hundred forest panchayats had been established throughout the U.P.

hills.32 The village forests were often common lands that had already been
severely deforested or overgrazed, but in remoter areas—beyond dense
population concentrations and motor roads—many of the panchayats
developed reputations in the 1930s for relatively shrewd management
of their resources.
World War II brought new and severe pressures on forest manage-
ment in the western Himalayas. Massive wartime demands for timber
products brought the danger of permanent damage to both government
and private forests. The problem was exacerbated by timber and fuel-
wood shortages and consequent inflationary pressures in the burgeon-
ing urban centers of north India. By now they drew to a large extent on
the Himalayan and central Indian forests, since almost no large timber
stands remained in the Ganges and Indus plains.
In 1945 the Forest Department surveyed the results of its work in
the war years as it planned the transition to Indian control of the agency
for the post-independence era.33 Foresters arrived at three conclusions:
first, that the department, by timing rotational cuttings, had successfully
met the demands upon government forests without permanent damage
to the forests’ vitality; second, that private forests, which were rarely
covered by systematic plans, had been decimated for the inflated civilian
economy; and third, that the forest law must therefore be amended to
give the government control over all forestlands. British and Indian for-
esters alike agreed that private forests must be taken by the government.
Moreover, an independent India under Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru
enjoyed a better chance of success in controlling private forests than
a colonial regime, since the change would be politically more accept-
able to the populace. The 1948 U.P. Private Forests Act and the 1952
national forest resolution largely accomplished that legal goal. During
the inevitable delays in implementing the policy, however, large add-
itional stands of timber on private lands, including some major hunting

32
Annual Report on the Forests of Uttar Pradesh for 1948–49, p. 3.
33
R.D. Richmond, “Post-War Forest Policy for India,” Empire Forestry Journal
23, no. 2 (1944): 103–09, and 24, no. 1 (1945): 52–55; W.F. Perree, “Post-War
Forest Policy for India,” ibid., 23, no. 2 (1944): 101–03.

53
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

preserves, were clearcut and sold. By the mid-1950s the task facing for-
est managers throughout India was more formidable than ever.

The Himalayan Forests since Independence

Independence brought a new era to the Himalayas, their forests, and their
people. The most pervasive change was a new attitude in New Delhi to-
ward economic development. Nehru’s moderate socialism was pledged
to providing basic necessities for the masses and linking private busi-
ness with all the resources of government, both technical and financial.
The First Five-Year Plan, covering 1951–56, stressed the expansion of
heavy industry and had little direct impact on the northwestern forests.
But industry and urbanization needed power, and north India’s greatest
power resource was the Himalayan rivers. In the 1950s the first high
dams and hydroelectric projects came to the mountains, beginning
with the great Bhakra-Nangal Dam.34 Planning for Bhakra had begun
at the turn of the century, but only when Nehru became prime minister
did the project receive urgent attention. Ground was broken in 1952,
and the turbines began turning in 1960.
Similarly, public health programs rapidly changed patterns of popu-
lation and land use. The introduction of DDT in the 1950s dramatically
reduced malaria in the tarai, both in India and Nepal, leading to rapid
transformation of the tarai forests into fertile farmland.35
For the Forest Department in the hills, danger lay in their perenni-
ally uneasy relations with the more powerful Revenue and Agriculture
departments. In the U.P. hills the Forest Department watched the civil
forests lose the last of their ragged trees, knowing that the revenue
authorities had neither the training nor the interest to protect these lands
and would rather see them gradually turned to subsistence farming.
In the Punjab hills, now a separate state called Himachal Pradesh, the
Forest Department met similar frustrations. Even today forest officers
complain about the right of nautor, by which the revenue authorities give

34
A.A. Michel, The Indus Rivers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
35
Frederick H. Gaige, Regionalism and National Unity in Nepal (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975).

54
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

village landowners the right to till government fallow and ultimately to

take ownership of the newly plowed fields.
By the late 1950s, it was becoming clear to the foresters that the civil
forests no longer provided a buffer zone for the reserved forests by meet-
ing the villagers’ needs for food and forest products. One hope for these
civil lands lay in closer working relations between foresters and villagers,
but the social forestry movement was slow to develop, caught up as it
was in mutual suspicion.36
The reserved forests themselves had to be made more productive for
the timber markets of all northern India. Here lay the Forest Depart-
ment’s great hope in the 1950s. For the first time in over twenty years,
political and military conditions were stable and the civilian economy
was expanding. State forest departments and private timber contractors,
both entirely Indian now, faced the “nation-building” task of increas-
ing timber production to meet the fast-expanding national market for
paper pulp and building timber. This would generate greater income
for the Forest Department, which could in turn finance more intensive
management and reforestation of the reserves. The Forest Research Insti-
tute in Dehra Dun contributed an important share to the new industrial
forestry. Freed of the colonial regime’s reluctance to use government
agencies to expand the commercial economy, the institute expanded its
research facilities in the first years after independence.
The timber exploitation teams were helped in crucial ways by other
aspects of economic development in the hills. The Public Works De-
partment’s budget was increasing, and new road-building programs
were pushing motorable roads into many remote mountain areas that
had been reached before independence only by river or horse-track.
For example, Chamba District just southeast of Kashmir—an autono-
mous Princely State until 1948—gained its first motorable road up the
Ravi Valley to its capital, Chamba town, in 1942. Only after it was ab-
sorbed into the Indian Union in 1948 was it fully integrated into regional
economic expansion.37 Further east, the first all-weather road up the Beas

36
S.L. Shah, “Socio-Economic, Institutional and Technological Constraints in
Development of Social Forestry in the Hills of U.P.,” unpublished paper, 1980.
37
Annual Report of the Administration of Chamba State, 1944–45, p. 6.

55
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

River gorge to Kulu and beyond appeared in the late 1950s, bringing
tourists and loggers nearly to the Rohtang Pass, gateway to high Ladakh
with its skirts of virgin spruce and fir. The motorcar that carried Justice
William O. Douglas into the region in 1951 clung to the unpaved track
as far as Kulu; from there Douglas and his party walked over the Rohtang
Pass.38 The Tata–Mercedes timber trucks did not arrive in these high fore-
sts for another decade. Peasants looking for work could follow the dirt
tracks downward to the plains, but timber was transported out of the
mountains as it had been for a century—on the rivers themselves.
The decisive turning point in the ecology of the Indian Himalaya was
the border war between India and China in October 1962. The fighting
was brief and did little direct damage to the mountain landscape; indeed,
there was no military action in Himachal or northern U.P. But India’s
military had been badly outflanked by the Chinese at high elevations,
and the military immediately gained Prime Minister Nehru’s support for
a network of roads into all mountain regions of potential strategic im-
portance. In the decade or so after 1962, the Border Roads Commission,
using all the engineering and managerial resources of the military on an
emergency footing, carved motorable roads through many previously
inaccessible high forests. Although these roads caused severe problems
of local landslides and soil erosion, the country viewed these effects as a
necessary price for strategic security.
The border roads, though built by the military, were accessible to
civilian traffic and thus opened the fragile high valleys to commercial
penetration far sooner than the cilivian economy alone could have done.
Since then the mountain forests have been exploited more intensely, and
the response of professional foresters has been deeply ambivalent.
The expansion of cash crops, notably apples, has also exerted pres-
sures on the Himalayan forests. Commercial apple growing in the
middle elevation of Himachal began before 1900 when Major John Banon
of the Indian Army introduced them into the upper Kulu Valley. Shortly
thereafter, the emigré Pennsylvania Quaker Samuel Stokes settled in the
hills beyond Simla and planted orchards that within a generation made

38
William O. Douglas, Beyond the High Himalayas (New York: Doubleday,
1952), pp. 19–40.

56
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

his family one of the most influential in all of Himachal.39 But the rapid
expansion of the fruitlands, which now cover many thousands of acres
and provide the hill regions’ greatest source of income, awaited the new
network of roads after independence. Private forests as well as degraded
civil forests have been turned into apple and pear terraces, stabilizing soil
though in some cases replacing coniferous stands. One divisional forest
officer in a village above Chamba (at 9,000 feet) points with pride to
trees he planted more than twenty years ago that are now laden with red
and golden delicious apples. In contrast, at the state forestry headquar-
ters in Simla, another forestry planner laughs half-seriously and says,
“I don’t want ever to hear the word apple again.” His fear, shared by
many in the hills, is that the spruce and fir forests are being depleted to
produce packing crates for each new season’s export of apples through-
out the subcontinent.
Within the past several years, forest researchers have urgently sought
substitute designs for fruit packing crates. At the Forest Research In-
stitute in Dehra Dun and the Upper Level Conifer Research Institute
in Simla, researchers are proceeding along several lines in an effort to
reduce pressures on the soft conifers. Packing materials derived from
petroleum hold little promise; plastics are too expensive and their source
too remote. Production of heavy cardboard boxes from sawmill wastes
as yet remains too expensive. One promising line of attack, according to
some, is a new process for using chir pine needles as the basic fiber for
packing cases.40
Faced with these various pressures on the Himalayan forests, the For-
est Department in the years after independence could do little to retard
the degradation of private and civil forests. Forest law stipulated that
the professionals were only to advise other forest owners on manage-
ment of the trees—and then only when called upon; such invitations
rarely came. In the wide reaches of the Kumaon hills, the new reserves

39
C.M. Kashyap and Edward Post, “Yankee in Khadi: The Story of Samuel
Evans Stokes,” Span 1, no. 3 (January 1961): 23–28; V.S. Nanda, “The Stokes
of Kotgarh,” Span 10, no. 9 (September 1970): 2–7. Stokes’s son-in-law was the
guiding spirit of Himachal politics until his recent death.
40
Personal communication from Dr R.V. Singh, director, Upper Level Conifer
Research Laboratory, Simla, November 13, 1981.

57
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

of 1911–16, removed from department jurisdiction in 1923, were reach-

ing the last of their productivity in the 1950s. Around 1960 planners
in the state capital of Lucknow finally recognized the need for new
measures to preserve the civil forests, and in 1964 they were returned
to either the Forest Department or local panchayats. Euphemisms in
official reports cannot fully mask the ensuing struggle between foresters
and villagers for control of the civil forests. Foresters were committed to
preserving and improving existing timber stands, chiefly the pine in the
lower hills, while villagers demanded fuller access to the woodlands for
their subsistence needs and whatever profit they could make from sales
of timber and other forest products. Forest Department officers, having
limited formal authority over panchayat forests, have little enthusiasm
for work that brings minimal professional reward.41 Villagers, perceiv-
ing the department as little more than a purveyor of restrictions and
red tape, prefer to go their own way. In many cases this means simply
improvising to meet each season’s needs, with midnight forays into the
reserves when necessary.
But in the upper districts of Garhwal, nestled between Kumaon and
Himachal, a dramatic new chapter in the controversy began in 1974
when village women learned that a nearby hardwood forest had been
sold in Lucknow to a timber contractor supplying wood for sports
equipment. Beating the loggers to the woods, the housewives hugged
the trees, vowing that they themselves would have to be sawed before
their trees could be cut. The Chipko movement, born that morning, has
altered the balance of forces in the exploitation of the U.P. hill forests.42
Each autumn season, between the monsoon rains and the winter snows,
Chipko organizers penetrate more villages of Garhwal and Kumaon.
Armed now with broader ecological perspectives, they work with villagers

41
Personal communication from Dr S.L. Shah. Consultant in Agricultural
Economics, Vivekananda Parvatiya Krishi Anusandhan Shala, Almora, October
22, 1981.
42
Among the many recent publications on the Chipko movement, see especial-
ly Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Eco-System of the Central Himalayas and Chipko Movement
(Gopeshwar, India, 1980); Bharat Dogra, Forests and People (Rishikesh, India,
1980); and Anupam Mishra and Satyendra Tripathi, Chipko Movement (New Delhi,
1978).

58
 T H E F O R E S T S O F T H E W E S T E R N H I M A L AYA S

to improve management of panchayat forests for local use. And they con-
sistently demand an end to all commercial use of Himalayan timber.
Within the past two years the state governments of both Himachal
and U.P. have initiated partial or temporary moratoria on commercial
timber cutting above the foothills. In Kumaon a special commission of
senior foresters and civil servants is preparing a long-range plan to finalize
or amend the timber-cutting ban. In Himachal some voices have charged
in the legislature that the ban has been so heavy-handed that villagers
cannot even procure wood to cremate their dead.
Meanwhile the timber contractors are moving steadily into other lines
of investment. Many of the timber merchants of Himachal have sent their
sons into law, politics, and other business operations. Great old timber
families, such as those of Bawa Dinga Singh of Lahore and Dan Singh
Bisht of Naini Tal, have long since left the timber business. Others have
experienced declining profits from legitimate timber trade (evidently
a reflection of the declining availability of healthy timber stands) and
moved their investments into safer channels, such as road construction,
orchards, and other hill development projects.
Despite the longest unbroken tradition of forest management in the
non-Western world (except for Japan), India has yet to resolve the con-
flicts between local subsistence demands and the wider commercial mar-
kets for the resources of the Himalayan forests.43 Meanwhile, the vision
of high mountains clothed with dense stands of oak, deodar, pine, and
spruce—which once greeted British explorers in search of the sources of
the Ganges—continues to recede.

43
For our first English-language insight into the rich Japanese literature on
the history of forests and forestry in Japan, see Masako Osako, “Forest Preserva-
tion in Tokugawa Japan,” in Tucker and Richards, eds., Deforestation and the
Nineteenth Century World Economy.

59
 III
The British Colonial System and
the Forests of the Western Himalayas,
1815–1914∗

W ithin the past decade the countries which share the Himalayan
mountain system have become increasingly alarmed at the processes of
ecological degradation which are in motion in the region. The mountains
are experiencing an inexorable decline in the resource base for local sub-
sistence and are sending increasingly frequent floods and eroding soil
downriver into the densely-populated Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra
basins. The consequences in the Ganges system alone are felt as far
awayas the delta region around Calcutta and major population centers
in Bangladesh.
In New Delhi both the Government of India and independent resource
planners now recognize that the Himalayas are both a unique resource for
the life of India and an extremely fragile ecosystem which must be man-
aged both as a coordinated development system and as a high priority
in its own right, not just as an appendage to the economic and political
interests of the north Indian plains.

∗ Originally published as “The British Colonial System and the Forests of the
Western Himalayas, 1815–1914,” in Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth
Century World Economy, Richard P. Tucker and J.F. Richards, Eds. pp. 146–166.
Copyright 1983 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by per-
mission of the publisher.

60
 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

The environmental pressures on the western Himalayas have been

building for at least a century and a half. The region, once largely isolated
from the outside world, has moved to close integration with the world
economy and international administrative networks. Much of this pat-
tern was set during the century or more of British rule in the region. The
colonial regime left not only a complex set of traces on the mountain
lands but also the most extensive range of archives relating to resource
exploitation for any mountain region in the colonial world.
Those records tell an intricate and paradoxical story. The British Raj
not only contributed to the decline of the region as an ecosystem but
also, in response, it established the most sophisticated forestry service in
the colonial world. In turn, that service harvested vast regions of timber
from the Himalayas; in addition it began systematic sustained-yield for-
estry management and soil stabilization on the lands under its control,
even before World War I brought sudden new pressures to the region.
Finally, as the foresters well knew, their efforts to exploit and preserve
the Himalayan timber lands operated within a much broader system
over which they had little control. The destinies of the forest and their
users were profoundly influenced by the international economic ties of
British India. Even though almost no products of the western Himalayas,
either timber or other crops, were exported beyond India’s borders,
human use of the mountains was tied closely to the worldwide dynamism
of nineteenth-century Britain and cannot be fully understood except
in that broad context.

Landforms, Vegetation, and Subsistence

The area of this study is the mountain region which lies between the
present border of Jammu and Kashmir to the northwest and Nepal to
the east.1 Politically and geographically it is divisible into two segments.
The eastern is Kumaon and Garhwal in the Ganges watershed, two sub-
regions which together comprise the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh state.
The state was known before independence in 1947 as the United Prov-
inces; hence it is referred to as U.P. both before and after independence.
Kumaon reaches eastward to the Sarda River, which defines the Nepal
border as it descends to join the Ganges system. Beyond, the mountains

61
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

of Garhwal are drained by the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers, which

join to form the main stream of the Ganges. The western gorges of
Garhwal form the upper Jumna River, the westernmost branch of the
Ganges system, which determines a portion of the border of U.P. and
later flows past the capital, New Delhi. Just northwest of New Delhi,
and on a roughly northerly line into the mountains from there, runs the
demarcation between the Ganges and Indus river systems. The western
half of the region under analysis is the upper watershed for three
branches of the Indus system—the Jhelum, Beas, and Ravi rivers. Rising
in the hills which were part of Punjab until they were separated into
their own hill state, Himachal Pradesh, after independence, these three
branches water the fertile plains of Punjab.
The lower ranges of the western Himalayas form one of south Asia’s
critical ecological regions. Along the southern edge of the Himalayas the
hills rise abruptly from the heavily populated alluvial plains. The first
hills, the Siwaliks, stand at 600–900 meters. Behind them lie a series of
transverse valleys including Kangra and Dehra Dun, where Hindu rajas
based small kingdoms on prosperous subsistence agriculture during
Mughal times, unstable in their allegiance to the emperors below in the
plains. At the base of the Siwaliks on the Himachal border, the lowest
hills are composed mostly of a deep and highly unstable alluvium, and
are susceptible to severe, rapid erosion if their forest cover is stripped.
Farther southeast in U.P. runs the bhabar, a line of talus gravel slopes
deposited by the Himalayan rivers over the millennia. For much of the
year the streams subside beneath the bhabar for 15 to 25 km, emerging
again to carry finer alluvial silts more slowly into the plains. Where the
rivers emerge they form the tarai, a marshy, malarial belt of dense jungle
poorly suited in the nineteenth century to agriculture and permanent
settlement. Except along river channels the tarai formed the mountains’
most effective defense against overuse until the 1950s when chemical
pesticides became available.
Beyond the low valleys rise the outer Himalayas, northwest-to-
southeast ranges rising abruptly to 2,500 meters and more. The Himalayan
river gorges provide only occasional, difficult access routes to the inner
mountains. Beyond the outer ranges lie another series of valleys and then
finally their headwaters in the glaciers and permanent snows of the great
Himalayan peaks, which rise to 5,000–7,000 meters, many of the highest

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

peaks in the Indian Himalayas. These youngest and highest of the world’s
mountains are also among the most unstable. In large parts of Himachal
and northern U.P., natural geological processes, even without any human
assistance, have produced extremely high rates of soil erosion and
riverbed siltation.2 Rock formations, extremely varied in type, are shat-
tered in intricate and unstable striation; the threat of landslides and
earthquakes is constant.
Mountains of this scale succeed in dividing the monsoon climate
of south Asia from the cooler drier climate of central Asia. From mid-
June into September, monsoon storms swirl northward into the lower
Himalayas leaving 70–120 mm of rain in the warm valleys and up to
250 mm of rain on the southern slopes of the outer Himalayas beyond. The
northward-facing slopes receive a lower total accumulation of rain, but
the storms pound less intensely on their vegetation and soils. The heavy
monsoon clouds do not penetrate beyond the great Himalaya; north of
there is one of the planet’s great rain-shadow regions, the Tibetan plateau.
Coming from the north, winter deposits heavy snows on the high ranges,
closing the alpine passes even to traders and shepherds for several
months and sealing off the high country. The spring runoff into the Indus
and Ganges systems provides the year’s second source of water for the
valleys and plains to the south.
Within this region, as in any major mountain system, lie an almost
infinite variety of micro-climates. Human habitation has had to adapt
to highly specific equations of elevation, exposure to sun, soil pat-
terns, slope contours, and precipitation. This great variety, added to the
remoteness of most mountainsides and gorges, meant that before the
British colonial system appeared, local subsistence was virtually the only
economic pattern in the region.
The Pahari people of the hills (pahar in Hindi means mountain) have
traditionally sown a mixed pattern of crops in the kharif season, planting
wheat, barley, maize, rice, gram, and millet from April to July. Below
elevations of roughly 2,000 meters, a winter, or rabi, crop of wheat, barley,
and gram has also been possible.3 Above that, to 3,000 meters or so,
villages have had to depend on one crop annually, often elaborately
terraced on steep slopes. Until well into the nineteenth century, when the
plains began to make major demands on the mountains’ resources, this
was enough to provide survival for the sparse population of the hills.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Typically, small villages farmed their acreage in the alluvial soil along
river beds and grazed their domestic animals on common lands in pas-
tures and forests above. Demarcation of ownership in the pastures and
forests was usually unnecessary; broad belts of virgin forest meant that
boundary or usage quarrels were rare. The local rajas in theory owned all
land and arbitrated the use of noncultivated land; their demands on the
forests were minimal until the gradual development of a market economy
in the nineteenth century.
Even under the British regime, though the acreage planted to crops
expanded greatly, there was little market agriculture geared for commer-
cial export to the plains before 1947 except in the low valleys. The major
export crop was timber: deforestation was the principal economic and
ecological change in the hills during colonial times.
The history of timber operations has reflected the pattern of tree spe-
cies in the hills.4 In the moist deciduous forests of the foothills and tarai,
dense thickets of tall bamboo became commercially important for many
small traders in the nineteenth century, but this was timber only in a very
limited sense. The most desirable hardwood was sal (Shorea robusta),
then and now the great timber tree of the submontane tracts from U.P.
eastward. Its fine grain and hardy resistance to the ravages of white ants
placed it in prime demand for most timber purposes. Overcutting of
sal in the lowland districts as the century wore on was the key to the
increasing search for other hardwoods in the mountains.
In the outer Himalayan ranges, from 1,500 to 2,300 meters, the chir
pine (Pinus longifolia) dominated many slopes. Like most other conifers,
its wood was unsuitable for use as railway sleepers (crossties). Though
relatively accessible to rivers, it did not become an important commer-
cial tree until after 1900 when it became the chief plantation tree for the
resin industry of the foothills.
The great tree of the mountains is the deodar (Cedrus deodara), whose
hard and elegant wood was ideal for construction and railway uses. It
grows at altitudes of 1,600 to 3,000 meters in the moist temperate zone.
Most of the massive cuttings of the nineteenth century were in the deodar
forests; silviculturists learned only slowly that it is not only slow growing
but also difficult to propagate. Unfortunately, it had no ready substitute,
for the other conifers, though faster growing, were all far less durable.
Mixed with the deodar, and increasingly dominant in the middle ranges

64
 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

at 1,800 to 2,600 meters in recent decades, is the kail or blue pine (Pinus
excelsa or wallichiana). Above that, into the alpine zone, the Himalayan
spruce (Picea or Abies smithiana)5 from 2,100 to 3,300 meters and the
Himalayan silver fir (Abies webbiana or pindrow) from 2,200 to 3,300
meters were not under severe commercial pressure until the advent of
high elevation roads after independence in 1947.
One other type of tree became commercially valuable in the nineteenth
century, the broad-leaved oak (Quercus), several species of which grow
at widely ranging elevations in open stands on drier slopes. They have
been used commercially primarily for building and furniture, but this
has conflicted with villagers’ needs for oak leaves as fodder and mulch.
Some of the most severe soil erosion in the region has resulted from de-
forestation on south-facing slopes—where only oaks grow well—on soil
which is very dry until the monsoon rains pound it.

British Rule and the Expansion of Agriculture

British administration of northern India took nearly a century to evolve

into a relatively integrated system of land revenue, agricultural develop-
ment, and timber harvesting. Beginning with the conquest of the lower
Ganges basin in 1765, British power moved slowly upriver. The entire
Ganges and Indus basins were not firmly in their hands until 1858.
The hill districts of the western Himalayas were also annexed in stages.
In 1816 British armies annexed Kumaon and Garhwal, expelling the
Gurkhas, the ruling ethnic group of Nepal, Upper Garhwal they left as
Tehri-Garhwal State under the autonomous control of the Raja of Tehri;
the rest of the region became Kumaon Division of British India. The
Punjab hills fell to the British only in 1849, after protracted maneuvers
and finally open war against the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab.6 Here too
the British took direct control over only part of the region. A treaty with
the Raja of Kashmir left that region as a princely state. Immediately to
its southeast, Chamba in the Ravi valley was also left to its ruling family,
as were several smaller principalities in the hills around the new British
summer capital of Simla. By the 1860s the modern political boundaries
of the region were set in place, nearly in their present form except for the
integration of the princely states into larger units after 1947.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Forest depletion in the region, in both plains and hills, evolved in the
wake of the expansion of agriculture. Before the British era large tracts in
the lowlands had already been transformed from forest into agriculture,
though in times of political and military disruption some of this land
had reverted to degraded second growth forest. The richest and best
watered lands in the U.P. districts below the tarai were the most fully
exploited and densely populated. Districts in northwestern U.P., in the
Ganges–Jumna Doab region, were marginally too dry for reliable annual
wheat cropping and suffered periodic droughts. Population was thinner
there and land clearing less systematic. The tarai itself supported exten-
sive forests until long into the twentieth century.
As soon as the British defeated local powers and dispersed their
armies, they turned to improving agricultural yields and encouraging
trade. They particularly fostered the expansion of marketable cash crops
in the plains, primarily wheat, cotton, indigo, opium, and sugar. Cotton,
indigo, and opium were marked primarily for foreign markets; as the
century wore on, wheat and sugar also began to respond to demand
from Europe.7 Not only was existing arable land turned to the newly
profitable crops; previously fallow land began to come under the plow as
well, wherever the Revenue Department could stimulate the hard labor
of breaking new soil.
Gorakhpur district in the northeastern corner of U.P., just below
the Nepal border, typified the processes at work, though the scale of
its transformation was greater than in many districts.8 There the British
took control in 1801 and busied themselves with increasing the acreage
under cultivation and harvesting the resulting profits for their friends,
both princely and European. By 1830 an estimated one million trees had
been felled and many others killed by the peasants’ slash and burn fires.
In that year the District Commissioner reported that the district, until
recently densely forested, held no more valuable timber, only overaged
and scrub growth. His proposal was to give large land grants to British
investors in order to bring more land under marketable crops. One entre-
preneur, John Bridgeman, purchased 28,000 hectares in Calcutta in
1836, over half of which he brought into cultivation before 1850. A
Mr Finch bought 36,000 hectares of second growth sal forest for cultiva-
tion, but his project failed after a few years’ effort.

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

The most vivid expression of the land mania of the era was Lady
Malkin’s purchase of 9,389 hectares in the district. She held the land for
a few years but did nothing to change its use. One commentator wryly
observed, “One wonders what the dainty Lady Malkin thought she was
going to do with the 23,200 acres of Nagwa. Doubtless she was a regular
visitor at Government House in Calcutta and had heard at dinner what a
good thing was going for the asking.”9 Detailed studies of the long range
changes in land use and rural social structure which resulted from this
giddy era remain to be carried out, with the help of Revenue Depart-
ment Proceedings. For now we can confidently conclude, on the basis of
later Forest Department records, that the chief biological loss was tens
of thousands of hectares of mixed hardwood forests whose primary cash
earning species was sal. The railway builders who began work there in
the 1860s found the supplies of sal far from adequate for their needs.
The most dramatic change which the British introduced in the land-
scape in the first half of the century was an elaborate system of canals,
designed to irrigate these districts and turn them into productive agri-
culture, especially in the Doab where rainfall was unreliable.10 Beginning
in 1830 British civil engineers planned major canal systems to channel
Himalayan waters through the northern Gangetic plain. By 1860 four
hundred thousand hectares were irrigated by canal water in the Northwest
Province; by 1878 that figure rose another 50 percent. Most of this land
was turned to production of cash crops.
Under these peacetime conditions the population of the northern
plains, both rural and urban, increased steadily through the middle years
of the century. Markets increased for timber, both for building purposes
and for the fuelwood and other subsistence needs of the peasants. No
statistical data of any sort were ever collected in the early colonial de-
cades; but when the first Forest Department reports were written in the
late 1860s, they reflected the small scale but very widespread inroads
on the forests which an era of steady economic expansion entailed. Any
woodlands adjacent to navigable streams or bullock cart roads were sus-
ceptible to clearing of the trees. And on any private land where trees
were felled to make way for the plow, the owners were willing to sell the
trees at low rates to local merchants, eager to have these impediments to
agriculture removed.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

From the perspective of the towns the timber trade was socially com-
plex, providing occupation for a variety of specialized traders. A report
from Lucknow in 1875 gives our best insight into the small scale timber
trade of the era.11 It would still be recognizable to anyone who knows
the small scale timber and fuelwood trade today, for it has persisted
alongside the larger scale transactions of a more highly technological
age. Bamboo traders represented one caste, bringing bamboos down to
Lucknow by boat. Charcoal burners bought miscellaneous wood in small
lots for processing into charcoal and shipment to the city. They bargained
almost exclusively with the zamindars, landowners willing to sell mixed
timber from their private forests. This trade was monitored only when it
crossed provincial boundaries, where amounts exported were measured
and recorded. In the city the lakriwalas were a socially mixed group who
traded only in timber, buying both milled lumber and unprocessed logs
wholesale at river depots and retailing them around the city. Fuelwood,
a separate specialization, was controlled by talwalas, who purchased odd
lots of second growth trees from private forests, speculating on probable
firewood prices in cities such as Lucknow. Shipping this wood by river
or bullock cart to Lucknow, they wholesaled it to vendors of grain, salt,
oil, flour, timber, and so forth for final sale around the city.
In the hill districts of Kumaon and Garhwal the impact of the colo-
nial system in the years between 1815 and 1857 was essentially similar.
Traill, the British Commissioner who organized civil administration after
the fighting was over, reported that the dense sal and bamboo forests
of the tarai had hardly been cleared at all in previous years, but the Siwa-
liks and the valleys behind them had been considerably exploited. This
was so despite the fact that the only communications in the hills were
by a set of footpaths, often deteriorating and unreliable, through glens
and up riverbeds. Several of the ancient trade routes into Tibet linked
the only four towns of Kumaon, none of which had a population of
more than 3,000. Many villages in the Kumaon hills had been depopu-
lated under military pressure from the Gurkhas from the east and Rohilla
soldiers from the submontane districts. The Gurkhas had levied heavy
“taxes” on agriculture in order to pay their soldiers. Many villagers had
left their homes; the result by 1815 was crumbling terraces and fallow
farmlands. It was Traill’s challenge to reverse the tide.

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

The British left northern Garhwal, present-day Uttarkashi and Chamoli

districts, to the Raja of Tehri. In lower Garhwal and all of Kumaon they
resolved land ownership records and revenue rates over the following
decade, culminating with the first detailed cadastral survey of the hills in
1823. The major challenge was to encourage peasants to resettle the de-
serted villages and fallow terraces. The British commitment to maximum
expansion of arable land, which these conditions elicited, rested on the
regulation that anyone who cultivated fallow or waste-land would be de-
clared its owner and assessed taxes at a nominal rate.12 Further, the 1823
Settlement established the basic modern system for control of wasteland,
including both grazing lands and forests. Vast tracts of mountains, tech-
nically designated waste, lying between one village and another, had
been used for subsistence grazing and gathering of fuelwood and oth-
er forest products. These lands, never a source of revenue under pre-
British regimes, had never been surveyed or laden with any restrictions,
since they were far more extensive than the hill population could use. In
monetary terms they had no value. Under the rationalized administra-
tion of the British, village boundaries were demarcated in 1823, often
along high, remote ridges. Villagers were guaranteed unrestricted use of
the waste and encouraged to bring under the plow new lands adjacent to
existing croplands.13 Once established by the Revenue authorities, this
system for turning waste into plowed land remained in place until 1955;
it was the first key to forest depletion in Kumaon and an important legal
basis for peasants’ defense of their subsistence rights in the twentieth
century.
In addition to maximum encouragement of agriculture, Traill shared
his generation’s determination to foster trade and transport. He repaired
the small scale irrigation canals which had crumbled under the Gurkha
occupation, and repaired and widened many hill paths, making even
the road north to Almora passable for some bullock carts. He minimized
and regulated the system of transit taxes which had inhibited trade
in the hills as in the plains. By the late 1820s this policy was clearly effect-
ive when measured in terms of expanded economic activity. Revenue,
tilled land and population had begun the steady increases which have
marked the region with minor disruptions ever since. By the late 1860s
in Kumaon as a whole, both cultivated land and net revenue more than
doubled in most subdistricts.14

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Rural population also began the inexorable rise which by 1890 put
severe pressure on food production on the small portion of the moun-
tainous land which could be farmed. In Dehra Dun, for example, one of
the less mountainous districts, the 1865 census showed 270 square
kilometers under cultivation out of a total land area of 2,655 square
kilometers. There the population had been estimated at roughly 17,000
in 1816 and 25,000 six years later. By 1865, at the first careful census, it
reached 66,299.15 In the 1891 census the official figure for the district’s
population was listed as 117,438. Because of the severe difficulty in
the hills of calculating any statistics of humans, livestock or land, these
figures must be taken as gross approximations. But they suggest steadily
increasing pressure on both arable and forest lands, as do all their ac-
companying descriptive reports. The major escape valve in the twentieth
century has been a massive migration of hill people into the cities of
the plains, searching for salaried employment.16 No figures are available
for the outmigration of the nineteenth century, but the 1896 settlement
report for Garhwal revealed that the region, even the drier areas in its
southwestern hills, had met all its grain and food needs throughout the
century until the early 1890s. In 1890, and again two and four years later,
the hills of Garhwal for the first time since 1815 could not meet their
own needs for grain. The resulting inflation in market prices for grain
seems to have precipitated the first large scale migration of hill men into
the plains, setting a permanent pattern which linked the money econ-
omy of the hills to the wider economy of north India, in the peasants’
household budgets.17
The success of their early efforts to achieve economic expansion, ex-
tension of agriculture and rising revenues led the Commissioners into
new commercial ventures by the 1840s and 1850s. The first was to
encourage plantation cropping for export to the plains. Thus, by the mid-
twentieth century there was massive cultivation of fruits and potatoes for
markets throughout India. But before World War I the only plantation
crop of any significance was tea, for which the Siwalik hills of Kumaon,
Dehra Dun, and Kangra north in the Punjab hills seemed well suited.
In the Outer Himalayas farther east tea was already becoming a major
source of export earnings, as Darjeeling and Assam teas began conquer-
ing world markets. In the 1840s many individuals with capital to invest
in the western hills began speculating on tea there. These hills were well

70
 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

watered, their soil was adequately fertile, they were high enough to be
protected from the worst intensity of plains climate, and they were easily
accessible from many north Indian cities.
In Dehra Dun the first private tea plantation was established in 1847,
on 120 fertile hectares. Similar small plantations were organized in the
hills farther east. Robert Fortune, who surveyed the region for its tea
growing potential in 1851, reported that land was “plentiful, and of little
value either to the natives or the Government.”18 North of Almora, in
central Kumaon, he focused attention on village lands which even then
were formerly but no longer cultivated and had reverted to scrub jungle.
He argued that land brought under tea cultivation would become pro-
ductive once again, bringing profit not only to the investor but to the
poverty stricken villagers as well. Describing the typical villager in the
Almora region, he asserted, “A common blanket has to serve him for his
covering by day and for his bed by night, while his dwelling-house is a
mere mud hut, capable of affording but little shelter from the inclemency
of the weather.” By working on a tea plantation, “he would return home
with the means in his pocket of making himself and his family more
comfortable and more happy.”19
Eighteen years later a progress report on tea production in the region
reported a total production of 18,684 kilograms, 7,522 kilograms from
the Kaolaghir factory in Dehra Dun. Total net income for the plantation
owners, both British and Indian, was ` 82,280 in 1869. This was not as
rapid an expansion as its backers had hoped; several difficulties had be-
come evident. The best soils seemed to be in Dehra Dun, but inadequate
water supplies restricted tea cultivation. Considerably more ambitious
canal and irrigation systems were a prerequisite of much more expansion
of tea production. There were also labor problems, for the hill people
had no experience in the complex work of growing and harvesting the
tea.20 Finally, beyond Dehra Dun’s relatively easy access to marketing
networks in the plains, the hills remained virtually as remote as in Traill’s
time. One assessment saw Almora as the ideal tea processing center, but
Traill’s road south to Naini Tal and then down the steep hills to the tarai
would have to be further improved, at an expense which tea marketing
alone could not afford.
Nonetheless, over the next half century tea production continued to
increase slowly in the U.P. and Punjab hills. By 1911 a total of 6,880

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

hectares were under tea, producing 1,810,800 kilograms of tea. No other

plantation crop in the western Himalayas even approximated that extent
before independence, though this production did not remotely rival the
transformation of the Bengal and Assam hills, where in 1911, 203,000
hectares of former forest were producing 109,668,000 kilograms of tea,
dominating the export market.21
In the same period one other expression of the commercial and tech-
nological impact of the British empire made some inroads on the natural
resources of the western Himalayas; this was mining. When the British
arrived in Kumaoan, they found scattered copper and iron mines there,
all operated on very primitive, small-scale methods. The first geo-
logical and mineralogical assessments of the region were very tentative
and ineffectual, in view of the enormous complexity of the Himalayan
rock. But the very scale of these mountains led mining engineers to pre-
dict that great mineral wealth was waiting in the Himalayas, asking only
for aggressive investment of funds and technique. Captain Herbert, the
Chief Surveyor, reported in 1829 that in Kumaon’s copper, lead, and
iron mines “the actual produce ... is trifling in quantity, and inferior in
quality,” producing only ` 1,500 in total annual revenue for the gov-
ernment.22 But improved methods could easily change this picture. In
particular he recommended that the use of coal for smelting, which was
the standard British method, must be set aside in favor of the Swedish
technique of using charcoal. With this change in method and the import
of a better blast furnace design from Europe, the Kumaon mines could
be made more productive, rewarding both investors and government.
Herbert assumed that the adjacent chir pine forests would be entirely
adequate for the necessary supply of charcoal; he was in no position to
see that problems of charcoal supply would soon become a major dif-
ficulty for smelting operations.
Fourteen years later and a 160 mountainous kilometers to the north,
G.S. Lushington presented a more ambivalent assessment of copper
mining prospects on the Alaknanda branch of the Ganges, where the
rajas of Tehri had mined for many years. On the one hand, “the cli-
mate is excellent, admirably adapted to the European constitution; water
is good, and oak, fir and other timber trees abundant.”23 But copper
reserves there were evidently close to being worked out, and transport
difficulties down the Alaknanda gorge were formidable. On Lushington’s

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

recommendation the government invested nothing further in prospect-

ing in the higher ranges, centering its interests in the iron mines of the
Siwaliks.
By 1855 W.J. Henwood, chief surveyor and assay master of the tin
mining industry of Cornwall, was brought by the provincial govern-
ment to assess the Kumaon iron mines. His report on the forests and mines
there was the first to lay urgent emphasis on the growing shortage of
timber for charcoal in the vicinity of the mines. Anything over fifteen
kilometers of transport was hardly feasible or economic for charcoal in
the rugged terrain, and the combination of local and British charcoal
production had ravaged the chir forests. The lower bhabar slopes were
still heavily forested, but higher, near the mines, only a few stands of
large trees too grand for charcoal production remained. Local oper-
ators using traditional methods and machinery lopped limbs from even
the largest trees, crippling the giants by the thousands. British methods
could exploit pine trees more fully, but even then only systematic re-
planting of the chir pine forests would assure a future supply of charcoal.
This the provincial government had no capacity to do as yet, but in its
capital, Lucknow, it was not easily deterred by Henwood’s fears. In re-
sponse to his report, the Lieutenant-Governor insisted he was “satisfied
that, for mining operations on any extensive scale, the supplies of fuel,
both within the hills and on their borders toward the plains, will be
found to be abundant for a long course of years.”24
The search for commercial expansion, agricultural production and
increased revenue could lead both officials and investors to dismiss the
issue of ecological degradation. But Henwood’s warnings proved cor-
rect before long. By the 1860s Kumaon’s copper and iron mines were in
decline; their best seams of ore were running out and timber for charcoal
was becoming prohibitively expensive. The opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869 made it more profitable to import processed iron from England,
even to markets in north India, than to continue investing in the Kumaon
mines. Mining in these hills subsided to trivial levels thereafter;25 recent
mining operations in the Siwaliks begun at independence have been more
of limestone and other minerals which require no timber or other fuel
for smelting. The main significance of the brief era of iron and copper
mining was that it helped catalyze the discussion of long-range forest
planning, and thus the establishment of a professional forestry service.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Timber Harvests in the Pre-Railway Era

In the midst of the debate over the mines’ impact on Siwalik forests,
J.H. Batten, then Commissioner of Kumaon and the most influential
person in the region, sharply attacked Henwood’s assessment of the chir
forests.

I venture ... to declare that the forests of Kumaon and Gurhwal [sic] are boundless,
and, to all appearance, unexhaustible; and that they require no human care to
preserve them.... The lower hills and Bhabur, at every iron locality ... can supply
sufficient charcoal for the largest English furnace for a hundred years to come.26

Nonetheless, even this enthusiastic developer by 1855 concurred that re-

strictions must now be placed on some types of forest. The sal forests of
the bhabar, though still vast, must not be wastefully used for fuelwood or
charcoal; carefully harvested and replanted chir pine would be far more
prudent. In higher elevations the deodar stands should be preserved
against further exploitation. Even in the chir zone no more cutting of
pine should be allowed by the government except for landowning peas-
ants’ house building needs and the charcoal demands of iron smelters.
Something must have happened to the Himalayan forests by 1855 to
elicit Batten’s unprecedented call for government intervention in forestry
management.
Revenue demand, agricultural expansion, and commercial develop-
ment had indeed influenced the pattern of timber use in the mountain
districts, although these factors were not so dominant there as in some
other regions, such as the districts which Richards and McAlpin analyze
elsewhere in this volume. In the western Himalayas changes in vegeta-
tion patterns resulted far more from large-scale timber harvesting. The
first era of deforestation was the 1840s and 1850s, a period of uncon-
trolled cutting before any systematic forest use planning began. In those
years timber was demanded primarily for construction of the expanding
cities of the Indus and Ganges plains.
The extent of virgin forest cover in the vast Himalayan region at the
beginning of this era was such that no one at first could imagine how
quickly it would be threatened. The first British travelers in the mountains,
who explored and mapped the region even before formal annexation,

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

reported deep, lush coniferous forests in the mountains, guarded by the

tarai’s redoubtable marshes, mosquitoes, and tigers.27 The first warning
against this euphoria came from the observant Bishop Reginald Heber
on his tour of north India in 1824–25, who noted in the bhabar and
Siwalik tracts:

Great devastations are generally made in these woods, partly by the increase of
population, building and agriculture, partly by the wasteful habits of travelers, who
cut down multitudes of young trees to make temporary huts, and for fuel, while
the cattle and goats which browse on the mountains prevent a great part of the
seedlings from rising. Unless some precautions are taken the inhabited parts of
Kemaoon will soon be wretchedly bare of wood, and the country, already too arid,
will not only lose its beauty, but its small space of fertility.28

Heber was correct. Even when the British first occupied Dehra Dun
in 1815, private Indian timber contractors were transporting timber to
the nearby plains at the rate of some 50,000 trees per year. In 1819 the
Commissioner established transit duties on timber, farming the collec-
tion of these fees to merchants from the foothills towns. For example,
for the years 1839–44 Atmageer, a contractor from Hardwar, purchased
the right to collect timber duties for ` 35,500 per year. He was reported
to have grossed ` 80,000 per year over that period, for there were no
restrictions whatever on forest cutting.29
The result of this trade with urban markets was a steady depletion
of the woodstock in the outer hills and the first interest in conifer tim-
ber from the higher mountains. By the early 1840s enterprising timber
men, both British and Indians from major towns such as Lucknow and
Meerut, began studying ways of using the Himalayan rivers to transport
timber. At first there was little experience to draw on; timber cutting was
entirely haphazard and unregulated. In the higher hills, where soils were
less fertile and stable, major and even irreversible damage to standing
timber could be done in a very short time.
It seems likely that in British districts the deforestation was less sud-
den and severe before 1860 than in the adjacent princely states of the
hills where civil administration of any sort was still rudimentary and
the rajas as yet had little experience with modern marketing systems.
The hill rajas, who were traditionally accepted by consensus as outright
owners of all their forested lands, had usually used them as a source of

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rewards for their courtiers and payment for military service. Systematic
harvesting of timber was a concept from another world.
In the early 1840s an Englishman, a Mr Wilson, first exploited the
great potential connection between the rajas’ methods of business and
the lucrative markets downriver. The first to succeed by floating large
numbers of deodar trees down the turbulent mountain rivers in the high
water months. Wilson negotiated a twenty-year lease in 1844 with the
Raja of Tehri-Garhwal, which for ` 400 annually allowed him to fell an
unspecified number of trees.30 Later forestry reports refer to Wilson with
ambivalence, admiring his entrepreneurial drive but appalled by the im-
pression that in little more than a decade he managed to decimate the
major stands of deodar in Tehri.
Wilson’s deodars, destined for the expanding urban markets of the
upper Ganges region, made their commercial profit and ecological loss
as a reflection of the general economic expansion of the colonial era. In
contrast, the deodars of the upper Chenab gorges of the Indus system
farther northwest built the military defenses of the northwest in the
early 1850s, immediately after the British conquest of the Punjab. As
such, devastation of these superb stands was an immediate expression
of the British imperial system. In 1849 the British occupied Sialkot, an
old town strategically situated to control the upper Punjab plains from
the gateway to Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier. British military au-
thorities commissioned private traders to buy and fell timber from the
western hill regions. The great deodar forests of Kashmir were har-
vested later to help build the prosperity of the Punjab. But deodar
stands in nearer Chamba state were more accessible at first. By 1852 an
Armenian entrepreneur named Aratoon negotiated with the Raja of
Chamba, whose title to his estate had recently been confirmed by the
usual treaty with the British, for the sale of large tracts in the Pangi area
of the upper Chenab. Aratoon’s timber provided some material for the
Sialkot cantonment, but the hazards which beginners faced in floating
timbers for hundreds of miles down its dramatic gorge resulted in the
loss of a large majority of the felled trees. A year later the British desig-
nated one of their own military engineers to take charge of the project.
For many years still, the losses of logs on the Chenab, as on the other
Himalayan rivers, were often a majority of the trees cut each season.

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

But the military defense of the British Raj demanded this expense and
sacrifice; the price of forest depletion seemed reasonable enough at the
time.31
In sum, by the middle 1850s severe depletion of the then commer-
cially valuable timber trees of the western Himalayas was already evident
to many policy makers, and a debate had begun as to the most effective
means of conserving the remaining hardwood forests. But the demand on
the Himalayan forests was just beginning to be felt on a truly massive scale.

The Railway Building Era and the Forest Department

The key to India’s integration with international commodity markets on

a massive scale was the construction of a network of rail lines across the
subcontinent beginning in 1853. This in turn was the key factor in the
depletion of and later the systematic management of the Himalayan for-
ests. The ecological consequences of railway construction were immedi-
ate and severe, beginning with India’s first line from Bombay on the west
coast through the coastal hills in 1853, for which the teak forests of the
Malabar coast, already severely reduced to meet the British Admiralty’s
needs, were further decimated to produce sleepers.32
In the following years, as much in the effort to expand export produc-
tion of cotton, wheat, and other crops as for any reason,33 the govern-
ment of British India and private investors in England together created
the greatest railway network in any colonial country. As one historian of
India’s railways puts it,

By 1860 there were 838 miles of track; by 1870, 4,771 miles; by 1890, 16,401
miles; and, by 1920, 37,029 miles ... India’s railway mileage by 1910 was six times
that of China. In the broadest sense the system was designed for the purpose of con-
necting the principal ports with the major agricultural hinterlands and urban cen-
ters in order to draw goods out for export and to provide markets for imports.34

In 1859 the line up the Ganges from Calcutta was opened for 942 km
to Allahabad, and by 1870 the principal cities of Punjab and U.P. were
connected to the main lines. The first line to Bareilly, the eighteenth
largest city in India, near the Kumaon foothills, opened in 1872. All of
these lines were vital to the establishment of a regionwide and ultimately

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

international market for lowland crops including cotton and grain.35

Secondary railway lines to more remote areas including the mountains
were built later. Western Himalayan timber, bulky and very expensive to
transport over long distances, did not therefore become an export com-
modity, nor could it compete with timber from other hill regions, such
as the Vindhyas of central India, for use farther south.
The primary impact of the railways on the Himalayan forests in
the nineteenth century resulted from timber felling for production of
sleepers and railway fuel. Some teak was still available from the Malabar
coast for railway construction in the western region. And by the 1870s
the great teak forests of upper Burma began to be harvested for export to
India and elsewhere.36 But, as an official assessment concluded in 1877,
“for the great Railway system of Northern India, teak sleepers cannot be
thought of.”37 The costs of transport even on existing railway lines were
prohibitively high. Some source of sleepers had to be found in north
India itself to free the crop-marketing potential of the rich northern
plains.
The rich sal forests of the submontane districts were splendid candi-
dates for this. They stretched on a thousand mile arc from the western
tarai down into Bengal, they were easily accessible to the plains, sal’s tough
fibers were particularly resistant to the white ants, and their lands—
at first seemingly abundant—had soil and climate ideal for growing food
crops. Revenue officials were eager to expand agricultural production;
Railway Department planners were interested in maximum harvesting
of sal stands for their uses. But by 1860 the sal forests were already
badly depleted by the mixed market demand and totally unregulated
system of cutting which the previous half century had witnessed. What
sal forests remained were rapidly depleted in the submontane districts
for production of sleepers.38 As yet no one had responsibility or author-
ity to replant sal forests. Hence sal production dipped in the last third of
the century and rose again only after 1900 when the first fruits of new
sal plantations were mature enough for marketing. This was one of the
major achievements of the Forest Department after its formal founding
in the 1860s.39
Faced with the depleted stocks and rising costs of both sal and teak in
the 1860s, the railway builders of northern India set their sights farther
into the mountains. Men such as Wilson had shown over the previous

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

twenty years that the deodar was also well suited to their needs. But the
deodar stands were far more remote, situated only above 1,600 meters
from western Nepal into Kashmir. Reliable large scale harvesting of deodar
demanded far more complex processes of felling and transport than
local timber contractors could manage by themselves. Exploitation of the
deodar forests soon became the central focus of the first half century of
the Forest Department’s work in the Himalayas, first for the continuing
depletion of the deodar stands and later for the gradual stabilization of
commercially valuable timber lands in the system of Reserved Forests.40
The height of demand on deodar for the railways came in the 1870s
and 1880s, when the major lines were built in northwestern India. The
single largest project of the early 1870s was the Rajputana Railway,
which stretched 640 kilometers southwest from Delhi and required
800,000 sleepers. Nearly all were deodar, partly from the Jumna and
partly from the adjacent Bhagirathi, the westernmost branch of the
Ganges.41 Simultaneously the deodar forests of the Punjab hills and
Kashmir were requisitioned for the new line northwest from Lahore to
Peshawar on the Northwest Frontier, and then for the longest line of all,
the Lahore–Karachi railway, which was designed primarily for the export
of Punjabi wheat to Europe.
The pressure was now at a maximum on the deodar forests of the
upper Ganges and Indus basins. In all, by 1878, 2,495 kilometers of rail-
way were in use in northern India and 372 kilometers more were under
construction.42 For management purposes the railways’ needs had first
claim on government forests; their demand could be planned and regu-
lated for several years in advance. But when this demand was added to
the markets for construction timber and urban fuelwood supplies, there
was great difficulty in planning and financing annual timber harvests and
maintaining consistent inventories. The annual harvest of trees in western
U.P. fluctuated between a low of 78,000 and a high of 147,000 in the
years around 1870; in the Punjab hills it fluctuated between 29,000 and
67,000.43 By the early 1880s the figures rose to approximately double
that figure in both parts of the north.44
Faced with the intricate organizational challenge of regulating this
production and increasingly aware of the danger that the Himalayan
and submontane forests might soon be totally depleted, the Government
of India designated Dietrich Brandis as its first Inspector-General of

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Forests in 1865. By then he had more than a decade’s experience in

south Asia, primarily in the teak forests of upper Burma, where the
British had first assigned him in the early 1850s. In the years after 1865
one of Brandis’s major concerns was to place controls on the logging of
the Himalayas and use the urgent demand for those forests as leverage to
establish a permanent management system for those states as part of the
new national Forest Department system.
Thirteen years later Brandis summarized the results of his early
efforts to supply the northern railways, showing that the empire’s railway
system had been inexorably extending its ecological frontier farther into
the mountains. One must be prepared, he wrote, to negotiate systematic-
ally with the governments of Kashmir and Nepal for major future sup-
plies of deodar and sal timbers respectively. For further construction and
maintenance of the railways over 500,000 sleepers annually would be
needed for some years to come. The forests remaining would be grossly
inadequate for meeting that demand. If no alternative supply is found it
may be necessary to cut

… the last remaining stock of mature sal and deodar in the Government forests.
Such a contingency must by all means be avoided; the few remaining forests under
the control of Government in Northern India, which still contain large quantities of
mature sal and deodar timber, must now be worked with sole regard to their main-
tenance and improvement as permanent sources for the supply of these woods.45

Fortunately, technical innovation promised the hope of a more satis-

factory long term solution to this impasse. By that time several railway
lines around India had begun to use sleepers imported from Europe,
either creosoted conifers or even iron sleepers from England’s foundries.
By 1880 this numbered nearly 200,000 units annually. Some specialists
in India were coming to the view that in time all lines should be laid
on iron sleepers; this task might well be undertaken by the fledgling iron
industry of eastern India. But the Forest Department immediately saw
that softwood conifers from the Himalayas offered an a bundant supply
of raw timber, if only a satisfactory creosoting system could be designed
using local raw materials. For many years after a beginning in 1863, the
Forest Department experimented with methods of creosoting the abun-
dant softer woods of the western Himalayas, specifically chir and kail
pine, Himalayan spruce and silver fir. Brandis’s 1878 report predicted

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

that technical problems could be solved, thereby providing “almost any

quantity of sleepers ... annually, for the forests of the species mentioned
are very extensive, well-stocked, and nearly untouched.”46 For forestry
management this would be the key to the otherwise contradictory goals
of maximizing profits from timber sales and improving the quality and
sustained yield of the Himalayan forests. “The object will eventually be
gained of utilizing the trees associated with deodar in the forests, and of
thereby placing the working of these deodar forests upon a sound and sat-
isfactory footing, while at the same time largely increasing the supply of
indigenous sleepers.”47 Unfortunately for this strategy, pines, spruce, and
fir ultimately proved to be not viable as sleepers. The softer woods failed
to last well under the rails and had to be replaced too often to be used on
any large scale. In consequence the chir pine forests of the Siwaliks
and lower hills, and the Himalayan spruce and silver fir remained largely
intact until World War I or later. The technological capacity of the
colonial system was not yet capable of more than a selective impact on
the vegetation of the mountain region.48

Timber Marketing and the Sociology of Forest Depletion

The structure of the colonial administrative system and its associated

technologies and marketing systems were one dimension of the eco-
logical transformation of the western Himalayas. But in order to clarify
how that system penetrated to any specific town, trade route, village
or mountainside, the analysis must also note the indigenous socio-
economic system of the region, in particular the social composition of
the timber merchant class and that of the employees, the contract la-
bor, as they interrelated with the colonial regime on one side and village
society on the other. This discussion can only begin to describe this in-
termediate level of the human systems which struggled for the use of the
forests; fuller treatment will have to await a subsequent occasion.
As the early years of British rule had already revealed, under the
prevailing laissez-faire ideology policy makers preferred to encourage
private timber contractors for meeting the empire’s needs. The Forest
Department developed a variety of harvesting and marketing arrange-
ments with private contractors, all of which also reflected the fact that

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

the Forest Department could not possibly carry out each phase of the
timber harvest and marketing by itself. Two alternative systems were
used, with several variants on each; they were broadly labeled “depart-
mental agency” and “private agency.”
Under the first system, which the department often preferred if it
could staff the work, its employees harvested the trees and transported
them to depots, usually at the foot of the hills. Periodic auctions of the
cut timber brought the department its major source of revenue and
handed the wood to the merchants for transport and final sale. Under the
second alternative, contractors bought the right to fell specified timber
standing in the forests. Either the department marked each tree selected
for harvest, or the right to all timber in a designated area was auctioned
for clear cutting—a far less desirable alternative. The winning contractor
then organized the entire operation, from mountainside to market.49
Either variation on the auction system placed responsibility for long
range care of the forests entirely on the Forest Department’s shoulders.
Contractors organized a single felling in each tract; their rights and
responsibilities ended there. They did not own the timber lands them-
selves, and their operations were almost always on a small scale, with no
long-range financial investment in what was a very volatile commercial
market.
Furthermore, the pattern of their ecologically destructive operations
reflected the social structure of Indian trade and entrepreneurship. Frag-
mentary studies give some insight into the social composition of the tim-
ber merchants as a group. For the inland timber trade of northern India
after 1860 British merchants were rare: the trade thereafter was almost
entirely in Indian hands.
The purchase and marketing of timber was the occasion for intense
competition among various merchant castes and religious communities.
An 1897 summary of Punjab’s timber trade indicates that there were a
few “wealthy” contractors but does not stipulate who they were, what
the scale of their capital was, or how many stages of the trade they con-
trolled.50 A few were Sikhs, from the non-Hindu entrepreneurial sect
of the region. Others represented several Hindu merchant castes, who
invested in timber as only one of several lines of trade. They included
Agarwal Banias, Khatris, and Aroras. From about 1900 the smallest

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

Hindu merchant sect, the Suds, began moving toward their later dom-
inance in the timber trade of eastern Punjab.51
Within this fragmented system each trading operation was controlled
by a single kinship group, partly to assure control and secrecy in its
internal network of commercial information. Contractors from the same
caste or religious community frequently cooperated closely with each
other in competition with members of other social groups. This helped
solve the problem of the dearth of capital. Within each caste network a
man’s name and his caste ties sufficed as collateral for short-term funds
at the auctions. Without this, the ready cash for this highly competitive
and speculative business would not be available, except occasionally at
exhorbitant interest rates.

The Labor Force

The transformation of society and economy which resulted from the

gradual integration of the Himalayan hills into regional and international
systems affected the labor force as much as the employers. We must
not overlook the composition of the workforce for the timber harvest:
which groups were recruited for the labor, and how the relatively highly
differentiated tasks of felling, dressing, and transporting the timber func-
tioned. Through the nineteenth century, labor for timber operations was
primarily local in origin. Peasants who owned their land, as well as the
landless service castes, the Doms, traditionally were required to pro-
vide begar, or unpaid labor for transport and trail maintenance.52 They
were the primary wage labor available for timber operations, and anyone
who owned land would resist timber work at crucial times in the agricul-
tural cycle. In the late nineteenth century, as road networks improved in
the mountains, a two-way shift in the labor force began to occur. Sons
of peasant families in the hills began leaving for work in the cities of the
plains or for the military. In the other direction landless laborers from
western Nepal and later eastern U.P., Bihar, and central India began to
appear in Kumaon looking for day labor.53
There was also significant specialization of labor, particularly among
the sawyers, which led to further competition between the mountain

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

people and outsiders. Roughly for a century sawyers from foothills dis-
tricts in Punjab have been reputed as the most reliable and skilled in
the region. But their availability was unpredictable; in Kumaon they
were supplemented by others from Himachal and local sawyers. Other
parts of the process had a very mixed and competitive labor force. In the
Almora area, for example, Garhwalis from the higher mountains were
used for carrying timber to stream beds or road depots, while increasing
numbers of itinerant laborers from western Nepal were also hired.
Increasingly the principle among the labor contractors was to use
labor from a distance, to gain the advantages of controlling a rootless
rural proletariat. Contractors increasingly concluded that local laborers
were unreliable as well as insistent on higher wages than their compe-
tition. They were still tied to subsistence agriculture, less completely
at the mercy of daily wages for their survival, and determined to harvest
their own crops rather than trees at summer’s end. In consequence, the
forests probably suffered as much as did local villagers when increasing
numbers of itinerant loggers with no stake in the future of the forests
were hired for their exploitation.

The Early Twentieth Century

Brandis’s report on the Himalayas as a source of railway sleepers was

written in 1878, the same year as India’s first fully developed Forest
Law, which provided the legal basis for systematic management of gov-
ernment forests. From that year onward the system of reserved forests
allowed the government to designate forests which were not yet used
for subsistence and had potential commercial value as being under the
Forest Department’s full control and management. The reserves were
lands already under government ownership; they were to provide both
the major supply of commercial timber and India’s major guarantee of
ecologically stable forest cover permanently into the future. A second
category was protected forests; this was a transitional legal category, des-
ignating government woodlands which would be surveyed and given full
working plans or other final status in future years. Other forest lands,
which have gone under various legal designations since then, included

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

private holdings and village communal lands, whose permanent desig-

nation and uses would be determined later.54
In the following thirty-six years until the onset of World War I, forest
use in the western Himalayas as elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent
saw few dramatic changes. The Forest Department’s funds and energy
were largely consumed in the intricate task of implementing their powers
in the reserved forests. Timber had to be surveyed and boundaries marked;
paths, access roads, and foresters’ huts had to be constructed; all of this
had to be enshrined in each stand’s working plan. Endless disputes over
nearby villagers’ access to the reserves had to be resolved, in settings in
which Forest and Revenue departments often had conflicting interests.
Time and again authorities had to negotiate at length with private own-
ers to consolidate government holdings in forests which had been frag-
mented into many small holdings over the years.
All of this had to be done simultaneously with maintaining the annual
supply of timber for railway sleepers, the construction trade and fuel
for the sugar refineries, urban marketplaces, and individual hearths.55
The railways’ demand remained relatively high and steady. Although
fewer major lines were constructed after 1880, many small feeder lines
remained to be built to extend the network into more remote rural areas.
Further, by the 1880s as many second-generation sleepers as new ones
were required for replacing those that had deteriorated on original lines.
All this demand guaranteed the Forest Department with a basic flow of
funds with which to finance its full range of professional activity.
Shortly after the turn of the century came the next major breakthrough
in the exploitation of the Himalayan forests, when improved methods of
processing chir pine resin from the lower hills became available.56 Lower
Kumaon became the major source of resin for many commercial and in-
dustrial uses, both in India and abroad. The resin industry remained on
a small scale until 1920 when the government’s major processing factory
was built near Bareilly in the aftermath of the war’s intense industrial
demands. Hence, even this change falls largely outside the scope of our
present project.
Some of those funds were invested in the old sal forests below the
hills in the form of north India’s first modern forest plantations. Refor-
estation had been the subject of intensive discussion within the Forest

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Department from the start. But the proper silvicultural techniques took
some years to establish, and it was always difficult to find both funds
and a labor force for the actual work of replanting. Sal proved relatively
easy to regenerate, in contrast to the low rate of success in the early
deodar forests. By 1914 in Punjab and U.P. together some 10,000 acres
of forest lands were replanted. The showpiece plantation was the Changa
Manga forests in a newly irrigated tract in Punjab, where as early as 1880
roughly 80,000 trees annually were harvested for the railways.57 Aside
from Changa Manga nearly all successful reforestation in these years was
in submontane districts along the tarai. In the mountains reforestation
was far more difficult and its rate of success less predictable. Replanting
at higher elevations came only later, under conditions of increased popu-
lation of towns and villages and inexorably deteriorating conditions in
village forests and grazing lands and private woodlands.
Reserved forests were established one by one over the decades after
1880; few were demarcated in the mountain districts before the mid-
1890s. Gradually the reserves were stabilized; the main focus of any
analysis of deforestation processes in the hills must be those forests
which were left under the Revenue Department or confirmed as village
lands. These forests, extensive throughout the mountain region, were to
see virtually no planned silvicultural management until well after inde-
pendence. Their changing vegetation cover was never documented in
any detail; it is far more difficult to see with any precision. The key ques-
tions are difficult to assess: at what rate they became inadequate to the
region’s subsistence needs and to what extent they contributed to soil
depletion and disruption of water flow in the rivers. This study remains
to be done, if it can be with any precision.
In the villages, subsistence use of forests contributed primarily to the
gradual deterioration of quality in nearby woodlots and grazing land, a
very gradual process. While shifting agriculture, never as widespread in
these hills as in some other parts of the subcontinent, steadily dimin-
ished over these years, the grazing of sheep, goats, and cattle became a
massive threat to the growth of young trees and thus to the continued
viability of the forests.
The urban population of the hills was also rising steadily, bringing
with it expanding demand for building timber, charcoal, and fuelwood.
The first useful census figures come from 1872; from 1881 onward the

86
 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

regular decennial censuses were taken. They show that between 1872
and 1911 the old center of Almora grew from 6,260 to 10,560, while
the new British hill resort of Naini Tal grew from about 7,000 to 10,270.
Rural population data are far less reliable, but some indication of the
trend is shown by district-wide data.
The year 1914 was to initiate new pressures which took the Himalayan
region into a dramatically different and more difficult era, for both its
human population and its natural ecology. The war brought sudden and
unprecedented demand for military timber. The understaffed Forest ad-
ministration worked overtime to provide that timber without irrepar-
ably decimating the Reserves; there were disagreements after the war as
to how successful they had been. The labor force of the hills was also
severely strained until 1919 because these districts provided many of the
recruits for the Indian Army. By the end of the war, relations between the
Forest Department and the hill people were seriously strained. Shortly
thereafter, when Mahatma Gandhi initiated the first nationwide Non-
Cooperation Campaign against the empire, the hill people turned their
protest on the restrictive forest laws as the expression of the colonial
system which most directly touched their lives. From 1921 onward the
issue of forest use became more highly politicized, and the ecological
viability of the western Himalayas more seriously endangered.

Notes

1. The best general survey is O.H.K. Spate and A.T. Learmonth, India and
Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen,
1967). The standard regional work is Augusto Gansser, Geology of the
Himalayas (London: Interscience Publishers, 1964).
2. See S.P. Raychaudhuri, et al., Soils of India (New Delhi: Indian Council of
Agricultural Research, 1963).
3. Gerald D. Berreman, Hindus of the Himalayas, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), chapter 2.
4. G.S. Puri, Indian Forest Ecology, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press,
1938).
5. For a few species whose terminology has changed over the past century,
both the nineteenth-century name and the more recently adopted name are
indicated.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

6. For the pre-British history of Kumaon and Garhwal, see E.T. Atkinson, The
Himalayan Gazeteer, 3 vols. (Allahabad: Government Press, 1882), vol. 2,
chapters 3–7. For pre-British Himachal, see John Hutchison and J.P. Vogel,
History of the Panjab Hill States (Lahore: Government Press, 1933).
7. M.I. Husain, “The Formation of British Land Revenue Policy in the Ceded
and Conquered Provinces of Northern India, 1801–13” (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of London, 1963–64); Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and
the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Walter Neale, Economic
Change in Rural India: Land Tenure and Reform in Uttar Pradesh, 1800–1955
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). In Sir Auckland Colvin, Memo-
randum on the Revision of Land Revenue Settlements in the Northwest Provinces
(Calcutta: Government Press, 1872), we find statistics on the expansion
of cultivation, but they are approximate; and he explicitly excludes the
Kumaon Hill Division as being too problematical to calculate.
8. C.M. Johri, Working Plan for the Gorakhpur Forest Division, United Provinces,
1944–45 to 1953–54 (Lucknow, 1949).
9. Ibid., p. 27.
10. Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, vol. 1, The
United Provinces under British Rule, 1860–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1972). Also Ian Stone, “Canal Irrigation and
Agrarian Change: The Ganges Canal Tract, Muzaffarnagar, 1840–1900,” in
K.N. Chaudhuri and Clive Dewey, eds, Economy and Society (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1979).
11. William Hoey, A Monograph on Trade and Manufactures in Northern India
(Lucknow: American Methodist Mission Press, 1880).
12. Atkinson, Himalayan Gazetteer, 3: 463–87, discusses the early Revenue
Settlements of Kumaon. For full detail see G.W. Traill, “Statistical Sketch of
Kamaon,” Asiatic Researches 16 (1828): 137–234.
13. A. Ross, Report on the Settlement of Dehra Dun (Agra, 1852).
14. J. O’B. Becket, Report on the Revision of Settlement in the Kumaon District…
1863–73 (Allahabad: Settlement Department, 1874). Key elements of this
analysis which remain to be done, if they ever can be, are how much of the
expansion of tilled land came at the expense of forested land and which
species of trees were lost. Even the statistics of land under corps, though
detailed from the 1870s onwards, are very unreliable. Several specialists on
the subject have recently assured us that the intricacy and seeming com-
pleteness of agricultural statistics primarily reflect lower level bureaucrats’
desires to meet their superiors’ demands, rather than a reliable knowledge

88
 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

of conditions on the land. For non-agricultural land the data are even
less certain. Because waste land produced little revenue and was an
afterthought in theories of economic and rural development, data-hunters’
attention to it was approximate, even arbitrary, until well after independ-
ence. B.H. Farmer, Agricultural Colonization in India since Independence
(London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Chap. 1. This applies to the
plains; in the mountains the picture is still more tenuous.
15. G.R.C. Williams, Historical and Statistical Memoir of Dehra Dun (Roorkee,
1874), pp. 266–67.
16. Frederick H. Gaige, Regionalism and National Unity in Nepal (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).
17. E.K. Pauw, Report on the Tenth Settlement of Garhwal District, 1896,
pp. 68–74.
18. Robert Fortune, “Report upon the Tea Plantations of Dehra, Kumaon and
Gurhwal, 1851,” in Selections from the Records of Government North-Western
Provinces (Allahabad: Government Press, 1869), 5: 409. See also W. Jameson,
“Government Tea Plantation,” in the same volume.
19. Fortune, “Report,” pp. 420–21.
20. Becket, Report, p. 63.
21. Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India
during the Year 1913–14 (London, 1915), p. 47.
22. J.D. Herbert, “Report of the Mineralogical Survey of the Himalaya Moun-
tains Lying between the Rivers Sutlej and Kalee,” Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal 11 (1842): xxxiv.
23. G.S. Lushington, “Account of the Experiment Carried on at the Pokree Cop-
per Mine, Ghurwal,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 12 ( June 1843):
454.
24. J. Strachey, “Note Regarding Forests and Fuel in Kumaon and Gurhwal,”
Papers Regarding the Forests and Iron Mines in Kumaon (Allahabad, 1855),
pp. 14–15.
25. Pauw, Report, p. 9.
26. J.H. Batten, “Minutes on Iron Mines in Kumaon,” August 1855, Papers Re-
garding the Forests and Iron Mines in Kumaon, pp. 7, 9.
27. For greater detail see Richard Tucker, “The Forests of the Western
Himalayas: The Legacy of British Colonial Administration,” Journal of Forest
History ( July 1982).
28. Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India,
2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1849), 1: 274.
29. “Private Forests in Dehra Dun,” Indian Forester (April 1884): 151–53.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

30. U.P.S. Verma, Working Plan of the Tehri Forest Division, Garhwal Circle,
Uttar Pradesh, 1973–74 to 1982–83; V.B. Singh, Working Plan of the Uttarkashi
Forest Division, 1961–62 to 1975–76, p. 43; Forest Lease of Chamba State,
1885.
31. L. Gisborne Smith, Report on the Forests of Pangi, Chamba State, 1891,
pp. 6–8; Forest Lease of Chamba State, 1886.
32. For further detail see Richard Tucker, “Forest Management and Imperial
Politics: Thana District, Bombay, 1823–1887,” Indian Economic and Social
History Review 16 (September 1979), 273–300.
33. See Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in
the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 1972), for cotton and content. See also Michelle Burge McAlphin,
“Railroads, Cultivation Patterns and Food Grain Availability in India,
1860–1900,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 12 (1975): 43–60.
34. John Hurd, “Railways and the Expansion of Markets in India, 1861–1921,”
Explorations in Economic History 12 (1975): 267.
35. John M. Hurd, “Irrigation and Railways: Railways,” in Dharma Kumar and
Meghnad Desai, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume II
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
36. Charles L. Keaton, King Thebaw and the Ecological Rape of Burma (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1974).
37. Dietrich Brandis, “Memorandum on the Supply of Railway Sleepers of the
Himalayan Pines Impregnated in India,” October 1878, p. 367.
38. A.C. Gupta, Working Plan for the Pilibhit Forest Division, Central Circle, Uttar
Pradesh, 1971–72 to 1980–81, pp. 94–99.
39. By the 1890s there was a gradual change to the use of coal on India’s rail-
ways. No study has yet assessed the volume of timber fuel which could be
dispensed with thereafter.
40. The standard history of the Indian Forest Service is E.P. Stebbing, The For-
ests of India, 3 vols. (London: John Lane, 1922–26).
41. Review of Forest Administration in British India for the Year 1870–71 (hereafter
RFA), pp. 4–7.
42. Brandis, “Memorandum,” p. 372.
43. RFA, 1870–71, p. 29.
44. RFA, 1882–83, pp. 28–29; RFA, 1884–85, pp. 32–33. At the same time it
was calculated that each mile of railway used 1,800 to 2,000 sleepers and
the average life of a sleeper was about ten years. In later years fewer new
railways were built, but the annual number of replacement sleepers steadily
increased. Calculations of the net impact of this shift over the years have not
yet been made.

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 THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

45. Brandis, “Memorandum,” p. 376.

46. Ibid., p. 377.
47. Ibid., p. 383.
48. Campbell Walker, “The Introduction of Saw Machinery into Our Indian
Forests,” in Simla Forest Conference, 1875, pp. 69–72.
49. Working plans for each forest division give full details of the system.
50. E.M. Coventry, “Report on the Timber Trade in Punjab,” Revenue and
Agriculture Proceedings, F. No. 75 of 1897 (March 1897), National Archives
of India.
51. Leighton Hazelhurst, Entrepreneurship and the Merchant Castes in a Punjabi
City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966).
52. For further detail, see Richard Tucker, “The Historical Context of Social
Forestry in Kumaon, Western Himalayas,” paper presented to American
Association for the Advancement of Science, January 1982.
53. Working plans for each forest division give details.
54. Stebbing, 2: 461–84.
55. Forest Department reports in the later years present an additional puzzle,
concerning the amount of timber harvested for fuelwood, sugar refineries,
hill towns and villagers’ subsistence. The figures suggest that in many years
as much fuelwood as commercial timber was harvested, but the statistics
fluctuate widely and irregularly. RFA, 1901–02, p. 28; RFA, 1908–09, p. 48.
This important issue will be explored more fully in a future paper.
56. See United Provinces Forest Department, Progress Report on the Resin
Industry in the Kumaon and Utilization Circles, annual publication since 1918;
and E.A. Smythies, “The Resin industry in Kumaon,” Forest Bulletin No. 26
(Calcutta, 1914).
57. RFA, 1882–83, pp. 31–32.

91
 IV
The Historical Context of Social Forestry
in the Kumaon Himalayas∗

O ver the past decade the inexorable deforestation of the Third World
has preoccupied those working on planning and research in many cen-
ters. It has become common knowledge that a firewood famine has hit
the large portion of humanity who still use wood fuel for cooking and
heating.1 In fact, the Third World’s efforts even to grow adequate food
are jeopardized by the shrinking of forest resources. Villagers in many
countries perceive that their subsistence is threatened first by private
timber traders and second by governmental bureaucracies. Rural social
conflict for centuries centered on access to agricultural land, but in the
late twentieth century it increasingly focuses on forest and grazing rights.
Especially where modernizing bureaucracies have laid systematic claim
to management of nonagricultural lands, conflict between villagers and
foresters has become a repeated dilemma for resource planners.
In many peasant societies within the last ten years, planners have
designed agroforestry, social forestry, or community forestry programs
in attempts to harness the cooperative energies of foresters and villagers
to sustain their fuelwood supplies.2 There have been some notable suc-
cesses in expanding woodlots of fast-growing fuel and fodder trees.
In many of the new social forestry efforts in Africa and southern Asia,
however, we do not yet have clear information on the results of the pilot
projects or, almost as important, on their socioeconomic dynamics.

*Originally published as “The Historical Roots of Social Forestry in the

Kumaon Himalayas,” Journal of Developing Areas, 18(3) (April 1984), pp. 341–56.

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

Far more is involved in what happens in any social forestry project

than just the professional tools and objectives of foresters and the annual
material needs of the villagers. The broader setting includes the division
of forestland ownership and use, and power struggles—struggles be-
tween landed and landless villagers, between rural and urban people,
between hill forests and plains markets, or between village communities
and governmental machinery. Furthermore, most social forestry plans
have little historical perspective on the roots of conflict among villagers,
forest contractors, and professional foresters. The participants them-
selves, however, have long memories of competition and conflict. These
memories are evoked regularly when foresters enforce restrictive laws,
contractors underpay local labor or overcut timber, or villagers gather
fuelwood after midnight.
In Third World countries now politically freed from a colonial past,
there is yet another factor in history’s ecological legacy. There, as in
Europe, peasant resistance to outside authority has been a repeated fea-
ture of rural life.3 Governments’ gradual extension of their powers of
taxation and land-use regulation, including the extraction of forest wealth,
long antedated the West’s adventures in extracting the Third World’s
forest wealth. Colonial regimes had world markets at hand, however,
making it profitable to control forest resources in the colonies.4
The first colonial forestry service was established in Dutch Indonesia
in the 1840s, for export of teak to Europe. Shortly thereafter, in the
1850s and 1860s, when railways and expanding urban markets led to
sudden shortages of marketable hardwoods, the British organized India’s
forest service, but effective reforestation and sustained-yield manage-
ment of India’s hardwood forests came into direct conflict with peasants’
traditional uses of the forested hill tracts. The forest law of 1878 declared
that the twin and equal goals of forest management were to be peasants’
needs for fuel and fodder and wider commercial markets. Hence, out of
the British experience in India came the best-documented history of rela-
tions between villagers and foresters and thus the history of the fuelwood
crisis. One of the earliest confrontations, dating from at least 1916, arose
in the Kumaon hills of the western Himalayas. It led to one of the earliest
formal village forestry systems in India, and it remains one of the most
intensely debated social forestry programs in existence.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Forestry in the Kumaon Himalayas

The present state of Uttar Pradesh (or U.P., as it is usually called) domi-
nates the central Ganges plains. Its fertile but overused soils sustain
nearly 100 million people. The Ganges basin as a whole supports well
over 200 million people. India’s ability to feed itself depends to an im-
portant degree on the food raised in the Gangetic plains, and that ulti-
mately depends on the ecological stability of both the tilled plains and
their semiforested watersheds primarily in the Himalayan districts of
India and Nepal. As the Himalayan forests have declined, so has their
capacity to mitigate flooding from the annual monsoon rains and to store
the rains for gradual release into the branches of the great river dur-
ing the long dry season. In the unusually severe flood year of 1978 the
Indian government spent approximately one billion dollars in flood-
control and flood-relief programs. The recent national commission on
floods reported that the area of land subject to flooding nationwide ex-
panded from some 20 million hectares in 1971 to an alarming 40 million
hectares a decade later.5
For the downriver districts of the Ganges system, then, the stakes in
watershed stabilization in the Himalayas are indeed high. The eight hill
districts of U.P. are thus crucial, for they control headwaters of several
major branches of the Ganges system, and they have been under central
government control since the British conquest in 1815. Four of those
districts, collectively called Garhwal, had a separate history during the
colonial era, because much of the area was controlled by the Maharaja of
Tehri, not directly by the British.6 The four present districts of Kumaon
were far more directly influenced by colonial economic and adminis-
trative development. Not surprisingly, political struggles over control
of forest wealth were far more intense in Kumaon, both at the district
level, where nationalist politicians joined Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation
Campaigns by protesting the forest law; and at the village level, where
local landowners struggled to keep forest use under the control of village
councils rather than the Forest Department.
Before modern logging began in the mountain region in the 1840s,
the subsistence population of the region placed no significant burden
on its forest resources. In pre-British times there was no system of in-
dividual ownership of nontilled land.7 The local rajas held the power

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

to allocate forest use, but forest and grazing lands were so much vaster
than the villagers’ demands on them that they were generally treated
as an unregulated commons. Even during early British times, dense
malarial jungle in the tarai at the foot of the hills prevented much com-
mercial penetration except along the main river routes. In most of settled
Kumaon, both population and agriculture expanded slowly enough be-
fore World War I that villagers had little trouble finding wood products
and grazing lands to meet their daily needs. Traill, the British commis-
sioner who established the legal precedents for land and resource use
there in the 1820s, encouraged villagers to reclaim deserted agricultural
terraces and open new fields to the plow.8 One technique was to grant
outright ownership to any villager who would continuously plow former
village common lands. Beyond that, nothing was done to stabilize con-
trol of grazing and forest lands. In the early revenue settlements cadastral
surveys were limited to lands in or near settled villages. All other lands,
formerly controlled by the local hill rajas, were so extensive that neither
villagers nor revenue officials as yet paid much attention to ownership
or usufruct claims.
The first signs of change appeared in the 1840s, when British tim-
ber merchants began harvesting conifer forests in the upper reaches of
several Ganges tributaries.9 By the late 1850s Traill’s successor, Ramsay,
began systematically organizing timber management in the lower Siwalik
hills, hoping to concentrate logging and new settlement there and limit
indiscriminate logging on the more fragile soils of the higher mountains.
His moves were well timed, for the great era of railway construction,
beginning in north India in the 1860s, generated a demand for hundreds
of thousands of trees annually, a demand that continues today.
The government of British India organized the colonial world’s first
and ultimately most sophisticated Forest Department in the 1860s, pri-
marily to manage the supply of timber for India’s vast railway network
and for other long-range commercial uses.10 The early foresters had little
doubt that the villagers’ subsistence needs could also be well met if
efficient systems of forest use were established. India’s first comprehen-
sive Forest Act in 1878 was designed for that dual purpose.
Despite its multipurpose intentions, the 1878 Act produced a po-
larization between the Forest Department and villagers that accelerated
the decline of forests. Until then there had been almost no regulation of

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

villagers’ access to any forest for grazing, fuelwood, construction tim-

ber, and their other needs. Now, however the Forest Department was
empowered to designate reserved forests, a process that took several
decades to complete. In the reserves villagers no longer had “rights,” but
only “privileges,” which could be restricted according to the foresters’
assessments of the forests’ needs.11 The foresters were becoming special-
ists in timber production like their counterparts in Europe and North
America. In their determination to control the reserves, they constructed
a hierarchy from British professional foresters down to forest guards
recruited from local villages, who became the first police force of any sort
in the history of the hills. From their training programs to their uniforms
the forestry hierarchy emphasized efficiency, discipline, and authority.
The villagers of Kumaon soon came to see the Forest Department
primarily as a machinery of repression. Their natural response was either
to evade the forest rangers and guards, which was rarely difficult in the
wide-ranging hills, or to bribe or intimidate the low-paid guards into
overlooking what were now labeled “forest offenses.” By 1880, senior
British foresters were well aware that many of their employees were cor-
ruptible, but within the authoritarian framework they were rarely able to
do much about it. This factor, as much as silvicultural necessity, caused
their preoccupation with forest offenses and the punishment of offenders.12
The 1878 law did not give the Forest Department the same authority
over unreserved forests. These tracts, including many small blocks of
degraded forests near village agricultural lands, had little commercial
potential. Over the years they have gone under various titles; for sim-
plicity here they will be given two labels: Civil Forests, administered by
the Revenue Department and available for expansion of agriculture, and
Panchayat Forests, controlled by the villages, many of which had already
lost much of their tree cover and served primarily for low-productivity
grazing of village livestock. Together those unreserved forests were crit-
ical for the village economy, as well as for the soil and water resources
of the hill region as a whole. As later events were to show, the Civil and
Panchayat Forests remained almost entirely unplanned in their use. All
that could be said for the system was that it eliminated the need for
direct confrontation between foresters and villagers in the unreserved
forests, but the lands themselves slowly deteriorated.

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

Before World War I the major issue was what the system of reserved
forests meant for the Pahari or hill populace. We can make some estima-
tions of the relative benefits and disadvantages of the reserves for the
villagers and their perceptions of the system’s operation. The first reserves
in the Kumaon were a series of small tracts that were demarcated in the
1890s, primarily as fuelwood reserves for several expanding colonial
towns and military cantonments in the hills.13 Their total extent was only
a few thousand acres, and they were designated in high timber where
there were relatively few pressures from nearby villages. The principal
issue there concerned the timber contractors and commercial logging.
The system of timber extraction necessitated close cooperation be-
tween the Forest Department and the contractors. In some reserved for-
ests the logging work was done by the Forest Department itself, and the
timber sold in annual auctions at foothills depot towns. More often the
Forest Department did not have the personnel to carry out logging on
its own; instead, it auctioned the right to harvest marked trees in prean-
nounced tracts each year. The winning bidders sent their own crews into
the hills to cut the purchased trees.
Several aspects of the contracting system led villagers to conclude
that they were under pressure from a hostile alliance, even though the
foresters rarely perceived the situation in that light. First, very few of
the contractors were hill men before 1920; traders with the necessary
capital plus access to lowland trading networks were from Meerut,
Lucknow, Bareilly, or other cities of the U.P. plains. The Pahari people’s
traditional resistance to interference by outsiders was reinforced by the
awareness that both contractors and forest managers held authority and
wealth based in the plains. Further, under the system of auctioning
standing timber, contractors became notorious for bribing or intimidat-
ing local forest guards and removing far more trees than they had for-
mally been allocated. There was little the Forest Department could do
or chose to do about this pattern, which has persisted to the present.
Although Forest Department files include voluminous records of
villagers stealing wood or fodder, letting livestock graze on reserved for-
ests, or setting fire to dry grasslands, the files say virtually nothing about
illegal actions of the contractors.
Another issue also appeared around the turn of the century to cause
conflict between the commercial and subsistence interests; this one has

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

become increasingly intense in recent years. One purpose of the reserves

was to enable the Forest Department to replant forests that would be
commercially valuable and would stabilize the soil and water regime.
From the first forest plantations of the late nineteenth century, the pre-
dominant method of reforestation has been monoculture, usually spe-
cies of little use to local villagers. The most valuable timber species of
the plains and foothills was sal (Shorea robusta), a broadleaf hardwood
which was the Railway Department’s perennial first choice for sleepers
(crossties) on its north Indian system. In the Siwalik foothills and the
tarai jungles there were few permanent villages. Hence there was little
conflict with villagers over the sal plantations before World War I.
A second type of monoculture tree plantation has caused far greater
conflict since the early years of this century. In the middle elevations
of settled Kumaon the dominant conifer is the chir pine (Pinus longi-
folia), which produces the finest resin on the subcontinent. Resin tap-
ping on a commercial scale began around 1906, and by 1920 the Forest
Department had built India’s largest resin-processing factory near
Bareilly, not far below outer Kumaon. For the Forest Department and its
labor contractors, the chir forests held the promise of sustained, large-
scale revenue; resin products were filling a steadily expanding range of
uses around India and in industrial Europe. For the villagers, however,
the chir pine had little attraction. Its needles formed a thick mat on the
forest floor that inhibited the growth of grasses for their livestock. Its
wood was less desirable for fuel and timber than other species. Above all,
chir competed with several species of oak (Quercus spp.) that gave leaves
for fodder and mulch, and limbs for construction and fuel. Where
the oak forests have not been renewed or adequately protected in the
Kumaon hills, the village economy has become increasingly precarious.
Annual forestry reports for the hill region made persistent efforts
to demonstrate that the chir forests and resin industry were highly
beneficial to the villagers by providing wage labor, in a region where other
sources of money wages had only begun to penetrate. Nevertheless,
the department’s arguments and their elaborate supporting statistics at
best only mitigated the villagers’ discontent. Private merchants who pur-
chased resin-collecting contracts evidently preferred to import outside
labor, from the plains or other hill regions, just as they did for much of

98
 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

the timber labor. Outsiders would work for lower wages, and they were
more “reliable,” not being tied into the local agricultural cycle’s labor
demands.

The Political Challenge of the Nationalist Movement

Many forces were operating in the hills to transform the pattern of

nonagricultural labor. Indirectly these forces produced destructive
effects on Kumaon’s forests during and after World War I, and this in
turn precipitated the Social Forestry movement there in the 1920s. The
first open conflict arose over the tradition of begar, or unpaid coolie
labor, which the colonial regime had adapted from its predecessors,
the Princely States of both hills and plains. Begar was the north Indian term
for corvee labor, which had been required of all landowning peasants in
lieu of money taxes. In the Kumaon hills a vast majority of the male popu-
lation were landowning small peasants, living in a rather more egalitar-
ian society than in the plains below. In a region where there were almost
no motorable or all-weather roads, begar was demanded by the British
to meet the needs of both government officials and private travelers on
tour. A hunting holiday might require forty or more porters for two
couples. Forest and revenue officers on tour usually moved with less
elaborate trains, but they were more frequent. Villagers were required to
provide unpaid begar whenever it was demanded, regardless of the point
in the annual agricultural cycle.
In the early years of the century nationalist leaders began to question
the justice of this system. When World War I broke out, the system came
under sudden and intolerable pressures. Thousands of hill men left with
the Garhwal Rifles for military duty around the empire. Thousands more
were needed for the emergency timber harvests required for wartime
use. By 1915 the first young nationalist political leaders of the Kumaon
hill towns found it a worthy issue. Protesting against begar, they called
it forced labor and demanded the end of the “feudal” system. In 1916 an
organization was founded in the hills which established teams of coolies
to work for set wages, and by 1919 the first Congress political spokesmen
in Naini Tal and Almora joined the struggle to abolish begar, with the

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

blessing of nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and C.F. Andrews.14 One

of the new spokesmen was Govind Ballabh Pant, the rising young lawyer
and journalist from Kumaon who later became chief minister of U.P.
after independence. By 1919 there was a clear threat of labor strikes.
The provincial government responded quickly, organizing a new system
of paid coolie labor in 1921.15 In the early 1920s, the begar system was
phased out in the hills long before this occurred in some of the Princely
States of the plains below.
Repercussions of the begar controversy on the forest conflict were
severe, however. Forest Department officials used the coolies, both on
official tour and on holiday, and they were often the only officials on the
spot, making arrangements for other British travelers to tour the hills and
stay at Forest Department rest houses. Further, as the Forest Depart-
ment’s administrative cadre had expanded to manage the reserved for-
ests, its demands on coolie labor had expanded correspondingly. The
tightening link between the begar controversy and the expansion of
reserved forests led toward the greatest ecological disaster in Kumaon’s
history, the forest fires of 1921, whose damage was keyed to the specific
composition of forests at various elevations.
Facing increased pressure on the forests for both commercial and
subsistence uses, the Forest Department continued to survey woodlands
for expansion of the reserves. Between 1911 and 1916, they completed
working plans for a vast increase in the reserves, which they had the legal
power to implement under the 1878 law. Under wartime pressures, the
Forest Department initiated these “New Reserves” by 1916, most of them
in the middle hills, at the same elevations as the most dense villages and
productive agricultural land of Kumaon. Time and again in the mod-
ern management of India’s forests, the danger of open hostility between
officials and villagers has been at its greatest just when reserves are
established, villagers’ access to them is restricted within a short tran-
sitional period, and their grazing and gathering are forced into new
molds. Unfortunately for the hills of Kumaon, the New Reserves were
established at a time of maximum political and climatic stress, for the
war years were unusually dry, exacerbating the food scarcities brought
on by the war.

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

The hot dry months between February and June are the most difficult
of the year for forest management, even in ordinary years. This is the
season when villagers burn the dry grasses to encourage vigorous new
growth of fodder in the early monsoon rains of June and July. There is
always danger that the grass fires will spread into the forests, destroying
young seedlings or even mature trees.
The year 1916 was a dangerous one for initiating new forest reserves.
The dry months that year saw the first example of forest fires set by the
Pahari people not just for their annual grazing cycle but to protest the new
restrictions. Forest Department records and other materials make only
terse references to these fires, but the acreage burned that year included
thousands of acres beyond the usual annual grass fires.16 It was an omi-
nous precedent for the fires of 1921.
After the war’s end in late 1918, political tensions between the co-
lonial government and the Indian National Congress led to the first
national Non-Cooperation Campaign, led by Mahatma Gandhi and based
on his principle that it was patriotic to resist illegitimate and repressive
colonial laws. By early 1921 many districts of U.P. were in ferment and
the provincial government in Lucknow feared the worst from peasant
protest movements. In Kumaon the protest centered on the begar con-
troversy until that was resolved, but then it quickly shifted to the forest
reserves, which seemed to the Pahari people to strip away their ancestral
subsistence rights.17
The early months of 1921 were the hottest and driest in many years.
By January, young Congress leaders were urging the population to resist
what they called the abrupt and arbitrary new forest regulations. In
this incendiary atmosphere, the hills were suddenly in flames. Within a
few weeks, in March and April, thousands of acres of forest in Kumaon
burned out of control, and many more forest areas burned as far north-
west as the Kangra valley of the Punjab hills.18 The most intense fires
were in the young sal plantations of the lower hills, where thirty years’
Forest Department work was destroyed almost overnight. Dry pine for-
ests of the higher hills vanished in smoke as well.
The provincial government, the Forest Department, and Congress
leaders all were appalled at the damage. Congress spokesmen insisted

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

that no one had intended such a holocaust. The Forest Department re-
sponded that the fires showed an organized effort of the Kumaoni people
and their leaders to destroy their own future in an ignorant effort to
undermine a progressive administration. The anguish of professional
foresters, helpless to preserve their wooded heritage, was just begin-
ning. The U.P. government under seemingly revolutionary pressure in
all parts of the province established a commission of inquiry to recom-
mend measures that would defuse the danger in the hills before the next
dry season.
The Forest Grievance Commission toured extensively through
Kumaon, interviewing officials, Congress spokesmen in the towns, and
village landowners in the hills. The issue of grazing rights was especi-
ally controversial in the testimony gathered by the commission. Villagers
complained that grazing areas left open to them in the new reserves were
far less than their livestock required and were often far distant from
the villages.19 The Forest Department responded that regeneration of the
forests, whether natural regrowth or artificial planting, absolutely neces-
sitated closing recently logged tracts to grazing for several years at a time.
Its defense was that nearly all forests in Kumaon were open to grazing for
all or part of every year, and the closures were carefully rotated so as not
to cause villagers hardship.20
The commission’s report largely sided with the villagers and their
political spokesmen in the hill towns. It recommended in effect that the
new reserves be taken from the Forest Department and either returned
to the Revenue Department or given directly to the villages for control
by their panchayats, the village councils. Henceforth forests should be
designated either Class I, which were of little commercial value but
might be significant for preserving vital watersheds, or Class II, which
held commercially valuable stands of timber but had few demands from
villagers. In the first case, very little would be done to manage the for-
ests, beyond occasional inspection by the Revenue Department. In the
second, the Forest Department would retain control but be stripped of
its powers to regulate grazing or the lopping of oak branches, except in
very limited regeneration areas.21
Everyone knew that the Revenue Department, if given control of forest
areas, would allow steady expansion of agriculture at the expense of tree

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

cover in these undemarcated forests. It could do little else, for without

the Forest Department’s expertise it had no capacity to administer them
as forests. Nor was it often interested: agriculture, not timber, brought
returns to the Revenue Department. Forest Department spokesmen
pleaded with the commission not to be stampeded into a decision that
would consign many hillsides to permanent barrenness. Nevertheless,
the commission listened to the Revenue officials, who were responsible
for civil order as well as finance, and to Congress leaders and village
spokesmen, all of whom found the reserved forests a convenient target.
The government in Lucknow eagerly agreed to the proposal after mini-
mal debate; the commission’s report had the political virtues of being
decisive and clear-cut. From early 1922 onward, thousands of acres of
reserves were no longer systematically managed as forests.22 The Forest
Department concluded in 1922:

Under existing circumstances the ultimate disappearance of these forests is quite cer-
tain. The intelligentsia of Kumaon appear to think that the community will shortly
become so alive to their own interests that they will themselves undertake protec-
tion. What agency is going to control the irresponsible Kumaonis is not stated.
This department does not share the comfortable convictions of these leaders.23

The New Village Forests

As the 1920s wore on, the Forest Department had to modify its bitter
sense of loss in the face of the movement to establish panchayat control
over the Class I forests. The 1922 policy had stated that the areas returned
to that designation, henceforth usually called Civil Forests, should be
run wherever possible by village panchayats, “communal rules, if pos-
sible, being eventually introduced.”24 This was the beginning of social
forestry in the Himalayan region, for the Forest Department was urged to
make its technical services available for assistance to the villages, if they
chose to request the foresters’ advice.
By the mid-1920s the Forest Department, faced with the reality of
the changed situation, adapted its strategies in a somewhat more con-
ciliatory direction. It began encouraging a program of forest-extension
education, to attempt to alert villagers to what it saw as their long-range
interest. In the words of a 1926 report:

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Improvement can now only come by the education and growth of public opin-
ion.... It was the intelligentsia of Kumaon who fanned the flame of anti-Forest
feeling and the fact that they are now reported to be on the road to appreciating the
dependence of Kumaon for its existence on its forests is small consolation for the
damage they have encouraged.25

This was a skeptical recognition of what many others had come to insist—
namely, that no strategy of forestry management could possibly thrive
without the committed cooperation of the nearby villagers. Yet the village
forests were still not being served well. Extension education under
the Forest Department was poorly funded and largely neglected for many
years, while the department turned its primary energies to preservation
and sustained-yield logging of those forests still under its control. It was
not often invited to advise villages that began attempting to manage their
own degraded woodlands.
The titles “Village Forests” and “Panchayat Forests” are not descriptive
labels but legal designations. They do not indicate which vegetation pat-
tern the land supports but define which organizational entity has control
of them. Even in the 1920s most Panchayat Forests had at best only a
few scrub trees; any village was severely disadvantaged from the start if
it wanted to grow a new crop of timber or fodder trees. Organization-
ally, however, the opportunity was there after 1929, the year when the
provincial government set up procedures for organizing village forest
panchayats. The government designated one Revenue Department offi-
cial as Kumaon Forest protection officer and sent him to Madras to study
the southern presidency’s system of village forests, which had been the
first in India some twenty years before. After his return, his work was to
tour the hill region encouraging villages to establish forest panchayats.26
Organizationally the work was not easy. The protection officer had
to determine whether each projected forest panchayat would encom-
pass lands of one or several villages. He had to resolve landownership
disputes between individuals or villages on forest and grazing lands
where many boundaries had never been precisely established. At least in
contrast with today, he was empowered to act quickly, making binding
decisions on the spot. That done, he had to arrange for all the affected
landholders to elect a three- to nine-man panchayat. When established,
a forest panchayat had the power to sell products from its lands and the

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

punitive power to fine trespassers or seize their cutting tools or cattle.

The Forest Department was to be available for technical advice only.
Under this system the hope that any forest panchayat would man-
age its trees and grasses well depended on an intricate set of relations:
between the Revenue Department’s forest protection officer and the
Forest Department, between government officials and villagers, between
frequently competitive villages, and within the faction patterns of each
village. The 1922 legislation had taken one more step designed to de-
fuse tensions: it formed the Kumaon Forest Advisory Committee to work
with the government on forest management and appointed influential
citizens of the hill districts to it. Meeting several times a year, from 1930
onward the committee encouraged the forest panchayat movement,
and so increasingly did officials, sensing the political importance of the
panchayats. By 1937, 182 villages had forest panchayats, and though the
district commissioner had the power to dissolve any forest panchayat
for corruption, crippling factionalism, or inactivity, only a handful were
ever actually dissolved.
In addition, several hundred other villages formed unofficial forest
panchayats in the 1930s, preferring to avoid the formalities of official
supervision.27 The Forest Department was rarely consulted by either sort
of panchayat, for its priorities were still at odds with villagers’ needs.
Even in its most detailed administrative reports, the department in
later years has devoted only a few paragraphs to the subject, having
concluded that panchayat forestry was outside its sphere of responsibil-
ity. A pattern of administration by avoidance was evolving: the various
interests whose cooperation was essential for effective natural resource
management chose to minimize conflict by minimizing their working
contacts with each other.
Over the years after 1930, some forest panchayats in the oak and
long-needled pine belt of Kumaon had some success in spite of all these
obstacles, regulating grazing so as to improve the fodder crop or harvest-
ing their own timber and investing the profits in village-improvement
projects. In the higher mountain districts of the north many of the
conifer and oak forests were less degraded and retained great financial
potential for commercial harvest after 1930. In some northern areas,
the local culture of the villages also seems to have stressed consensual

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

decision making as well. Some forest panchayats in remote Pithoragarh

District are said to have been effective for many years in regulating the
subsistence system of their hills. One experienced rural-development
specialist in rural Pithoragarh asserts that this success was the conse-
quence of the absence of roads there. The lack of motorable roads until
recently, he notes dryly, prevented outside contractors from devastating
the mountainsides and, equally important, discouraged visitation of the
higher hills by officials with the capacity to impose delays and bureau-
cratic objections on the villagers.28
World War II and the difficult transition to independence brought
new pressures to the forests of the western Himalayas, and any new pres-
sure had at least indirect influences on the viability of village forestry.29
The Forest Department was required to harvest timber far in excess of
the thirty- to eighty-year cycles that its working plans had established,
but by 1945 its evaluations of its own wartime operations concluded
that little permanent damage had been done in the reserved forests. The
severe damage had occurred in neither government nor village forests,
but in the remaining miscellaneous woodlands under private owner-
ship. Under wartime conditions prices for fuelwood and construction
timber in the urban markets of northern India rose to unprecedented
levels. Private contractors could make fortunes in one season by dealing
directly with individual owners, often bypassing the Forest Department
entirely.
Nevertheless, villagers and political organizers in the hills often
insisted that there was little difference between independent contractors
and those who worked closely with the Forest Department, bringing
in outside labor to purchase and market timber from the department’s
auctions. As early as 1930 or so, the timber auctions began to be the
scene of confrontations between local people and the forester–contractor
coalition. Villagers would picket auctions or demonstrate against what
they called the oppression of foreign rulers in league with unscrupulous
commercial interests from the plains. There were also threats of labor
boycotts at the lumbering sites in the hills, but these were evidently not
carried out. Patriotic sentiment in Kumaon was coming to have a com-
bined anti-British and anti-plains character.30 The war years left a legacy

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

of Pahari people’s hostility to the contractors over labor policies as great

as its hostility to the Forest Department’s powers. None of this changed
much after the transition to independence though it brought Indian for-
estry professionals into complete control of the forest service in 1947.

Trends since Independence

The end of British rule in 1947 did not mean an abrupt break in the
administration of India’s forests, since the professional cadre of the
Indian Forest Service had been transformed into a largely Indian unit
over the previous twenty years, and many people considered that the
U.P. forest service was the elite of the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the
broad context of forest use was changing with the advent of represen-
tative democracy. From 1947 onward foresters had to respond more
directly to elected officials and the men who had put them in power,
men who often were eager to reduce or eliminate the forest restrictions
that had become associated with arbitrary colonial rule. Moreover, the
new government under Prime Minister Nehru was committed to rapid
industrialization and agricultural expansion. Even the formerly marginal
hill region saw accelerated road building and population expansion from
the 1950s onward. From 1901 to 1951 the hill population had grown
by 46 percent; from 1951 to 1981 it grew another 80 percent.31 With
these trends came the extension of tilled land onto ever more marginal
hillsides, usually at the expense of denuded commons, and with little
innovation in farming methods. The same territory was asked to grow
more food, at the expense of designated forest lands.32
In this setting any effort to grow more fuelwood and fodder on village
forest lands faced severe obstacles. In the years after independence there
were two major changes in the legal structure of Kumaon village forests.
The first concerned the private forests. Because of the dismal record of
their cutting during the war, foresters and others around India pressed
successfully for legislation giving the government the right to manage
private timber stands. In 1952, the U.P. government transferred manage-
ment of each private forest to either the Forest Department or the village
forest panchayats.33

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

The second change was to end the neglect of the civil forests, for they
too were reaching the point of total denudation. For many decades the
Kumaon Nayabad and Waste Land Act had encouraged villagers to open
new soil to the plow (the nayabad land); in return they ultimately gained
full ownership of the tilled plots. This policy of the Revenue Depart-
ment, which dated from Traill’s time in the 1820s, long since had been
outdated by the disappearance of trees from the civil forests. In 1957,
new legislation declared that no further nayabad grants were to be made.
Finally, in 1964 another law transferred the civil forests to village con-
trol, wherever villages could follow stipulated procedures so as to qualify
for panchayat forest management. All other civil forests were given to the
Forest Department for management. Hence, since 1964 there have been
two major categories of forest lands, those under commercial manage-
ment by the Forest Department and those primarily for subsistence use
controlled by the villages.34 The steady increase in the number of forest
panchayats is indicative of the rural population’s interest or at least their
resistance to bureaucratic control. At independence in 1947, the official
panchayats alone numbered 741; a year later that had grown to 1,043.
By 1966 there were 2,185, controlling an average of approximately one
square kilometer each.35
The Forest Department was eager to gain control of the maximum
possible extent of civil forests. One of its goals was to manage the
vanishing oak forests more effectively, but in this context its continuing
orientation towards the villagers is evident. As one recent working plan
expresses it, the oak stands

… are very important forests, as they act as a store house of water and are the
source of many a perennial spring and thus help to maintain the water supply.
Depredation on these forests by men and cattle has resulted in drying up of many
springs and acute water shortage in many villages during summer months.36

From its inception the forest service in India has been committed to
improving the quality of forest land.37 By the 1970s, however, after
long decades in which foresters and villagers had often been adversar-
ies, some foresters’ commitment to maintaining viable watersheds had
hardened into a description of the villagers’ actions as “depredation of

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

the forests.” A recent Forest Department study of the timber resources

and watershed preservation strategies of the hill districts concludes that
the forests under village control, fully one-third of the total forested area,
have had no systematic management. It concludes: “The productivity
capacity of these forests is not being utilized either for timber and fire-
wood or for fodder.... The transfer of these forests to the forest depart-
ment and their proper management to meet the demands of the people
is an urgent necessity.”38
Under the long shadow of the decades’ struggle with the hill people,
however, even the most sophisticated initiatives of the Forest Depart-
ment are bound to meet great skepticism in the panchayats. This is even
more true since 1973, when the village protest movement saw a resur-
gence in adjacent Garhwal, as the highly publicized Chipko movement.
For a decade now, village women in upper Garhwal have been work-
ing with local organizers and allies as far away as New Delhi to end all
commercial logging in the hills and provide both trees and jobs for the
Pahari villagers before attempting to answer any other demand on the
Himalayan forests. Chipko organizers have recently expanded their or-
ganization to work with forest panchayats in many villages of Kumaon
and are looking beyond to the entire mountain region as far northwest
as Kashmir.39 They charge the contractors with pervasive corruption in
overcutting the trees in their contracts and underpaying their laborers.
Their critiques of the Forest Department have been uncompromising
and the department has responded with attitudes ranging from wariness
to open hostility.
Under these conditions, how do the forest panchayats operate to-
day? Can there be effective cooperation between villagers and the Forest
Department? The first detailed studies at the village level in Kumaon
show that few forest panchayats have effective management programs
yet.40 Part of the difficulty lies in the excessively bureaucratized ap-
proach of the government. Each forest panchayat has the power to des-
ignate part of its lands for social forestry management. Once a panchayat
has defined certain lands, however, the proposal must go to the Revenue
Department for a survey of its records to guarantee that the tract in ques-
tion is in fact panchayat owned. This title check has often taken up to
five years, leaving the villagers discouraged at the start. Even when it

109
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

moves quickly, the villagers then have little control over their project.
Forest officers usually form the details of a management plan, and in
many cases villagers seem to know little or nothing of the plan and par-
ticipate little in its formulation.
Over the years the growth of elaborate governmental regulations has
been designed in part to control what outsiders see as corruption or
gross favoritism within the villages, though some villagers perceive the
fight for control of profits as consistent with traditional social behavior
on the land. Difficulties abound on both sides. There are profits for
powerful villagers in work such as building boundary walls or fences.
In all too many cases where planning has moved into action, aggres-
sive panchayat chairmen control these valuable contracts for themselves
or their families or castemates, undercutting all efforts at genuinely
cooperative management.
Beyond this there are still other barriers for foresters and villagers
to surmount in order to work effectively together. In another move
against corruption, regulations stipulate that any profits coming to the
panchayats from sale of forest produce must be banked by officials. This
is usually done in the form of five-year savings certificates, which gain
favorable rates of interest but postpone the village’s effective use of its
benefits almost indefinitely. Under these patterns, it is no wonder that
most foresters see the social forestry program as one of the least desir-
able assignments they can have, rather than as a challenge to bring about
effective working relations with villagers against the grain of a century’s
habits.41
Where the social forestry program is taking hold in Kumaon’s
villages, the key seems to be a familiar one. Unusually effective and even-
handed village leadership must be matched to a crusading forester who is
unusually alert to the ways in which his professional style may inhibit
active response from the villagers. Beyond this, third parties, such as
local teachers, social workers, and perhaps even Chipko organizers, may
be starting to play important catalytic roles in some areas. Still, prog-
ress has been slow against the background of over fifty years’ experience
with forest panchayats, which usually would prefer to work separately
from the professional foresters. Some forests are actually contributing
more than they once did to rural subsistence; others still have ma-
jor potential in their soils. More often, however, the social forestry

110
 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

program in Kumaon has not yet turned the corner toward preserving
both a major watershed of the Ganges system and the viability of rural
life in the hills.

Notes

1. Of the recent publications on the subject, none has alerted the wider public
more effectively than Erik Eckholm, Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and
World Food Prospects (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).
2. For valuable surveys see Douglas F. Barnes, Julia C. Allen, and William
Ramsay, Social Forestry in Developing Nations (Washington, DC: Resources for
the Future, 1982); D. Wood et al., The Socioeconomic Context of Fuelwood Use
in Small Rural Communities, Special Study no. 1 (Washington, DC: Agency
for International Development, PPC, 1980); Michael Cernea, Land Tenure
Systems and Social Implications of Forestry Development Programs, Staff Work-
ing Paper no. 452 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1981).
3. References to forestland conflict abound in studies of European rural history.
See Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working Class
Composition,” Crime and Social Justice (Fall–Winter 1976): 5–16. In France
alone, forest protests erupted periodically for some 200 years. For examples,
see Louis Clarenc, “Le Code forestier de 1827 et les troubles forestiers dans
les Pyrenees centrales au milieu du XIXe siecle,” Annales de Midi 77 (1965):
293–317; John Merriman, “Les Demoiselles de l’Ariege,” in 1830 in France,
ed. Merriman (London: Franklin Watts, 1975); and Ted W. Margadant,
French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979), pp. 41–46. For references to structurally similar
conflicts in Third World settings, see James Scott, The Moral Economy of the
Peasant (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 63–64, 135–36.
4. Richard P. Tucker and J.F. Richards, eds, Global Deforestation and the
Nineteenth-Century World Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1983).
5. Report of the National Commission on Floods (New Delhi: Government of India,
1980); Raj Kumar Gupta, “Deforestation and Floods,” in International Soci-
ety for Tropical Ecology, Souvenir, Silver Jubilee Symposium, 1982, pp. 32–41.
6. For the human ecology of the region see Raj Kumar Gupta, “Social-Economy
of the Himalayan People in Relation to the Forests of Garhwal Himalayas,” in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India 33, sec. B, pt. 1 (1963),
pp. 104–14.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

7. E.T. Atkinson, The Himalayan Gazetteer (Delhi: Cosmo Publications,

reprint, 1973), vol. 2, chaps. 6, 7.
8. G.W. Traill, “Statistical Sketch of Kumaon,” Asiatic Researches 16 (1828):
137–234.
9. V.B. Singh, “Working Plan of the Uttarkashi Forest Division, Uttar Pradesh,
1961–62 to 1975–76,” p. 43.
10. For fuller detail on the period before World War I see Richard P. Tucker,
“The British Colonial System and the Forests of the Western Himalayas,
1815–1914,” in Global Deforestation, eds Tucker and Richards, pp. 146–66.
11. For the system in recent form, see Gerald D. Berreman, Hindus of the
Himalayas: Ethnography and Change, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972), chaps 1, 2, and 8.
12. United Provinces Forest Department, Annual Administration Reports (hereafter
UPFDR) give precise details on the numbers of arrests and convictions.
13. Each Forest Division was provided with detailed working plans for its re-
served forests; these plans carry full detail on management of the reserves.
14. Samuel E. Stokes, “Begar in the Hills,” in National Self-Realization, ed. Stokes
(Madras: Ganesan, 1921), pp. 131–47.
15. United Provinces, Legislative Council Debates, on several dates from
16 December 1918 through 22 March 1922, carry the controversy in detail.
16. Harry G. Champion, “Working Plan for the Forests of the Central Almora
Forest Division, 1921,” pp. 139–42; UPFDR, 1916–1917, p. 7.
17. For a fuller account of the political campaigns until 1947, see Richard P.
Tucker and Ajay S. Rawat, “Forest Protests and the Freedom Movement in
Kumaon,” in press.
18. UPFDR, 1921–1922, pp. 7–9.
19. United Provinces, Reports on the Native Press, 1921, p. 201.
20. UPFDR, 1920–1921, pp. 6–7.
21. Ibid., 1921–1922, pp. 1–2.
22. Report of the Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee (Lucknow: United Prov-
inces Government, 1922).
23. UPFDR, 1922–1923, p. 9.
24. The Leader (a daily newspaper in Allahabad), 5 July 1922.
25. UPFDR, 1925–1926, p. 2.
26. Ibid., 1929–1930, p. 3.
27. Ibid., 1936–1937, pp. 1–3; F.C. Ford Robertson, Fifteen Years’ Forest
Administration in the United Provinces (Lucknow, 1942), p. 120.

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 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOCIAL FORESTRY

28. These observations and others are based on my personal interviews in

Kumaon, October 1981.
29. For a fuller analysis of the impact of the Depression and World War II,
see Richard P. Tucker, “The British Empire and India’s Forest Resources:
Assam and the United Provinces, 1914–1950,” in The World Economy and
the World’s Forests in the Twentieth Century, eds J.F. Richards and Richard
P. Tucker (forthcoming).
30. UPFDR, 1930–1931, pp. 4–5.
31. Report on the Task Force for the Study of Eco-Development in the Himalayan
Region (New Delhi: Planning Commission, 1982), p. 10.
32. Vimal Kishor and Raj Kumar Gupta, “Economy of a Typical Western
Himalayan Watershed: An Analysis for Eco-Development,” Dehra Dun, 1982.
33. UPFDR, 1952–1953, pp. 1–2, 38–42.
34. Working plans of each Forest Division since 1964 give statistics on the
distribution of each type of forest.
35. UPFDR, 1948–1949, p. 3, and 1965–1966, pp. 1–2; Report of Kumaon For-
ests Fact Finding Committee (Lucknow, 1960).
36. B.N. Dwivedi, Working Plan of the Naini Tal Forest Division, 1978 (Lucknow:
Uttar Pradesh Government, 1978), p. 111.
37. This was reinforced once again in 1982, when the distinguished commis-
sion of planners appointed by the central government to study the moun-
tains declared, “Commercial exploitation for national industries, pulp,
packing cases [should be met] only after subsistence needs of the local
population have been met and ecological safeguards are fully satisfied”
(Report of the Task Force for the Study of Eco-Development in the Himalayan Region
[New Delhi: Planning Commission, 1982], p. 28).
38. P.N. Gupta, Afforestation, Integrated Watershed Management, Torrent Control,
and Land Use Development Project for U.P. Himalayas and Siwaliks (Lucknow:
Uttar Pradesh Forest Department, 1979), p. 28.
39. In addition to several excellent accounts of the movement written by
its organizers, most of them unpublished, see Bharat Dogra, Forests and
People: The Efforts in Western Himalayas to Re-establish a Long-lost Relationship
(Rishikesh: Himalaya Darshan Prakashan Samiti, 1980). For a more recent
analysis, in the context of Garhwal regional politics, see Gerald D. Berreman,
“Identity Definition, Assertion, and Politicization in the Central Himalayas,”
in Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural, Uppsala Studies in Cultural An-
thropology no. 6, ed. Anita Jacobson-Widding (Stockholm: Almquist and
Wiksell International, 1983).

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

40. S.L. Shah, “Ecological Degradation and the Future of Agriculture in the
Himalayas,” Presidential Address, Indian Society of Agricultural Econo-
mists, December 1981; and S.L. Shah, “Socio-Economic, Technological,
Organizational, and Institutional Constraints in the Afforestation of Civil,
Soyam, Usar, and Waste Lands for Resolving the Fuel Wood Crisis in the
Hill Districts of Uttar Pradesh” (Almora: Vivekananda Laboratory for Hill
Agriculture, 1982).
41. For an outstanding recent example of systematic prescriptions to overcome
similar difficulties throughout Asia, see Christopher Gibbs and Jeff Romm,
“Institutional Aspects of Forestry Development in Asia,” Asia Society/USAID
Conference on Forestry and Development in Asia, Bangalore, India, April
1982.

114
 V
The Evolution of Transhumant Grazing
in the Punjab Himalaya∗

I n modern times, colonial systems have reorganized the use of the

Third World’s natural resources in intricate ways and transformed the
ecological balances between indigenous peoples and their landscapes.
One of the most dramatic of these changes has been the conversion of
large areas of the Third World’s forests into crop lands or monoculture
tree plantations to meet demands for industrial raw materials and con-
sumer goods in the West (Tucker and Richards, 1983; Richards and
Tucker, 1986). But in many mountain and hill tracts, the changes caused
by logging of commerical timber have evolved in intricate counterpoint
to traditional local land-use systems which inhibit regeneration of the
forests. Intensive grazing, especially by goats and 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. In temperate-
zone mountains under colonial management, inexorable processes of
soil erosion and pasture degradation have resulted from interactions be-
tween the pastoral economy and colonial institutions.

∗ This article was first published in Mountain Research and Development

(MRD): Tucker RP. 1986. The Evolution of Transhumant Grazing in Punjab
Himalaya. Mountain Research and Development 6(1): 17–28. It is reprinted here
with kind permission of the co-copyright holders, who retain the rights of
reproduction: the International Mountain Society (IMS) and the United Nations
University (UNU), c/o MRD Editorial Office, Bern, Switzerland (www.mrd-
journal.org).

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

This chapter considers those processes in a region of the western

Himalaya, in what is now the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, which
was under British administration for a century until Independence in
1947. The discussion focuses not on the forest depletion which has
resulted from timber extraction but on the decline of forest and pas-
ture resources associated with the livestock economy. Nowhere else in
the Himalaya is the grazing economy more complex, the profits from it
more bountiful, or the ecological implications more critically important.
Sedentary farmers at lower elevations maintain their own mixed live-
stock. Migratory Gujar graziers from the plains below take their buffalo
herds through the valleys of Himachal on their routes to summer pasture
every year. And most important, Gaddi shepherds pursue the largest-
scale transhumant sheep and goat herding in the entire Himalayan region.
The mountains of Himachal supported a complex interaction be-
tween sedentary agriculture and transhumant grazing long before the
British arrived. Then, during the colonial century, British administrators
attempted to channel and later to restrict grazing in government forests,
primarily to preserve tracts for regeneration of trees, but with very limited
success. Since Independence the state government has continued the
broad policy laid down in colonial times, still with mixed results. In the
long run the interactions among regime, rural economy, and ecological
base have produced a slow downward spiral which, while depriving no
one of subsistence, has not fully satisfied anyone.

The Pre-colonial Setting

Himachal Pradesh extends from the northwestern ranges of the high

Himalaya and the borders of Kashmir southeastward to the Siwalik foot-
hills which fall to the fertile plains of Punjab (Figure 1). In the colonial
era Himachal was in part administered as districts of Punjab and in part
left as autonomous Princely States. The hill districts were only peripheral
to the centers of population, agriculture, and commerce in the plains.
But, ecologically speaking, Himachal is not peripheral at all, as it bears
enormous importance for both northwestern India and eastern Pakistan.
Its portion of the Himalaya constitutes the upper watersheds of four
major branches of the Indus river system: the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, and

116
 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSHUMANT GRAZING

Figure 1: Location Map (Lori A. Sklut, cartographer, Clark University)

117
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Chenab rivers. Subsistence for tens of millions of people downriver de-

pends on the viability of its mountain forests, meadows, and terraces.
Trends in the mountain region, therefore, have been as vital for the
downriver population as for the hill people themselves.
Rising from the plains, the Siwalik hills are only a few hundred
meters high; they are formed largely of unstable sandstone and gravels
deposited over the millennia by runoff from the high ranges behind them
(Kayastha, 1964). Their tree cover is dominated by chil pine (Pinus longi-
folia), with intermixed stands of heavily lopped ban oak (Quercus incana)
which villagers use for timber, fuel, fodder, and leaf mulch (Champion
and Seth, 1968). The grass cover in the understory of the open forests
provides pasture for livestock from the adjacent plains and local villages;
in winter it also supports transhumant flocks which migrate down from
the high ranges. This combination has resulted in some of the most se-
vere grassland degradation and soil erosion in all of northwestern India.
North of the Siwaliks, the fertile Kangra valley runs transversely for
about half the length of Himachal; beyond Kangra the high ranges rise.
Before the British arrived, the town of Kangra was the most powerful
political center of the mountain region with the densest rural popula-
tion (Hutchison and Vogel, 1933). Behind the valley the first granite
Himalayan range, the Dhauladhar, rises dramatically to over 4,500 m.
To its north lie the Pir Panjal, and then the Great Himalayan ranges,
where the migrating flocks spend the summer. At the lower elevations,
at around 1,500 m, a transition begins from chil pine forests to mixed
stands of kharsu oak (Q. semecarpifolia) and several rhododendron
species on the wetter slopes, and to the great Himalayan conifer for-
ests. First come deodar (Cedrus deodara) and kail pine (Pinus excelsa), the
major timber trees of the region until recently. Above 3,000 m they grad-
ually give way to Himalayan spruce (Picea morinda) and silver fir (Abies
webbiana or pindrow), which thrive as high as 4,000 m. At their upper
limits, alpine pastures are flanked by stands of paper birch (Betula utilis)
and pencil cedar (C. tortulosa). Above this the central Himalayan ranges
from Pangi and Zanskar eastward to Lahaul and Spiti rise to 6,000 m and
more, and include the upper watersheds of the Indus tributaries.
In these mountains, serious deforestation and man-made soil ero-
sion have occurred almost entirely since the mid-nineteenth century.
Before then human settlement in the region was sparse and concentrated

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in the river valleys below 2,500 m. Even today the population of

Himachal is overwhelmingly rural, over 90 percent living outside its
scattered towns. Before the economic expansion which accompanied the
colonial era, the forests were exploited lightly, and only close to villages
or to major rivers where timber could easily be floated downstream.
Grazing land was far more extensive than the needs of its livestock
population.
Major river valleys were controlled by lineages of rajas, some of which
extended back a thousand years or more, but their capacity to extract the
rich mountain resources was narrowly limited (Hutchison and Vogel,
1933). However, the land tenure systems which evolved in the rajas’
domains set traditions that decisively shaped resource use in the colonial
century and later. The hill rajas held personal control of all land. Arable
land was bequeathed hereditarily to individual farming families. Rights
for use of forest and pasture, where the resource was abundant and its use
very light, were dispensed by the rajas to courtiers, military supporters,
or others. The rajas ordinarily granted small fields and limited local grazing
rights but kept the vast remaining areas of largely unutilized mountain
land for their own use as hunting grounds. Royal gamekeepers were
posted to guard against encroachment (Lyall, 1874; Punjab District
Gazetteers, 1924–25). In all of this the role of the state in regulating the
livestock economy and extracting a modest income from it was imbedded
in the unique system of livestock ecology in the region.

The Pastoral Cycle

The livestock of the Punjab hills has had two major components; the first
was non-migratory domestic animals kept by farmers in the permanent
villages of the lower hills. There, largely in the chil pine and oak belt,
soils are relatively fertile and the climate is mild enough year-round to
allow adequate terraced farming. Cows, sheep, goats, and a few horses
grazed on the commons near the tilled fields. The forested hills and village
grazing runs which flank each valley gave adequate fodder even in the
winter months.
The second component was the yearly cycle of crop and livestock
management of the Gaddis, the sheep and goat herders, whose survival

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depends largely on transhumant herding. (For ethnographic details, see

Ibbetson et al., 1911; Newell, 1955, 1967, 1970; Nitzberg, 1970; Parry,
1979; Phillimore, 1981.) Some Gaddis, originating centuries ago in the
Brahmaur sub-district of Chamba, maintained permanent homes in the
mountains there at elevations up to 2,500 m and higher. Their grazing
territory has covered most of present-day Himachal, spreading gradually
farther northward into summer alpine pasture and southeastward into
winter grazing grounds as their livestock numbers have increased and
fodder resources deteriorated.
The area of the mountains where Gaddi flocks dominate merges in
complex and largely unstudied ways with the territories of other groups:
in Jammu and Kashmir to the northwest (Casimir and Rao, 1985) and
northern Pakistan beyond that (Zarin and Schmidt, 1984). It then spreads
northward to the dry reaches of Ladakh, and eastward to Kinnaur district
on the Tibetan border, with its winter grazing grounds in the foothills of
the boundary area between Himachal and Uttar Pradesh (Gairola, 1947;
Himachal Pradesh Grazing Committee Report, 1970). The Gujar buffalo
herders of this extensive region spread throughout much of Himachal
Pradesh as well as adjacent states, but this chapter does not attempt an
analysis of their cycles.
Most Gaddis have practised mixed farming and shepherding, since
almost none have held extensive enough arable land to provide a full
year’s food supplies. In the high villages of the Chamba region the short
growing season and poor soils have compounded the problem. Hence,
many Gaddi families over the past hundred years have established per-
manent homes in the low Kangra valley, especially in Dharmsala and
Palampur sub-districts (Parry, 1979). Yet even there the tiny individual
farmsteads, often less than a full hectare, have forced the Gaddis to main-
tain their flocks of sheep and goats. Subsistence cropping has long been
supplemented by market-oriented grazing. The Gaddis’ economy, and
thus its ecological impact, has been sensitive to market conditions in the
wide Punjab below, to a degree which has been underestimated because
it has never been fully calculated. One published study gives a broad
indication that the Gaddis’ flocks have been highly profitable, making
them the most prosperous single group with land-based incomes in the
hills (Bormann, 1980).

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For economic and ecological reasons, nearly all Gaddi flocks have
included both sheep and goats. Sheep are maintained largely for their
wool, which is sheared at least twice annually: in the spring before the
upward migration to alpine pastures, and in the fall upon their return.
In many cases a third shearing is done in the late winter in the lowlands,
postponing the spring shearing until June in the hills (field data, Frede-
Tucker and Tucker, 1984–85). The shearers keep a percentage of the
wool as pay; the rest the shepherds sell to trading-caste middlemen from
the plains who resell it at the great market to the southeast in Panipat.
The commercial system for wool from Himachal once it has left Gaddi
hands has not been studied, but the high rate of profits for the shepherds
has been clearly established. According to Bormann, each sheep pro-
duces at least one kilogram of wool annually, which the shepherd sells
for Rs 25–45, depending on its color and quality.
Some of the Gaddis’ goats are sheared once annually, to provide the
coarse wool which is woven into rain-resistant blankets and glacier boots
for the shepherds’ migrations. But this is a minor element of the goats’
value. More important is the milk which is a staple of the shepherds’ diet
on migration. Of greatest financial value is the meat: up to 40 percent
of the goats in each flock are sold in the cold months at markets in the
lower hills, as are some sheep (Bormann, 1980). A goat or sheep sold for
slaughter brings Rs 150–450, depending on its size and quality.
The profits from grazing make a dramatic difference to Gaddi families’
income. The shepherd households in Bormann’s 1980 survey earned an
average of Rs 597 from agriculture, in contrast to Rs 2,744 for non-
shepherd families. But the average net income from herding was Rs 5,240.
Thus, with cash income from their sheep and goats dominating the money
flow of many Gaddi households, they have been very responsive to mar-
ket conditions since the cash nexus expanded in the hills at the start of
British rule, and their flocks seem to have expanded when prices were
relatively high.
The Gaddis have both provided for their own needs and responded
to market demand by evolving a complex annual transhumant migra-
tion cycle. Recent field data suggest that for Gaddi families anchored
in the Kangra valley, three distinct migratory strategies have developed
(field data, Frede-Tucker and Tucker, 1984–85). The first migration is
hardly more than local, yet it is essential for the regeneration of village

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pasture during the wet monsoon months. In villages on the Dhauladhar

flanks, families send their livestock, mainly cows and buffalos with some
sheep and goats, upward to the high pastures below the passes, at dis-
tances rarely more than half a day’s walk from their permanent homes.
The villagers maintain makeshift shelters there, which are rebuilt each
monsoon season. Men, women, and children all participate in the work
of caring for the livestock as well as harvesting high-altitude grass for
winter fodder. The family agricultural cycle need not be disturbed; there
is constant interaction between the permanent homes and the temporary
shelters.
A second and longer migration route begins in permanent villages
lower in the Kangra valley, from which families move their flocks across
the Dhauladhar passes as soon as the snows melt, to solidly built sum-
mer homes beyond on the slopes of the Ravi River. Men precede their
families north with the flocks, and their families follow in time to harvest
winter wheat planted on steep terraces the previous September.
The third pattern is the most dramatic and difficult, since it exploits
the northernmost alpine region in summer and the most inadequate foot-
hill areas in winter. It is also the most commercialized and lucrative, as
its dominant purpose is to produce wool and meat for lowland markets.
From permanent homes in the Kangra and Chamba areas professional
year-round shepherds leave their families behind and guide their flocks
northward over the Dhauladhar from Kangra and over the Pir Panjal
from both Kangra and Chamba, into the regions of Pangi and Lahaul,
which together constitute the watershed of the Chenab River. The routes
and distances vary greatly from one flock to another, and the vegetation
changes from conifer forests and lush meadows to the dry, sparsely for-
ested region of the north, beyond the reach of monsoon storms. Two or
more shepherds may combine their flocks into composite sizes of 300
to over 1,000. In the summer pastures the alpine vegetation is similar
to that of western Tibet, of which Lahaul is in some ways a westward
extension (Mani, 1978). The flocks graze as high as 5,000 m on pastures
susceptible to severe summer droughts, often spending as little as two to
four weeks at their northernmost locations before retreating southward
in September ahead of the winter’s first snows. Life for these shepherds
and their flocks is no easier in the winter, for they must travel hundreds
of kilometers southeastward into shrinking, overgrazed lands among the

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settled agricultural villages and government forests along the borders of

Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states. Of the three variations on Gaddi trans-
humance, this last is the one most closely associated with overgrazing in
summer pastures, along migratory routes, and in winter grazing lands.
There is no clear evidence of any overgrazing pressure in these moun-
tains until after the British occupation began in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. When the closely associated patterns of overgrazing and land-use
disputes began to appear, they first arose in the outlying low hills where
the settled farming population was most dense and competition for
winter pasture was most severe. This centered on the Siwalik hills and
the Kangra valley, where governments had actively regulated both pas-
ture use and social relations long before the British arrived. There, in the
autumn Gaddi flocks passed through villages to glean the stubble from
newly-harvested fields, and the peasant owners provided the shepherds
with food. In return, fields were fertilized for the following year’s crops,
a crucial element of the agricultural cycle. Each Gaddi flock then settled
for the winter in the Siwaliks. At this point the government played a vital
role. Toward the west the Raja of Chamba, as overlord of all Gaddis, sent
his agent, always a Gaddi, to western Kangra to assign a run to each flock
for the cool months (Lyall, 1874:51). Most flocks returned to the same
run annually, but an aggressive shepherd who found new pasture could
negotiate with the raja’s agents for the right to graze there. The raja’s of-
ficial, as arbiter of the commons, received payments according to the size
of each flock. These payments, in effect, legitimized and regulated the
role of each user of the resource: government, peasant, and shepherd.
Beyond the reach of the Chamba raja, in the southeastern hills around
the Sutlej valley, other Princely States such as Mandi and Bilaspur held
control, but only over winter grazing. They had no traditional ethnic
connections with the Gaddis, and saw them entirely as outsiders to be
seasonally accommodated (Singh, 1912; Wright, 1917).

British Colonial Administration

In the early nineteenth century many of the kingdoms of the hills came
under the domination of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab plains, which
exacted tribute or annual revenue from the rajas, and used some timber

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for urban and military construction (Lyall, 1874:22). But the Sikhs never
made significant changes in administration or land tenure systems in the
hills, and traditional systems were left largely intact.
During the same decades British imperial power was extending north-
westward up the Ganges basin. The Sikh wars of the 1840s ended with
European victory and thus British control of the Punjab hills in 1849.
From that date modern resource exploitation and management in the
mountains began. The colonial administrative map of the mountains
became rather intricate. The new regime allowed various hill rajas to
continue administering their former states under British supervision,
most notably the rajas of Jammu-Kashmir and Chamba. But key regions
of the eastern hills, as well as the Kangra valley in the west and the high
mountain zone, were all administered directly by the British.
The first priority of the new government was to stabilize and extend
agriculture; the second was to exploit and sustain the mountain for-
ests (Barnes and Lyall, 1889). The initial task, an intricate one, was to
codify land tenure systems: to assign rights of ownership and use to
tilled, grazed, and forested land as a basis for revenue collection. The
underlying purpose of the early settlements was to reconcile the pre-
British systems of collective land tenure with principles of private prop-
erty and individual responsibility for tax payments. Barnes, the officer
who conducted the 1854 Land Settlement of Kangra district, first sur-
veyed and recorded the ownership of arable land. Though a painstaking
task, this was relatively straightforward. More serious difficulties lay with
the control and regulation of non-tilled land or “waste,” which seemed
far in excess of foreseeable needs. Barnes dismissed this issue by giving
full grazing rights to individual peasants for small plots adjacent to their
villages, and by granting the landholders of each village collective owner-
ship of large grazing and forest areas (Barnes and Lyall, 1889; Anderson,
1898). He made a rough attempt to draw boundaries through these
ranges, arbitrarily allotting all land on each side of a ridge to the village
below, though many villages’ commons had previously overlapped. He left
no detailed survey of the commons, in contrast to his precision on tilled
land, for only crop-producing land was to be directly taxed.
Addressing the needs of the transhumant graziers, the 1854 settle-
ment guaranteed that Gaddis who did not own land in a village still

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retained their grazing rights, and cancelled the grazing fees which had
previously formalized their rights to pasture. Gaddis seem to have been
quick to exploit their strengthened position, in response to an expansion
of the market economy which was occurring at the same time. Military
and political stability in the region after 1850 led to a rapid extension
of trade between the hills and the Punjab plains and a rise in prices of
marketed goods. This included wool and mutton, and the Gaddis re-
sponded quickly. Within a decade the market value of each animal is
said to have risen sharply, and the numbers of sheep increased steadily
as well. Leading Gaddis began charging others at increasing rates for the
use of their winter pastures, as well as looking for profitable new pas-
ture (Lyall, 1874). In the Palampur area of eastern Kangra valley, where
British planters had begun buying waste land to plant tea estates, the
shortage of unclaimed grazing land quickly began to drive prices up and
raise competition between sedentary villagers and shepherds (Anderson,
1887; Kangra Gazetteer, 1924–25).
The 1850s and 1860s were also the period when commercial timber
cutting put sudden, intense new pressure on non-agricultural land in the
high mountains. In the deodar and kail belt there was a vast demand for
timber after 1850, first as building material for the towns of Punjab and
by the 1860s as sleepers for the great railway network being constructed
in the plains (Tucker, 1982, 1983). The government at first put out its
orders to private contractors, but their work was so crude and wasteful
that this system was abandoned after a few years. Uncontrolled cutting
by contractors, plus expanding grazing in the forests being cut, together
led to the first modern crisis of forest and pasture management in the
western Himalaya. The existing Settlement and Revenue Department
was entirely inadequate to deal with the new land-management issues.
Hence, the first national Forest Law for British India was passed in
1865 and the Indian Forest Service was established under German for-
esters imported to implement it. A combined German and British forestry
cadre set out to improve long-term forest management and guarantee
future watershed stability, timber stocks, and subsistence supplies of
fuelwood and fodder (Stebbing, 1922). The 1865 law was the first at-
tempt to give the government indisputable power to regulate most forests
and pastures, which the earlier land settlements had failed to provide.

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Settlement officers in the 1860s and 1870s recognized that timber stands,
once cut, would never regenerate unless grazing was curtailed, since plant-
ing forests by hand was not feasible in the hills.
Barnes’s successors in Kangra recognized that by giving away the
government’s claim to ownership of the commons he had deprived them
of the power to regulate forest and pasture lands. Lyall’s revision of the
land settlement system in 1874, and then the forest law of 1878, effect-
ively gave the government that power. From 1878 onward a system of
Reserved and Protected Forests was constructed, enabling the Revenue
and Forest departments together to regulate most forest and grazing lands.
The Punjab government compiled local lists of grazing rights in the
early 1880s, and on that basis adopted in 1897 a forest settlement for
Kangra District to complement and complete the existing land settle-
ment (Schlich, 1882; Anderson, 1898).
The core of the grazing settlement was the lists of each shepherd’s
pasture area, and a permissible maximum size for each flock. Every mi-
gratory Gaddi was to pay three fees annually: one for his winter pasture,
a second on migration, and a third for alpine summer grazing rights
(Anderson, 1887; Wright, 1917). In addition, the specific migration route
for each flock was stipulated and flocks were required to move five miles
per day on migration, stopping only one night in any location. This sys-
tem was designed to codify existing practices; the settlement report out-
lined local traditions and agreements in great detail. By giving an entire
social and ecological cycle formal status backed by government, it began
a new era in the management of the commons.
The Gaddis were now faced with a new set of fee-collecting agents,
and they naturally responded with evasive strategies. Guards might be
bribed by liquor, meat, or money, or one shepherd with a flock below
his maximum allowance could take another’s excess animals as his
own, so that they both could avoid fines. The guards could retaliate by
over-counting a flock or threatening a shepherd with lengthy discus-
sions at the regional forester’s office. In some instances the shepherds
began attempting to avoid the check-posts entirely. The pastoral cycle
in the hills was becoming more regulated and more laced with conflict
between government and shepherds. But there came to be an important
gradient from low hills to high mountains: both ecological pressures and

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government involvement were becoming more intense in the winter pas-

tures and along migration routes than in summer pastures.
Where the flocks mixed with intensively tilled lands in the lower hills,
difficulties of management rose most rapidly from the late nineteenth
century onward. The extension of tilled land into former pasture was
not a major factor in the increased pressure on fodder reserves, for both
human population and total arable land expanded slowly before 1920
(Anderson, 1898). There were restrictions on opening new land to the
plough, the most important dating from the 1854 settlement which
had stipulated that any new ploughing must have the agreement of all
landowners of a village; this was extremely difficult to obtain (Lyall,
1874; Barnes and Lyall, 1889). Nonetheless, land pressure slowly grew
in the chir pine forests (Thorburn, 1898; Wright, 1917). Competition
for winter grazing lands, which seems to have been restricted to parts of
western Kangra in the 1850s, gradually spread eastward.
The geology of the southeastern Siwaliks made the problem especially
ominous in its scope, for here the unstable sands and alluvial detritus
were exceedingly fragile, and rates of erosion were among the highest in
all of India (Kayastha, 1964; Arya, 1968). Migratory graziers including
Gaddis and the Gujar buffalo herdsmen, who were beginning to spread
eastward from Jammu (Casimir and Rao, 1985), were an important elem-
ent of the challenge. A bewildering variety of grazing fees had grown
up over the years, varying from British to Princely districts, and from
government to village councils to private landowners. British officers
attempted to simplify and standardize the fee structures, with some suc-
cess (Wright, 1917). But others attempted above all to place a limit on
the numbers of sheep and goats arriving each autumn, not only to limit
the amount of pasture consumed but also to reduce the numbers of tree
branches lopped for fodder (Singh, 1912; Grieve, 1920; Mohan, 1934;
Arya, 1968).
The large landowners of Bilaspur state finally attempted a more rad-
ical response to the migratory flocks. Situated on the lower Sutlej River,
where it funneled many flocks down from summer pastures in high
Lahaul and Bashahr, Bilaspur experienced particularly heavy pressure
each autumn in the early years of this century. In 1919 the raja an-
nounced a policy of barring the migrants from crossing his borders at all.
Had he held to that position until October, open conflict would probably

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have resulted, for the herdsmen arriving from the north had nowhere
else to survive the winter. But hurried consultations with British officials
averted the crisis: the Bilaspur authorities backed down, and no district
since then has attempted the impossible task of totally resisting the mi-
gration (Glover, 1921:12).
Pressures on the migration routes, not only biotic but social and ad-
ministrative, were also slowly rising. As early as 1864, in the first detailed
survey of the Punjab mountain forests, Hugh Cleghorn had watched at
the Waru Pass on the Dhauladhar crest as many large flocks poured
northward into the Ravi valley, leaving degraded vegetation in their wake
(Cleghorn, 1864:97–104). Thirteen years later, Sir Dietrich Brandis, the
Inspector General of Forests, described the impact of the annual migra-
tion in a side-branch of the Beas below Kulu.

The lower part of the Tirth valley presents a lamentable scene of desolation, the
slopes on either side ... being furrowed by torrents and scarred all over by land-
slips and incipient ravines, which indicate that grazing and burning are destroying
rapidly the natural covering of the hill sides. (Brandis et al., 1877:4)

The Tirth stream joins the Beas at a precipitously steep point in its
gorge. But farther north into Kulu the valley widens into broad rice ter-
races flanked by splendid stands of deodar and kail, with spruce and fir
forests above them. There, as late as 1914, the forest settlement officer
assessed that forage was adequate for both local flocks and Gaddi mi-
grants (Coldstream, 1914). But his superior, on tour there two years
later, was alarmed at the steady deterioration of pasture, especially in
the high government forests above the valley. There the local populace
of Kulu practised local transhumance on a scale far beyond their subsist-
ence needs, while the professional shepherds moved quickly through
the valley toward the high pastures of Lahaul. He proposed severe re-
strictions for the local flocks, since he shared a guiding principle of the
region’s forestry management: that only the true professional shepherds
should operate on a commercial scale; all others should use wood and
fodder from the forests only to the extent necessary for their own subsis-
tence (Hart, 1916).
In the Kulu valley of the upper Beas, the jewel of Westerners’ imagina-
tions and hopes for the region, it was left to the young official C.G. Trevor

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 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSHUMANT GRAZING

in 1920 to devise a Working Plan which might reconcile all the conflict-
ing claims on the forests and pastures. Trevor, later to become India’s
Inspector General of Forests, surveyed the area and concluded that the
forests above Kulu villages were in a “deplorable” condition, with no
regeneration for at least fifty years past. He favored a strict ban on new
cultivation in the higher forests, in order to preserve the unique gran-
deur of untouched tracts. There

... the beams of the sun scarce penetrate the gloom beneath these mighty trees,
where save for the crow of the pheasant and the tap of the wood-pecker all is still.
Beneath the shade of the silver fir the giant Himalayan lilies lift their heads of lovely
flowers and diffuse their fragrance through the forest. (Trevor, 1920:18)

His proposed ban would restrict local flocks, not migrants. By now the
paths and timings of the migration routes were evidently functioning
well enough through the valley. But the condition of the wide meadows
nearing the Rohtang Pass above had not yet been ascertained. As the
most important pass from the outer hills into the alpine region, it had
been under severe pressure in recent decades. But foresters’ fellings did
not reach the approach to the pass until after Independence; hence, their
attention had not yet turned that high in any systematic way.
To the north of the Pir Panjal range beyond the Rohtang, and a series
of other high passes, lies the summer territory of the fulltime shepherds
in the alpine zone of Lahaul and Pangi in the upper Chenab River. Deg-
radation of pastures had begun in Lahaul, in part because of a rise in
long-distance trade through the region. Since the 1850s, population ex-
pansion and prosperity on the trade route northward to Ladakh and
western China had increased the demand for building timbers in the
very limited kail forests near Kyelang, the district capital. The interaction
between timber cutting for local use and migratory Gaddi grazing was
significant. The forest settlement officer warned as early as 1888 that
when the pine forests were cut, Gaddi flocks began to graze the stump
land, effectively preventing new forests from growing (Anderson, 1888).
Another forester down the Chenab in Pangi reported at about the same
time that though the Gaddis had no grazing rights in government forests,
they often “trespassed” there, cutting new paths on crumbling slopes
where forest guards could not reach them (Smith, 1886:5).

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Along the main branches of the Chenab, the Forest Department had
begun the task of sorting out the rights of local, permanent villagers from
those of the government and of the transhumant graziers. Early depart-
mental documents indicate that at that time there was more than adequate
summer pasturage for the Gaddis above the village commons, and more
particularly on the left bank of the Chenab, where few permanent villages
were located (Anonymous, late 1870s; Wace, 1901:3). In some side
valleys there were already signs of increased flooding and soil erosion.
Yet the British were reluctant to intervene aggressively along the Chenab,
for local villagers and migratory shepherds had long ago worked out a
system of dividing the pasture which seemed to function relatively well.
Any effort to regulate relations in greater detail would have cost more
than departmental budgets could afford, and would have raised the level
of friction between forest guards and villagers. This the Forest Depart-
ment was willing to avoid, partly because of increasingly troublesome
circumstances below in Kangra.
During the later nineteenth century the human population of the
Punjab hill tract grew far more slowly than the number of livestock.
Rising pressures on the land thus reflected grazing conditions more than
expanded agriculture (Hart, 1916; Phillimore, 1981). In the Kangra re-
gion two important patterns were emerging: a steady expansion of total
livestock, including Gaddi flocks, and equally alarming, an increasing
percentage of goats in the flocks (Wright, 1917). Goats adapt to more
varied and inhospitable conditions than sheep. They are more destruc-
tive to young vegetation, browsing high and intensively on tree seedlings.
They can survive on less nutritious vegetation, and they adapt better to
the summer heat and monsoon rains of the low hills. In harsh winters or
dry summers they lose less body weight; in the winter meat-selling sea-
son they sustain a much higher market price than the lean sheep (Gorrie,
1937b; Bormann, 1980). The trend toward more goats in Gaddi flocks
indicates a decline in available pasture nutrition, resulting in an increase
in soil erosion.
In response to these trends the Punjab authorities began using the
system of grazing regulation in an attempt to influence the size and com-
position of flocks. In 1915 the autumn migration tax, which had been at
Rs 2 per hundred animals and had not distinguished between goats and

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sheep, was separated into a fee of Rs 6 for 100 goats and Rs 4 for 100 sheep,
and a similar fee was set for the winter grazing grounds (Kangra Gazetteer,
1924–25; Punjab Erosion Committee, 1931). This was explicitly an effort
to reduce the total livestock migrating down from Chamba into western
Kangra, and also the first attempt to press shepherds into giving up goats
in favor of sheep. In 1916 a tax was also placed on sedentary goats and
sheep (Punjab Erosion Committee, 1931). The controversy over the use
of the government’s taxation powers to regulate environmental pressures
had begun.
From the end of World War I onward, the rising pressures were
not only social, biotic, and administrative, but also political. By 1918
Mahatma Gandhi was assuming control of the Indian National Congress
and the freedom struggle, and Congress workers were organizing rural
constituencies in many parts of India. Protests against taxes and admin-
istrative restrictions were becoming widespread. In hill regions they
centered on the most obvious restriction—the forest law, especially as it
limited grazing on government lands (Tucker, 1982, 1984). In Kangra
there was steady pressure from landholders to transfer management of
demarcated forests from the Forest Department, which restricted grazing,
to the Revenue Department, which granted new agricultural permits.
The Kangra forest officer, who was responsible for determining which
Reserved Forests should be closed to grazing for purposes of regener-
ation, was virtually paralyzed by the situation (Hart, 1916). He was re-
quired to consult with villagers in detail about which boundaries could
be established for closures without disrupting daily life. But by now he
was finding that the Kangra valley people opposed the closure system
at so many points that almost no silvicultural system could be success-
fully invoked. The Punjab government, anxious to mitigate the sting of
its enhanced grazing fees, arranged for the Forest Department to relin-
quish some forest reserves in the period around 1920 in exchange for the
power to close others to grazing (see details in Punjab Forest Reports,
1919–23).
In Punjab as a whole the hills remained peripheral to the major cen-
ters of population, food production, and political controversy. But by the
1920s the irrigation systems of the plains districts, which were making
the Indus basin the breadbasket of India, were increasingly threatened

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by soil erosion in the Siwaliks. Hence the center of debate on grazing

policy shifted there during the 1920s (Holland, 1928; Coventry, 1929;
Gorrie, 1937a).
The Punjab Forest Department had led the effort for erosion control
since the 1860s (Baden-Powell, 1879), in large part because erosion was
intimately connected with overgrazing and the resulting failure of har-
vested forests to regenerate. A rising sense of urgency from the late 1920s
onward led the Punjab government to search for new strategies which
could renew forest cover through more effective livestock policies, and
the Gaddis’ interests were directly implicated. In 1928 it appointed the
soil conservation specialist, L.B. Holland, to do a systematic study of the
causes of erosion in the Siwalik hills. As had his predecessors, Holland
singled out overgrazing as the most important source of pressure, and
proposed stringent restrictions on seasons and locations where grazing
should be allowed (Holland, 1928; Coventry, 1929).
Holland’s report stirred a public controversy so intense that the gov-
ernment appointed a special committee to hold public hearings in the
districts most affected. The Punjab Erosion Committee, whose report was
published in 1931, centered its attention on the Siwaliks and Kangra,
as well as the rather different issues related to overgrazing in the dry re-
gion around Rawalpindi far to the northwest. Data on the shifting balance
of sheep and goats in transhumant flocks, or on the balance between mi-
gratory and sedentary livestock, were still very difficult to obtain (Gorrie,
1937b:18–20; Mohan, 1933). Nonetheless, the committee concluded
that since 1916 there had been a significant reduction in the numbers
of non-migratory livestock, though no decline in the Gaddis’ flocks. The
broad picture of pasture resources was not reassuring. Most who testified
agreed that, although the extent of pasture had remained largely con-
stant, its quality had continued to deteriorate on both village and gov-
ernment lands. And public dissatisfaction with the Forest Department’s
role remained widespread. The Deputy Commissioner of Kangra, one of
the first Indians to hold that important post, voiced a frequent charge:
“The general belief in the district is that the Forest Department is doing
absolutely nothing to improve grazing or to check denudation” (Punjab
Erosion Committee, 1931). It was a harsh judgment, but it indicated the
prevailing degree of alienation.

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 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSHUMANT GRAZING

There was little pressure from any interest group to raise fees on sheep
or curtail the Gaddis’ flocks, for farmers needed their manure. But many
who testified, including landholders in the valley, agreed that the tax on
goats should be increased, even though goats were a far larger propor-
tion of sedentary farms’ flocks than of the migrants. The 1930 livestock
census counted the farmers as owning 180,231 goats and 54,503 sheep,
while the Gaddis herded 141,377 goats and 234,688 sheep. A Gaddi
spokesman, in rebuttal, insisted to the committee that the goats were es-
sential, for their hair provided the waterproof blankets which they used
on their migrations; furthermore they also provided milk, which the
sheep did not (Punjab Erosion Committee, 1931).
The committee’s work came to little; its hearings demonstrated that
the elements of the public whose interests were affected were rapidly
learning the techniques of pressuring the government not to tighten
restrictions. Its various suggestions for policy changes produced little
action, for by the 1930s the government no longer had the capacity to
implement new resource management policies. It was inhibited by the
severe staffing shortages of the Depression years, and by rising political
discontent. Although no formal political campaign based at Congress
headquarters to the south had much impact in Kangra or the outer hills
before 1939, Kangra’s villagers registered the general malaise (Sharma,
1977). In 1937 the Punjab government reviewed the situation once
again, for as the Lieutenant-Governor stated in launching the Garbett
Commission, “My object is to get the system to work in such a way as to
make it as little unpopular as possible. Particular care should be taken
to avoid anything in the way of harshness or rigidity of system where
not absolutely necessary” (Punjab Government Garbett Commission,
1938:102).
Concentrating again on erosion in the Siwaliks, the new commission
reaffirmed that few improvements could be made in either the livestock
pattern or the cycle of soil erosion until some equitable system of lim-
iting the number of livestock could be devised. Confronting the rules
regarding winter grazing of Gaddi flocks in the Siwaliks, it concluded
that the problem of reducing the migratory flocks but not local live-
stock was too complex to resolve, and suggested that the rise in graz-
ing fees which the previous commission had established be rescinded,
for popular opposition had increased more than the effective impact of

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the higher rates would justify. Instead Garbett and his colleagues (four
Indian members of the Punjab legislature), searching for a new approach
to balancing ecologically sound management with equitable access to
forage, proposed a novel system. All Gaddi flocks should be listed on a
common register. The maximum carrying capacity of the land for sheep
and goats should be determined. Finally, that number should be divided
into individual quotas, with prohibitively high fees set for animals in
excess of the quotas.
But nothing more could be implemented in the remaining pre-
Independence years. The war period between 1939 and 1945 strained all
administrative services to the limit, and political tensions with Congress
left the government unwilling to take any further unpopular actions,
even so much as raising a grazing fee. This drift coincided with the war-
time economy, which produced steep rises in the price of both wool and
mutton. The Gaddis are reported to have increased their flocks rapidly,
exacerbating the environmental pressures which would face the succes-
sor government at Independence (Parmar, 1959).

Since Independence

The dilemmas of the grazing economy have remained unresolved since

1947, in a context changed by a basic political reorganization, in those hills
as throughout India (Mahapatra, 1975). Himachal Pradesh became a
separate state in 1948, when the Princely States of the hills, newly an-
nexed by Nehru’s government, were declared as a state separate from
Punjab. Eighteen years later, in 1966, Kangra district and its outriding
areas were also separated from Punjab and added to Himachal, setting
the state in its present form, geographically far better integrated than be-
fore (Sharma, 1977). Its legislature has had final authority over land and
resource policy, and each district has been represented, thus giving the
grazing interest a direct voice in the politics of livestock management.
The state government appointed further commissions to study the
grazing problem in 1959 and 1970. The first was chaired by B.S. Parmar,
a forester and former subordinate of R.M. Gorrie, the distinguished
British soil specialist who had done much to focus attention on the
Siwaliks a half-generation before. The Parmar Report was explicitly a

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 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSHUMANT GRAZING

response to the flood of graziers’ petitions to the state government in

Simla since 1948, demanding more open access to Reserved Forests or
lower grazing fees (Parmar, 1959:12). As a counter-move representing
the deep alarm of the Forest Department, Parmar uncompromisingly
asserted,

... these graziers with their large flocks, which are ever on the increase, have
always been conspicuous enemies of the forests particularly in hill tracts. In a forest
tract, in which their flocks graze in a concentrated manner or through which they
pass, undergrowth vanishes, regeneration is no more, seedlings are eaten away,
shrubs and bushes are munched and even the saplings cannot escape uninjured.
They have been a constant headache to the Forest Department and in spite of the
best efforts their number had been on the steady increase. (Parmar, 1959:14)

Parmar’s proposals reiterated well-known strategies of raising grazing

fees and further restricting livestock rights in Reserved Forests, though he
recognized that this would elicit heavy political opposition. In addition,
he reflected the largely post-Independence effort to improve the quality
of livestock, proposing that the state government reinforce its efforts to
improve breeding and raise the profits from each animal’s milk produc-
tion. But he saw little possibility of encouraging improved breeding of
sheep and goats as a means of reducing the impact of migratory flocks.
Parmar’s proposals further heightened the grazier’s opposition to gov-
ernmental restrictions, and the higher fees which he had demanded were
not imposed. In the following decade the expansion of small-scale farm-
ing continued to reduce grazing lands. And the great Bhakra Dam on the
Sutlej near Bilaspur heralded the era when Himachal’s hydropower po-
tential would be exploited, putting more grazing and arable land under
water behind each new dam. In 1967 the state government organized a
meeting in Bilaspur where its representatives and the shepherds agreed
to reduce the percentage of goats in the flocks, allowing the shepherds
to add sheep in compensation. But the following year the government
dropped the negotiations and instead proposed only to reduce the per-
missible number of goats by 20 percent (Bormann, 1980).
Under these deteriorating political relations another commission was
established, this one more sympathetic to the shepherds’ dilemmas. Its
1970 report highlighted two rising pressures on them. First, private
owners of winter grazing lands in the Siwalik districts were charging

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

steadily rising fees to Gaddis who came from Lahaul’s highlands and
needed to continue winter grazing on their lands (for background, see
Walters, 1922:13–15). Second, village councils on the migration routes
for some of the same flocks, from the Simla area downward, were also
raising their passage fees rapidly, using the powers which Barnes had
granted them over a century before (Punjab Forest Report, 1939–40). As
a result, Gaddi profits were being siphoned off to other interests along
their way, and the incidence of flocks grazing illegally in the government
forests was consequently rising.
The Commission found it very difficult to propose politically viable
strategies. It condemned the escalating grazing fees on private and village
lands, but once again proposed that on government lands the fees on
goats, as well as on the rapidly rising population of water buffalo, should
be raised. Beyond this it could suggest little, for it faced an intensify-
ing dispute as to what the local circumstances actually were. All sides
were coming to realize that reliable and adequately detailed data on live-
stock and grazing resources were very difficult to obtain. On most major
issues the commission proposed an intensive five-year effort to gather
systematic data on the grazing system, while existing management sys-
tems remained unchanged. Since then no major commission has been
formed and, indeed, the existing management system has continued to
function largely as before. This has been the only politically feasible out-
come, reflecting as it does an uneasy balance of political forces in the state.
What can be concluded regarding the actual management of flock
size and composition and the long-term impact on the ecology of the
mountain region? The first question is anthropological, not silvicultural.
Little has been written on the Gaddis’ strategies of flock management. But
Phillimore reports that the Gaddis themselves believe that transhumance
is declining, partly because fathers now find it more difficult to recruit
their sons for the hard migratory life. They are particularly troubled
about rising social and biotic pressures in the winter pasturelands. But
they tend to blame the Forest Department’s closures of Reserved Forests,
rather than the expansion of subsistence agriculture, flooding of grazing
lands for hydroelectric dams, or declining pasture quality (Phillimore,
1981:109–110; Casimir and Rao, 1985).
Recent data from the high summer pastures (field data, Frede-Tucker
and Tucker, 1984–85) suggest a slower but inexorable rise in pressures

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 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSHUMANT GRAZING

there as well. For shepherds summering in Lahaul the problem is not

bureaucratic or financial so much as climatic. Grazing fees paid to the
Forest Department as they move northward (presently Rs 0.20 for each
sheep and Rs 0.40 for each goat, with the newborn exempted) remain
relatively very low, and arrangements for payment are easily made at
established checkpoints. But in the arid northern climate, any season
following inadequate winter snows, as in 1985, or any summer when
the light monsoon showers fail entirely, reduces eligible pasturage to
the vanishing point. Flocks must move among the high peaks almost
constantly, and in 1985 they were forced to begin the return southward
almost a month early. As they arrived at the farms below the passes,
crops were still standing and fields not yet ready to glean.
Finally, what are the ecological consequences of these trends? Infor-
mation on this is far from systematic, though available fragments all in-
dicate a slow deterioration in all the elements of the picture: quality of
vegetation, diversity of plant species in the pasture lands, and tree regen-
eration in forests which are not closed periodically to grazing. Presently
operative Working Plans for nearly all Reserved Forests of the region
point to the loss of biotic resources in their ranges. In the outer Siwaliks
which overlook the Punjab plains, data on vegetation and soils have
been plentiful since the anti-erosion campaign became intensive in the
late 1920s. At that time Coventry described the trend toward vegetation
types associated with drier soils, and the underlying permanent loss of
soil fertility (Coventry, 1929:6–14). Gorrie’s studies in the later 1930s
pointed up the greatly increased rates of water runoff and soil erosion on
denuded slopes (Gorrie, 1937a:581–582). Gorrie was persistent, con-
tinuing his studies throughout the Second World War. Shortly before the
war ended, he and his assistant, Parmar, studied the outer Dhauladhar
slopes closely, and documented that along migration routes toward the
first passes, turf was being torn away and hillsides were becoming less
stable (Parmar, 1959:14). Recent field studies have confirmed these pat-
terns of distress in the winter pasture areas, documenting impoverished
nutritional quality in the vegetation as well as soil loss (Gupta et al.,
1963; Kapoor, 1973; Christiansen, 1981; Cioffi, 1981).
Data on the pastures of Lahaul and Pangi are less extensive and pre-
cise. There, beyond the monsoon rains and the highest tree cover, large

137
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

flocks must pass the summers almost steadily on the move over the
fragile uppermost watersheds of the major rivers. The botanists Polunin
and Stainton (1984:20) have indicated that grazing has eliminated many
plant species from the meadows, but that the vast pasturelands still pres-
ent a highly varied picture, from fields of alpine flowers in some still-
virgin meadows, to the severely reduced vegetational complex of other,
heavily grazed pastures. Unfortunately, no department of government
has active responsibility for studying or managing these highlands. Hence
they evolve largely unknown to anyone but the Gaddis themselves.

References

(All publication places are in India unless otherwise specified.)

Anderson, A., 1887: Report on the Forest Settlement in the Kangra Valley. Lahore,
Government Press.
———, 1888: Settlement of Lahaul Forests in the Kulu Sub-Division of the Kangra
District. Lahore, Government Press.
———, 1898: Final Report of the Revised Settlement of Kangra Proper.
Lahore, Government Press.
Anonymous, late 1870s: Papers on the Demarcation of Chamba Reserved For-
ests. Lahore, Government of Punjab (typescript).
Arya, S., 1968: Working Plan for Nahan Forest Division. Simla, Government Press.
Baden-Powell, B.H., 1871: Punjab Forest Administration Report, 1870–1871.
Lahore, Government Press.
Barnes, G.C. and Lyall, J. B., 1889: Report of the Land Revenue Settlement of the
Kangra District, Punjab. Lahore, Government Press. (Identical to Barnes’ first
Settlement Report, 1854.)
Bormann, H.-H., 1980: Shepherding in the Dhaula Dhar. Palampur, Indo-German
Development Project.
Brandis, D., Baden-Powell, B.H., and Stenhouse, W., 1876: Suggestions Regarding
the Demarcation and Management of the Forests in Kulu. Calcutta, Govern-
ment Press.
Casimir, M.J. and Rao, A., 1985: The pastoral ecology of the nomadic Bakrwal of
Jammu and Kashmir. Mountain Research and Development, 5(3): 221–232,
Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
Champion, H.G. and Seth, S.K., 1968: A Revised Survey of the Forest Types of
India. New Delhi, Government of India.

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Christiansen, T. et al., 1981: Report on Erosion Hazard of the Area of the Indo-
German Dhauladhar Project. German Agency for Technical Cooperation,
Giessen, West Germany.
Cioffi, P.J., 1981: Effects of livestock on vegetation. The Wildlife of Himachal
Pradesh, Western Himalayas. School of Forest Resources, Orono, Maine,
U.S.A., pp. 115–119.
Cleghorn, H., 1864: The Forests of Punjab. Roorkee, Engineering College Press.
Coldstream, J., 1913: Revised Settlement of Kulu Subdivision. Simla, Government
Press.
Coventry, B.O., 1929: Denudation of the Punjab Hills. Indian Forest Records,
XIV, Part II.
Das, E.S. and Gupta, G.C., 1967: Problem of grassland improvement in the hills
of Western Himalayas. Indian Forester, 93: 22–26.
Eardley-Wilmot, S., 1906: Notes on a Tour in the Forests of Jammu and Kashmir in
1905. Calcutta, Government Press.
Gairola, J.P., 1947: The Ghaggar River catchment area. Indian Forester, 73:
82–83.
Glover, H.M., 1921: Report on the Forest Settlement, Sutlej Valley, Bashahr State.
Simla, Government Press.
Gorrie, R.M., 1937a: The foothills grazing problem in India. Agriculture and Live-
stock in India, 7: 579–584.
———, 1937b: Forest Working Plan for Mandi State Forests, 1937–56. Lahore,
Government Press.
Grieve, J.W.A., 1920: Note on the economics of nomadic grazing as practised in
Kangra District. Indian Forester, 46: 332–340.
Gupta, R.S., Khybri, M., and Singh, B., 1965: Run-off plot studies with different
grasses with special reference to conditions prevailing in the Himalayas and
the Siwalik region. Indian Forester, 91: 128–133.
Hart, G.S., 1916: Note on a Tour of Inspection in the Kulu and Kangra Forest
Divisions, Punjab. Simla, Government Press.
Himachal Pradesh Grazing Advisory Committee, 1970: Report. Solan, Himachal
Pradesh Government Press.
Holland, L.B., 1928: Report on Denudation and Erosion in the Low Hills of Punjab.
Lahore, Government Press.
Hutchison, J. and Vogel, J.P., 1933: History of the Punjab Hill States. 2 Vols., Lahore,
Government Press.
Ibbetson, D., MacLagan, E.D., and Rose, H.A., 1911: A Glossary of the Tribes and
Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province. Lahore, Government
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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Kapoor, D.P., 1973: Fifth Working Plan for the Kulu and Seraj Forests. Simla, Gov-
ernment Press.
Kayastha, S.L., 1964: The Himalayan Beas Basin: A Study in Habitat, Economy and
Society. Varanasi, Banaras Hindu University.
Lyall, J.B., 1874: Report of the Land Revenue Settlement of the Kangra District,
Punjab. Lahore, Government Press.
Mahapatra, L.K., 1975: Pastoralists and the modern Indian State. In Leshnik,
L.S. and Sontheimer, G.D. (eds), Pastoralists and Nomads in South Asia.Hei-
delberg, West Germany.
Mani, M.S., 1978: Ecology and Phytogeography of High Altitude Plants of the North-
west Himalaya. New Delhi, Oxford University Press.
Mohan, N.P., 1934: Revised Working Plan for the Forests of the Hoshiarpur Forest
Division, 1933–34 to 1950–51. Lahore, Government Press.
Newell, W.H., 1955: Goshen, a Gaddi Village in the Himalayas. In Srinivas, M.N.
(ed.), India’s Villages. Calcutta, West Bengal Government Press, pp. 51–61.
———, 1967: Report on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Census of India
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———, 1970: An upper Ravi village: the process of social change in Himachal
Pradesh. In Ishwaran, K. (ed.), Change and Continuity in India’s Villages.
New York, U.S.A., Columbia University Press, pp. 37–56.
Nitzberg, F.L., 1970: Land, labor and status: the social implications of ecologic
adaptation in a region of the Western Himalayas of India. Ph.D. disserta-
tion, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Parmar, B.S., 1959: Report on the Grazing Problems and Policy of Himachal Pradesh.
Simla, Government Press.
Parry, J., 1979: Caste and Kinship in Kangra. Routledge, Kegan, Paul, London.
Phillimore, P.R., 1981: Migratory graziers and their flocks. In The Wildlife of
Himachal Pradesh, Western Himalayas. School of Forest Resources, Orono,
Maine, U.S.A., pp. 98–110.
Polunin, O. and Stainton, A., 1984: Flowers of the Himalayas. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Punjab District Gazetteers, Kangra District 1924–25, 1926: Lahore, Government
Press.
Punjab Erosion Committee, 1931: Report. Lahore, Government Press.
Punjab Forest Administration, 1870–1947: Annual Reports. Lahore, Government
Press. Selected years.
Punjab Government (Garbett) Commission, 1938: Report. Lahore, Government
Press.
Samler, W.H.G., 1935: Revised Working Plan for the Kulu Forests, 1934–35 to
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Schlich, W., 1882: Suggestions Regarding the Demarcation and Management of the
Forests in Kulu. Calcutta, Government Press.
Sharma, Ranbir, 1977: Party Politics in a Himalayan State. New Delhi, National
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Singh, Durga, 1912: Forest Settlement Report of (Kahlur) Bilaspur State in the Simla
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Smith, Gisborne, 1886: Report on the Forests of the Upper Ravi River. Lahore, Gov-
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Stebbing, E.P., 1922: The Forests of India. John Lane, London, Vol. I.
Thorburn, S.S., 1898: Introduction. In Anderson, A. (ed.), Final Report of the
Revised Settlement of Kangra Proper. Lahore, Government Press.
Trevor, C.G., 1920: Revised Working Plan for the Kulu Forests, 1919–20 to
1943–44. Lahore, Government Press.
Tucker, R.P., 1982: The forests of the Western Himalayas: the legacy of British
colonial administration. Journal of Forest History, 26(3): 112–123, Durham,
N.C., U.S.A.
———, 1983: The British colonial system and the forests of the Western
Himalayas, 1815–1914. In Tucker, R.P. and Richards, J.F. (eds), Global
Deforestation and the Nineteenth Century World Economy. Duke University
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———, 1984: The historical context of social forestry in the Kumaon Himalaya.
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———, 1986: The British Empire and India’s forest resources: the timber lands
of Assam and Kumaon, 1914–1950. In Richards, J.F. and Tucker, R.P. (eds),
The World’s Forests and the Global Economy in the Twentieth Century.
Wace, M.E., 1901: Revised Working Plan of the Pangi Forest Division. Lahore, Gov-
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Walters, O.H., 1922: A Revised Working Plan for the Kangra and Hoshiarpur Divi-
sions, 1920–21 to 1929–30. Lahore, Government Press.
Wright, H.L., 1917: Report on the Forest Settlement of the Mandi State Forests.
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141
 VI
The British Empire and India’s Forest
Resources: The Timberlands of Assam
and Kumaon, 1914–1950∗

I n each forested region of India the first era of massive deforestation

occurred shortly after it was absorbed into the British Empire, at a time
of transition in the area’s political economy. Whatever the time for each
area, from roughly 1770 to 1860, it was a period of new commercial pos-
sibilities for timber sales or alternative cash crops, with no public agency
yet in place to enforce any systematic timber management or balanced
land use policy. Then gradually, as the imperial bureaucracy became es-
tablished on the land, greater planning and efficiency of forest use evolved,
especially after the Indian Forest Service was established in 1865. The
nineteenth century saw massive land clearances for agricultural expansion,
but in the later decades there was also careful demarcation and detailed
assessment of major timber stands, first in the commercially valuable
forests accessible to transport lines and urban centers, and gradually
farther into the periphery of the subcontinent in the formerly inacces-
sible Himalayan mountain regions of the Northwest and Northeast.1

∗ Originally published as “The British Empire and India’s Forest Resources: The
Timberlands of Assam and Kumaon, 1914–1950,” in World Deforestation in
the Twentieth Century, J.F. Richards and Richard P. Tucker, Eds. pp. 91–111.
Copyright 1987 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the publisher.

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 BRITISH EMPIRE AND INDIA’S FOREST RESOURCES

A second great wave of deforestation came in the 1940s with the de-
mands of World War II and the transition to independence for India and
Pakistan in 1947. This chapter will focus on the years leading to and
encompassing the second era, in which timberlands reflected the series
of global cataclysms that began in 1914. It will assess the impact on the
extent and composition of two vulnerable forest regions: the conifer and
broad-leafed forests of the western Himalayas and the subtropical mixed
forest lands of Assam in the northeast. Both are crucial for the water-
sheds of major north Indian rivers: northwestern Uttar Pradesh on the
upper Ganges and Assam astride the Brahmaputra. Both are adjacent to
dense lowland agricultural populations with their demands for forest
products. Both were subject to the bureaucratic and economic forces of
the British Empire, and therefore to global events. Both by now have suf-
fered severe ecological degradation.
But the two areas’ specific patterns of resource exploitation have been
very different. The deforestation of Assam has resulted from the complex
of political and cultural factors that led inexorably to the explosions of
1983; its political and ecological downward spiral promises only to con-
tinue in the future. The western Himalayas, in contrast, have seen a longer
and slower decline of their forest cover, and their recent social and
political history has been much less turbulent. There the mountains have
been washing away with a slower steadiness, and local peasant protests
specifically focusing against commercial timber operations have become
a familiar aspect of the scene since the early 1920s. By tracing trends in
these two contrasting but equally fragile environments, this essay will
highlight the dynamics of land policy, economic development, demo-
graphic and ethnic movements, and settings of landscape and vegetation
in Uttar Pradesh and Assam.

The Timber Belt of Kumaon

West of the Nepal border lie the Himalayan mountain districts of

Uttar Pradesh, or U.P., as the state is known by English and Hindi
speakers alike. (Under the British Raj before 1947, it was called the United
Provinces; hence U.P. then as now.) The state as a whole dominates
the upper plains of the Ganges basin. With a population now passing

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100 million, it faces intense pressure on its fertile alluvial soils. From the
early nineteenth century both subsistence and commercial agriculture
expanded into the forested belt below the outermost Himalayan hills. But
in contrast with the vast expansion of tea plantations in Assam, capitalist
export agriculture never became an important element of the Himalayan
hills in the northwest. Again in sharp contrast to Assam, there was little
shifting agriculture to wear away at the vitality of the forest. And there
has been no great peasant migration from the fertile though crowded
U.P. plains to the thin soils of the hills. Instead peasant agriculture in the
hills has seen the steady multiplication of individual farm plots, often
terraced; the intensification of livestock grazing; and a considerable out-
migration to the plains. The changing extent and composition of these
hill forests has been largely a reflection of commercial forestry manage-
ment under the terms of the 1878 Indian Forest Law, plus subsistence
pressures related to settled agriculture and transhumant grazing.
In the U.P. forest region of Kumaon2 three distinct zones of topog-
raphy and vegetation must be considered for any assessment of ecological
change during this period. The belt that daunted settlers throughout the
colonial era is the tarai, a malarial swamp that lies just below the outer-
most hills and accumulates heavy rainfall during the monsoon months
of June through October. The tarai effectively discouraged plains people
from expanding northward until the antimalaria campaigns of the 1950s,
thereby serving as a buffer zone for the hills. Timber cutting was a far
more profitable venture, for the Himalayan foothills from somewhat west
of U.P. and for 2,500 kilometers south-eastward as far as Assam produce
vast quantities of sal (Shorea robust) timber, a versatile broad-leafed hard-
wood that has always been the chief object of north Indian forestry man-
agement. Under British rule the sal forests of the north began to be cut
in the 1770s, as soon as Calcutta grew large enough to require building
timber and fuelwood from farther reaches of the Ganges basin.
Even a thousand miles inland from the Bay of Bengal the elevation in
the tarai is hardly above 300 meters. Immediately beyond the jungle belt
rise the Siwalik hills, the outermost range of the Himalayas; in Kumaon
their steep slopes reach to summits above 2,000 meters. From there
other ranges of roughly similar height roll roughly 100 miles northward,
cut by the gorges of several Ganges tributaries, until beyond the Ganges

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headwaters the High Himalaya towers to over 6,000 meters. The dom-
inant forest community in this region, with elevations between 500 and
2,300 meters, centers on the chir pine (Pinus longifolia), especially on the
dry south-facing slopes where reproduction of other species is extremely
difficult in the long dry months before the monsoon rains.
Above the chir belt—at elevations of 1,800 to 3,600 meters, which
begin to approach alpine conditions—several other conifers dominate:
small stands of the prized deodar cedar (Cedrus deodara) in the northwest,
the kail or blue pine (Pinus excelsa or wallichiana) both of which were
widely lumbered by 1900, and the softer woods of the West Himalayan
spruce (Picea smithiana) at 2,100–3,300 meters and silver fir (Abies pin-
drow) at 2,200–3,300 meters. These stands have been important for
general timber supplies for the regional market, though the spruce und
fir were not cut on a large scale until the era of aggressive economic
development that began after independence.
The years before 1914 were a period of consolidation of forestry
management in northern U.P. based on the 1878 forest law, which with
amendments has been the basis of Indian forestry ever since. Until then
bureaucratic management of the land was entirely in the hands of the rev-
enue officials, centering in the district collector’s office. Neither before,
nor at any time since then, did the revenue authorities have the staff,
training, or interest to manage forest or grazing lands in any detail. Their
interest lay with agriculture: revenue from crop production was the fis-
cal mainstay of the districts. Even after 1878 the collector retained the
power to grant small parcels of forest land to peasants who proved able
to plough it; the Forest Department was rarely able to prevent the slow
depletion of its acreage. The Revenue Department’s principal interest re-
mained the expansion of agricultural production, not by intensification
of production on existing tilled fields but by cutting into pasture and
forest as the hill populace gradually expanded and families produced
additional labor.
The 1878 law did empower the Forest Department to survey and
set aside reserved forests where timber stands could be commercially
profitable and managed for a perpetual crop of trees or where the forest
was so remote that it had no potential for crops and where, as on steep,
fragile mountainsides, its preservation was necessary in order to stabilize
watersheds. The process of establishing the reserves was painstakingly

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slow, occupying much of the foresters’ time in the following years. By the
early 1890s large reserves were established in the lowland chir belt, and
timber harvests primarily for railway sleepers (crossties) provided the
main source of the department’s budget. Higher into the Siwaliks a few
thousand hectares were reserved to assure an adequate fuelwood supply
for the growing European towns in the hills. The chir pine belt in the
Siwaliks and beyond was left to the slow processes of livestock grazing
and encroachment for new crop terracing until after 1900, for chir had
no commercial uses yet.
Shortly after 1900 one of the most important innovations in the his-
tory of Kumaon appeared: the beginning of commercial resin tapping,
for which the chir pine was ideal. Methods of distilling chir resin were
crude at first, and transport of the product from the factory at Bhowali
at an altitude of 1,500 meters was difficult. Large-scale resin production
became a key element of the forest economy only after 1918, but its
promise spurred the foresters on to establish large new reserves in the
middle hills, out of forests that had remained since 1878 in the interim
category of Protected Forest, under the minimal management of the Rev-
enue Department. The New Reserves, as the 1911 to 1916 areas were
called, promised to expand the Forest Department’s scale of operations
and profits dramatically. But local, national, and world events conspired
to disrupt these plans, with severe and permanent degradation of the
Kumaon forests as the ultimate consequence.
Stresses on the broader economy of the hills during World War I were
the key to the forests’ postwar crisis. The war produced severe pressures
on India’s productivity, but the direct effect on the forests was fairly
limited. In the early stages of the war little timber was mobilized for the
struggle in Europe. But by 1917 the wartime Indian Munitions Board’s
timber branch ordered structural timbers for bridges, piers, buildings,
and so forth from the Forest Department, primarily for shipment to
Egypt and Mesopotamia. New port facilities had to be created for these
shipments in Bombay, Karachi, and Rangoon. Railway building, mostly
also in Egypt and Mesopotamia, used almost 2,700 kilometers of wooden
sleepers, at approximately 3,000 sleepers per kilometer.3
Little of this timber was taken from north India; forests nearer the
coasts were adequate to meet the sudden demand. The indirect impact
of the war on the U.P. hills was more significant. Throughout the war the

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Forest Department’s budgets were curtailed and younger staff members

left for military service until the end of 1918. Consequently, planned
harvests in the forest reserves did not meet the targets for each year that
had been set in the forests’ Working Plans. The planned rotations (of as
much as 150 years for the slow-growing deodar) were designed to cull
diseased and “overaged” trees, thereby gradually improving the health
and productivity of the forests. In other words, in terms of the produc-
tion of commercially valuable species the war was a setback in the man-
agement of the reserves: by the silvicultural standards of the time too few
trees were cut and too little revenue was generated.4
The wartime labor shortage extended to another sphere as well, the
daily labor of timber cutting and transport. Thousands of men from the
Kumaon and Garhwal hills left for military service; the exploits of several
of their regiments are still remembered vividly in the traditions of the
British army. Other Pahari men (pahar is a Hindi word for hill or moun-
tain) migrated to the north Indian plains for wage labor there, accelerat-
ing a flow that has continued to the present and that has provided the
single largest source of cash income for farm families of the hills.
This would have had little significance for the vegetation cover of the
Himalayan hill region—the first aerial photographs in the 1930s would
not have registered any thinning tree cover—except for the political ten-
sions that resulted from the labor shortage and added an entirely new
dimension to the ecological affairs of the hills. For forest labor, including
the work of resin tapping, men could earn a small daily wage. Indeed, the
Forest Department perennially pointed to this cash flow as a vital source
of subsistence income for the Pahari economy. In contrast the traditional
porter labor throughout the hills and even in many plains areas of north
India, begar as it was usually called, was unpaid. India’s traditional form
of corvee labor, it was justified by both rajas and the British Raj as the
equivalent of land taxes.
But Mohandas Gandhi had returned permanently to India in 1915,
and others like C.F. Andrews joined him in declaring that begar was
the empire’s method of extracting free labor from unwilling landowners,
humiliating them by this “feudal” exploitation. By 1916 the first active
workers of the Indian National Congress in the Kumaon hills organized
a new scheme of wage payments for coolie labor. Many hill peasants
joined in threatening to boycott all further begar demands. Because this

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coolie labor was the sinew of local administration (the region had no
motorable roads and few tracks wide enough even for bullock carts until
after 1920), the Kumaon administration under Commissioner Wyndham
moved speedily after the Armistice in Europe. By late 1920 a new sys-
tem of entirely paid porterage in the Kumaon districts was ready to be
introduced.5
But it was too late to avoid the spread of political tension to the broader
arena of Gandhi’s first Non-Cooperation Movement, the 1920–1922
nationwide confrontation with the British Raj. The movement featured
civil disobedience against laws that Congress leaders believed unjust,
and no injustice was deeper than that which deprived the masses of their
inherent right to subsistence. For the people of Kumaon nationalist pro-
tests were unprecedented and galvanizing. To them the forest law was
the pure expression of the immorality of British law, for it had given the
Forest Department the right to exclude villagers and their livestock from
reserves when the department considered it necessary for the growth
of new seedlings. The New Reserves of 1911 to 1916 were the visible
symbol of oppression.
One of the most difficult moments in relations between foresters and
peasants, anywhere in India and later in other parts of the Empire as well,
was the moment when a new reserve was declared and fenced. The new
restrictions could be made palatable to nearby villagers only by care-
ful communication between officials and villagers during the transition
period. The war years in Kumaon left little time for announcing the new
reserves or making the small adjustments that might satisfy the village
people.
Moreover, the first months of 1921 were the hottest and driest in many
years. By early March, the season when villagers traditionally burned
the dry grasses of the hills to produce a faster, more lush new growth in
the monsoon rains, the forests of the western Himalayas were in extreme
fire danger. In a few weeks in March and April many thousand acres of
resinous chir pine in the New Reserves and large plantations of young sal
trees at lower elevations flared out of control. The U.P. government had
already come to fear mass peasant uprisings in the plains districts, and
the hill fires, suddenly the worst in modern India’s history, led the gov-
ernment to urgent action. A special commission under Commissioner
Wyndham surveyed the entire range of Pahari grievances about the

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forest law, and by the dry season of 1922 the government adopted
its recommendation: the New Reserves were to be canceled and their
administration returned to the Revenue Department.6
The Forest Department’s outraged protests were set aside, despite
their warning that forests left to the revenue officials would be given no
silvicultural treatment, no reforestation, and no measures against soil
erosion. But the damage was now twice done. Many Civil Forests, as they
were henceforth called, had hardly a tree on them by the 1960s when
they were turned over either to village councils or once again to the
Forest Department. The intricate economic and political forces triggered
by World War I had taken their ecological toll.
The war had another major consequence of a very different sort: it
precipitated intensive efforts to find industrial uses for “India’s forest
wealth,” as an influential book of the time called it.7 Consequently a variety
of tree species that had previously been considered of no commercial
value began to be logged, and new uses for familiar species were devel-
oped. India’s forests were entering the industrial age, and their exploita-
tion was beginning to be much more complex.
World War I brought Britain to the sober realization that the crown
jewel of her empire, India, could no longer be assured of the safe supply
lines to Britain that had determined imperial policy for a century. With
military threats from other powers compounded by rising transport
costs of European goods the Indian Empire would henceforth be advised
to look to its own industrial resources more seriously than in the past.
Moreover, Indian industrialists had begun to challenge their British
counterparts, while Gandhi’s Congress was boycotting imported cloth.
In an ideological parallel, Adam Smith would soon give way to John
Maynard Keynes, and the government of British India would begin to
take a more positive role In India’s industrial economy.8
The clearest indication of more active governmental involvement in
the timber economy concerned the chir pine. Since the turn of the cen-
tury foresters in U.P. had been eager to exploit the revenue potential
of resin manufacture. Immediately after the war the Forest Department
constructed India’s most sophisticated resin-processing plant outside
the city of Bareilly, which lay south of the tarai beyond Kumaon’s southeast
corner.9 The Forest Department defended the expenditure of its funds on
a large-scale industrial plant by assuring its critics that the factory would

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bring a new era of productivity to the Siwalik chir belt and prosperity to
the local villagers, and also by insisting that no private entrepreneur could
be found with adequate capital to set up a plant large enough to be profit-
able; But was the Bareilly plant immediately profitable? As soon as it
began operating, it produced the dominant share of India’s total produc-
tion of resin products and in addition began exporting to Europe. Several
small-scale, privately financed resin-processing plants farther northwest
toward Kashmir, where the chir pine belt ends, could only supply local
markets in the growing towns of Punjab.
But profitability was another matter. As an experiment in innovative
technology and somewhat speculative financing, the Bareilly plant soon
proved to be inefficient in some operations, and costs remained obstin-
ately high into the mid-1920s. The advocates of the old principle that
government should not intervene in the industrial economy were ready
to counterattack. In the U.P. legislative assembly during the budget de-
bate over the Forest Department in 1923, the defenders of laissez-faire
industrialization challenged the foresters’ move into industrial market-
ing.10 The debate ended inconclusively: the Bareilly factory remained in
operation and proved so successful that it still dominates India’s resin
industry. But the U.P. Forest Department adopted great caution in launch-
ing any further expensive forest products industries.
Yet the resin venture did exemplify what the Indian Industrial Com-
mission had recommended at the end of the war: industrial self-sufficiency
for the country. Research on the industrial uses of timber had begun in
India in the early 1870s with the effort to creosote railway sleepers made
from soft conifer such as chir so that they would withstand the attacks of
white ants and the competition from European wood and iron sleepers.
The effort bore little success for many years. But by the turn of the cen-
tury the need for other experimentation on forest products was a major
impetus to establish the Forest Research Institute (FRI) in Dehra Dun,
at the westernmost corner of the U.P. Siwaliks. In short order the FRI
became the colonial world’s premier research station and a model for
later centers in Britain’s tropics. But the resistance to governmental inter-
ference in commerce and industry meant that prior to 1914 its work was
primarily silvicultural: developing the systematic forest botany on which
twentieth-century forestry management is built. Only after the war did
industrial experimentation flourish at the FRI.11 When its vast modern

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headquarters were built in the early 1920s, its experimental labora-

tories were allotted a large acreage. Research on resin products remained
at Bareilly, but during the 1920s research began at the FRI on a wide
variety of possible new tree products. The exploitation of many new tree
species became a major possibility especially from forests such as mixed
broadleaf tracts in the tarai that previously had been ignored except for
their fuelwood potential. U.P. and other provinces appointed a new
officer, the forest utilization officer, whose days were spent not so much
in surveying the reserves as in studying the chemical and physical prop-
erties of each timber, and beyond that, in discussing potential market
demands. Forestry was moving into marketing and publicity, and this
too took an administrative budget that the old guard in the government
attacked. If the annual balance sheet of the Bareilly resin plant was open
to challenge, the profitability of the forest utilization officers and their
ventures into creating future markets in India and abroad was at first
negative. This might be acceptable in corporate finance, the conserva-
tives argued, but it was not an acceptable use of the public treasury.
Neither side clearly won this debate on the industrialization of India’s
forests in the 1920s, for this was only an early stage of the transforma-
tion of industrial policy and the role of the public sector. As for the
government’s role in exploiting natural resources, the results by 1929
were modest. Had the years of relative prosperity and a rewarding mar-
ketplace continued longer the “progressive” foresters might well have
scored greater successes. But when the bottom dropped out of the timber
market by early 1930, and a decade of depression was followed by an-
other world war and the subsequent transition to an independent gov-
ernment, nearly all expansion of the forest products industry was halted
for 20 years and more. The ecological consequence was that lowland
mixed broadleaf forests, and similarly the spruce and fir stands of the
higher Himalayas, were given a long reprieve from the pressures of com-
mercial forestry. Only the 1950s, which are beyond the scope of this
study, transformed them.
The decade since 1918 had seen the full professionalization of the
Indian Forest Service. Specialties of great importance for the long-run
character of commercial forests were reaching their maturity. One of the
most important examples was the vexing problem of how to regenerate
the great sal forests, which had become the core of timber supplies for

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India’s railways when northern deodar supplies were depleted in the

late nineteenth century. It had proved very difficult to find the optimal
pattern of light and moisture in which sal seedlings would thrive; more
articles were written in professional journals and more study tours of the
tarai forests were organized on this than on any other subject. Regen-
eration success rates were considerably higher by the late 1920s, assur-
ing the continued supply of sal sleepers for maintenance of India’s great
network of rails when imports of European sleepers faded away. The
sal forests from northwest of U.P. all the way to the heart of Assam in
the Brahmaputra valley were becoming a showpiece of modern forestry
practice in India.
But railway supplies were a controlled market; ever since the 1860s
both quantities and prices had been determined not by fluctuations of
price levels on an open market but by contracts negotiated between the
Railway Department and the Forest Department. Other timber harvest-
ing, for the urban fuelwood and construction markets of north India,
had always been determined far more by open market demand and the
perpetually unstable price levels of a volatile market. Research on price
levels and the timber market before the 1950s has barely begun for Third
World countries. In India available data are massive but poorly coordin-
ated. Only two rough pictures for the 1920s are available now.12 The
immediate post-1918 period for about three years saw a slump in timber
demand and large unsold inventories of timber in Forest Department
storage. This in turn meant lower operating budgets for forestry. The
next decade on the whole saw higher price levels and expanding demand
for timber. Despite this demand, with generally unstable markets in the
colonial economy over the decade,13 timber marketing remained a vola-
tile, high-risk investment for private entrepreneurs. Forest Department
reports frequently indicate the difficulty the department faced in attract-
ing private bidders at its timber auctions. Only a few Indian timber mer-
chants succeeded in building personal fortunes before 1929, in stark
contrast to the timber fortunes that became commonplace throughout
the Himalayas in the 1940s and 1950s.
Management of the sal and chir forests had become professional and
routinized. The U.P. forest service was the most prestigious in the country.
After the Kumaon debacle of the early 1920s acreage under reserves

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changed little until after independence. Private forests were a relatively

small percentage of the tree cover. And except for inaccessible conifer
stands of the remote high forests of the north, nearly all remaining wood-
lands of any quality were under regular management. (This contrasts
dramatically, as we will see, with the forests of Assam, whose commer-
cial exploitation was still in its early stages.)
Annual statistics of total timber production in U.P. in the 1920s show
a remarkably steady output, expanding somewhat but not fluctuating
widely. During the war production had been steady at 8 to 9 million cubic
feet annually. After the slight postwar dip, production reached a decade
high of 11.3 million cubic feet in 1924, and remained close to that
until 1929.14
Comparing the prosperous years of the 1920s with the Depression
years that followed gives some indication of the effect of national and
international market conditions on north Indian regional timber pro-
duction. To set the context it is worth noting that international tim-
ber exports from the British Indian Empire suffered sharply in the early
Depression years, as did most raw materials from most primary produc-
ing countries. Within India price levels generally fell by over 40 percent
between September 1929 and March 1933.15 Agricultural exports, which
constituted the bulk of India’s export earnings, were particularly hard
hit. Total export earnings fell from $610 million in 1929 to $181 million
three years later. In the case of tea, a plantation crop that had replaced
subtropical forest in Assam and elsewhere in the northeast (discussed
below) both production and export price levels fell dramatically for
several years.
As for timber, exports from British India were entirely restricted to
Burmese teak and mixed tropical hardwoods from the Andaman Islands
in the Bay of Bengal. Andaman timber sales had roughly doubled during
the 1920s, supplying specialized European markets for furniture material.
During the Depression years, income declined by over 30 percent, but
since prices presumably fell, this seems to indicate relatively stable pro-
duction volume. Burmese teak exports had for years been very vola-
tile. Production had hit as much as 60,000 tons in 1912–1913; it then
fluctuated between 14,000 and 29,000 tons by 1931. Timber export
earnings were also hard hit: total figures fell from a high of Rs 135 million
in 1928 to a 1932 low of Rs 26 million. In sum, the Depression reduced

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both harvests and profits from specific forests, but these were confined
to peripheral corners of the imperial possession.16
The Depression’s effects on the forests of U.P. were more indirect.
From the 1924 timber production of 11.3 million cubic feet, a low was
reached in 1931 with 8.2 million, but by 1937 figures recovered to
11.2 million.17 All in all, this was a far less severe fluctuation than any
food crop’s exports suffered. The relation between quantity and price
levels has not yet been carefully studied, but an oblique indicator, total
departmental income, varied equally little except for moderate declines
in the early 1930s. This suggests that timber prices on local and regional
markets in the north, despite sharp short-term fluctuations that troubled
small-scale investors, were about as stable as long-term demand.
In the U.P. in these years the major change was the largely unmea-
sured depletion of Civil Forests and private woodlots for fuelwood, and
this in turn reflected the demographic trends of the time. India’s popula-
tion had risen at relatively low rates throughout the nineteenth century,
even in the area of greatest concentration, the Ganges basin. But the last
great check, the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919, was now behind.
Decennial censuses beginning with 1921 show far faster population
increases, even in the hills.18 These in turn inexorably raised firewood
consumption, as even our very approximate statistics demonstrate. By
this time fuelwood consumption had outstripped commercial logging in
total biomass use, as it was doing in most Third World countries. Thus a
full analysis of the impact of global economic structures on Third World
forest use must ultimately come to grips with the controversies over in-
direct casual connections between colonial political economies and the
Third World demographic explosion. This chapter can only skirt that
debate, moving directly to effects on fuelwood and forest cover.
From a 1914–1915 figure of 7.7 million cubic feet of fuelwood, the
province’s Forest Department increased its cutting to 24 million in
1918–1919, and as high as 30.6 million in 1923. Thereafter it stabilized
just below 25 million cubic feet throughout the Depression years. As one
would expect, demand for fuelwood was inelastic; the impact of world
depression on the single largest use of wood was minimal. And since
these statistics represent only fuelwood provided through Forest Depart-
ment channels, giving no indication of cutting from Civil Forests or pri-
vate woodlots, the subsistence demand on U.P. forests must have been

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several times the commercial demand. This was registered only in the
long slow decline in the density and regeneration of the Himalayan hill
forests.
Within the Reserved Forests there was constant concern over main-
taining long-range rotational cuttings of timber through the 1920s.
Under the fiscal austerity of the government from the mid-1920s onward
and with the constant efforts to retrench stall and administrative costs
that characterized the entire last two decades of British India, no new
British foresters were trained after 1925 and total departmental staff
was cut by as much as one-third after 1929. The ecological effect of all
this is a matter of dispute. On the one hand, the quality of silvicultural
work on the reserves unquestionably suffered, as fewer and fewer profes-
sionals were available for a still vast acreage of forest. On the other hand,
because foresters were always reluctant to allow unsupervised logging by
haphazard or unscrupulous contractors, some important reserves were
harvested at far below their scheduled rates. Did this inhibit the long-run
sustained-yield maintenance of sal and other stands, or did it provide a
buffer supply for meeting the intense demand of the war years that fol-
lowed? Most likely the most important factor was the last, the years of
breathing space that the slack harvests of the 1930s gave the trees before
they were sacrificed in vast numbers to the war machine.
The opening assertion of this essay was that the 1940s were the
second era of massive cutting in India’s forests. From the beginning of
1942 onward timber management was placed on an emergency basis,
with supplies and prices from the Reserved Forests strictly controlled by
the Wartime Mobilization Board and the Forest Department.19 Timber
for bridges, harbors, railways, buildings, and many other uses placed all
foresters and their timber stands under severe strain. Schedules of rota-
tional harvesting were accelerated greatly. But by early 1945, when the
end of the struggle was in sight, the national forestry board concluded
that harvests under its command had been orderly, and no long-range
ecological damage had been done to the reserves. No one seems to have
disputed their assessment.20
In the private sector the story was grimly different. There could be no
serious attempt to control urban price levels for construction wood, and
particularly for fuelwood. Scarcities of wood in north Indian cities were
severe throughout the war, and private contractors made the most of

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rapidly rising prices. Private forest owners eagerly sold their standing
trees for easy windfall profits, and investors made fortunes in a single
season in timber contracting.21 In Nainital, the chief town of Kumaon,
local citizens nearly rioted in 1942 against the contractors and so began
a process of confrontation between peasants and contractors that is in-
tensifying even today.
The Forest Department was appalled by the carnage.22 By early 1945
it began pressing for nationalization of all private timber as the only
hope of preserving the small woodlots that still dotted the landscape.
The result was the U.P. Private Forests Act of 1948, but private owners
had several years in which to turn their trees into rupees before the “con-
fiscation,” as they saw it, could be accomplished. By the time the new
national forest law was passed in 1952, there were few trees left on the
former private lands, and not many more in the Civil Forests, which had
become scrub grazing grounds for scrub livestock. Only the reserves
were still in reasonably head thy condition, and they would come under
increasing pressure from all interests in the accelerated economic devel-
opment of the Five Year Plans.

Forest Depletion in Assam, 1941–1947

On the easternmost fringe of the Himalayan ranges, where the

Brahmaputra has made its great arc to the southwest and the Bay of
Bengal, Assam’s dense forest belt has been under siege since the early
nineteenth century.23 In contrast to U.P., whose total land area of 294,413
square kilometers in 1930 included only 13,512 square kilometers of
government forest, Assam’s 142,854 square kilometers included 53,950
square kilometers under government forest control, one of the highest
percentages in India. A large portion of this was inaccessible from the
outside world, and particularly from commercial and demographic cen-
ters until very recently. This summary will center on two of Assam’s
three major forest regions, both in the Brahmaputra basin.
In the lower reaches, on rich alluvium, stand forests of sal, the far-
thest eastward extension of the great sub-Himalayan sal belt. Because of
the perennially warm, moist climate these are the finest quality of all sal
stands. The down-river districts of Kamrup and Goalpara boast the most

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extensive stands; the adjacent low hills of Darrang and Goalpara also
have large sal reserves. All are of great economic value. Farther north-
east, as the gorges become steeper and the hills higher and less acces-
sible, lie Lakhimpur and Sibsagar districts near the borders of Burma and
China. These still-remote forests now grow mixed subtropical broadleaf
evergreen trees. In earlier times they grew various potentially market-
able species; during the late colonial era the foresters’ principal attention
focused on the towering hollong (Diptero-carpus marocarpus).24
Even more than in most parts of India, the history of Assam’s forests
has been intertwined with the intricate ethnic and cultural patterns of the
state.25 The remote high hills of Assam and adjacent regions are home to a
wide variety of tribal groups whose subsistence has been based primarily
on shifting agriculture, or jhum, as it is locally known. Until recently
tribal populations were thin enough so they presented no fatal threat
to the mixed forest, if left to themselves. But the Brahmaputra lowlands
supported a much more dense, rapidly growing, and culturally different
populace of Hindu rice farmers. In the twentieth century Assam has had
the fastest-growing population of any state in India: from 3.3 million in
1901 to 15 million in 1971, nearly all of the growth before 1947 occur-
ring in the lower areas of settled agriculture.26 Further, the traditional
settlers of the lowlands are Assamese speakers, while the tribals speak
a totally separate set of languages. Most challenging of all, down-river
in Bengal lies perhaps the densest rural population in the world; by the
late nineteenth century Bengali peasants, most of them Muslim, began
drifting up-river into the fertile Assamese forest fringe. The British Raj
had only rudimentary administrative operations outside the lowlands of
Assam, and transport, commerce, and industry were less developed than
in other parts of India. Even before World War I, one cause of depletion
of Assam’s vegetation was the steady encroachment of immigrant peas-
ants on the forest and jhum lands of lower Assam.27
The other transformation, one that quickly penetrated far into the
hills, was the tea industry. After 1833, when the East India Company’s
new charter allowed foreigners to own rural land in India, European tea
planters quickly bought Assam hill land. By 1871, 700,000 acres were
owned by the planters, though as yet only 56,000 acres were actually
producing tea. By 1900 there were 764 working tea estates in Assam,
producing 145 million pounds of tea annually for export.28 Most of the

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plantation workers were outsiders; by 1900, 400,000 alien workers had

been brought into Assam under appalling conditions. The ethnic struggle
for land in Assam, then, was a four-way conflict, and beyond this the tea
planters for many years held the dominant financial and political lever-
age. No wonder that the Forest Department, though separated from the
Bengal Forest Department in 1874, had succeeded in demarcating only a
few thousand acres of lowland sal as Reserved Forest by 1914.
The tea industry of northeast India is a classic case of a foreign-
dominated plantation economy that controlled a colony’s land use pat-
terns and was highly sensitive to markets in the industrialized world.
When we consider the impact of World War I on Assam’s forest lands,
the most immediately evident factor is the wartime prosperity in the tea
industry. Prices in Europe rose, dividends to the planters for their role
in aiding the war effort rose correspondingly, and acreage under crop-
ping extended rapidly. The first years after 1918 saw a brief oversupply
in England’s warehouses and a minor depression in the Assam hills, but
this was succeeded by a decade of prosperity and further expansion of
the acreage under tea.29
The Depression hit the tea industry heavily. The all-India wholesale
price index for tea dropped by 53 percent in four years. By 1933 the
tea industry responded with an international system regulating supplies,
which assured a rebound of profitability by 1934. Economic strength
continued to increase until the war, at which point, although Assam was
threatened by great military danger, the tea industry entered another era
of wartime prosperity. The British government controlled all tea produc-
tion and consumption beginning in 1940, and from early 1942 the rising
competition of Indonesian tea was ended by the Japanese occupation
there. The tea industry in Assam and adjacent northern Bengal expanded
another 20 percent by 1945.
What was the impact on Assam’s forests? Tea planting continued to
expand onto lands previously in government forest, village commons,
or private ownership. The tea industry also slowly came to have a stake
in the adjacent forests, because massive amounts of wood were required
for tea chests. Throughout the nineteenth century the planters preferred
birch chests imported from Scandinavia; plywood technology was not
yet available in India. Later the Japanese began supplying tea chests for
northeastern India.

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 BRITISH EMPIRE AND INDIA’S FOREST RESOURCES

World War I brought intensive efforts to substitute Indian wood

for the whole range of forest product imports. The Forest Department
experimented with Assamese species for sleepers on which to lay the
lines of new railways that moved, painfully slowly, up the gorges toward
Sibsagar and Lakhimpur. They had little success in this quarter, but
the war spurred more successful efforts to begin a plywood industry in
Assam. By the early 1920s several sawmills were opened along the
Brahmaputra valley, experimenting with various subtropical woods from
upper Assam. Here lay a significant contrast with the simultaneous ef-
forts to build a resin industry in U.P. In Assam the Forest Department
was still a fledgling; there was no possibility of finding either capital or
personnel within the department for the necessary sawmill experiments.
Attracting private capital from Calcutta was the only possible course. In
the early 1920s several Calcutta firms (controlled by Marwari or Bengali
businessmen, not Assamese) were given long-term leases on exception-
ally favorable terms, in order to encourage the commercialization of the
upper Assam forests.30
This indicated a fundamental, widely shared view of the balance
between agriculture and forest lands in Assam, which was different in
degree from attitudes toward land use in far more densely settled U.P.
“Wasteland,” a term generally designating land not under settled agri-
culture or forest reserve, was a great opportunity for settling immigrant
peasants. In Assam the Revenue Department, for whom “nonproductive”
land was truly a waste because it produced no taxes, consistently pressed
for opening more land to the plow. The Forest Department acquiesced
on the principle that peasants’ need for land that could be terraced for
wet rice and other grains should take first priority in land allocation.31
The foresters were as oriented to development as their confreres in other
agencies. They would not disagree with the government’s 1938 report,
which stressed “that indigenous people alone would be unable, without
the aid of immigrant settlers, to develop the province’s enormous waste-
land resources within a reasonable period.”32 However, by 1920 the
Forest Department also realized that in the long run this would threaten
timber supplies and watershed stabilization. Hence the department be-
gan to accelerate the painstaking survey of vegetation and land-potential
classification in previously unclassified government forests, especially so
as to delineate sal forests which arguably should be kept from the plow.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

This was also a pragmatic response to the growing up-river flood of

Bengali Muslim peasants. In lowland Goalpara district the population
had risen by 2 percent between the 1891 and 1901 censuses; in the next
10 years it rose by 3 percent. From there the settlers moved up-river,
occupying Nowgong and Kamrup district wastes; by this time they were
beginning to challenge tribal lands as well. They had on their side the
general British assumption that settled agriculture was a far more pro-
ductive use of land than jhum. In the 1920s the movement began to
reach upper Burma, where lowland peasants had no experience of the
climate and agricultural patterns. Despite these difficulties, land hun-
ger and political pressures continued to force Bengali peasants eastward,
and when East Pakistan was created in 1947 from eastern Bengal, a new
wave of Hindu peasants moved from Muslim Pakistan into Assam. In the
20 years ending in 1950 some 1,508,000 acres were turned to settled
agriculture by the immigrants.
How was all this reflected in the timber extraction of the govern-
ment forests? Before the early 1920s the Assam Forest Department was a
small cadre, a few officers whose work was limited to serving short-term
commercial demands, mostly in the sal districts. One report, survey-
ing the 75 years before 1925, complained that “the provision of staff
and improvements in the forests have depended upon the profit of each
year, and not one single budget presented by the Department has even
emerged without large cuts by Finance.”33 The government forests of the
1920s which had long been awaiting survey and reservation, were so
burdened with peasants’ rights that purchasing those rights threatened
to be prohibitively expensive for the government.
Nonetheless, it was a boom period for Assam’s forests. During the
highly profitable years from 1925 to 1929, the reserves increased by
some 400 percent, largely in the sal belt. But for the following decade
severe retrenchments in staff and budget left Assamese forestry virtu-
ally where it had been in 1918, except that shifting cultivation in the
Unclassed State Forests of the hill regions was inexorably expanding.
World War II brought major changes in forest production. Between
1939 and 1945 timber production in the reserves more than doubled,
while fuelwood cutting there more than tripled. The height of this pres-
sure came after 1942 when heavy concentrations of troops moved up
the Brahmaputra valley to stem Japanese forces in Burma. Profits rose far

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 BRITISH EMPIRE AND INDIA’S FOREST RESOURCES

more dramatically still: total receipts for railway timber rose five times,
and military timber use raised eight times more revenue. Much of the
profits went into the hands of private contractors from Calcutta as well
as the Assamese towns, just as happened in U.P. at the same time. The
majority of the contractors were small operators who simply cut and ex-
ported logs using only hand tools. With the exception of the two larger
sawmills established in the early 1920s, no timber processing was done
within Assam. Thus the extreme inefficiency and wastefulness of lum-
bering continued well toward the present.
In one way the war made major changes in forestry technology, not
only in Assam but throughout the Himalayan region. Especially in Assam
the war effort required new motor roads as well as emergency rail lines.
These roads were used by motor lorries and by jeeps, some of which are
still in operation almost 40 years later. Foresters in U.P. agree that the
motorization of forestry that happened during the war years was a turn-
ing point in the mobility of foresters, bureaucrats, and politicians alike.
No longer thereafter did foresters spend nine months each year in their
reserves; they became more familiar with desk work and more remote
from their forests. The scale of timber exports could now be increased
to meet the economic demands of independence. New roads could be
used, as in many parts of the tropics since that time, by peasants looking
for new land to till.
Assam’s forests, having been put under sudden new pressures before
1945, underwent yet another major trauma in 1947, when the influx of
Hindu refugees from East Pakistan moved westward into the Calcutta re-
gion and northeastward into Assam at the same time that transport lines
for Assamese timber were severed at the Pakistani border. The sudden
new pressure of the immigrants accompanied severe disruption of the
state’s administrative machinery and its forest management. The valu-
able sal forests of Sylhet in the south became part of Pakistan just when
the Forest Department had to face severe political pressures to de-reserve
existing forest tracts. From an ecological perspective, some commenta-
tors suggest that this was a period of temporary reprieve from commer-
cial logging, especially in upper Assam. The full picture of the transition
in Assam’s land use during the immediate aftermath of independence is
still not entirely clear.34 But it can safely be concluded that the political

161
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

and ethnic turmoil of that period led to similar, but more intensive, con-
flicts in recent years, on a steadily shrinking base of land and vegetation.
The recent political turmoil there has made regular economic and ad-
ministrative life very difficult; the forests are among the victims.

Conclusion

To what extent should we speak of these changes as being related to

international economic forces? It may be more appropriate to refer to
the whole complex of political, military, and economic structures of the
dying years of colonialism. The two great wars and the devolution of
political power in South Asia were dominant forces in the second and
fifth decades of the twentieth century. Market forces were more pro-
minent between 1918 and 1939, but in U.P. and Assam there was little
international export of timber. The only export plantation crop of signifi-
cance was tea, which slowly expanded its acreage, encroaching largely
on forests; the boom years for tea had been the nineteenth century. But
here Assam’s tie-in to international markets directly affected timber use
too. Though Assam grew little teak or exportable tropical timber, pro-
duction of packing cases and the plywood industry began to emerge
in the 1920s. The Assam government’s development policy encouraged
this, but it was soon caught in the Depression. The worldwide economic
crisis had effects placing Assam in the mainstream of troubles facing
the “primary producing” areas: low prices, low production, management
cutbacks. Parallel to all this were powerful local factors; first of these was
the growing pressure of peasant immigration, which in turn was related
to new political pressures centering in the new Muslim League state gov-
ernment after the 1937 elections.
Ecologically, though, we may come to somewhat different conclu-
sions. All the negative vocabulary of economics for the 1930s may be
inappropriate for trends in vegetation and land use. Slack markets meant
less pressure for production in plantations and forests, though reduced
labor probably increased subsistence pressure on the Assamese hills from
the industrial unemployed. Similarly in the U.P. hills, reserved forest
targets were not met in the 1930s, and resin production fell somewhat;

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 BRITISH EMPIRE AND INDIA’S FOREST RESOURCES

Forest Department profits declined and management of the forests was

reduced. At least by planning standards, this provided a reserve stock
of timber for meeting wartime demands. The massive cuttings of 1942
through 1945 were under strict control in government forests. But in the
private economy of civilian life, the usual profiteering for urban demand
showed the severe price inflation caused by scarcity, which meant a
financial boom and ecological disaster on private lands, continuing into
the time around the 1949 Private Forests Act. The disruptions of inde-
pendence in Assam were far greater, when East Pakistan took Sylhet and
cut off markets for Assam’s tea and timber.

Notes

1. Richard P. Tucker, “The British Colonial System and the Forests of the
Western Himalayas, 1815–1914,” in Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-
Century World Economy, eds, Richard P. Tucker and J.F. Richards (Durham,
N.C., 1983), 146–66.
2. For convenience I shall use the term Kumaon, though the forests under
consideration include both the broadleaf belt at the foot of the hills (the
Western Division Forests in colonial terminology) and the coniferous forests
of the Kumaon Division, which encompassed the pre-1947 civil districts of
Nainital, Almora, and Pauri Garhwal. The people of Garhwal would prob-
ably object to this distinction.
3. Anonymous, India’s Contribution to the Great War (Calcutta, 1923), 124–26;
De Witt Ellinwood, ed., India and World War I (New Delhi, 1978), 141–76.
4. Working Plans of those years from each forest division give full details.
5. Richard P. Tucker, “The Historical Context of Social Forestry in Kumaon,
Western Himalayas,” Journal of Developing Areas 18 (April 1984), 341–56.
6. Ibid., 346–48.
7. E.A. Smythies, India’s Forest Wealth (London, 1925).
8. B.R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914–47 (Cambridge, 1979),
chaps 3–4.
9. R.G. Marriott, Resin Industry of Kumaon, United Provinces Forest Depart-
ment, Bulletin no. 9 (Allahabad, 1937); United Provinces Forest Department,
Annual Progress Reports on the Resin Industry in the Kumaon and Utilization
Circles (Allahabad, annual from 1918).

163
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

10. United Provinces, Legislative Council Debates, 1923.

11. E.P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, vol. 4, ed. H. Champion and F.C.
Osmaston (London, 1962), chap. 8; A.C. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries
of the United Provinces (Allahabad, 1920); and Anonymous, Forest Research
and Indian Industry (Delhi, 1936).
12. See Government of India, Annual Return of Statistics Relating to Forest
Administration in British India, for full statistical tables (hereinafter cited as
SRFABI).
13. Tomlinson, Political Economy of the Raj, chap. 4.
14. Stebbing, Forests of India, vol. 4, chap. 10; for detailed statistics, see Progress
Reports on Forest Administration in the United Provinces, annual (hereinafter
cited as PRFAUP).
15. P.S. Narayana Prasad, “The World Depression and India,” Indian Journal
of Economics (October 1935): 121–44; C.H. Lee, “The Effects of the
Depression on Primary Producing Countries,” Journal of Contemporary His-
tory (1969): 139–55.
16. See SRFABI, annually, for details.
17. See PREFAUP, for annual statistics; Stebbing, Forests of India, vol. 4, chap.
21.
18. See the figures for the hill districts of U.P. in the Government of India’s
decennial censuses.
19. Reconstruction Committee of Council (Government of India), Second
Report on Reconstruction Planning (New Delhi, 1944); Stebbing, Forests of
India, vol. 4, chap. 9.
20. Herbert Howard, Post-War Forest Policy for India (New Delhi, 1944);
R.D. Richmond, “Post-War Forest Policy for India,” Empire Forestry Journal
23, 2 (1944): 103–9, and 24, 1 (1945): 52–55.
21. For a survey of the results, see Report of the Tarai and Bhabar Development
Committee (Allahabad, 1947).
22. See several discussions in PRFAUP, 1945–49.
23. P.D. Strachey, “The Development of Forestry in Assam in the Last Fifty Years,”
Indian Forester (December 1956): 619–23; H.P. Smith and C. Purkayastha,
Assam: A Short History of the Assam Forest Service, 1850–1945 (Shillong,
1946).
24. M.C. Jacob, The Forest Resources of Assam (Shillong, 1940).
25. For the region’s general history, see E.A. Gait, A History of Assam, 2nd. ed.
(Calcutta and Simla, 1926), for a British perspective; and the fuller study by
Amalendu Guha, From Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral
Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi, 1977).

164
 BRITISH EMPIRE AND INDIA’S FOREST RESOURCES

26. Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India
(Princeton, 1978), chap. 2.
27. Ibid.; for the context in land tenure law, see J.N. Das, An Introduction to the
Land Laws of Assam (Gauhati, 1968).
28. Sunil K. Sharma, “Origin and Growth of the Tea Industry in Assam,” in Con-
tributions to Indian Economic History, ed. T. Raychudhuri (Calcutta, 1963);
also Guha, Raj to Swaraj, 14; Weiner, Sons of the Soil, 88–92.
29. Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London, 1967),
35–76.
30. For details, see Government of Assam, Progress Reports on Forest Administra-
tion in Assam, annual, 1919–25.
31. This principle had been supported from the beginning of forest management
in Assam, as elsewhere in India. See Dietrich Brandis, Suggestions Regarding
Forest Administration in Assam (Calcutta, 1879); B. Ribbentrop, Notes on an
Inspection of the Forests of Assam during January to April 1889 (Simla, 1889).
32. Guha, Raj to Swaraj, 261–62.
33. Smith and Purkayastha, Short History, 42.
34. Bertram Hughes Farmer, Agricultural Colonization in India since Independence
(Oxford, 1974), 13–17, 28–31, 56–59.

165
 VII
The Depletion of India’s Forests under
British Imperialism: Planters, Foresters,
and Peasants in Assam and Kerala∗

I n the centuries after Columbus reached the Caribbean islands and

da Gama arrived on the coast of India, Europe’s economic and strategic
expansion, one fledgling nation-state rivaling another, was the driving
force in domesticating the natural world. In its fundamental legacy,
colonialism helped shape a globe whose once vast wildlands are now
almost entirely managed to one degree or another. Even the great river-
basin civilizations of India and China, home to dense populations before
the European era, had extensive wild hinterlands of mountain, jungle,
and desert until the past century. But the joint efforts of indigenous
people and Western interlopers have now nearly completed the trans-
formation.1 Forests and grasslands have retreated massively before the
expansion of settled agriculture, and nowhere more dramatically than
in India, where step-by-step between the 1770s and 1850s, Britain
established its Raj, or imperial regime. From this perspective British
rule in India, like other Western empires elsewhere in the developing

∗Originally published as Richard P. Tucker, “The Depletion of India’s Forests

under British Imperialism: Planters, Foresters, and Peasants in Assam and
Kerala,” in Donald Worster (ed.), The End of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989). Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
1
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

world, must be seen as an elaborate system of resource extraction and

allocation, determining not only who was to have access to nature’s
wealth but what pattern the biotic systems themselves would ultimately
take by the time India gained independence in 1947.
This system of natural resources management was by no means mono-
lithic or unchanging, nor did the British entirely control it. Throughout
the imperial era, the British administered two-thirds of the Indian sub-
continent directly but left the remaining third under the autonomous
rule of over five hundred indigenous aristocratic houses, the “Native
Princes.” Within this framework an intricate system of administration
and economic change evolved, so varied that almost any generalization
about India as a whole in that era is nearly foolhardy. But one theme
stands out in the subcontinent’s history: the steady expansion of land
under the plow, at the expense of forest and grassland.2 A recent study
which covers most of the subcontinent shows that over the years be-
tween 1890 and 1970, more than thirty million hectares of land were
transformed from forest and grassland into areas of crop production and
settlement; the amount of land being cultivated rose by over 45 percent.
In the same years the population of the same area grew by 147 percent.
Hence arable, grassland, and forest resources all shrank severely for each
person in what is now Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.3
During these decades the agricultural produce of the subcontinent in-
creased dramatically, though probably not enough to keep pace with the
expanding population. More alarming was the loss of the resources of
non-arable lands, but until recently few people seriously weighed these
costs against the gains in arable acreage. On the one hand, revenue and
agriculture administrators measured their success on the basis of the tax-
ation which derived from crop production. On the other hand, the rural

2
In this, India has typified global trends. See Richard P. Tucker and
J.F. Richards, eds, Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Econ-
omy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983); and J.F. Richards and
Richard P. Tucker, eds, World Forests and the Global Economy in the Twentieth
Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
3
John F. Richards, Edward S. Haynes, and James R. Hagen, “Changes in the
Land and Human Productivity in Northern India, 1870–1970,” Agricultural His-
tory 59, no. 4 (October 1985): 523–48.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

populace had to be fed. In India’s monsoon climate, with its extremes of

wet and dry seasons, the relief or prevention of famine was a major chal-
lenge to the imperial rulers.
Until the end of the colonial era India followed a strategy of expand-
ing acreage under hoe and plow, at the expense of grassland and forest,
rather than intensifying production on existing acreage. The villagers of
forested regions struggled to maintain their traditional subsistence uses
of the forest against the incursions of the market economy, but they were
more successful in expanding agriculture than in maintaining their forest
resources. Only among the founders of the Indian Forest Service, set up
in the 1860s to administer the exploitation of government forests, did a
few voices warn that a more stable balance among forest, grassland, and
tilled land must ultimately be achieved.
It was not until after India achieved independence in 1947 that its new
leaders turned seriously to intensifying agricultural production on exist-
ing arable lands and thereby somewhat stabilizing a balance between for-
est and arable acreage. When they did, they had the advantage over their
foreign colonial predecessors of having new agricultural technologies
which had been developed in the Western world especially after World
War I,4 and they faced the sober reality that India was nearing the end of
its reserves of potentially arable land: The luxury of moving beyond
existing agricultural frontiers onto new lands was no longer theirs.5
By 1947, India’s forests were depleted not only by expanding crop
production but also by both commercial timber operations and planta-
tion cropping for European markets. Foresters and planters were two of
the most significant exotic species introduced into India from Europe.
Like imported botanical species competing with indigenous flora, these
two human groups became competitors with villagers for access to the
land. Many elements of the history of forest reduction in modern India
can be understood from a survey of the work of foresters and planters.
Both were major actors in the drama of the British Empire as a system of
resource management and exploitation.

4
G.B. Masefield, A Short History of Agriculture in the British Colonies (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1950).
5
Benjamin Farmer, Agricultural Colonization in India since Independence
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

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 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

The landscape of India had been shaped by highly developed polit-

ical and economic systems for many centuries before the first Europeans
appeared there. Nonetheless, in the early nineteenth century many of its
forests remained virtually untouched, especially in mountain areas. Early
British travelers lyrically praised the grandeur of its landscapes under the
monsoon climate (their contemporaries in North America believed that
their forests would provide abundant resources for many centuries to
come). The towering Himalayan mountains on the north supported
almost impenetrably remote forests of conifers as well as tropical forest
on the northeast fringes in Assam. And at the opposite end of India, on
the jagged hills or Western Ghats of the Kerala coast, other travelers
occasionally struggled through steaming jungles which seemed similarly
limitless. Two British engineers who penetrated the ghats to survey
the region’s natural wealth in 1817–19 were captivated by the wanton
beauty of the hills.

The larger portion of this desolate region is covered with lofty and luxuriant green
forests in every direction.... The whole scene is truly sublime; a large portion of
this wild tract has not been explored from the want of guides, and the difficulty of
penetrating such wild extensive regions.6

Yet by 1947 few of those forests remained unmeasured and undisci-

plined. Where tea and coffee planters could work and foresters could
plan, a more restricted and ordered patchwork of forests remained at
the end of British rule. In other hill areas of the Indian subcontinent,
the depletion of forests was affected in similar ways by the expansion
of peasant agriculture and the agricultural and forestry policies of the
British. But the additional pressure applied by plantation cropping of
perennial crops for world markets was largely limited to two peripher-
ies of the subcontinent. In the nineteenth century coffee and tea became
India’s dominant export plantation crops and were grown almost en-
tirely in the northeastern hill region of Assam and the Nilgiri Hills and
Western Ghats of Madras and Kerala in the deep south. Thus Assam and
Kerala provide the two foci of this study.

6
Benjamin S. Ward and P.E. Connor, Geographical and Statistical Memoir of
the Survey of the Travancore and Cochin States (Travancore, 1863), pp. 205–6.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Assam: Plantations, Immigrants, and Deforestation

On the eastern fringe of the Himalayan ranges, where the Brahmaputra

River has made its great arc to the southwest toward the Bay of Bengal,
Assam’s dense forest belt has been under siege since the early nineteenth
century.7 By 1900 Assam’s 55,156 square miles included 20,830 under
government forest control, one of the highest percentages of any state
in India. Until very recently, moreover, a large portion of this was inac-
cessible from the outside world, and particularly from commercial and
demographic centers. The British Raj had only rudimentary administra-
tive operations outside the lowlands of Assam, and transport, commerce,
and industry were less developed there than in other parts of India. This
meant that the great forest zone of upper Assam was depleted more
slowly than most parts of India; but it also meant that the government
had less capacity to control the combined surge of tea plantations and
immigrant peasant frontiersmen than it might have wished.
Even more so than in most parts of India, the history of Assam’s forests
has been intertwined with the intricate ethnic and cultural patterns of
the state.8 The remote high hills of Assam and adjacent regions are home
to a wide variety of tribal groups, whose subsistence has been based
primarily on shifting agriculture.9 Until recently tribal populations were
thin enough that they presented no fatal threat to the mixed forest, if left
to themselves. But the Brahmaputra lowlands supported a much denser
and rapidly growing, culturally different populace of Hindu rice farmers.

7
P.D. Strachey, “The Development of Forestry in Assam in the Last Fifty
Years,” Indian Forester (December 1956): 619–23; H.P. Smith and C. Purkayastha,
Assam: A Short History of the Assam Forest Service, 1850–1945 (Shillong, India,
1946). For geographical context, see H.P. Das, Geography of Assam (New Delhi:
National Book Trust, 1970); and O.H.K. Spate and A.T.A. Learmonth, India and
Pakistan, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 600–10.
8
For the region’s general history, see E.A. Gait, A History of Assam, 2nd ed.
(Calcutta and Simla, 1926); and Amalendu Guha, From Planter Raj to Swaraj:
Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi: Indian
Council of Historical Research, 1977).
9
M.D. Chaturvedi and B.N. Uppal, A Study in Shifting Cultivation of Assam
(New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1953).

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 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

In the twentieth century Assam had the fastest growing population of

any state in India: from 3.3 million in the 1901 census to 15 million in
1971, nearly all of the growth before 1947 occurring in the lower areas
of settled agriculture.10 Further, the traditional settlers of the lowlands
are Assamese-speakers, while the tribals speak a totally separate set of
languages. Most challenging of all, downriver in Bangladesh lies one of
the densest rural populations in the world. By the late nineteenth century
Bengali peasants, most of them Muslim, began surging upriver into the
fertile Assamese forest fringe. Even before World War I, one cause of
depletion of Assam’s vegetation was the steady encroachment of these
immigrant peasants on the forest lands of lower Assam.11
The other cause of transformation, one which quickly penetrated far
into the hills, was the tea industry. The tea plantations of northeast India
are classic examples of a foreign-dominated plantation economy which
controlled a dependency’s land-use patterns and was highly sensitive
to markets in the industrialized world. After 1833, when the East India
Company’s new charter allowed foreigners to own rural land in India,
European tea planters quickly bought large tracts of hill land in Assam
and adjacent north Bengal. Most tea plantations were established by
clearing natural forest on lands purchased from the government of British
India; others were commandeered from village commons or bought from
other private owners. By 1871 the tea planters owned 700,000 acres, of
which 56,000 acres were already producing tea. By 1900 there were
764 working tea estates in Assam, producing 145 million pounds of tea
annually for export.12 Most of the plantation workers were outsiders, for
local farmers and tribals were unwilling to submit to the regimentation
of the plantation. By 1900, some 400,000 low-caste and tribal workers
from farther west had been brought into Assam under appalling working
conditions. Removed from their subsistence in ancestral soil far to the

10
Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1978), chap. 2.
11
For the context in land tenure law, see J.N. Das, An Introduction to the Land
Laws of Assam (Gauhati, 1968).
12
Sunil K. Sharma, “Origin and Growth of the Tea Industry in Assam,” in
T. Raychaudhuri, ed., Contributions to Indian Economic History (Calcutta, 1963);
also Weiner, Sons, pp. 88–92.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

west, they became a rural proletariat whose only base of survival was
the company: they were housed in company barracks, fed by company
kitchens, and worked on the companies’ rigorous terms.13
For many years the tea planters held dominant financial and political
leverage in Assam, preventing their critics from mounting effective pres-
sure to mitigate their labor policies,14 and preventing the state’s Forest
Department, their competitor for control of forest lands, from gaining
control over wide forest areas.
The impact of World War I on Assam’s forest lands centered on
wartime prosperity and expansion in the tea industry. Prices in Europe
rose, acreage under tea in Assam extended rapidly, and dividends to the
planters rose correspondingly. The first years after 1918 saw a brief
oversupply in England’s warehouses and a minor depression in the
Assam hills, but this was succeeded by a decade of prosperity and further
expansion of the acreage under tea.15
The global Depression of the 1930s hit the tea industry heavily.
The all-India wholesale price index for tea dropped by 53 percent in
four years. The planters reduced production by firing many plantation
workers, men whose only livelihood was wages from work on the
estates. Some returned to their homes farther west, but others moved into
adjacent government forest land as squatters, growing crops in clumsy
imitation of local shifting cultivation. In their desperation they damaged
forest and soil cover wherever they went. Meanwhile the tea planters
turned their attention to their markets. By 1933 the industry created an
international system to regulate and, when necessary, limit production;
this assured a rebound of profitability by 1934.16

13
For a recent sociological analysis, see A.C. Sinha, “Social Frame of Forest
History: A Study in Ecologic and Ethnic Aspects of Tea Plantation in the North
Eastern Himalayan Foothills” (Unpublished paper, 1985).
14
R.K. Das, Plantation Labour in India (Calcutta, 1936), chaps, 2–3.
15
Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London, 1967),
pp. 35–76.
16
For the global context of these trends, see V.D. Wickizer, Coffee, Tea, and
Cocoa: An Economic and Political Analysis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1951), pp. 155–257.

172
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

Hardly had the tea industry emerged from the Depression that
Assam faced another war beginning in early 1942. This war brought
great military danger to Assam, but it also brought wartime profits to
the tea planters again. The British government controlled all tea produc-
tion and consumption from 1940 onward, and the rising competition of
Indonesian tea was ended by the Japanese occupation of the islands. The
tea industry in Assam and northern Bengal expanded another 20 percent
by 1945. When in 1947 eastern Bengal downriver was designated part
of Pakistan, the tea industry of Assam went through another period of
painful disruption, but in the long run its international markets were
assured.
Whenever markets for tea were strong enough to enable expansion of
plantation acreage, forest cover was correspondingly reduced. Moreover,
directly or indirectly, tea cultivation contributed to the commercialization
of the remaining forests, as the timber industry emerged. This process can
be clearly seen through the work of the Assam Forest Department, the
planters’ major European competitor for control of forest lands.17 Pro-
vincial forest departments had been established throughout British India
in the 1860s; the Bengal Forest Department included in its reach the
upper Brahmaputra basin until Assam’s foresters became a separate cadre
in the early 1870s.18 They confronted great reserves of potentially valu-
able timber. In the lower reaches of the Brahmaputra, on rich alluvium,
stand forests of the great hardwood sal (Shorea robusta), the easternmost
extension of the great sub-Himalayan sal belt. Because of the perennially
warm, moist climate of lower Assam, these are the finest quality of all sal
stands. The downriver districts of Kamrup and Goalpara boast the most
extensive stands; the adjacent low hills of Darrang and Goalpara also
have large sal reserves. All are of great economic value, providing the
wood particularly for railway sleepers or ties. Farther northeast, as
the gorges become steeper and the hills higher and less accessible, lie the
Lakhimpur and Sibsagar districts near the borders of Burma and China.

17
The standard history of the Indian Forest Service and its work is
E.P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, 3 vols. (London, 1922–5).
18
Dietrich Brandis, Suggestions Regarding Forest Administration in Assam
(Calcutta: Government Press, 1879).

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

In these still-remote forests can be found mixed subtropical broadleaf

evergreen stands, including various potentially marketable species. Dur-
ing the late colonial era the foresters’ attention focused principally on the
towering hollong (Dipterocarpus macrocarpus).19
The combined interests of planters, imported laborers, and immi-
grant farmers placed such heavy and escalating pressure on the forests
of Assam that the Forest Department there was one of the weakest in
India’s provinces. Assam’s Revenue Department consistently pressed for
opening more land to the plow, believing that settling immigrant peas-
ants in the hills would stimulate economic growth while simultaneously
relieving social and even political pressures. The Forest Department ac-
quiesced on the principle that the peasants’ needs for land which could
be terraced for wet rice should usually take first priority in land alloca-
tion.20 The foresters would not publicly disagree with the government’s
1938 report, which stressed “that indigenous people alone would be
unable, without the aid of immigrant settlers, to develop the province’s
enormous wasteland resources within a reasonable period.”21 However,
as early as 1920 the Forest Department had realized that in the long
run this would threaten both timber supplies and watershed stabiliza-
tion. Hence the department began to accelerate the painstaking survey of
vegetation and classification of land-use potential in previously unclas-
sified government forests, especially so as to delineate sal forests which
arguably should be kept from the plow.
This was also a pragmatic response to the growing upriver move-
ment of Bengali Muslim peasants. In lowland Goalpara district the popu-
lation had risen by 2 percent between the 1891 and 1901 censuses; in
the next ten years it rose by 3 percent. From there the settlers moved
upriver, occupying forest lands in Nowgong and Kamrup districts; by
now they were beginning to challenge tribal lands as well. They had on
their side the general British assumption that settled agriculture was a far

19
M.C. Jacob, The Forest Resources of Assam (Shillong: Government Press,
1940); Gustav Mann, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Assam for the Year
1874–5 (Calcutta: Government Press, 1875).
20
B. Ribbentrop, Notes on an Inspection of the Forests of Assam during January to
April 1889 (Simla, India: Government Press, 1889).
21
Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj, pp. 261–2.

174
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

more productive and stable use of land than slash-and-burn cropping. In

the 1920s the movement began to reach Upper Burma, where lowland
peasants had no experience with the climate and agricultural patterns.
Despite these difficulties, land hunger and political pressures continued
to force Bengali peasants upriver, and when East Pakistan was created in
1947 out of eastern Bengal, a new wave of Hindu peasants moved out of
Muslim Pakistan into Assam. In the twenty years ending in 1950 the im-
migrants turned some 1,508,000 acres of forest into settled agriculture.
How was all this reflected in timber extraction from the government
forests? Before the early 1920s the Assam Forest Department was a small
cadre, a few officers whose work was limited to serving short-term com-
mercial timber demands, mostly in the sal districts. One report, survey-
ing the seventy-five years before 1925, complained that “the provision of
staff and improvements in the forests have depended upon the profit of
each year, and not one single budget presented by the Department has
ever emerged without large cuts by Finance.”22 By the 1920s government
forests which had long been awaiting survey and reservation were so
burdened with peasants’ rights that purchasing those rights threatened
to be prohibitively expensive for the government.
Nonetheless, the 1920s were an optimistic period for Assam’s forest
managers. During the highly profitable years from 1925 to 1929, the
acreage in reserves increased by some 400 percent, largely in the sal belt.
But in the Depression decade severe retrenchments in staff and budget
left Assam’s forest management able to cover little more than it had in
1918, while shifting cultivation in the unclassed State Forests of the hill
regions was inexorably expanding. As so often happens in the develop-
ing world, foresters saw themselves fighting a losing battle, against their
superiors on one side and villagers on the other.
World War II brought major changes in forest production. Between
1939 and 1945 timber production in the reserves more than doubled,
while fuelwood cutting there more than tripled. The height of this pres-
sure came after 1942, when heavy concentrations of troops moved up
the Brahmaputra valley to stem Japanese forces in Burma. Profits rose far
more dramatically still: total receipts for railway timber rose five times,
and military timber use raised eight times more revenue. Much of the
22
Smith and Purkayastha, Assam, p. 42.

175
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

profits went into the hands of private contractors, from Calcutta as well
as the Assamese towns. With few exceptions the contractors were small
operators who cut and exported logs using only hand tools, an extremely
wasteful process. And with the exception of two sawmills established
in Assam in the early 1920s, no timber processing was done within the
province. Thus the extreme inefficiency and wastefulness of lumbering
continued well toward the present.
The war made major changes in forestry technology, not only in
Assam but throughout India’s Himalayan region, for the war effort re-
quired new motor roads and emergency rail lines. The roads were used
by trucks and jeeps, some of which are still in operation over forty years
later. The motorization of forestry which happened during the war years
was a turning point in the mobility of foresters, bureaucrats, politicians,
and peasants alike. The scale of timber exports could be increased to
meet the economic demands of independence. And new roads could be
used, as in many parts of the tropics since that time, by peasants looking
for new land to till.
Assam’s forests, having been put under sudden new pressures before
1945, underwent yet another major trauma in 1947, when the influx of
Hindu refugees from East Pakistan moved westward into the Calcutta re-
gion and northeastward into Assam, at the same time that transport lines
for Assamese timber were severed at the Pakistani border. The sudden
new pressure of the immigrants accompanied severe disruptions of the
state’s administrative machinery and its forest management. The valu-
able sal forests of Sylhet district in the south became part of Pakistan,
just when the Forest Department had to face severe political pressures to
de-reserve existing forest tracts.
From an ecological perspective, the late 1940s was a period of tempor-
ary reprieve from commercial logging, especially in Upper Assam. The
full picture of the transition in Assam’s land use during the immediate
aftermath of independence is still not entirely clear.23 But it can safely
be concluded that the political and ethnic turmoil of that period led

23
Farmer, Agricultural Colonization, pp. 13–17, 28–31, 56–9; Progress Report
of Forest Administration in the Province of Assam for the Year 1947–48 (Shillong,
India: Government Press, 1948).

176
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

to similar, but more intensive, conflicts in recent years, on a steadily

shrinking base of land and vegetation. Immigrant Bengali peasants, long-
established Assamese Hindu rice farmers, and hill tribals now struggle
to maintain a foothold on the land, often resorting to open violence.24
Forest managers after independence struggled to maintain a remnant of
the forest cover, more for commercial purposes than for preservation of
the natural biota.

Kerala: The Shrinking Forests of the Southwest Coast

On the other subtropical fringe of India a similar process of commer-

cialization took place, as large areas of natural forest were cleared in
response to commodity markets in Europe. As in Assam, in what is
now the state of Kerala, relations between peasants and planters became
severely strained, and the abundant natural forests were severely depleted
in the course of colonial economic expansion. In their biotic profu-
sion Kerala’s forests, like the Brahmaputra basin forests, add priceless
diversity to the subcontinent’s natural endowment. These mountains,
called the Western Ghats, stretch along the entire west coast from
north of Bombay. Rising abruptly from the Arabian Sea to elevations of
3,000–8,000 feet, they then slope gradually eastward into the Bay of
Bengal. Their western-facing slopes crowd the Arabian Sea, leaving only
a narrow coastal belt, which varies up to forty miles in width. Their
flanks produce a series of steep short rivers which have deposited rich
alluvium at their feet to supplement the otherwise poor soils of the coastal
region. From early June through September they confront the monsoon
storms, catching up to 200 inches of rain; thereafter there is virtually no
moisture for the following eight months. The hills and valleys bask in
steady high humidity and temperatures, while only the highest peaks are
ever touched by winter frost.25

24
S.K. Dass, “Immigration and Demographic Transformation of Assam,
1891–1981,” Economic and Political Weekly (10 May 1980): 850–9; G.S. Ghurye,
The Burning Caldron of North-East India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1980).
25
Spate and Learmonth, India and Pakistan, pp. 673–81.

177
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Along the coast, in the backwater estuaries of the many short rivers,
mangrove forests once covered large areas.26 But like other mangrove
wetlands globally, these have been inexorably drained for such uses
as rice cultivation over the past two hundred years, to feed one of the
densest population concentrations in the subcontinent. Coastal back-
waters lead upward into the sharply cut foothills of the ghats, where a
second broad ecological stratum on the lower hills rises to about 4,000
feet and is largely based on lateritic soils. These soils leach and harden
when forests are stripped, gradually losing their capacity to support
vegetation.27
The dominant forest community of these hills is one of richly varied
subtropical species, semievergreens on the lower slopes and true ever-
greens on the higher hills.28 These forests provided many products for
the premarket subsistence economies of the hills. As in all tropical for-
ests, great floristic variety meant that in most locations few trees of any
single species grew, and few species had any commercial use in urban
and international markets until the nineteenth century. Since this forest
was mere “waste,” in the market’s terms of reference, it was vulnerable to
being removed in favor of plantation crops.
In the third and highest ecological zone of Kerala both natural vege-
tation and land tenure have been markedly different from that of the
zones below. The lush, tangled mountainsides of subtropical evergreen
vegetation were one of the subcontinent’s richest floras when early
British travelers struggled to penetrate them.29 These high hills constitute
the upper watersheds for Kerala’s westward-flowing rivers. Disruption of
the natural vegetation produces accelerating flooding and erosion in the

26
F. Blasco, Les mangroves de l’Inde (Pondicherry, India: Institut Français,
1975); C. Caratini, G. Thanikaimoni, and C. Tissot, “Mangroves of India: Paly-
nological Study and Recent History of the Vegetation,” Proceedings of the Fourth
International Palynology Conference, Lucknow 1976–77, 3 (1980): 49–59.
27
G. Kurian, “Some Aspects of the Regional Geography of Kerala,” Indian
Geographical Journal 17 (1942): 5–8.
28
Jean-Pierre Pascal, Les forêts denses humides sempervirentes de basse et
moyenne altitudes du sud de l’Inde (Pondicherry, India: Institut Français, 1983).
29
Francis Buchanan, A journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore,
Canara, and Malabar, 3 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807).

178
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

densely settled region below, in a cycle that has recently become annual,
expensive, and tragic.
The evolution of this tragedy has been inseparable from the erosion
of tribal life in the hills. Until the late nineteenth century there was little
settled population in the higher hills; peasants and townsmen from
lower elevations toward the coast feared that the vaporous airs of the
cool, moist mountain climate would be disastrous to their health. Only
a complex of tribal groups on the fringes of Hindu culture inhabited the
dense jungles and high grasslands, for the most part practicing shifting
agriculture on lands which no one had ever declared the property of any
private individual.30
Historically this coastal zone was largely isolated from the great cen-
ters of population and agriculture in the wide river valleys of Tamil Nadu
(British India’s Madras) to the east. The western coast evolved a series of
little kingdoms at its river mouths, kingdoms whose kings and landed
gentry traded pepper, cardamom, and a few other crops to Arab and other
traders for export to world markets.31 A series of small ports toward the
north comprised the Malabar coast, known to Europe from medieval
times onward. Lengthy rivalries among the Portuguese, Dutch, French,
and British ended with British annexation of Malabar in 1792 and its in-
corporation as Malabar District of Madras Presidency.32 From then until
independence in 1947, Malabar’s fortunes, both political and environ-
mental, were shaped by the British regional government headquartered
in Madras.33

30
P.R.G. Mathur, Tribal Situation in Kerala (Trivandrum, India: Kerala Histor-
ical Society, 1977).
31
For the general history of the region, see L.M. Panikkar, A History of Kerala
(Annamalainagar, India, 1960); or A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala His-
tory (Kottayam, India: National Book Stall, 1967). See also John Edye, “Descrip-
tion of the Sea-Ports on the Coast of Malabar ... and the Produce of Adjacent
Forests,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1835): 324–77.
32
N. Rajendran, Establishment of British Power in Malabar, 1664–1799 (Allahabad:
Chugh Publications, 1979).
33
For the pattern of human ecology on the eastern and western slopes of the
ghats, see Joan P. Mencher, “Kerala and Madras: A Comparative Study of Ecology
and Social Structure,” Ethnology 5, no. 2 (April 1966): 135–71.

179
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Farther south toward Cape Comorin, the most powerful of the

Kerala kingdoms, Travancore, rose to prominence in the early 1700s. It
remained autonomous throughout the British era, and not until 1956
was it amalgamated with Malabar and the smaller Princely State of
Cochin (which lies between Malabar and Travancore) into the present-
day Kerala State. The southern half of Kerala developed its own ap-
proach to resource exploitation, including its forests. The Princely States
in general had the reputation of being far slower to modernize and es-
tablish links to the outside world than those districts which the British
administered directly; in many parts of India they were backwaters that
preserved the older hierarchies and rituals of aristocratic landholders
against the blandishments of capitalist wealth and efficient bureaucracy.
We might therefore expect the forests of the Travancore hills to have been
less heavily exploited than the neighboring tree cover to the north.
The truth on the Kerala coast, however, is more complex and para-
doxical. In important ways the British in Malabar avoided any economic
development which might affront the entrenched landed elite there,
while the rajas of Travancore endorsed capitalist transformations of their
lands and forests, hiring British administrators to modernize their state
and encouraging export crop plantations to supplant economically un-
remunerative forests.34 By 1947 economic development, and thus the
pressures on the forest cover, was further advanced in Travancore than
in Malabar.
Before the British conquest of Malabar in 1792, the region had suf-
fered the worst political turmoil and military depredations of its history.
Tipu Sultan, the powerful Muslim emperor of Mysore to the northeast,
had fought through the ghats to the Malabar coast. The high-caste land-
lords (jenmis) who had consolidated their power earlier in the century
had fled south beyond Tipu’s armies; their low-caste tenants had been
left without either their protection or their oppressive demands for pro-
duce. After the British defeated Tipu, the entire system of claims on
arable and forest had to be reconstructed.

34
R.N. Yesudas, British Policy in Travancore, 1805–59 (Trivandrum: Kerala
Historical Society, 1977); Robin Jeffrey, The Decline of Nayar Dominance: Society
and Politics in Travancore, 1847–1908 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976).

180
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

Lacking their own trained cadre of tax collectors, the European con-
querors relied on the old landlord class to collect and remit tax pay-
ments. The new Malabar government declared that the jenmis were full
owners of the land, not only arable but “waste” or forest land eastward
into the hills as well; henceforth tenants’ rights to subsistence in Malabar
were among the weakest of any district in British India. For more than
a century thereafter these conservative landlords controlled Malabar’s
land exploitation. They were slow to open new land to cultivation, and
discouraged their tenants from moving upward into the forest. Further,
under Malabar’s joint-family property law, sale of land was extremely
difficult, and until well into the twentieth century little land became a
marketable commodity. Entrepreneurs wanting to grow new crops for
distant markets found it almost impossible to begin in coastal Malabar.35
Higher into the hills, however, lies the Wynaad plateau, where events
moved very differently after 1830. Wynaad is a distinctive feature of
Malabar: between the coastal lands and the high peaks, it is an undulat-
ing plateau, its broad fields cut by many low hills. In the early nineteenth
century it was one of the most malarial areas of the region; its popula-
tion density was considerably lower than that in the coastal lowlands.36
Though landlord claims to the land of Wynaad were theoretically strong,
Wynaad was too remote to interest them. Even Tipu Sultan had not built
any all-weather roads from Wynaad to the coast.
Commander James Welsh, who succeeded in controlling the area
only when he put down the last tribal rebellions there in 1812, wrote in
his campaign diary of the difficulty of trapping rebels in such impene-
trable terrain. His words express a sense of wonder at the lushness and
potential productivity of the Wynaad forests.

35
T.C. Varghese, Agrarian Change and Economic Consequences: Land Tenure
in Kerala, 1850–1960 (Bombay: Allied, 1970); T. Shea, Jr., “Barriers to Eco-
nomic Development in Traditional Societies: Malabar, a Case Study,” Journal of
Economic History 9 (1959): 504–22. For a critique of the broader socio-
economic implications of the jenmis’ power and the government’s role in sustain-
ing that power, see Government of Madras, Malabar Special (Logan) Commission,
1881–1882, Report, 2 vols. (Madras, 1882).
36
G. Gopalan Nair, Wynad: Its Peoples and Traditions (Madras, 1911).

181
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

This part of the country is strong, wild and beautiful, consisting of a number of
small hills, covered with jungle, and separated by narrow valleys, in which there
are neither rivers nor paddy fields. Yesterday we passed through a narrow defile,
nearly a mile in length, in which we discovered trees of such enormous height and
magnitude, that I am fearful of mentioning my ideas of their measurement.37

The British fascination for Wynaad and its economic potential had begun
to evolve. By the 1830s coffee planters began to discover that its climate
and soils were well suited for their interests. But they first had to purchase
land from some clearly defined owner, either private or the government,
and some powerful jenmi landlords to the west began to assert their for-
merly shadowy claims. But the British commissioner by then was strong
enough to overrule their claims in 1841. His reasons revealed what
was at stake: “From its temperature and the salubrity of its climate, it is
peculiarly adapted for the settlement of Europeans, and I need not dwell
upon the important consequences that would follow from the planting
of an European colony in such a position.”38 In the following years, some
higher hill land in Wynaad came under peasant or tribal cultivation with
concomitant revenue for the government; the rest was either purchased
by British coffee and tea planters who cleared the forest, or it ultimately
became forest reserves managed for timber production.
In the centuries of European trade with the Kerala coast since 1500,
international demand for spices and coconuts had added new species
to Kerala’s flora and increased the concentration of others. But sudden,
intensive forest clearance began only in the 1830s with the appearance of
plantation monocrops, first coffee and then tea. The Madras government,
determined to increase revenue by selling wasteland for new cultiva-
tion, found ready buyers in the first coffee planters. A few experimental
patches in the 1830s led to a rush of coffee planters after 1840, despite
the total lack of good cart roads which made export of the beans to coastal
ports slow, difficult, and expensive. By 1866 more than two hundred
coffee plantations had been established on 14,613 acres; two-thirds of
the acreage was owned by Europeans, the rest by Indian investors from
the coastal towns. This was progress to European eyes. As the planters’
chief ideologue of the time expressed it,
37
James Welsh, Military Reminiscences (London: Smith, Elder, 1830), p. 14.
38
Quoted in Varghese, Agrarian Change, p. 26.

182
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

A great and important interest has thus sprung up in Wynaad, many thousands of
pounds having been sunk in it, and very greatly increased wealth has resulted to
the neighbouring countries of Malabar and Mysore.... A community cultivating
15,000 acres of such products as coffee and cinchona, employing and feeding
thousands of labourers, bringing wealth into the country, and paying taxes, has a
right to just and effective laws for the regulation of labour, and significant staff to
administer the laws, and good main lines of road through the district.39

Elephants and other wild animals were being brought under control.
The breeding grounds of the malarial mosquito were being drained,
shrinking the habitat of that great enemy of progress. And mountain
hideaways could be denied to potential human rebels against established
government. In Manantoddy, where a tribal rebellion early in the cen-
tury had centered, there were fifty-three coffee estates by 1866.40 From
the coffee planters’ perspective, the provision of wages for the laborers
was not in the least beneficial for the civilizing process on the land. In
forests where the only previous subsistence laborers had been occasional
Kurumbar tribals with their shifting agriculture, now dense settlements
of coolie laborers were being established. Men from coastal Malabar were
reluctant and unreliable coffee workers, and the hill tribals flatly refused
to submit to the regimentation of the plantations. But from the districts
east of the ghats Tamil-speaking untouchable laborers could be imported
in adequate numbers for clearing the forest and cultivating coffee. As in
plantation areas throughout the colonial world, the biotic transformation
could not be accomplished without a corresponding social transforma-
tion.41 Contract labor, its terms dictated by the planters’ capital, was the
key to intensive forest clearance.
Even in the railway era after 1860, the Malabar government still
refused to commit major funds to construct roads and bridges, so the
planters spent their own funds on a campaign of building cart roads,
bridges, and embankments through Wynaad and southward. The peak
of this building, and of coffee production in Malabar, came in the 1860s;

39
Clements R. Markham, Report on Wynaad Coffee-Planting District (London,
1866), p. 2.
40
Ibid., pp. 10–22.
41
Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas,
1830–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

183
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

then suddenly a disease far more devastating than malaria crippled the
coffee boom. In 1868 the first Indian coffee planter discovered a new
blight on his plants. Reported earlier on the coffee plantations of Ceylon,
the blight spread rapidly through Kerala’s coffee regions, and by 1876
most coffee there had been destroyed. If the planters were to survive,
they had to change to other crops.
Cinchona, which had already been experimentally intercropped with
coffee in some areas, was one possibility. Throughout the tropics, the
nineteenth-century expansion of plantation monocropping was accom-
panied by a rising incidence of malaria, which threatened to debilitate
the labor force and undermine the plantation economy. Cinchona, a
genus of trees and shrubs whose bark produced the only known sup-
pressant for malaria, had been introduced into Asia early in the century
from its original home in the Andes.42 Wynaad coffee planters began
experimenting with it in the early 1870s, but it entered the international
market after the superior quality cinchona from Ceylon and Dutch Java,
and never succeeded in competing effectively with them. In the long run
cinchona acreage in Kerala never became significant.43
In the hills of South India tea ultimately became the viable alterna-
tive to coffee over large areas, and was more successful than coffee at
higher elevations. Coffee had rapidly invaded the middle hills between
3,000–4,000 feet, but tea could grow as high as 7,000 feet into the highest
ranges of Kerala’s ghats.44 The East India Company’s first tests with tea
in the south were made around 1840. But as a major investment there, it
lagged far behind Assam, and large-scale production in Kerala began only

42
For the British strategy throughout the Empire, see Lucille H. Brockway,
Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens
(New York: Academic Press, 1979). For the struggle against malaria in the
Ganges valley of northern India, see Ira Klein, “Death in India, 1871–1921,”
Journal of Asian Studies 32, no. 4 (August 1973): 639–59; and in western
India, D.K. Vishwanathan, Malaria and Its Control in Bombay State (Poona, India:
Chitrashala Press, 1950).
43
Nair, Wynad, pp. 41–7.
44
M. Viart, Contribution a l’étude de l’action de l’homme sur la végétation dans
le sud de l’Inde. (Thèse d’Ingénieur-Docteur, Université de Toulouse, 1963),
pp. 4–5, 13–19.

184
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

after 1870, during the worst of the coffee blight. In the long run, though
coffee survived as the major plantation crop in Wynaad, tea proved far
more important farther south, especially in Travancore, where it is har-
dier and prospers on poorer soils. The British Resident in Travancore
encouraged tea planting along with coffee from 1840 onward. Under
a new Indian Prime Minister, new laws enabled the raja’s agents to sell
forest lands efficiently, and then tea cultivation could spread rapidly.
The heart of Travancore’s tea country was the Peermade hills, a re-
gion of escarpments and tangled forests so dramatic that traditionally
only tribals had inhabited its mountainsides and river valleys. Then the
pioneer planters appeared. They were a closely knit network of British
missionaries, planters, and officials interested in both immediate profits
and retirement homes. Henry Baker, the son of an Anglican mission-
ary who had arrived in the Travancore lowlands in 1819, had worked
with tribals in the lower hills since 1843. When the Travancore govern-
ment began granting “waste” or uncultivated hill lands to planters in the
1860s, a large free grant went to Baker. Other planters moved in from
Ceylon as the coffee disaster accelerated there, attracted by the virgin
lands of the Travancore hills. Officials were equally interested in invest-
ment opportunities. John Daniel Munro, grandson of the first British
diplomatic representative to the court of Travancore, established estates
in the Peermade hills in the 1860s, which remained in his family for
eighty years.45
On the London end of the trade, the 1862 Companies Act led to a
change from many small family firms in the import sector to the con-
centration of capital in limited liability corporations with hired manage-
ment. Similarly in Kerala, individual tea estates in the early years were
relatively modest in size, usually between two hundred and five hundred
acres. But as the century wore on, the business began to be dominated by
a few large firms, often with corporate connections to estates in the hills
of Ceylon as well. Large-scale capitalization had not mattered decisively
in the earlier years when coffee plantations were being set up, for hill
wasteland had cost little or nothing, cultivation and processing could

45
Heather Lovatt, A Short History of the Peermade Vandiperyan Plantation
District (privately published, 1970), pp. 6–10.

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tolerate unskilled labor, and work was only seasonal; coffee plantations
there as elsewhere could be competitive in international markets even on
a very small scale. But with tea the process was different. Maintenance of
the tea plants, harvesting the leaves, and processing them for the market
are all year-round activities, and require considerably more specialized
skills. With more capital at their disposal, corporate planters were better
able to finance the change from coffee to tea and organize stable labor
recruitment from intensely populated Tamil districts of Madras. Typical
of the new twentieth-century agricultural economy was the Travancore
Tea Estate Company, which began in 1897 with a capital base of
£150,000. With that core, it consolidated several family estates and
opened new areas as well, clearing the high forest as it went.46
British planters aggressively lobbied the governments whose land
policies concerned them. As early as 1874 they founded the Peermade
Planters Association; by the 1880s it held an annual Planters Week in
Travancore, with the raja presiding over its discussions. Similar efforts
were ripening farther north and in the adjacent Nilgiri Hills as well, cul-
minating in the United Planters’ Conference in 1893, when local associ-
ations merged to form UPASI, the United Planters Association of South
India. In Travancore as well as the British districts the tea and coffee
interest lobbied systematically for liberalized wasteland sale regulations
and tighter labor control laws. The major result of the planters’ lobby
was its environmental impact: rapid forest clearance to make room for
tea, especially in central Travancore, in the two decades before war broke
out in Europe.47 The conditions of the labor force on the plantations in
these years varied somewhat, but most planters resisted reforms imposed
by the government just as their colleagues in Assam did.48

46
Ibid., pp. 18–20.
47
Ibid., pp. 23–6. See also Usha Joseph, “History of the Central Travancore
Planters Association,” in Central Travancore Planters Association Centenary Souvenir
(Kottayam, India, 1970); and United Planters Association of South India, 1893–1953
(Madras: MacMillan, 1953).
48
See Royal Commission on Labour in India (Whitley Commission), Report
(Calcutta, 1931), chaps 19–23; D.V. Rege, Report on an Enquiry into Conditions of
Labour in Plantations of India (Delhi: Government Press, 1950), chaps 1–3.

186
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

What losses in the land’s resources did this trend imply? In the early
days of coffee planting, little was known about which soils and drain-
age patterns were most favorable for the bushes, or which climatic con-
ditions were necessary in order to ensure financially viable operations.
Plantations were attempted at elevations over the entire spectrum from
400 to 4,000 feet, and from the fertile alluvial soils of the bottom lands
to hilltops with soils so thin and lateritic that they were adequate only for
the tribals’ light shifting cultivation. Many of the early plantations failed
financially, their lands reverting to second-growth scrub forest with
severely degraded vegetation.
More alarming still was the effect of deforestation on the higher
hills, which constituted the watersheds both of the series of rivers which
flow westward and of the great Cauvery river system to the east. As hill-
tops were stripped of their trees, rivers began flooding more severely dur-
ing the rains and drying up sooner in the long dry season. Moreover, their
flood waters carried increasingly high loads of silt into lowland channels.
Beginning with the pioneering forester and natural historian Hugh
Cleghorn around 1860, a few voices warned of disastrous erosion, land-
slides, and flooding stream beds as high ridges were stripped of their
forests.49 Finally in 1913 the Travancore government passed its first law
limiting the extent of tea and coffee planting: there was to be no new
cultivation within fifty yards of any streambed or within one-fourth mile
of the crest of any hill; nor was livestock grazing to be allowed in nat-
ural second-growth forests, since that would severely inhibit regrowth of
the vegetation. This first law was generally ignored in practice for many
years, but at least it provided a first legal precedent and an ecological
standard for later governments to follow.
The combined appearance of coffee and tea transformed wide areas
of Kerala’s middle hills into plantation monocrops by the first years of
this century. The years after 1900 witnessed the coming of a third major
plantation crop, rubber, whose role in shrinking the natural forest would

49
Hugh Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens of South India (London: Allen,
1861); Dietrich Brandis, Memorandum on the Demarcation of the Public Forests in
the Madras Presidency, 15 August 1878 (Calcutta, 1878); Dietrich Brandis, Sugges-
tion Regarding Forest Administration in the Madras Presidency (Calcutta, 1883); and
T.F. Bourdillon, The Forest Trees of Travancore (Madras, 1893).

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

be as important as coffee and tea. Like these crops, rubber is a peren-

nial crop, but it grows well on the low-elevation terrain which coffee
trees and tea plants dislike. On many hillsides, from virtually sea level to
3,000 feet, uniform stands of rubber trees replaced natural forest.
With the advent of bicycles in the 1870s, the industrial economies’
demand for rubber tires led tropical botanists to study several species
of trees which produced rubbery latex. Kerala, like other locations in
tropical Africa and Asia, had an indigenous candidate. But none had the
qualities of Brazil’s Hevea brasiliensis, which came to dominate the world
supply of natural rubber for industrial uses after 1900. The Brazilian
government, aware of its potential, banned export of the tree. But the
British smuggled out seedlings to Kew Gardens in 1873, and from there
introduced them into Ceylon and then Malaya. In 1879 the first seedlings
were brought from Ceylon to Malabar, where foresters at the Nilambur
teak plantation grew them experimentally.50
The first Hevea brasiliensis rubber trees were planted in Travancore in
1904. By 1917, at the height of Europe’s wartime demand for rubber,
Travancore had 29,640 acres (12,000 hectares) under production, and
Malabar and Cochin between them had another 17,290 acres (7,000
hectares).51 At first this rubber production was almost entirely for
European markets, since automotive transport and other industrial de-
mand in India were still in their infancy. The rubber plantations were
controlled almost entirely by British firms. But after India became in-
dependent, the picture changed greatly. In 1960 India as a whole grew
333,600 acres of rubber trees, of which the majority, 201,000 acres,
were in Kerala. But by then little, if any, rubber was exported: The entire
production, processed locally, met only 43 percent of India’s internal
demand.52
By the time Kerala was created in the merger of Malabar, Cochin,
and Travancore in 1956, its remaining forest cover was under pressure

50
Robert Cross, “The American India-rubber Trees at Nilambur,” Indian For-
ester 7 (1881–2): 167–71; R.L. Proudlock, Report on the Rubber Trees at Nilambur
and at Calicut, South Malabar (Madras, 1908).
51
“Industrial Crops of Kerala,” Journal of the Madras Geographical Association
12, no. 1 (1937): 1–8.
52
Viart, La végétation dans le sud de l’Inde, pp. 160–2.

188
 THE DEPLETION OF INDIA’S FORESTS

both from one of India’s densest rural populations and from the export
plantation system. Rubber and other commercial tree crops, grown
and harvested by both private landowners and the government’s Forest
Department, were threatening to replace the last remnants of natural
subtropical jungle in southwestern India. Even timber, especially the
costly teak, was a commodity so valuable that it was becoming the object
of large-scale theft.53 Equally alarming, the process of cutting down those
forests and planting new crops was causing severe soil erosion and deg-
radation of watersheds.54 To small farmers downstream from the high
hills, Cleghorn’s warnings a century before were starting to have daily
meaning as their clean water supplies dwindled.
During the 1940s the transition of the Indian subcontinent through
world war into independence, coupled with its partition into the two
separate countries of India and Pakistan, was profoundly traumatic not
only for the half billion humans who lived through the drama, but for
the other species, notably the forest trees, which shared the subconti-
nent with them, notably the forest cover. Assam’s forests experienced the
trauma perhaps as intensely as any, situated as they were on the border
of British India’s defenses against Japanese armies in Burma, and up-
river from the great Hindu–Muslim conflict in Bengal in 1947. Both tea
growing and timber harvesting were deeply disrupted in the transitional
years; both had to be reconstructed in the 1950s.
In the aftermath of independence, however, a counterevent occurred
which is easily overlooked by observers of India’s deforestation: the
official designation of great new regions as Reserved Forests to be man-
aged by the professional foresters. Many rajas in their Princely States
had reserved large forest areas as their personal hunting reserves. They
lost these reserves after 1947, and Prime Minister Nehru took a personal

53
For a common recent occurrence, see the 1984 timber-smuggling scandal
in southern Malabar, India Today, 31 July 1984, 52.
54
See M.A. Oommen, ed., Kerala’s Economy Since Independence (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press and India Book House, 1979); for a systematic critique
of recent forestry management, see C.T.S. Nair, Mamman Chundamannil, and
E. Mohammad, Intensive Multiple Use Forest Management in the Tropics: A Case
Study of the Evergreen Forests and Teak Plantations in Kerala, India (Peechi, India:
Kerala Forest Research Institute, 1984).

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

interest in saving many of them as permanent forest and wildlands.55

From a 1947 total of 22.97 million acres (9.3 million hectares) covered
in a recent study of India’s vegetation patterns, by 1972 the system ex-
panded by 119 percent, to 42.48 million acres (17.2 million hectares) in
Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.56 The actual tree cover on those lands
varied, of course, from remnant natural jungle in remote mountain and
hill zones, to almost total denudation in many arid regions. The term
“forest” was by then more a legal than a descriptive term. But at least the
legal system of land use in the independent nations provided the basis
for a belated surge of concern over ecological degradation, when the
worldwide environmental movement of the 1970s began to accelerate.57
This then was the ambiguous environmental legacy of empire. Like
most colonialists, the British in India expanded agricultural lands at the
expense of a forest mantle which had once been far greater than the needs
of its human population. European legal institutions and technology ac-
companied the intercontinental market economy in penetrating even
remote mountain and jungle lands, turning forests into commodities.
Planters, traders, and landlords benefited; peasants may have benefited
in some ways too, but tribals and plantation workers clearly suffered.
And by 1947 nearly all of the vegetation map of India was determined by
the intricate structure of power which had evolved under the British Raj.
The lands of the subcontinent were almost entirely domesticated, under the
most complex system of resource extraction which any European empire
ever established in the developing world.

55
For background, see Richard P. Tucker, “Resident Populations and Wildlife
Reserves in India: The Prehistory of a Strategy,” in Patrick West and Stephen
Brechin, eds, Resident Populations and National Parks in Developing Nations: Inter-
disciplinary Perspectives (forthcoming).
56
Richards, Haynes, and Hagen, “Changes in the Land,” p. 545.
57
Richard P. Tucker, “India’s Emerging Environmentalists,” Sierra (May–June
1984): 45–9; for a detailed survey, see The State of India’s Environment, 1984–85:
The Second Citizens’ Report (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment,
1985).

190
 VIII
The Commercial Timber Economy under
Two Colonial Regimes in Asia∗

Introduction

I n many countries of the developing world there is now a vocal

movement to prohibit further clearing of primary forest. Commercial
timber companies, ranging from small-scale sawmills for local markets to
multinational corporations exporting timber products worldwide, have
been charged with primary responsibility for the alarming decline of trop-
ical and sub-tropical forest resources. Yet our understanding is severely
limited: little information is readily available regarding the evolution of
commercial timber extraction in the tropics. In many areas serious forest
depletion began under colonial regimes, which varied widely in the role
they assigned to private logging investors. This chapter discusses some
aspects of timber contracting and marketing in two contrasting colonial
settings: the Himalayan forests of northern India under British rule and
the Philippine Islands’ rainforests during the American occupation.
The history of the private sector timber economy in Europe, North
America and Australia is well documented, as evidenced in papers pre-
sented at the Australian forest history conference. This literature can
potentially provide lines of analysis and comparison for understanding

∗Originally published as Richard P. Tucker, ‘The Commercial Timber Economy

under Two Colonial Regimes in Asia’, in John Dargavel et al., eds, Changing
Tropical Forests: Historical Perspectives on Today’s Challenges in Asia, Australasia
and Oceania. Canberra: Australian National University, 1989, pp. 219–30.

191
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

both individual firms and national or international timber markets in the

tropical world. But in some fundamental ways the tropical world differs
from the temperate. For one, most tropical countries share a legacy of
recent colonial rule which shaped their governments’ interactions with
private timber firms, both local and foreign. This brief analysis of two co-
lonial cases attempts to suggest contrasting patterns of that interaction.

Timber Contractors in the Western Himalayas

under British Rule

Throughout the colonial century before India became independent in

1947, timber extraction was largely controlled by the government through
the British colonial forest service. Private sector marketing was carried out
by commercial contractors, but markets were almost entirely domestic,
not international. Timber licensees did not own tracts of timber lands,
nor did they negotiate long-term logging contracts. In the typical case
they won at auction the right to a single season’s harvesting of a specified
tract of government forest. Consequently there were few, if any, cases
of private companies employing professional foresters or investing in
long-term silvicultural management of their resources. Thus private con-
tractors had only one goal: to maximize short-term profits in a highly
competitive and volatile market, with no long-term concern for the re-
source. Sustaining the forests was left to the government’s foresters, who
saw themselves as defenders of rational timber management against a
class of unscrupulous, opportunistic manipulators of the market.
Successive forest laws in 1865, 1878 and 1892 established govern-
ment ownership of nearly the entire forest cover of India. One of the
greatest timber banks was the hardwood tracts of the Himalayas from
Kashmir south-eastward to Nepal’s western border. In that region, as
elsewhere in the colonial world, policy makers’ options were shaped by
the pre-existing social and economic patterns of rural and urban life. The
hills region had traditionally been a periphery of power centres in the
plains below, and the populace of the hills saw political and commercial
intrusion into their homeland as threats to be resisted. Most hill people
were small farmers. There were no major urban centres in the timber belt,
and few merchants capable of raising the capital necessary to compete

192
 THE COMMERCIAL TIMBER ECONOMY

for the profits which came from timber auctions. Until the region-wide
economic expansion of the 1920s the timber contractors in the hills were
all ethnic outsiders, their bases in commercial centres in the plains and
their interests totally removed from those of hills society. In order to
understand timber extraction from Himalayan watersheds, we thus must
know something of the commercial life of cities in the plains, whose
entrepreneurial classes long predated British rule.
The commercial history of that region is now being written, but no
study has, as yet, specifically looked at the timber merchants. Fortu-
nately one account of forest products marketing early in the British era
survives. In 1875 William Hooey was appointed tax commissioner of
Lucknow, now the capital of India’s state Uttar Pradesh. He began his
work by surveying the ethnic and commercial structure of the city and
its hinterland, including the trade in construction timber, firewood
and charcoal, and other forest products. Hooey’s report shows that the
trade in wood products was like the rest of Lucknow’s economy: highly
segmented; highly stratified by caste and ethnic group; and intensely
competitive, especially where resources or markets were limited. One
subcaste traditionally cut trees on private woodlots north towards the
Himalayas; another controlled the traditional role of carrying the wood
to market in bullock carts; other specialized social units were associated
with retail lumber sales, fuel distribution, and so forth. This was hardly
an entrepreneurial setting in which capital accumulation, technical in-
novation or investment in land was likely to occur.
An important new dimension of timber marketing emerged after about
1850, in the years when British demand for massive amounts of railway
and construction timber resulted in the first widespread destruction of
Himalayan hardwood forests. Logs were floated down mountain rivers
to foothill locations where new railheads and timber depots were set up.
Those riverside points grew into a series of timber-milling towns along
a 500 mile arc. Though their commercial history has not been carefully
studied, it is clear in general that these towns have been critical links in
the extraction of the mountains’ resources, particularly in the interac-
tions between Indian entrepreneurs and imperial forest managers.
Mercantile speculators who entered the highly competitive and finan-
cially risky game of the timber auction faced unpredictable retail markets
but the possibility of great profits. Contractors jealously guarded their

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

records from public view; it has not yet been possible to reconstruct
the histories of individual firms. Official forestry records rarely revealed
details of the contractors’ operations beyond some individuals’ names.
Nonetheless a tentative picture emerges.
In the era between 1850 and 1920 the major contractors for
Himalayan hardwoods were centred in the larger, older cities of the
plains. The first prominent contractor, who operated throughout the
1850s, was an Armenian merchant from Lahore in the Punjab, who cut
the great deodar cedar stands of Jammu and Kashmir for building military
outposts facing the North-west Frontier, and later for the region’s new
railways. British foresters respected the consistency and honesty of his
work, in contrast to his competitors, whom they regularly criticized
for overcutting their allotments, bribing local officials and violating the
terms of their labour contracts. (All of these charges have been persis-
tently levelled against many contractors ever since.) Efficient logging and
honest commercial transactions became the only criteria for evaluating
a contractor’s work.
A few other names emerged by 1900 on this list, including a large
Muslim contractor from Meerut, north-east of Delhi. In each case they
were entire outsiders to hills society, linked to the Himalayas’ resources
and population in strictly limited, strictly commercial ways. The forest
protest movement of recent years, centred in the Garhwal Himalayas,
expresses the long-evolving consequences. Beginning in the early 1970s
mountain villagers have concertedly resisted the incursion of contractors
from the plains, in the name of their prior claim to timber and stable
watersheds.
The social clustering of the contracts broadened after World War I, in a
decade of steady population expansion and economic growth throughout
northern India. For the first time local entrepreneurs from Hindu com-
mercial castes in the mountains gained prominence in the hills towns,
largely through profits from timber contracting. In Simla, the summer
capital of British India, the Sud merchant caste of the lower Punjab hills
produced several prominent timber-based families. By a generation later,
in the 1950s, Sud families were leaders in commerce, law and other pro-
fessions in Simla, and nearly dominated commercial and political life in
more than one town between there and Delhi.

194
 THE COMMERCIAL TIMBER ECONOMY

Farther north-west the great deodar forests of Kashmir continued to

be harvested. There a unique phenomenon occurred: the rise of the only
British timber firm of northern India, the Spedding Company. In the
1920s Spedding marketed Kashmiri hardwoods throughout the Indus
River basin, and possibly as far as Karachi, Bombay and even East Africa.
British foresters found him highly professional and reliable. They nat-
urally preferred working with Spedding to manoeuvring with his local
competitors. But by the late 1920s British businessmen throughout
India could see that the country was headed towards independence, and
began preparing to divest their interests or transfer local management
to Indian partners. In Lahore Spedding gradually turned over the firm
to a Punjabi protege, Dinga Singh, who had begun his career as a junior
clerk in the head office. At independence in 1947 Lahore became part of
Pakistan and was cut off by a militarized national boundary from its
timber sources up-river. Dinga Singh, and other Hindu merchants like
him, fled to New Delhi and other cities to the east, re-establishing their
fortunes as best as they could. Dinga Singh was exceptionally successful:
by then known as the ‘Timber King of the Punjab’, he and his sons diverted
their capital into several other branches of commerce and industry. Like
other timber merchants in recent years, they gradually moved out of that
high-risk field into other more stable, less controversial work.
Similar stories appeared through the hill region to the east. Concen-
trated wealth and rapid social mobility could be most easily attained
through exploitation of the hills’ leading source of profit, timber
contracting. In Naini Tal, the regional capital for the Kumaon hills just
west of Nepal, the most successful entrepreneur of the same era, Dan
Singh Bisht, was a man who rose from obscurity in the remote moun-
tains north-east of there to become the leading philanthropist of Naini
Tal district in later years.
The final decade of imperial British rule saw massive military, polit-
ical and economic upheavals, which were reflected in the region’s timber
economy. From the outbreak of World War II in 1939 timber contrac-
tors made great windfall profits from wartime conditions. The impe-
rial resources allocation board controlled all timber harvests closely,
accelerating cutting to meet the war’s enormous strategic needs. Tim-
ber and labour contractors’ agendas were full. Meanwhile the civilian

195
A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

economy was strained; throughout northern India timber was scarce and
prices skyrocketed. Forest department records report that timber mer-
chants bought virtually the last remaining privately owned woodlots’
logs in the region, selling for top prices in urban markets. Instant for-
tunes were made. By the end of the war, and then through the tumult of
Pakistan’s creation and the transition to Indian control of the forest ser-
vice, the administrative controls governing the harvesting and marketing
of timber were badly shaken.
In sum, the social and mercantile patterns of timber marketing in
northern India combined with British India’s forestry law and manage-
ment to produce the post-independence class of timber extractors. They
specialized in speculative investment, knowledge of urban retail mar-
kets and exploitation of labour. This branch of the commercial economy
became accessible to a wide range of players, and the stakes and re-
wards were high. Their markets were regional—possibly reaching as far
down the Ganges as Calcutta or down the Indus to Karachi—but not
international. And they faced essentially no foreign competition. Com-
bined with these entrepreneurial traditions, government management of
forest resources did not encourage the emergence of privately owned
modern lumbering technology or private timberland management. The
efficiency and long-term planning perspectives available to modern tim-
ber companies never evolved there, but neither did the capacity to clear-
cut vast tracts of natural forest in a short time. Roughly the opposite set
of conditions was true in the Philippine Islands, where American colo-
nial forestry interacted with the entrepreneurial elite of Manila.

The Timber Export Trade of the Colonial Philippines

In sharp contrast to British India, the Philippines under American rule

was transformed after 1900 from a timber importer into the foremost
timber exporter of Southeast Asia until the later 1960s. From the Forest
Law of 1904 onwards, U.S. colonial policy set about to modernize the
logging industry as rapidly as possible, through close cooperation be-
tween the Bureau of Forestry and large-scale timber corporations, both
foreign and domestic. Philippine logging came to be dominated by a

196
 THE COMMERCIAL TIMBER ECONOMY

capital-intensive, technologically modern sector. Great profits accrued

to the major investors, but the rainforests of the islands were depleted at
an increasing rate by the allure of international markets.
Just as in other colonial settings, early American foresters in the
Philippines inherited a pre-existing logging economy which shaped their
efforts to modernize and regulate timber production. For several centu-
ries that production had included the export of rainforest hardwoods to
markets in China and around Southeast Asia. That trade centred on sev-
eral species of dipterocarps, known in the islands as lauan. These were
the dominant species of the rainforest; their systematic extraction would
damage entire ecosystems.
Through the three centuries of Spanish colonial rule before 1898, the
export trade was never large enough to dominate the local small-scale
trade, and the timber economy was never well documented. A 1916 report
shows it already in transition, and indicates the complexity of what the
new regime inherited. In that year an American forester characterized
the industry as falling into three categories according to size and com-
plexity of operations. First and smallest were the hand-powered shops
of the local retail trade throughout the islands. Reflecting the overall
character of the commercial economy, all of these firms were Filipino
or Chinese. Second in scale were the small power mills, with stocks of
thousands or tens of thousands of feet of rough and milled lumber. These
were more varied in scale, and were owned by Spaniards, Filipinos and
Chinese, as well as a couple of American and European firms at the larger
end. Finally, the new era of colonial industry had brought large special-
ized mills, mostly American or British in capital but also one owned by
Spaniards, one by Chinese and one by a Filipino–Spanish partnership.
The American foresters’ goal was to modernize the Filipino firms; the
local entrepreneurs’ goal presumably was to maximize profits while suf-
fering minimal control over their operations.
The American transformation of the upper end of the hierarchy had
begun immediately after the U.S. occupation was consolidated. In 1900
the forestry profession in the United States was in its infancy. Graduates
of the major forestry schools were a small cadre; whether in govern-
ment or private industry, they were closely in contact with each other.
One of the pioneers, George Ahern, was the founder of forestry in

197
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the Philippines. Until his retirement in 1914 he worked aggressively for

rapid modernization of the islands’ timber harvests along American lines.
Looking back on his years there in 1917, he wrote:

We found in 1900 vast stretches of unmapped and sparsely inhabited forests,

which contained a large number of unknown and non-merchantable tree species.
No effort had been employed to make any use of these great forests. Communities
living in sight of virgin forests imported lumber from abroad.

Indeed, despite its great forest riches, the Philippines had become an
importer of building timber in the nineteenth century. Like many of the
rapidly expanding ports of the southern Pacific rim, Manila was being built
with Douglas fir and redwood timber from the American coastal ranges.
In Manila the colonial regime acted quickly, adopting a forestry law
of Ahern’s design and establishing the Bureau of Forestry in 1904. The
Bureau was given the authority to regulate commercial logging by grant-
ing concessions to harvest timber from specified tracts. If a company
applying for a concession could demonstrate that it had adequate capital,
machinery and management for the task, it could receive a licence for
ten to fifty years. The Bureau made most of its large-scale grants on these
terms so as to encourage the expansion of the industry, looking particu-
larly for firms with the most advanced technology and strongest capit-
alization. It also granted short-term leases, usually for one year, which
were meant for local use.
The Bureau of Forestry forged close working relations with logging
companies, especially American firms in the early years. Major American
firms began operations in the islands as soon as the forestry law was in
place, for Ahern knew his commercial counterparts well. Immediately
in 1904 the timber industry of the American North-west launched the
first modern lumber company in the Philippines, the Insular Lumber
Company. Insular took advantage of the new law to gain a 300 square
kilometre timber concession in the dipterocarp forests of Negros island,
which was beginning intensive forest clearing for sugar plantations. As
one forester observed six years later, full of enthusiasm about the new
technology:

On the Insular Lumber Company concession, the operations are an exact copy
of the lumbering operations of a large company in Seattle, Washington, and the

198
 THE COMMERCIAL TIMBER ECONOMY

sawmill, of 100,000 board-feet daily capacity, is as thoroughly fitted up with up-

to-date appliances and as well run as almost any mill in America. All this is a new
venture, believed to be utterly impossible a few years ago.

In contrast with the existing logging methods in the islands, which

used only rough axes for cutting and carabao (water buffalo) for haul-
ing the timber to water, Insular and other American firms rapidly made
the islands the most advanced in tropical Asia in lumbering technology.
The supervisory role of Americans in every aspect of logging operations
was at first pervasive. Boss loggers, superintendents of logging railways,
sawyers, saw filers and yard bosses were generally Americans. All other
workers were local, including those trained for various semi-skilled
jobs. Insular, for example, by 1911 employed 800 Filipino and Chinese
labourers under 18 American supervisors.
Another U.S. firm almost equally as significant in the evolution of
Philippine tropical forestry, was the Cadwallader-Gibson Company,
which launched a long-lasting operation on Manila Bay at the same time.
Cadwallader-Gibson worked closely with the Bureau over the years to
refine the system of logging rules, and to train Filipino recruits at the
nearby national School of Forestry after its founding in 1910.
The Bureau also cultivated close relations with Filipino loggers, teach-
ing and encouraging them to expand and modernize their operations.
In this work the foresters were entirely in tune with the general tenor
of American colonialism in Manila, where entrepreneurs from the U.S.
and their local counterparts evolved much closer working relationships
than in many colonial systems. One broad consequence was the strength-
ening of the Manila elite’s power to dominate land use after indepen-
dence in 1946.
The way the Filipino–American lumbering connection evolved in the
inter-island trade, and its role in transforming lowland dipterocarp for-
ests into agriculture, are indicated by an important early concession, a
1905 grant to the Mindoro Lumber and Logging Company. This firm was
a subsidiary of a Manila milling company; the likelihood is that this was
a Filipino-owned operation with direct connections to Ahern’s forces.
It was becoming an important actor in the second category of firms:
medium-scale coastal logging for the rapidly expanding Manila market,
a dimension of the timber industry which Filipino and Chinese, not for-
eign, loggers controlled.

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Mindoro island’s north-eastern lowland forests lie easily accessible

to the nation’s major urban market in Manila; its various hardwoods
have been increasingly in demand on international markets in recent
years. The island’s population in 1903 was only 28,300, most of it clus-
tered around several small ports. Northern Mindoro thus was one of the
country’s most attractive targets for loggers. The 1905 license gave the
Mindoro Lumber and Logging Company the exclusive right to commer-
cial logging on a tract of 85 square miles along the east coast, which
was mostly untouched dipterocarp forest. The company’s sawmill took
mostly lauan, but handled smaller amounts of several other species as
well. In the forest it relied in the old way on carabao to haul logs to water
for floating. But it also used some newly imported American equipment,
including heavy American axes for felling and a portable sawmill for
cutting logs into lumber for shipment to Manila by small steamer or sail-
boat. In Manila’s booming construction market it had no trouble finding
buyers for its products.
The result of these operations was a rapid expansion of timber-
cutting, primarily for domestic markets before 1914. Official figures
estimated that production rose from 40 million board-feet in 1901 to
112 million in 1913. After World War I was over, the foresters and the
larger commercial firms turned their ambitions more to international
markets, as the regional economy of the entire Pacific basin was ex-
panding steadily in the 1920s. Ahern’s ambition had been to make the
Philippines an exporter of timber by marketing in the burgeoning ports
of Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney, as well as
in the United States. Insular Lumber’s 1904 concession, as managed by
Seattle-based A.P. Clark, Ahern’s close friend, became the basis for in-
troducing lauan onto international markets as ‘Philippine mahogany’. By
1920 lauan began replacing American timber in the ports of the western
Pacific.
By the early 1920s the Philippines’ timber export trade was owned
one-third each by Filipino capital, American investment and a mixture
of other Western and Asian firms, primarily British and Chinese. Most
Philippine mahogany exports were destined for the U.S., for panelling,
doors and furniture in Pacific coast markets. A less extensive trade de-
veloped with the north-eastern states, including the Grand Rapids furni-
ture makers in Michigan, who began purchasing lauan from New York

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importers after 1918. This coincided with the declining availability of

true mahogany from the Caribbean basin.
The dipterocarps were specialty woods, harvested primarily for for-
eign markets. For more mundane building lumber within the country,
and increasingly for wood pulp, the Philippines continued to import
softwood supplies, especially redwood and Douglas fir from the north-
western U.S., as well as railroad ties from Australia, though the latter
were being reduced by the increased Philippine production. Over the
long run, Philippine timber imports dropped from 16 million board-
feet in 1907 to just over 2 million in 1941, the final peacetime year of
American rule.
The political setting changed significantly in 1935, when a new
constitution brought the islands Commonwealth status and internal
autonomy, one step short of independence. The new government set
about legislating to defend Filipino commercial interests against foreign
competition, especially Chinese. But the special ties with U.S. lumber
interests were carefully preserved. New legislation provided that only
Filipino or U.S. firms could be given long timber leases. Other for-
eigners could no longer legally participate to more than 40 per cent of a
firm’s capital. By 1939, as the Depression was lifting but the Pacific was
drifting towards war, the nation’s sawmill industry, with an estimated
$15.5 million capitalization, was divided among several national invest-
ments: 42 per cent was U.S. capital, 25 per cent was Filipino, 12 per cent
was Chinese, 7 per cent was British, and still only 4 per cent was
Japanese. The most rapid diversification of markets in the 1930s had
been in Europe, where red lauan and many other specialty woods were
expanding their markets. But the U.S. remained the largest single mar-
ket. Cultivating that market, the Bureau of Forestry issued a booklet in
1939 which reminded its potential buyers:

When you buy Philippine lumber, you are helping not only the Filipinos, but also
the American lumbermen in the Philippines and the American machine manufac-
turers in the United States.

The nationalist message was never clearer. American and Philippine

lumber industries, both investments and markets, remained intricately
intertwined.

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The ultimate consequence was severe depletion of export timber sup-

plies, but military and political factors played key roles in that ultimate
outcome. Japanese occupation of the islands from 1942 to 1945 resulted
in devastation of the national economy, destruction of cities, and de-
molition of the timber industry and its sawmills. The immediate post-
war years saw rapid reconstruction of Manila and other cities, mostly by
Filipino lumbermen but with the loan of American equipment. American
companies were reluctant to reinvest, leaving a great portion of the in-
dustry to advanced local firms with effective political connections in
Manila. Filipino firms were thus able after independence in 1946 to take
over an increasing share of the rapidly expanding Pacific-wide markets.
Through the 1950s and 1960s the Philippines was Southeast Asia’s largest
timber exporter, but its vast forest resources were depleted so severely
that exports began a rapid decline before 1970.
Experienced onlookers in the 1950s were appalled at the picture. The
most emphatic was Tom Gill, generally considered the pre-eminent U.S.
tropical forester of his generation. Addressing the Philippine Lumber
Producers Association at the end of a 1959 tour of the Islands’ forest
lands, Gill described:

Some weeks ago I visited Cebu, Bohol and Negros. Parts of these islands made
me think I was back again in Korea, North China, or the man-made deserts of
Mexico. For I saw thousands upon thousands of hectares of cut-over, burned-over
and abandoned land, pock-marked with red and yellow scars of bare earth at the
mercy of sun, wind and rain.

American colonial forestry had stressed rapid expansion and mod-

ernization of the timber industry, as well as taking advantage of inter-
national markets, in contrast to their counterparts in northern India. But
both finally lost control of the political and administrative leverage which
shaped forest use. Whether one pattern or the other held more ecological
hope in the long run is a separate issue, too complex to consider here.

References

Detailed documentation may be found in the author’s following papers:

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 THE COMMERCIAL TIMBER ECONOMY

‘The British Colonial System and the Forests of the Western Himalayas,
1815–1914,’ in Richard P. Tucker and J.F. Richards, eds, Global Deforesta-
tion and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1983).
‘Forest Depletion in the Himalayas under British Administration: The United
Provinces and Assam, 1900–1950,’ in J.F. Richards and Richard P. Tucker,
eds, World Deforestatioon in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1988).
‘Forest Exploitation in the Philippines, 1900–1950,’ forthcoming.

203
 IX
Resident Peoples and Wildlife Reserves
in India: The Prehistory of a Strategy∗

S ystematic integration of local people into wildlife planning is a

relatively new effort. Yet in most of the world there is very little true
wilderness where wildlife does not coexist with human and domestic
animal populations. Given this elementary fact, it is puzzling that a strategy
that encompasses domestic as well as wild animal populations has taken
so long to evolve. We are compelled to review the history of the conser-
vation movement in each country to see the political, cultural, and natu-
ral setting in which the movement developed and to determine which
constituent groups have played important roles in the movement, and
what their priorities and preoccupations have been.
Many dimensions of wildlife conservation were constructed first in
India and later adopted in other parts of the British Empire. The struggle
to preserve India’s wildlife heritage began more than a century ago, at
the height of the imperial era, when its wildlands were coming under
severe pressure from an ever denser population of humans and livestock.
Under siege, the early conservationists favored only wildlife, and not
until well after India became independent in 1947 were resident popula-
tions, either human or livestock, considered in detail. By then a series

*Originally published as “Resident Peoples and Wildlife Reserves in India” from

Resident Populations and National Parks by Patrick West and Stephen Brechin.
© 1991 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University
of Arizona Press.

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 RESIDENT PEOPLES AND WILDLIFE RESERVES

of attitudes toward peasants, tribes, and their livestock in relation to

wildlife had evolved, providing the basis for more elaborate discussions
of resident peoples in recent years.
The subject encompasses both agencies of the imperial regime and
private civic associations; it includes both forest officials and hunter-
naturalists, and both British colonialists and Indian aristocrats. Together
their first priority over the years after approximately 1870 emerged as the
effort to stave off extinction for big game species, which centered on the
design and enforcement of laws controlling hunting and poaching.
Until recently, it left little room for detailed understanding of the peasant
and tribal communities’ local needs in wildlife areas. Research focused
on wildlife and habitat, and was rarely integrated with the human and
livestock population.
Following the colonial era, India went to war and succeeded in gain-
ing self-rule in the 1940s. With their departure in 1947, the British
also left principles for integrating the rhythms of wild and domestic life
deeply embedded in India’s approach to wildlands management.

The Rise of Modern Forestry and Game Management

Fundamental to the course of British rule in India was the inexorable

expansion of arable land, at the expense of natural vegetation cover
(Tucker and Richards 1983; Richards et al. forthcoming). The achieve-
ment of increased agricultural production was a guiding moral and even
the Forest Service maintained throughout the era that in any conflict
between forest preservation and agricultural expansion, the food needs
of the rural populace must have precedence.
Agriculture and urbanization expanded at the cost of massive forest
depletion from the late eighteenth century onward (Stebbing 1922–1926).
In each region the British quickly constructed military cantonments,
civilian settlements, and new transport facilities, all providing commercial
markets for timber. Then, in 1854, the great era of railway building com-
menced. Over the next thirty years Asia’s finest railway network was
constructed, consuming vast tracts of hardwood forest for supporting
the rails and fueling the engines (Guha 1983; Tucker 1982).

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In response to the massive cutting, high ranking officials established

the Indian Forest Service in 1865, marking the first step toward wild-
lands conservation in the subcontinent. Foresters’ three functions were
profitable timber cutting, preservation of remaining forests, and provid-
ing for villagers’ subsistence needs. The commercial function was the
most successful, due to the high profits, praise from the higher reaches
of government, and promises of more adequate departmental budgets.
The third charge, to understand and meet the needs of resident peasants
and tribals, was the function that the forest service was least equipped
to carry out. In part this arose from the colonial character of the regime.
The heart of the issue, for forests and later for wildlife, was the system
of Reserved and Protected Forests established in 1878. These reserves
were given to the Forest Department to cut selectively or, in more remote
and fragile areas, to preserve without cutting. The forestry hierarchy was
empowered to establish restrictions on local use of the forests wherever
necessary to assure regeneration of timber supplies. Thus emerged a com-
petition between peasants who had never before been restricted in their
access to fuelwood and fodder, and officials imbued with a tradition of
enforcing detailed regulations. Management by restriction was expressed
in many ways, including the standardized forms in departmental annual
reports that compiled statistics of each year’s forest offenses, fines im-
posed, cases brought to court, and cases resolved (Tucker 1986).
The preoccupation with legal forms and illegal actions bore heaviest
on the forest rangers and guards. Of low rank, they had little motivation
for controlling forest offenses; they could be tempted to blackmail other
peasants with threats of punishment, or could easily be bribed. Later
as gun licensing and anti-poaching laws were set into place, poachers
learned the unwritten rules of the game against the forest guards as quickly
as firewood gatherers had.
By 1900, the Forest Department regulated access to the Reserved
Forests not only for wood and fodder but also for game. It issued gun
licenses to villagers (as distinct from sport hunters from outside) expli-
citly to defend their fields and livestock from predatory wild animals. In
these and other ways the foresters’ relations with the village economy
were complex, not entirely adversarial.

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The Nongovernmental Conservation Movement

In the same years a movement was launched to declare certain Reserved

Forests closed to all human exploitation, so as to preserve endangered
game species from extinction. This fledgling national parks movement
saw little legitimate place for any human or livestock residents in the
vicinity of endangered game. From its inception, major impetus came
from voluntary organizations outside official government agencies.
In 1883 the Bombay Natural History Society was founded, providing
a meeting place for wildlife enthusiasts both Indian and Western, both
private and official. Sponsoring field studies of animals, fish, and birds
of the subcontinent, the Society quickly established standards respected
internationally for the recording of natural history. Equally important, it
became a hunters’ club and emerged as imperial India’s national lobby
for controlled hunting.
Provincial game associations appeared in the same years, the first and
most influential being the Nilgiri Game Association, founded in 1879 in
the hills of south India and dominated by tea planters. More than
one important nature reserve in the Nilgiris today was formerly a tea-
planter’s reserve whose wildlife habitat was protected by the Nilgiri
Game Association (Bedi and Bedi 1934; Phythian-Adams 1893, 1927,
1929, and 1939).
By 1900 another powerful Indian component of the conservation
movement emerged: several leading “Native Princes,” rajahs who began
to realize that game species were being rapidly depleted in the ancestral
hunting reserves. In close parallel to European aristocratic tradition, an
essential element of Indian courtly life was the social ritual of shikar, the
aristocratic hunt, which re-enacted both the warrior’s fighting prowess
and his social dominance in peacetime (MacKenzie 1988). In the
nineteenth century important rajahs regularly hosted British hunting par-
ties, a social and diplomatic coalition that produced appalling slaughter
of game because improved technology was now available from Europe
(Burton 1952; Phythian-Adams 1939).
Several major rajahs began adapting British India’s game laws to their
own hunting reserves; some hired professional game managers. But there
was a difference from British India. Most rajahs held unfettered personal

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authority to frame and enforce laws in their domains. Being autocrats,

rooted in medieval times, they tended to levy harsh and instant pun-
ishment on poachers in their personal reserves (Stracey 1963). One of
the most powerful, the Maharajah of Kashmir, summarily removed the
human population from the Dachigam deer reserve in the high moun-
tains in about 1910; in British India, the government had no such power
(Holloway et al. 1969).
The movement primarily emphasized avoiding extinction of endan-
gered quadrupeds, and secondarily regulating hunting of those birds and
animals that still flourished in safe numbers. The legislative means to
achieve this were laws linked to the forest laws. First, they prohibited
taking valuable animals and provided penalties for breaking the new
restrictions. Second, they provided a licensing system which for a fee
legitimized a hunter, like a fuelwood gatherer, in claiming the resource if
local foresters considered it to be in adequate supply.
For British India as a whole, the Forest Law of 1878 enshrined many
provisions regulating shooting. In the same year several provinces put in
place complementary legislation designed to protect specific endangered
species, including elephants and one-horned rhinoceros (Phythian-
Adams 1939; Gee 1950). Enactment was one thing, however; implemen-
tation was far more difficult.

The Acceleration Movement, 1918–1939

World War I and its aftermath brought fundamental changes to India.

Among them were greatly accelerated threats to its wildlands and conse-
quently new initiatives from the nature protection movement. The war
led immediately to a dramatic rise in commercial game poaching be-
cause of greatly increased access to sophisticated breechloading rifles
(Phythian-Adams 1939). The war also brought the automotive era to
India, constructing new road networks into forested areas previously ac-
cessible only by foot, horse, or elephant. By the early 1920s many new
cars appeared in India; the era of the townsman-hunter was beginning,
and new technologies made possible more wanton killing than even the
mass shikars (Seshadri 1969).

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In these years India drew heavily from other continents in shap-

ing its strategies, and, in turn, contributed considerably from its own
path-breaking experience, for its leading conservationists had close ties
at high levels in Europe. The international parks movement began with
the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, but after the virtual
elimination of the native population in North America, parks were never
faced with the problem of resident human and livestock populations to
nearly the degree that park planners would face elsewhere. The North
American model in this way was a risky one to adopt in the colonial
countries of the tropical world, but this became evident only slowly.
In 1900 the European colonial powers launched a series of inter-
national conferences to plan wildlife reserves (Boardman 1981). The
first conference, held in London, produced the first wildlife convention
for Africa, stressing the need for more effective regulation of hunting.
In 1933 conservationists met again in London to design the landmark
International Convention for the Protection of the Fauna and Flora of
Africa. The links between that conference and India led in both direc-
tions: Indian models for colonial wildlife management were used in the
conference discussions, and the new convention spurred two years of
major changes in India itself.
In 1934 the Indian National Parks Act became law, embodying many
years’ experience of game laws and their implementation. Regarding resi-
dent peoples in protection areas, the Act defined which human visitors
could enter the game reserves, with which licenses and at which seasons.
But this focused on sport hunters; regarding resident tribal and peasant
populations, it was almost silent.
A year later Corbett Park, India’s first modern national park, was es-
tablished, covering ninety-nine square miles of prime tiger habitat in
the Terai jungles at the foot of the Himalayas (Burton 1951a). The prob-
lem of resident human and livestock populations there was not severe,
for the incidence of malaria was so high that only a scattering of Tharu
tribals, immune to the anopholes mosquito, could survive the monsoon
rains there (Ford-Robertson 1936).
The new law and its first park came at a difficult time for wildlife
management, for funds to administer forests and game reserves were
shrinking in the Depression years, making it ever more difficult to guard

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against poachers. In response the United Provinces Wildlife Preservation

Society, assisted by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), organ-
ized a major conference in New Delhi in 1935 (Burton 1953).
The familiar conservationist theme dominated each province’s report.
Endangered species must be preserved at all costs. More national parks
were needed. Budgets for control of poaching must be increased. In
addition, leading wildlife enthusiasts were beginning to explore the im-
plications of how habitats could be reconciled with a human presence,
and in particular, what the economic implications might be for villagers
in and near the new game reserves.
First were the universally accepted principles that gave farmers rights
of subsistence and self-protection near forests, and access to wood and
grasses. But their licensed guns, used for crop protection in the nights
before harvest, enabled the farmers to turn into predators in other seasons.
One forester urged more sport hunters to hire the best local shikaris
to guide them in the wilds, arguing that this would give an income to
poachers and establish at least momentary control over them.
The question of poaching for subsistence, and beneath it the issue of
resident peoples in wildlands, often concerned the habitats of the tribal
peoples who had long been the primary inhabitants of India’s hill regions.
Though their subsistence patterns varied widely with the ecological set-
ting, many were bird and animal hunters. With the fast-accelerating mar-
ket for bird meat at elite dinner tables and bird feathers on international
markets, many tribes had their first access to cash incomes from snaring
game birds and selling them to urban-based traders. By the 1920s, this
commercial trade had gained massive proportions, endangering many
species of game birds (Abdulali 1942; Ogden 1942).
Conservationists alarmed at this trend blamed not the tribals them-
selves, for many British held a romantic and paternalistic view of the trib-
als. Instead, they centered their wrath on the urban traders and exporters
who callously exploited both the game and the hunters. The New Delhi
conference reflected this in declaring that traders in birds must be stopped;
if the market for bird poaching could be curtailed, tribals would no
longer be corrupted (Burton 1953).
Shifting cultivation, the other aspect of tribal life that had a direct im-
pact on wildlife habitat, was a very different problem, and British officials

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had long insisted with near unanimity that it had reached a dangerous
scale. Tribals must be encouraged or pressured to settle into permanent
tilling of individually owned plots. In sum, foresters and conservationists
were confronting the intricate web of tribal life as the market economy,
and population increase began to change the basis of tribal subsistence.
Peasants presented a very different set of dilemmas, not the least of
them the regulation of their livestock. The New Delhi conference in
1935 repeatedly raised the dangers of epidemic cattle diseases spreading
to hoofed wildlife. Conference participants were convinced that these
epidemics, of both domestic and wild cattle, were becoming more severe
and frequent as India’s domestic cattle population inexorably increased.
Two broad approaches arose to confront the challenge of cattle dis-
ease. First was to organize large-scale vaccination campaigns (Burton
1953). This approach assumed that limiting the cattle population was
virtually impossible, and it implied a willingness to improve the con-
ditions of domestic populations in or near important wildlife habitats.
But the principle was not pursued in any detail; no study resulted on
how resident peoples’ subsistence systems could be balanced with the
remaining wildlife.
The second approach to the livestock problem at the New Delhi con-
ference was more fully consistent with the conferees’ largely negative
approach to the claims of resident villagers. Several speakers urged strict
limitations on the number of cattle allowed to graze in the sanctuaries
during the hot, dry months and then the monsoon rains, when grass
resources were at the most delicate stages of their growth cycles. Only
as many cattle should be admitted as would not endanger the fodder
needs of the wild ungulates. This principle gave the needs of wildlife pre-
cedence over those of domestic cattle, in contrast to the accepted principle
that humans in the villages must have access to reserves for legitimate
subsistence needs.
In sum, by 1935 the conservation movement had achieved mature
studies of wildlife species and their habitats, had designed detailed laws
to assure the preservation of rare fauna, and was increasing its aware-
ness of the full range of life in critical ecosystems. Serious attempts at a
detailed understanding of adjacent human and livestock populations, or
their interactions with wildlife ecology, had hardly begun.

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World War II and the Transition to Independence

The decade of the 1940s was a difficult time for total self-rule to come to
India. The World War II brought devastation to wildlife interests as great
as the first had done. Once again guns by the tens of thousands flowed
into rural India as a consequence of the war, enabling many more peas-
ants to become hunters and poachers than ever before (Stracey 1963).
During the war the Forest Service was stretched to the limit of its
resources of money and men. All its energy had to be turned to harvest-
ing timber as war material, wherever possible, by accelerating rotational
cutting schedules. Some foresters departed for the war, leaving the man-
agement of forests severely understaffed, and wildlife protection had to
remain an afterthought for the next six years.
The end of the war led quickly to independence under the new Prime
Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Two major segments of the subcontinent
became Pakistan, but what remained in India encompassed most of the
major wildlife areas of the subcontinent. The tensions of these transi-
tions had discouraging effects. In the Terai jungles of the north, Corbett
National Park had been clearly delineated, and no part of it could now
be alienated for the plow. But new lands had to be found for resettling
masses of Sikh and Hindu refugees from West Pakistan, and only some
of them could take farmland from which Muslims had been evacuated;
therefore Forest Department lands were designated (Anonymous 1947).
Today, four decades later, large areas of what had been Terai forests
support extremely successful ex-Punjabi farmers, across the border from
similarly cleared foothill jungles in Nepal.
Clearing forests for settlement of Sikh refugees was at least an admin-
istratively orderly operation; other events were not. In many parts of
India, game was besieged by hunters. In both British and Princely dis-
tricts, peasants went on a rampage of poaching, for the old regimes were
dead; what better way to celebrate than to violate their most galling laws
(Seshadri 1969; Stracey 1963; Prakash and Ghosh 1976).
The first decade of India’s independence brought a fundamental shift
in her economic and political priorities, toward accelerated economic
development both rural and industrial. The 1950s saw a major expan-
sion in the acreage under crops; by the end of the decade, virtually all
viable agricultural soils and much marginal land came under the plow

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(Farmer 1974). In addition, regional marketing networks and expanding

urban centers, particularly in hill areas, placed new pressures on forest
and wildlife zones.
Closely linked with agricultural expansion in a monsoon climate
with its long, dry season was the launching of India’s great multipurpose
hydropower dams. In the Himalayan foothills, the first of the great dams,
at Bhakra, was completed in 1960, inundating farm and forest land.
East of there the Ramganga River flowed into the Ganges through part of
Corbett Park. When its dam was completed in 1972, the finest grazing
area for the park’s wildlife was lost in order to meet the human needs of
the plains district downriver (Kandari and Singh 1982).
Wildlife planners and foresters watched the construction of the high
dams with mixed emotions, recognizing the need to harness the power
and regulate the rivers, yet seeing more clearly than the engineers the
threat to watersheds and wildlife. In this setting, the arguments for the
economic benefits of wildlife habitat took on new sophistication, for as
Burton argued for the BNHS, reforestation would benefit not only wild-
life but village agriculture and hydroelectric dams’ watersheds as well
(Burton 1951b).
Fortunately, Nehru, who exercised enormous power until his death in
1964, understood the urgency of preserving India’s compromised wild-
lands. As an urban and cosmopolitan man he cultivated a romantic vision
of the potential harmonies of peasant and tribal life. The leading Indian
conservationists, whether the rajahs or the urban-based naturalists in
Bombay and elsewhere, had personal access to Nehru. The social basis of
the pre-independence movement had survived the difficult years largely
intact, and also remained influential in the international conservation net-
work through the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
(Burton 1950). Together with Nehru they constructed a new and far
more ambitious legal and administrative structure for wildlife preservation.
In 1949 Nehru established a National Wildlife Board. Its constitution
charged it “to preserve the fauna of India and to prevent the extinction of
any species and their protection in balance with the natural and human
environment” (Burton 1953: ix). The emphasis was still on preservation
of endangered species, but the board’s principles could be understood
to encompass the needs of resident peoples in the vicinity of refuges.
In the 1950s many additional national parks and wildlife refuges were

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established; their administrations posed difficult questions of priorities.

Wildlife management remained a secondary branch of the Indian Forest
Service. There was no separate professional track for wildlife biologists,
and Forest Department budgets remained chronically inadequate to sup-
port wildlife research and management. Finally, shortly after 1980 the
central government resolved that wildlife management should be sepa-
rated from forestry and made an autonomous agency (Saharia 1982).
The conservationists’ desire for greater professionalization of wildlife
managers was achieved, but at the cost of adopting a more fragmented
approach to balancing wild and domestic life.
The growth of more aggressive rural political lobbies in recent years
has led in that direction, for rural and “backward” constituencies have
increasingly learned to exercise their leverage in India’s structurally
democratic system. Because many major wildlife habitats are also tribal
areas, the rise of tribal political movements has great potential signifi-
cance (Singh 1982). As tribal habitats have become degraded in recent
decades, the conflict between tribals and state forest departments has in-
tensified. In this political setting it has become less adequate for any for-
ester or wildlife manager to stress merely the destructive aspects of tribal
hunting traditions, although P.D. Stracey’s wildlife textbook for forestry
trainees in 1963 still took that perspective, reflecting the discouragement
of his long years in the service. “Forest dwelling communities are invari-
ably inveterate hunters and have in most areas practically annihilated
the game animals and birds by indiscriminate hunting and snaring. It is
surely time to instill in the tribal mind a respect for the basic game laws
of the country” (Stracey 1963).
By the 1960s the old ambivalence of hunters, foresters, and conser-
vationists toward the tribals was hardening into an almost total hostility
as the habitat inexorably declined. This in itself was reason to search for
fuller understandings of the forest peoples’ subsistence as they struggled
to avoid cultural extinction.

Bibliography

Abdulali, H. 1942. “Partridge Snaring by Wandering Tribes.” Journal of the

Bombay Natural History Society 43: 659.

214
 RESIDENT PEOPLES AND WILDLIFE RESERVES

Anonymous. 1947. Report of the Tarai and Bhabar Development Committee.

Allahabad: Government Press.
Bedi, R. and R. Bedi. 1934. Indian Wildlife. New Delhi: Brijbasi Printers.
Boardman, R. 1981. International Organization and the Conservation of Nature.
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
Burton, R.W. 1950. “A Bibliography of Big Game Hunting and Shooting in India
and the East.” JBNHS 49: 222–241.
———. 1951a. “Wild Life Reserves in India: Uttar Pradesh.” JBNHS 49: 749–754.
———. 1951b. “The Protection of World Resources: Wild Life and the Soil.”
JBNHS 50: 376.
———. 1952. “A History of Shikar in India.” JBNHS 50: 843–869.
———. 1953. The Preservation of Wild Life in India. Bangalore: Bangalore Press.
Ford-Robertson, F.C. 1936. Our Forests. Allahabad: Government Press.
Gee, E.P. 1950. “Wild Life Reserves in India: Assam.” JBNHS 49: 82.
Guha, R. 1983. “Forestry in British and Post-British India: A Historical Analysis.”
Economic and Political Weekly, October 29, 1882–1896; November 5–12:
1940–1947.
Holloway, C.W., G.B. Schaller, and A.R. Wani. 1969. “Dachigam Wild Life
Sanctuary, Kashmir: Status and Management of the Kashmir Stag Cervus
elephus hanglu: Report.” IUCN Eleventh Technical Meeting, vol. 3. New Delhi:
IUCN.
Kandari, O.P. and T.V. Singh. 1982. “Corbett Park, India: An Exploratory Survey
of Habitat, Recreational Use and Resource Ecology.” In T.V. Singh et al.,
eds, Studies in Tourism, Wildlife Parks and Conservation. New Delhi: Metro-
politan Press, 244–246.
Ogden, F.G.D. 1942. “Partridge Snaring by Wandering Tribes.” JBNHS 44: 299.
Phythian-Adams, E.G. 1893. “Nilgiri Game Association Report.” JBNHS 8: 535.
———. 1927. “Game Preservation in the Nilgiris.” JBNHS 32: 339–343.
———. 1929. “Game Preservation in the Nilgiris.” JBNHS 33: 947–951.
———. 1939. “The Nilgiri Game Association, 1879–1939.” JBNHS 41: 374–396.
Prakash, I. and P.K. Ghosh. 1976. “Human-Animal Interactions in the Rajasthan
Desert.” JBNHS 75: 1260.
Richards, J.F., et al. Forthcoming. Land-Use and Vegetation Changes in South and
Southeast Asia, 1700–1980.
Saharia, V.B. 1982. “Human Dimension in Wildlife Management: The Indian
Experience.” In J.A. McNeely and K.R. Miller, eds, National Parks, Conserva-
tion, and Development: The Role of Protected Areas in Sustaining Society. Pro-
ceedings of the World Congress on National Parks, Bali, Indonesia, October
11–22, 1982. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 190–196.

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Seshadri, B. 1969. The Twilight of India’s Wildlife. London: J. Baker.

Stebbing. E.P. 1922–1926. The Forests of India. Vol. 1 of 3 vols. London: John
Lane.
Stracey, P.D. 1963. Wild Life in India: Its Conservation and Control. New Delhi:
Department of Agriculture.
Tucker, R.P. 1982. “The Forests of the Western Himalayas: The Legacy of British
Colonial Administration.” Journal of Forest History 26 (3): 112–123.
———. 1986. “The British Empire and India’s Forest Resources: Assam and
the United Provinces, 1914–1950.” In J.F. Richards and R.P. Tucker, eds,
World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press.
Tucker, R.P. and J.F. Richards, eds. 1983. Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-
Century World Economy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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 X
Non-timber Forest Products Policy in the
Western Himalayas under British Rule∗

Foresters in India will gradually understand that they are expected to make the
utmost of the estates intrusted to their charge for the benefit of the present gener-
ation, while steadily improving the capital value and productiveness of their estates;
and this will lead them eagerly to seek information regarding the various trees and
shrubs which may be turned to account.
Dietrich Brandis, 1874

Introduction: The Methodological Problem

T he history of forest exploitation in the South Asian subcontinent

emerged as the leading aspect of studies in environmental history in the
region in the early 1980s. For nearly a decade analysis has centred on
the extraction of timber by the colonial and post-colonial state and the
social conflict which resulted from that system’s challenge to the trad-
itional rights and practices of village communities.1 The imperial sys-
tem has been seen largely in terms of timber-cutting, conservation and
commercially oriented silviculture; the village-level resistance has been
seen primarily as a defence of grazing and timber rights.2 This work has

∗ Originally published as “Non Timber Forest Products Extraction in the Western

Himalayas under British Rule,” in Richard Grove and Vineeta Damodaran, eds.,
Nature and the Orient: Essays on the Environmental History of South and South–East
Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 459–83. Reprinted with the
permission of the publisher.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

gone far towards clarifying the issues central to political conflict between
village communities and the local extensions of imperial control and
management.
However, the discussion has tended to be shaped by the colonial
system’s own frame of reference: it has been silent concerning the wide
variety of minor forest products which have always been vital to both
the floral diversity of forested areas and the subsistence systems of the
people of the forest. European foresters imported into India a classifica-
tory system which defined as ‘Minor Forest Products’ (MFP) all products
which did not produce large-scale market sales or revenue for govern-
ment. Their system of scientific research relegated the vast majority of
forest products to an insignificant corner of their agenda. This market
orientation was one major reason for their failure to comprehend the
character and scope of twentieth-century peasant and tribal resistance
movements. It is therefore important to retrace the evolution, scope and
limitations in the Forest Service’s non-timber forest products policy and
evaluate the extent to which the Forest Department attempted to regu-
late the gathering and sale of MFPs. It seems likely that in many places
their rhetoric about managing the extraction of MFPs was not matched
by any significant effort on the ground. If this was the case, then in fact
the conflict between the Forest Department and villagers did not extend
to most non-timber forest products.
It is important for our retrospective of those decades to transcend
the limited categories of those times. This chapter highlights the need to
reconstruct rural people’s ‘traditional’ use of non-timber forest products
in the western Himalayas, a mountain region where the evolution of
modern forestry systems is now familiar but the social ecology of for-
est use has been very little studied. To the extent that the interaction of
these systems can be historically reconstructed across the wide variety
of local circumstances over the subcontinent, it will become possible
to shed brighter light on the evolution of relations between the state,
the market, villages and forest ecosystems. This reconstruction of rural
social ecology is not a simple matter to achieve. Written documentation
from colonial times is thin because of the relative lack of interest among
the literate who knew their own botanical resources well. To compound
the problem there has been little research on ethnobotany which could
help to broaden our understanding of forest productivity beyond a

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 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

near-exclusive emphasis on timber products. There are indications that

tribal and peasant systems were very differently influenced by colonial
forest policy. Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil have applied the
broad distinction between hunter–gatherers with their systems of shifting
cultivation, on the one hand, and settled cultivators on the other, to sug-
gest the differential impact of the colonial state.3 The implications of this
approach now need to be drawn out in local studies of varied ecosystems
around the subcontinent.
Even this approach will not cover the entire spectrum of the prob-
lem, since it is limited to human interactions with the flora of forest re-
gions. The next step would be to add studies of the human uses of forest
fauna. This would include domestic livestock, whose grazing the Forest
Department struggled to comprehend and regulate. There has been gen-
eral agreement that this was a major dimension of the forester–villager
conflict, varying with traditions of livestock management.4 It would
also include wild fauna, ‘wildlife’ in its usual sense, connoting birds and
animals. The traditional hunting patterns of rural populations, aristo-
cratic hunting reserves and ritualized hunts or shikar, and the commer-
cial market hunting of this past century would be covered by this aspect.
This too is not a separate story in the full picture of competing human
uses of nature and their ecological consequences, but it is separable for
purposes of the present discussion, in part because analytical studies are
only now emerging.5
Finally, for both peasant and tribal areas, the question of population/
land ratios lurks behind any analysis of rural history and environmental
change. It is difficult to assess, in part because virtually no useful statis-
tics of human or livestock numbers exist before the advent of colonial
censuses (and livestock censuses until the present remain notoriously
unreliable). It is also a treacherous issue, easily misunderstood. Sheer
numbers of consumers are not the issue so much as the changing de-
mand for various products of the natural landscape. Demand is largely
shaped by the social distribution of access to resources, most notably
land tenure systems. Landholding elites were a far less significant factor
on the landscape of the western Himalayas than, say, the Kathmandu
region of the Nepal Himalayas beginning in the eighteenth century, and
the rulers of local hills kingdoms rarely, if ever, restricted their subjects’
access to the common resources of mountain forests. The new systems

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

of regulation imposed by British rulers were a dramatic departure from

previous history, and second, demographic pressure had not yet pre-
sented society, government and ecosystem with the problems which are
inherent in an increasing scarcity of socially valued natural resources. In
sum, the great escalation of human and, therefore, livestock populations
since the nineteenth century is fundamental to the question of social and
ecological change. But since the complexity of population–environment
dynamics is still only vaguely understood (for India or anywhere else), it
remains merely a shadowy factor in the following discussion.

The Pre-colonial Setting: The Western Himalayas

Any analysis of the historical interactions between humans and nature

functions within a tension among political–administrative units, cul-
tural regions and biogeographical regions. Moreover none of these can
be neatly spelt out, except for the bureaucratic boundaries defined by
modern governments. But for the purposes of this chapter, the western
segment of the Himalayan region can be taken as the mountain zone
south-east of the Khyber Pass and west of the Sarda river (India’s bound-
ary with western Nepal). More specifically it is the present-day hill dis-
tricts of Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, with some reach into
adjacent areas of Jammu and Kashmir. Its southern boundary is the trans-
ition zone of the Terai, the formerly dense lowland forest zone at the foot
of the Siwalik hills. The northern boundary of the zone is less easy to de-
fine usefully. For most purposes its farthest extent during colonial times
was the snowy passes marking the transition into the Tibetan highlands.
This is particularly appropriate for historical ethnobotany.
But in any case any discussion of the human use of biological re-
sources in pre-colonial times must be very tentative, since no systematic
study has yet been carried out for this mountain region. Much there-
fore must be speculation, based in part on the survival of earlier extrac-
tion systems long into the colonial era. The social dimension is largely a
question of the customary law of common property systems and collect-
ive patterns of use of non-timber resources. In the western Himalayas,
over a period of over two thousand years, Hindu farmer castes gradually

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 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

expanded their settlements and terraced agriculture up the alluvial soils

of the region’s many river valleys. Hill peasants practised mixed crop-
ping systems on their terraces, primarily for local use but in some situ-
ations, and to a limited degree, for monetized regional markets as well.
In principle ownership of all land including arable lay with the hill rajas.
But, in practice, peasant households generally maintained use of their
terraces down the generations, and landholding was distributed rela-
tively equitably, with far less of a presence of a landholding elite than in
many parts of lowland India.6
Equally important, farm families maintained a mixed livestock regime,
as household animals grazed in the open forest commons, and commer-
cial herds managed by seasonal transhumance. The latter was especially
true of the Himachal districts, where Gaddi farmer-shepherds herded
large mixed flocks of sheep and goats from winter pasture in the chil or
chir pine forests of the Siwalik foothills to the Himalayan alpine pastures
for the summer monsoon season.7 To compound the region’s complexity
Gujar water buffalo herders, originally from Jammu, gradually extended
their transhumance range eastward as far as the outer hills of Garhwal.8
All of these systems of animal husbandry and social differentiation added
up to one of the world’s most intricate tapestries of use of oak and con-
ifer forest and grassy hillsides. Pre-colonial regimes regulated customary
grazing rights in a very limited way, only to the extent of extracting a
modest revenue plus the ritual of obeisance to authority. Ratios of land
to people and domestic animals were so generous that there is little evi-
dence of ecological deterioration before the nineteenth century.
In sharp contrast to peasant systems was the specialized human
ecology of hunter–gatherer groups and those who employed shifting
or cyclical cultivation systems in forest regions. In the Himalayas, as in
many parts of the world, these tribal economies utilized an extremely
complex variety of non-timber forest products, and their systems of
botanical knowledge were both subtle and intricate. In the western
Himalayas, however, even before the nineteenth century shifting cultiva-
tion was restricted to a very few locations, especially the Terai forests of
the lower border of Kumaon. There, Tharu tribals, more resistant than
other populations to the malarial ravages of anopheles mosquitoes, con-
tinue to subsist in forests where no other human genetic stock could sur-
vive year-round before the advent of DDT and massive forest clearance

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

in the 1950s.9 Though colonial revenue and forest administrators uni-

versally condemned these systems of vegetation and soil use, nearly all
examples which they attempted to suppress were not in this region of
north-west India but in the wetter forests of the eastern Himalayas and
tribal hill districts of central India and the Nilgiris of the south.10
One further dimension must be added to a full analysis of resource
extraction in order to define the context of non-timber botanical re-
source use. This is the historical expansion of marketing systems, long-
distance trade routes, and consumer demand for the traded products.
This encompasses both social and spatial dimensions. Socially its seg-
ments are suppliers, traders and consumers, which have been little
analysed for that region; only the rural suppliers, the harvesters of the
botanical riches of the hills, will be touched in this analysis. In the spa-
tial dimension it includes trade routes and market towns. At least two
different kinds of hill towns emerged over the centuries: hill settlements
with periodic local markets, where locally based entrepreneurial castes
interacted with peasants and tribals; and distant markets below the hills,
linked by middlemen from different social groups rooted in the low-
lands. Important among the latter was a line of foothills towns which,
by the nineteenth century, became the key timber transit points of north
India’s forest products industry. Local and distant markets were linked
with each other as well, in ways which are ethnographically less well
understood for the Indian Himalayas than for Nepal. As a total set, these
markets have been the key transition points in the western Himalayas, as
in all mountain–lowland interaction systems around the globe.
For the western Himalayas these marketing systems had complex and
shifting pre-colonial histories, buffeted by irregular political and military
movements. They certainly experienced long-term expansion under the
Pax Brittanica of the nineteenth century, though this subject too has not
been studied in any depth.11 Taken together these contextual uncertain-
ties leave us free from older stereotypes of a steady-state rural ecology
before the European arrival, but necessitate being tentative in drawing
a new pattern of conclusions regarding systematic changes in the ex-
traction and possible depletion of the biological riches of mountains in
colonial times.

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 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

British Forest Administration

In the aftermath of the East India Company’s 1815 victory over the
Gorkha armies of Nepal, British revenue officials moved into lower
Kumaon and began surveys of the forest wealth of the outer Himalayas.
From then on their primary interest lay with the commercial and revenue
potential of a few species of timber trees, plus a few other species such
as bamboos which could be marketed on a large scale. Forty years later,
at the time of the founding of the colonial Forest Service, it was already
conventional to relegate all other botanical resources to the category of
‘Minor Forest Products’—minor, that is, in monetary terms, though by
no means minor in the range and diversity of biological species or their
human uses for rural subsistence and some trade.
It must be asked whether British interest in these products was mi-
nor or peripheral, and whether their efforts to regulate them or even to
collect systematic data on them were incidental to their major interests.
If this was so, then the use of these many resources of the forest prob-
ably evolved largely from an increasing rural population’s demands on
shrinking commons. It would also be the case that the political con-
flicts of this century did not encompass a struggle over access to most
non-timber forest resources. In tribal zones elsewhere in the subcontin-
ent, many pre-colonial communities were gradually and profoundly un-
dermined. But in a mountain region populated largely by farmers and
shepherds, these particular consequences of colonial rule seem to have
been far less damaging. In the Punjab hills, which came under British
control after the successful military campaigns of the late 1840s, early
revenue settlements began a process of defining and cataloguing non-
timber forest resources, a process which was less systematic than prag-
matic. Economic botany was bound to develop faster than ethnobotany
as a field of inquiry.
The forest laws established a system of reserved and protected forests.
Reserved forests were to be managed primarily to protect the natural
forest or to produce commercial timber; protected forests were intended
to meet nearby villagers’ needs as a higher priority. Thus for non-timber
forest products the reserved forests in principle would preserve the
understorey in all its variety, while in the protected forests the District

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

Forest Officers and their rangers would ideally monitor the availability of
minor products, encourage their optimal growth, regulate their harvest
and sale, and collect duties for the government. A third class, gener-
ally called ‘shamilat’ in the Punjab hills, was the commons adjacent to
villages; there the villagers themselves would exercise formal authority.
In the Punjab hills the arduous, time-consuming effort of reviewing
actual patterns of forest use, codifying them, and thereby implicitly es-
tablishing a social philosophy, was finally settled in the last years of the
nineteenth century, in a series of forest settlements, for each adminis-
trative jurisdiction. In order to establish administrative uniformity and
expedite the otherwise endless work officers came to adopt similar lists
of villagers’ rights in the forest, but with significant variations from one
jurisdiction to another. These lists reveal a social and economic ideology
which attempted to allow villagers to maintain both material subsistence
and religious ritual. At the same time the regulations were designed to
restrict severely and systematically forest products harvesting for sale
or monetary profit. In reserved forests the lists were very limited; but
in protected or second class forests, where local subsistence was a high
priority, the discussions were lengthy and detailed. These were the regu-
lations from which we can infer the fine grain of the working lives of the
District Forest Officers and their staffs of rangers and guards. These are
the lists which suggest to us the day-to-day working relations between
imperial authority and local subjects—regulations which villagers would
tolerate as far as they could, evade wherever the risk was not too high
and rebel against when survival seemed at stake.
Products other than trees and shrubs fell under a general principle
of control. The regulations for Hamirpur District, in this regard virtu-
ally identical to all others, stated, ‘No forest produce acquired in the
exercise of these rights of user, except bamboos, fruits, flowers, medical
roots and leaves may be sold or bartered.’12 Long lists of trees, leaves,
bark and brushwood, leaves and bark of creepers, grasses of several
kinds, fruits, flowers, medical herbs, and finally honey, were identified
as open to unrestricted local use except when a maximum of one-third
of any forest was closed for several years for reforestation. In other words
many non-timber products in these areas of small-scale settled farm-
ing were normally excluded from governmental management and con-
trol. To make the analysis more difficult, the western Himalayas were

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 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

administratively complex; large areas outside the British districts were

left as intact Princely Hill States. These states tended to maintain the
older forms of discretionary management more nearly intact until they
were administratively absorbed into independent India or Pakistan in
1947. But most of them, under diplomatic pressure from the British,
gradually adopted approximations of the British forest management sys-
tem. The effect of this on the management of non-timber forest products
is even more uncertain than for the districts of British India, but some
indication can be gained from the forest rules which Chamba and Bashahr
states adopted by 1900. These rules stated that reserved forests would
be under the direct control of a British Forest Conservator appointed
by the raja, whereas unreserved forests were under the raja’s control. In
reserved forests the villagers had rights only to building timber, fodder
grass and fuelwood. In the raja’s forests villagers had rights to ‘the col-
lection and sale of dry and fallen timber and inferior trees for fuel, grass,
wild animals, birds, honey, wax, fruits and flowers, taking care that such
collection is effected in such a manner as not to injure the forest’.13 The
mutual value of such cooperation between local rajas and British admin-
istrators was exemplified in the tiny state of Guler in the Punjab foothills,
where duties from sale of both timber and bamboos to traders from the
plains were divided, giving three-fourths of the revenue to the raja and
one-fourth to the British-run Forest Department.14
In sum, both British India and the princely states under British influ-
ence experienced a trend towards managed forest ecosystems, with an
accommodation between European and traditional systems of use. On
the British side, where systematic documentation was a virtual compul-
sion, there was to be a gradual accumulation of knowledge, especially
on the economic aspects of botany. But that presupposed some develop-
ment of systematic taxonomy, based on collections painstakingly made
in the field.

Forest Botany: Research and Training

India in the eighteenth century was exotic to the Europeans in every

way, and no one found it more so than botanists and natural history
enthusiasts. Italians, Swiss, Spanish, French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes,

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

British—virtually every variety of European—were collecting on explor-

ations all over the world. Many passed through Calcutta on their way
to and from Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the last decades of the
century. By 1800 the Calcutta Botanical Garden was taking shape as
the coordinating point for botanical explorations throughout British and
princely India.15 Calcutta in turn was linked to London under Sir Joseph
Banks’s influence as President of the Royal Society and patron of the
empire-wide Botanical Garden at Kew outside London.
Economic botany was the major motive underlying colonial natural
history, expressed especially in the search for commercially profitable
crops, most notably tea. In the Punjab hills tea was gradually introduced
as far as Palampur in the Kangra valley.16 (In this region it is significant
that because of the importance of commercially oriented pastoralism in
the drier north-western plains from Delhi onwards, and into the entire
range of the western Himalayas, grasses were also potentially important
for research.) Saharanpur, a quiet town not far from where the Yamuna
and Ganges flowed out of the mountains, became a convenient launch-
ing place for geographical and geological expeditions into the great
watersheds of the region. Several early explorers left their plant col-
lection at Saharanpur with George Govan, Civil Surgeon there, who
cleared a 40-acre botanical garden from the open jungle.17 His successor,
J.F. Royle, established Saharanpur as the botanical centre for north-
western India, coordinating with the Calcutta Garden and emphasizing
the experimental planting of horticultural crops for plains, woodlands
and hills. His successor, William Jameson, Superintendent from 1841
for thirty-three years, centred his energy on encouraging the introduc-
tion of new crops into the lower Himalayan hills. When the next gener-
ation finally took over in 1876 it was J.F. Duthie who made his mark as
a taxonomist of fodder grasses.
Medical plants were also an important category of MFPs, for they
were obviously of great interest to pharmacologists, and no culture car-
ried a more profound or complex understanding of the many species
and their uses than India. Throughout the following decades the British
supported work on medical botany, reflecting the origins of several
botanists’ careers as East India Company surgeons.18 Work was coord-
inated from the Calcutta Botanical Garden. Its first major publications
were E.J. Waring’s Bazaar Medicine of 1860 and his Pharmacopoeia of

226
 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

India of 1867, which remained the standard work in English for many
years. Waring’s work was praised for enabling the British in India to
avoid importing drugs from Europe. But in addition to the practical uses
of indigenous medical drugs, this research (however limited in staff and
scope) gained scientific standing internationally, establishing the Raj as
an important link in an international network of research on tropical
medical botany. By the early 1900s the Calcutta Botanical Garden was
working in collaboration with Duthic, who had moved to Dehra Dun
for his senior years, and internationally with Kew Gardens as well as
two American institutions, the Smithsonian Institution and the Missouri
Botanical Garden.19
However, the study of Ayurvedic and folk medicine remained periph-
eral in colonial British science, in part because those traditions embodied
much broader cultural knowledge than simply botanical taxonomy, and
European taxonomists of the Enlightenment traditions had become rig-
orously narrow in their definition of their work, partly because research
would have to be carried on in bazaars as much as in hill forests and in
part because the research would require greater respect for Sanskrit and
vernacular traditions than most late Victorians would tolerate.20 Though
the Government of India established an Indigenous Drugs Committee in
1896 to encourage systematic cultivation and use of indigenous medical
plants, it was so weakly funded that it remained little more than a curios-
ity at the cultural fringe of the empire.21 Beyond this, in an era when even
the basic building blocks of the ecology of plant communities were being
assembled at a painstakingly slow pace, few botanists could yet think
about entire plant and animal communities. Of course India was in no
way unique in this, for international sources of information, methods or
broad conceptual structures for integrated ecological studies were only
beginning to appear in the mid-nineteenth century.22
In the meantime, what were the practising foresters doing? Some of
the recruits to the Forest Service were enthusiasts of botany in its broader
sense and contributed to the publication of Forest Floras for the sub-
continent. Moreover they soon learned that the propagation and regen-
eration of timber species required knowledge of the life-cycles of those
species, which was inseparable from the interactions of all species in spe-
cific plant and animal communities. Early British surveys of Himalayan

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

forest botany began to reveal which non-timber products interested the

men of the Raj. Hugh Cleghorn, who was sent from Madras to survey the
timber resources of the Punjab hills, travelled more extensively through
the western Himalayas than any other early British officer. His 1864
report set a high standard of detail and precision for the trees species
of the region. Though his major concern was the environmental dam-
age caused by intensive, unregulated logging of the timber trees of the
mountains, most of all the deodar cedar forests, his eye was quick: his
report included a long list of tree and shrub species and their uses. Yet
even this versatile and energetic official’s catalogue revealed the limits of
British interests. He noted the uses of nuts and fruits of those trees, but
little else. The few tree species he discovered which had medicinal uses
he merely listed by botanical and vernacular names, not stating their
medicinal properties specifically.23
Another decade of this work was sufficient to produce the first sys-
tematic Forest Floras for each region of the subcontinent. The Forest Flora
of North-West and Central India appeared in 1874, largely the work of
J. Lindsay Stewart in the Punjab plains and hills. Stewart coordinated
work on his Flora with Kew Gardens, where research for the economic
botanies of many parts of the empire was being coordinated.24 Dietrich
Brandis finished Stewart’s work when Stewart died. Recognizing the
emphases and pragmatic uses of a work like Stewart’s helps to reveal
the priorities and limitations of colonial ecological science. Brandis was
explicit: it ‘includes only the more important trees and shrubs; ... it has
been written, not for botanists, but for practical men, especially for those
who have the care of the public forests’.25 Some observers had wanted an
even simpler volume, a practical handbook for the field. Brandis identi-
fied them as

… those who hold that the sole legitimate duty of forestry in India is to provide
fuel and timber, and that the forester has no concern with bark, lac, gums, resins,
caoutchouc, wax, oil, dyes, fruits, and other marketable products of trees and
shrubs. Such views will continue to be maintained until it comes to be acknow-
ledged that the principle aim and object of forest management in India is the forma-
tion of public estates, to be managed so as to secure large benefits to the country of
an indirect nature, as well as a continuous and increasing yield of all descriptions
of forest produce necessary to supply the requirements of the people and their
export trade.26

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 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

In other words Brandis and his founding colleagues of the Indian

Forest Service saw themselves as interested in far more than simply tim-
ber products, because meeting the subsistence needs of forest villagers
was as much their responsibility as meeting more distant and mone-
tized market demand. Yet their practical perspective was limited to tree
and shrub species, and was for some time largely commercial in con-
tour. It would take decades more work to expand it towards the much
more complex scope of entire forest botanies. Even a generation later
Osmaston’s major taxonomic work, Forest Flora for Kumaon, of 1927
was limited to trees, shrubs and woody climbers. This in itself was rather
formidable, for it had taken him fourteen years to compile precise details
on 290 tree species, 321 shrubs and 112 woody climbers in 94 families.
The explorers a century before had not been wrong; the Himalayan flora
were indeed vast and varied.

The very complexity of the botany to be studied helped insure that the specialists
would not venture into the still more complex and multi-faceted work of compiling
systematic data on the social uses of the mountain and foothills flora. That would
be to cross the boundary into the human sciences, which would have required an
entirely additional range of techniques, skills and cultural sensitivity.27

The Minor Forest Products Branch at the

Forest Research Institute

The First World War made heavy demands on India’s timber resources
for military uses and highlighted the strategic importance of the em-
pire timber reserves. In the aftermath the Government of India took the
decisive step of expanding the modest research and training facilities
at Dehra Dun into the monumental buildings of the Forest Research
Institute (FRI) and its long adjacent avenues of botanical gardens. This
investment in the early 1920s was the time when the forestry priorities of
the Raj would show whether a biologically (and culturally) broad range
of non-timber species would finally gain serious emphasis. There were
tantalizing economic possibilities on that front. Various annual reports of
the Minor Forest Products Branch reported that vast but little-tapped re-
sources of non-timber species were available for control and exploitation.

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This was only a semi-educated guess, for the research remained to be

done. As well as presenting routine arguments for expanded budgets
the reports perpetuated the familiar stereotype of the virtually limitless
resources of the Himalayas, and in the 1920s the official reports did
not yet broadcast any warning that commercially attractive species were
becoming scarce or their sources remote.
Among the Institute’s priorities, minor forest products remained from
the beginning a very minor branch indeed. MFP research and product
development efforts were initiated shortly after 1910 when R.S. Pearson
was appointed Forest Economist at the FRI. An energetic man, he could
not fill his time entirely with timber trials, so he added non-timber spe-
cies to his agenda, searching for sources of commercially viable paper
pulp and tanning materials. But, as his successor H. Trotter put it in
1925, that work was soon almost totally eclipsed by timber experiments;
the MFP laboratory became the perennial ‘Cinderella of the Economic
Branch’.28 The commercial timber economy took a long downward turn
in the early 1920s, and, as a result, the restricted research budget at the
FRI was allocated almost solely to timber testing and marketing. After
1922 no one was appointed officer in charge of MFP for many years.
Perennially underfunded and understaffed, the MFP Branch’s work
of gathering and cataloguing was extremely constrained and often nearly
haphazard. Very little was done to explore the rural people’s knowledge
and use of these products. Trotter’s 1925 report sheds light on this lack
in explaining the weakness of the MFP Branch at the FRI.

The real fault ... lies in the inability of the Divisional Officer to get into touch with
the trade and vice versa. The majority of the minor forest product industries are
purely local at present. Leases or privilege rights are given year after year to small
contractors and villagers, who carry on in exactly the same way as their great-
grandfathers did and in many cases their methods are of the crudest description.
The result of this is that genuine buyers on a large scale are seldom able to get into
touch with these small suppliers.29

Trotter was committed to modernizing a decentralized and diffuse

trade system and giving it uniform scientific standards. He was more
concerned with the trade than with the sources. Four years later an-
other assessment of the FRI made the same emphasis more emphatically
still: utilization of minor forest products would not prosper until the

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Institute worked much more closely with foresters in the provinces and
with the traders wherever they were.30 But minuscule budgets made even
that impossible, to say nothing of allowing the specialized researcher
staff in Dehra Dun reach farther into the mountains to the realities of
village life.
Little changed during the penurious years of the Depression and then
the tumultuous years of Second World War and the transition to inde-
pendence. Even as late as 1965 a select committee which evaluated the
entire FRI operations reported that the full-time staff numbered only
four botanists, whose research had been allowed to expand to unsystem-
atic coverage of more products than they could handle. The products
under study were only a modest list in themselves: principally camphor,
two species of citronella grass, and three medical herbs. The committee
recommended that the MFP staff should be expanded, that they should
take over chir pine tapping from the Silviculture Branch, and intensify
research on products which ‘are of high value or which have been earn-
ing foreign exchange’. They could expand their work on medical plants
by establishing links with other institutes like the Central Medical Plants
Organization and the Central Drugs Research Institute, as well as the
pharmaceutical and chemical industries which had been increasingly
aggressive in forest areas. In other words the Institute’s central adminis-
tration had marginalized this work and its own staff had been sluggish
in their work.31
Research priorities were repeated in the Institute’s training pro-
gramme for Forest Service recruits. Their two-year curriculum included
only brief surveys of ‘minor’ forest species in Forest Botany and For-
est Utilization, in which they used Troup’s Indian Forest Utilization. This
was hardly more than an afterthought in the curriculum. Then, presum-
ably, individuals carried on further work on location, but that was be-
yond the formal administrative structure of the Service. In other words
the conceptual structure was not oriented toward subsistence issues,
thus limiting ability to comprehend villagers’ realities. Nonetheless, in
spite of all these limitations, the central records of the Forest Service do
reveal some patterns of evolving use, monitoring and management of
non-timber forest products in the western Himalayas during the decades
before independence.

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Management of Non-timber Products

The Floras provided systematic definitions of minor forest products

as well as discussions of them by category, for British India as a whole.32
Ideally any analysis should consider them in terms of specific species
and their biotic communities and extents, and their specific social uses.
But this merging of perspectives has not yet happened, except in a few
fragmentary cases, most of which are not from north-western India. The
following discussion therefore is a preliminary approach to compiling
the elements of data for that region.
Several non-timber botanical products became so important commer-
cially that the Forest Service produced a steady flow of research and pub-
lications, as well as developing their management in great detail. In effect
they became major forest products, since they were vitally important
sources of revenue for the Forest Departments of the provinces. Several
were highly significant in the western Himalayas and their adjacent low-
lands. One category of commercially major non-timber forest products
was bamboo. This was complex in both its botanical and social implica-
tions. Bamboos are one of the most varied useful plants of the Himalayas
and the Indian subcontinent; Pearson counted 100 species in 1912.
Many bamboo species are indigenous to the Himalayas, growing in dif-
ferent elevation zones, from the Terai forests below the mountains to the
outer hills and intermontane valleys, then up to 8,000 feet and higher.
Their exploitation and marketing can be seen clearly in the Punjab
Siwaliks below the Kangra valley, from a report of 1904. There, as else-
where in the lower hills, bamboos had a wide variety of traditional uses
in the village economy and in money transactions at regional markets.33
In an arc from Nurpur to Kutlehr, bamboo thickets varied from pure
bamboo forests to scattered clumps in mixed forests. Cleared, carefully
managed clumps could yield up to forty strong new shoots in a mon-
soon season, but poorly slashed and cluttered clumps were congested
and choked with dead and malformed shoots. Systematic cuttings could
encourage more healthy growth, available for both local and market use.
Thus careful management could benefit all potential users. From the
early 1870s onwards Forest Departments launched detailed studies of
life-cycles and management strategies for several species of bamboo; the

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resulting bibliography became one of the richest for all of South Asian
botany.34 No wonder Brandis reported that 15–20 per cent of all forest
revenue from the Kumaon and Garhwal hill came from bamboo sales.35
By the time he toured those hills in 1881 many areas near villages were
seriously overcut, while more remote areas were virtually untouched.
Timber and bamboo contractors cut carelessly from the bamboo clumps,
leaving 3–5 feet of stem which led to hopeless tangles and declining qual-
ity of the stock. Harvested stems more and more frequently shrivelled
before they reached markets, and villagers’ sources for their own use
were being crippled. What could be done? It proved entirely possible to
manage the clumps of the 40 feet tall Dendrocalamus strictus to achieve
far greater regeneration and growth, and produce more sustainable
results by four criteria: ecological health, village use, market consumption
and government revenue. Forest Department regulations indicate how
this was done. In blocks of concentrated bamboo growth, where bamboo
quality had declined, forest rangers prohibited cutting of first-year stems
or any cutting above 1 foot from the ground. Old stems and clutter near
the roots were removed. When rotational harvests were organized the
great bamboo revived quickly and everyone benefited.
In Hoshiarpur District, in the Punjab segment of the Siwalik hills,
similar reports appeared. There, in the north-west corner of its range,
bamboo canes grew in several dense forests. In the 1880s rotational har-
vesting in forests which had been declared reserved in 1879 was pro-
ducing 600,000 canes per year. Farmers were allowed to graze their
livestock for nine months each year, outside the monsoon, and to cut as
much bamboo as necessary for their own use.36 In 1891–96 the Forest
Department sold 251,000 bamboos. Traders who purchased bamboos
and cut clumps themselves usually cut haphazardly and destructively,
so the Forest Department attempted to cut the bamboos with their own
labour, and haul them to auction depots at Pathankot and Gurdaspur.
But Departmental budgets were inadequate for so ambitious a scale of
work, so the traders were soon invited back to purchase bamboos on
locations where they had just been cut. But, just as with perennial For-
est Department struggles against timber contractors, this system offered
‘facilities for irregularities to subordinate establishment’, which is to
say bribery and intimidation of forest labourers by the contractors was
common.37

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

These reports, however, probably mask complex difficulties in the

silviculturists’ relations with both commercial contractors and villagers,
for they rarely indicate anything about the socioeconomic dimension of
the work. The contractors are rarely named in forestry documents, so that
readers might know their social identity, economic scale, or geographical
base. One exception was a commercial catalogue of 1930 which named
eighty bamboo contractors who supplied the cities of the Punjab and
Delhi. These men, the critical link between rural supplies and urban
markets, were based in Montgomery, Lahore, Hoshiarpur, Ambala and
Delhi, which represented commercial transit towns below the hills, major
Forest Department depots and the largest urban markets of north-western
India. Their names reveal that they were primarily Muslim, but also Sikh
and Hindu. Many of them were also long-term timber merchants, while
after 1920 a few were men of the Himalayan hill towns. All the others
were outsiders to the hills, with no ties to montane society and environ-
ment except monetary ties.38
Despite all the frustrations of fluctuating demand and unreliable pri-
vate traders, the bamboo thickets of the Punjab Siwalik forests probably
recovered gradually from the totally unregulated cutting for market de-
mand in the last half of the nineteenth century. What impact the more
orderly management system had on village life is less clear. Supplies
seem to have been adequate in that region to meet both village and urban
needs; indeed, the Nurpur bamboo forests were regularly undercut from
a lack of market demand. Labour rates were low: workers were paid no
more than Re 1 per 100 bamboos cut and loaded. But the social sig-
nificance of any wage rate was determined partly by how the labourers
perceived those rates; in the Punjab hills there was no evidence of severe
discontent or anti-government protest on this issue. It may be appropri-
ate to conclude that in the years before independence bamboo supplies
were adequate for the hill people, and that the commercially most im-
portant species had at first been threatened by mid-nineteenth century
market prosperity under the Pax Britannica but were able to recover
very successfully under effective management. But the record is very
murky regarding the likely tensions among local villagers, outside com-
mercial interests and forest staff. Hence it remains difficult to assess how
well prepared complex human relation to the bamboo forests for the

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great pressures which developed after independence, in an era of rapid

economic and demographic expansion.39
A second commercially important forest product was widespread in
this region: katha. Called cutch elsewhere, katha is the heartwood of the
Acacia catechu tree. Its uses are many: dyeing and tanning in Europe and
the Americas, in traditional folk medicine for mitigating fevers and other
purposes, and throughout India for chewing with betel leaf. Atkinson’s
encyclopaedic report on the resources of the Kumaon and Garhwal
Himalayas revealed that katha dye had been collected for centuries by
the Doms, landless untouchable castes of the hills. From November to
May, the entire non-monsoon season, they searched the hills for the
acacia tree for its red heartwood which they chipped and boiled into a
dye for sails and fishing nets. In the 1870s the annual export from that
region averaged 120 tons, giving many otherwise indigent families their
major source of cash income.40 An 1892 report indicated that the qual-
ity of the heartwood could not be predicted until a tree was felled and
cut into; thus it was a very wasteful operation. But licence fees were very
low, so contractors purchasing katha from the Forest Department could
make big profits.41 Here was yet another example of damage and deple-
tion caused by individuals playing the market.
Other products began to appear on Forest Department lists as well,
but coverage of them was more fragmentary, primarily because their
commercial value was minor. This is not to say that their importance for
village life and biological diversity was minor. It does suggest that the
Forest Department’s declared right to manage the contracting and sale of
them in protected forests seems have been infrequently imposed. One
broad category of these products was medical herbs.42 Herbs represent the
widest variety of species for human use of any category in the mountain
region.43 Forestry and Botanical Survey documents usually indicated the
provenance of each species and its methods of harvesting, preparing and
storing. The full range of the herbs’ human meanings, encompassing
such dimensions as their ritual uses and sacred significance, was ex-
cluded from the explicit concerns of forest botanists.44
One sharp indication of the rulers’ growing awareness of the fiscal
value of these products appeared just at the time of Indian independ-
ence in 1947, when Nehru’s government was absorbing princely states
large and small into an integrated national administration. It also shows

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the increasingly legalistic character of rural administration, and perhaps

most significantly it gives one of the first indications that market demand
for medical herbs was leading to their disappearance at their source loca-
tions. The Raja of Chamba state, which controlled the middle reaches of
the Ravi river (a branch of the Indus to the west of Kangra) decreed in
March 1947 the ‘Chamba Minor Forest Produce Exploitation and Export
Act’,45 which specified that the Raja’s foresters, local revenue officers and
village officials had the authority to grant or refuse, or revoke, licences to
gather and sell medical herbs. The government’s fiscal interest was spe-
cific it was decreed that villagers must pay Re 1 for each permit to collect
medical herbs, urban Chambaites must pay Rs 25, and non-residents
must pay Rs 50 for a three-month season. Renewals would cost Rs 25
yearly. The decree enumerated fifteen controlled species and defined ‘col-
lection of herbs’ as ‘picking up, digging, extracting out of earth, culling,
separating or cutting from the bushes, plants or pods’.
The language of the law reveals the emergence of a fear that overex-
ploitation of the enumerated species was becoming a danger. It warned
that no permit-holder should ‘so act as to retard further development
of the said produce or render it extinct from further growth’. Further,
if ‘any permit holder is exploiting any area in a manner highly detri-
mental to the source of supply or so as to render natural reproduction
impossible’, the permit could be restricted or revoked. Fines of up to
Rs 300 and imprisonment of up to three months gave the law teeth.46 Like
other management documents, sadly, this one indicates nothing about the
castes or genders of the herb collectors, the social identity of the traders,
or the ultimate markets for these species of herbs. Nor does it suggest
anything about whether the right to harvest the herbs was allowed to
landholders only, or also non-landed jatis such as Doms, or annual
migrants through these areas.

Conclusion: Peasant Resistance?

Two major constraints over the local use of minor forest products
emerge as especially important over the last century. These involved
growing scarcity and growing control by the state both before and after

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independence. The latter issue, in particular, was a potentially power-

ful political factor and soon entered the agendas of those parts of the
population as were involved in non-violent resistance. Many forest re-
sistance campaigns are now well documented, both of a local kind and
those stimulated by satyagrabas linked to the freedom movement. Many
were about basic broad principles of access, especially related to build-
ing timber and grazing. In all likelihood only in tribal ( jhum) subsistence
systems were particular MFPs important enough to village life and of
enough interest to the Forest Department (and possibly scarce enough?)
to produce open confrontation. However, this is a topic demanding fur-
ther research.
What evidence of scarcity emerges from the colonial and post-
independence documentation? This is difficult to measure. It is clear that
in recent years botanists are increasingly recommending controlled plan-
tations of medical herbs, fearing that traditional methods of gathering
are endangering their natural sources in the mountains. They describe
increased marketing demand, by both the traditional peasant marketer
system and modern pharmaceutical manufacturers, both placing poten-
tially dangerous pressure on sources. Botanists now frequently assert
that it is necessary to ban unregulated harvesting.47 The Forest Research
Institute has itself made some efforts at intensive cultivation of herbs. But
this work is difficult and expensive; and only fragmentary efforts have
been possible as yet.48 Here again local research should prove valuable.

Notes

1. For early discussion of these issues see Richard Tucker, ‘Forest Management
and Imperial Politics: Thana District, Bombay, 1823–1867’, Indian Economic
and Social History Review, 16 (1979), 273–300; see also Richard Tucker, ‘The
Depletion of India’s Forests under British Imperialism: Planters, Foresters
and Peasants in Assam and Kerala’, in D. Worster (ed.), The Ends of the Earth:
Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Cambridge, 1988, 118–41.
2. The most systematic discussion of these issues to date has been Ramachandra
Guha, The Unqutet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the
Himalaya, Delhi, 1989.

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A FOREST HISTORY OF INDIA

3. See Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, ‘State Forestry and Social Con-
flict in British India’, Past and Present (May 1989), 141–77.
4. See Richard P. Tucker, ‘The Evolution of Transhumant Grazing in the
Punjab Himalaya’, Mountain Research and Development, 6, 1 (1986), 17–28,
on the most important and complex mountain transhumance system on the
subcontinent. Recent studies of Rajasthan also describe the human ecology
settings in which public policy has attempted to intervene.
5. See Richard P. Tucker, ‘Resident Peoples and Wildlife Reserves in India:
The Prehistory of a Strategy’, in Patrick C. West and Steven R. Brechin (eds),
Resident People and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in Inter-
national Conservation, Tucson, 1991, 40–50, for a brief overview.
6. Guha’s summary for the eastern districts (Kumaon and Garhwal), in The
Unquiet Woods, especially pp. 14–21, also largely holds true for Himachal
(designated as the Punjab Hill States in colonial times).
7. See Tucker, ‘Transhumant Grazing’.
8. Ten or more scholars now have unpublished materials on various aspects of
Gujar herding and farming; these remain to be coordinated and published.
See also forthcoming Ph.D. on Gujar anthropology by Brinda Dalal, Univer-
sity of Cambridge, Department of Social Anthropology.
9. See the work of Loki Pandey and Ajay Rawat’s research in progress.
10. Colonial analysis added to the confusion by commonly designating some
Hindu farmer castes of the hills as ‘tribes’, notably the numerically strong
Gaddis of Himachal. The label was entirely inappropriate in relation to sys-
tems of land and resources use.
11. This may be an appropriate extrapolation from such work as Christopher
Bayly’s study of the larger market centres of the Gangetic basin, Rulers,
Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion,
1770–1870, Cambridge, 1983.
12. Anon., Hamirpur Jagir Record of Rights, Lahore, 1904, 2.
13. A Collection of Forest Rules of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province,
Lahore, 1907, 116–19.
14. E. Sheepshanks, Forest Settlement Report for Jagir Forests of the Rajas of Goler,
Dada Siba, Nadaun and Kutlehr in Kangra District, Simla, 1913, 9.
15. The standard survey is I.H. Burkill, Chapters on the History of Botany in
India, Delhi, 1965. For the Calcutta garden, see page 21ff. See also Deepak
Kumar, ‘The Evolution of Colonial Science in India: Natural History and
the East India Company’, in John M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the
Natural World, Manchester, 1990, 51–66.
16. The only commercial crop of that region which promised any hope of find-
ing export markets was tea. By the 1840s experimental plantings spread

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 NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS POLICY

west from Darjeeling through the Kumaon hills as far as the Palampur area
in the central Kangra valley. No study has yet traced that story in detail. But
for a comparison see A.C. Sinha, ‘Social Frame of Forest History: A Study
in The North Eastern Himalayan Footbills’, Social Sciences Probings (1986),
236–63.
17. For sketch of the Saharanpur Garden’s evolution, see Burkill, History of
Botany in India, 29–34, 75–85, 149–51.
18. Burkill, History of Botany in India, 31–4.
19. K.R. Kirtikar and B.D. Basu, Indian Medical Plants, 6 vols, 1918, Reprint,
Dehra Dun, c. 1980.
20. Kumar, ‘Evolution of Colonial Science’, 61; Burkill, History of Botany in India,
137–9. For a detailed account of British interest in indigenous medical
traditions in Bengal, the centre for imperial policy, see Poonam Bala, Im-
perialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective, New Delhi,
1991. Bala shows both deep-running interest and severe constraints in that
Presidency.
21. Kirtikar and Basu, Indian Medical Plants, vol. 1, lxv.
22. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology, San Francisco,
1977, traces the rise of ecological science within its broader cultural and
ideological context.
23. H.H.T. Cleghorn, Report on the Forests of Punjab and the Western
Himalaya, Lahore, 1904.
24. See L.H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British
Royal Botanic Garden, New York, 1979; and forthcoming book by
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: The History of Kew Gardens, New
Haves, CT.
25. J. Lindsay Stewart and D. Brandis, The Forest Flora of North-West and Central
India, London, 1874, ix.
26. Ibid., x–xi.
27. In tribal areas of the subcontinent—though this did not apply significantly
to the western Himalayas—one basic reason why the growth of economic
botany did not expand into studies of ethnobotany was cultural: the
Europeans’ pervasive assumption that shifting cultivation, which embod-
ied forest peoples’ complex knowledge and use of hundreds of plant and
animal species, was both culturally primitive and ecologically destruc-
tive. No historian has yet undertaken a careful retrospective study of the
evolution of colonial analyses of shifting cultivation. It might begin with
the varied writings of the 1870s, such as J.L. Laird, ‘On Coomrie Cultiva-
tion’, Indian Forester (hereafter Ind. For.), 1 (1875–6), 11–15, or Dietrich
Brandis’s writings of that period.

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28. H. Trotter, ‘Minor Forest Products Section’, in Development of India Forest

Resources, Calcutta, 1925, 31–5.
29. Ibid., 34.
30. Forest Research Institute, Report of the Forest Committee, Simla, 1929, 27–8.
31. Report of the Second Expert Committee on the Forest Research Institute and
Colleges, Dehra Dun, Dehra Dun, 1965, 42–7.
32. See G. Watt, Commercial Products of India, Calcutta, 1908; R.S. Troup,
Indian Forest Utilization, Calcutta, 1913; and R.S. Troup, The Work of the
Forest Department in India, Calcutta, 1917.
33. See Pearson’s description, in E.F. Pearson, ‘Sub-Himalayan Forests of
Kumaon and Garhwal’, Selections from the Records of the Government of the
North West Provinces, 2nd Series, No. 5, Calcutta, 1869, 125–52.
34. For an early survey of bamboo ecology and bamboo markets around India
and Southeast Asia, see S. Kurz, ‘Bamboo and Its Uses’, Ind. For., 1, 3
( January 1876), 219–68; and 1, 4 (April 1876), 335–61.
35. [Dietrich Brandis], ‘On the Treatment of Bamboo Forests’, Ind. For., 16
(1890), 147–52.
36. Gazetteer of the Hoshiarpur District, 1883–84, Lahore, 1884, 105.
37. G.S. Hart, Report on the Forests Comprising the Kangra Forest Division
with a Working Plan for their Management for Twenty Years, 1903–4 to
1922–3, Lahore, 1904, 18, 25–6, 30–41.
38. [S.L. Tulsi], The Commercial Directory of Punjab and Delhi, 1929–30,
Lahore/Delhi, 1930, 2, 89–90.
39. Forest Department documents reveal much less about use of smaller
bamboos of higher elevation, the ringals, presumably because there were
adequate supplies for village use and much less market demand below.
But this deserves a more painstaking search through records of villages and
their forests at the middle elevations.
40. E.T. Atkinson, The Himalayan Gazetteer, Allahabad, 1882, Reprint,
New Delhi, 1980, vol. 1, 775.
41. F.R. Branthwaite, ‘Cutch and Its Adulterants’, Ind. For., 18 (1892), 184–5.
42. Barks and fruits from a variety of trees were often important on MFP lists,
for example myrabolams harvested for European markets. See Pearson,
‘Sub-Himalayan Forests of Kumaon and Garhwal’, 129–34. But none of
these were important in the western Himalayas.
43. A leading present-day authority, S.K. Jain, wrote in 1968 that in India as a
whole some 2,000 species of herbs were used as aromatic and medicinals,
many of them endemic. But at that date only fragmentary beginnings of eth-
nobotanical surveys had been made, in contrast to his seventeen-years’ work
in economic botany for the Botanical Survey of India. See S.K. Jain, Medical

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Plants, New Delhi, 1968. The Anthropological Survey of India similarly has
even now stressed other aspects of physical and cultural anthropology, and
at least for the north-west region has barely touched ethnobotany.
44. For a commonly used definition of the zones, see N.C. Shah and M.C. Joshi,
‘An Ethnobotanical Study of the Kumaon Region of India’, Economic Botany,
25 (1971), 414–22.
45. The Act is reprinted in Himachal Pradesh Code, Simla, 1947, vol. 1, 223–6.
The Chamba law was in turn based on a similar but less fully explicit law
adopted in Mandi state in 1941. See its text on pages 227–9.
46. The 1941 law of Mandi state listed eighteen threatened species, of which
only three appear on the Chamba list. The implication is that an increas-
ingly wide variety of species, stratified by elevation and other factors, were
coming under pressure.
47. For example see R.L., Sinha, ‘Industrial Potential and Planned Exploita-
tion of Indian Medical Plants in Relation to Conservation of Hill Eco-Types
in U.P.’, in G.S. Paliwal (ed.), The Vegetational Wealth of the Himalayas,
Delhi, 1984, 241–5. Plants are used for alkaloids, medicines, pesticides,
contraceptives and abortifacients, foods and beverages, and industrial
products. About 70 per cent drugs of drugs used in Indian indigenous phar-
macology are available in UP. See also J.K. Maheshwari, ‘Some Thoughts on
the Endangered Flora of the Himalayas’, in Paliwal,Vegetational Wealth of the
Himalayas, 256–68.
48. See Proceedings of the First Forestry Conference, Dehra Dun, December 6 to 10,
1973, Delhi, 1979, vol. 1, 115.

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a forest history of india

Index

academic discipline of forest history, Central Medical Plants Organization,

xi 231
Agarwal, Anil, xiii Centre for Science and Environment,
Ahern, George, 197, 200 xiii
Andrews, C.F., 100, 147 Changa Manga forests, 86
Aratoon, 76 Chipko movement, xiii, 58
Arnold, David, xv Chiplunkar, S.H., 23
Arunodaya, 25 Clark, A.P., 200
Assam’s dense forest belt, 156–157, Cleghorn, Hugh, 128, 187, 228
170–177 colonial forest administration, in
Kumaon, xiv, 95–99. See also
Baker, Henry, 185 Kumaon Himalayas, forestry in;
Banks, Sir Joseph, 226 timber belt of Kumaon
Batten, J.H., 43, 74 commercial timber economy
Bazaar Medicine, 226 contractors for Himalayan hard-
begar, 99, 100, 101, 147 woods, in British era, 194
Beinart, William, xvi dimension in timber marketing,
Bisht, Dan Singh, 59
in British era, 193–194
Bombay Association, 17
government ownership of forest
Bombay Forest Inquiry Commission,
area, 192
24
history of private sector timber
Bombay Natural History Society
economy, 191–192
(BNHS), 207, 210
timber contractors in the western
Bombay Presidency Association, 20
Himalayas under British rule,
Brandis, Dietrich, 45–46, 79–80, 128,
192–196
217, 228–229, 233
timber export trade in Philippines
Bridgeman, John, 66
The British Empire and the Natural under American rule, 196–
World, xvi 202
Burmese teak exports, 153–154 Commonwealth Forestry Library,
Oxford, xi
Calcutta Botanical Garden, 226–227 Companies Act (1862), 185
Central Drugs Research Institute, 231 Corbett Park, 209, 213

242
 index

Dalzell, N.A., 11–12 Forest History Society (FHS), xi

Damodaran, Vinita, xv Forest Law (1865), 21
depletion of forests. See specific forest management, colonial period,
headings xii. See also forest management, in
Douglas, William O., 56 Bombay, pre-British and British
Duthie, J.F., 226 times
forest management, in Bombay, pre-
Environment and Empire, xvi British and British times, 8–16
aftermath of protest against local
Fergusson, Sir James, 20 control, 30–34
Forest Act (1878), xii, 24, 46–47, 93, British agricultural and forestry
95, 100, 208 policy, 8–9
Forest Bill (1980), xiii Dalzell’s tenure as conservator,
forest depletion, in Assam (1941–1947), 11–12
156–162 experimental rules, 14
Assam’s dense forest belt, area, Gibson’s tenure as conservator,
156–157 10–11, 13
due to encroachment of immi- infringement of private commer-
grant peasants on forest cial rights, 13–14
lands, 171, 173–174 and Maharashtrian politics of
land use in 1920s, 159–160 1870s, 16–30
tea industry, impact on forests, ownership pattern, 12–13
158, 171–174 question of forest ownership,
timber extraction from govern- 9–10
ment forests, 174 Shuttleworth’s tenure as conser-
World War II and, 160–161, vator, 12
175–177 teak forests, 9
forest depletion, under British reign village elites vs forest managers,
Assam’s dense forest belt, 15–16
170–177 wood tax, 9–10
Kerala’s forests, 177–190 Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehra
landscape of India, 169 Dun, xii, 55, 57, 150, 229–231
natural resources management,
167–168 Gadgil, Madhav, 219
Forest Flora for Kumaon, 229 Gandhi, Mahatma, 87, 100, 131
The Forest Flora of North-West and Gangetic forests, 41
Central India, 228 Gibson, Dr, 10, 13
Forest Floras, 227 Gorrie, R.M., 134
Forest Grievance Commission, 102 Govan, George, 226
Forest Grievance Committees, 51 Governor, Tory, xii

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a forest history of india

Green Imperialism, xvi timber and market economy, 42–

Grove, Richard, xv, xvi 44
Guha, Ramachandra, xiv, xv, 219 timber-cutting ban, 59
turning point in the ecology of,
Heber, Bishop Reginald, 36, 75 56
Henwood, W.J., 73 Holland, L.B., 132
Herbert, Captain, 72 Hooey, William, 193
Himalayan forests. See also western Hughes, Lotte, xvi
Himalayas, during British rule
cash crop cultivation (apple), Imperial Gazetteer, 30
56–57 Indian Forestry Institute, 30
and Chipko movement, 58 Indian Forest Utilization, 231
chir pine forests, 39 Indian National Parks Act (1934), 209
commercial exploitation and de- Indian revolt of 1857, 16
forestation, 39–40 Insatiable Appetite, xvi
coverage of western, 38–40 International Union for Conservation
deodar forests, 39 of Nature (IUCN), 213
early colonial forest use, 40–42 International Union of Forest Research
early history, 36–38 Organizations (IUFRO), xi
fir and pine trees, 39
and First Five-Year Plan (1951– Jameson, William, 226
56), 54 Joshi, G.V., 17
foresters vs villagers, 46–54
forest panchayat movement, Kerala’s forests, depletion of
52–53 aftermath of independence, 189–
hardwood trees, 39 190
historical pattern of timber op- cinchona production, 184
erations, 39 coffee plantation, 182–184, 187
Kumaon’s new reserves, 47–51 crops traded, 179
modern forest management, geography and climate, 177–178
45–46 history, 180–181
oak trees, 39–40 rubber plantation, 187–189
railway construction, impact of, tea plantation, 185
44 tribal life, 178–179
Reserved forests and Protected Wynaad forests, 181–182
forests, 46–50 Kesari, 25
sal forests, 41, 49 Kew Gardens, 227–228
since independence, 54–59 Keynes, John Maynard, 149
Siwalik Range of foothills, 38 Kumaon Forest Advisory Committee,
smelting operations, impact of, 43 105

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 index

Kumaon Himalayas, forestry in establishment of Reserved and

during British era, 95–99 Protected forests, 21–22, 26
categories of forests, 96 Forest Act of 1878, 24
and Chipko movement, 109 forest law of 1865, 21
Civil Forests, 103 impact the famine years on, 20
forest department vs villagers, 96 inquiry commission report on
historical perspective on, 93 control of forests, 26–30
impact of Forest Act (1878), Local Self-Government Act, 17
95–96 system of forest preservation, 22–
method of reforestation, 98 23
new forest reserves, 100–101 Temple’s tenure, 19–20
new village forests, 103–107 Mahratta, 24
Panchayat Forests, 104–105 Malkin, Lady, 67
regeneration of forests, 102–103 mamlatdars, 15
reserved forests and reserved for- Minor Forest Products Branch, FRI,
ests, 96–97 229–231
resin tapping, 98
Minor Forest Products (MFP), xv, 218
settlements on Kumaon, 95
Modernizing Nature, xvi
Social Forestry movement, 99–
Munro, John Daniel, 185
103, 110
system of timber extraction, 97
national forest resolution (1952), 53
timber trade, 105–106
Native Opinion, 24
trends since independence, 107–
Natural Premises, xv
111
Nature, Culture, Imperialism, xv
Village Forests, 104–105
Nature and the Orient, xv
Kumaon nationalist protests, 148
Nehru, Prime Minister, 107, 189, 212
Local Self-Government Act, 17 Nilgiri Game Association, 207
Lushington, G.S., 72 Non-Cooperation Campaign (1931),
52
Maharashtrian politics of 1870s, 16–30 Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–
case against the forest depart- 1922), 148
ment (1880), 23 non-timber forest products policy, of
change in political context, 16–17 Forest Service, 218
climatic changes and socioeco- bamboo forests, 232–234
nomic imbalances, 18–20 botanical research, 225–229
commercial marketing of forest changes in population/land ra-
products, 27 tios, impact, 219–220
concept of local control, 24–26 colonial times, 223–225

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a forest history of india

Forest Research Institute, Dehra forestry law, 198

Dun, 229–231 Insular Lumber Company,
human ecology of hunter–gath- 198–199
erer groups, 221–222 Mindoro Lumber and Logging
human use of biological resources Company, 199–200
in pre-colonial times, 219– in 1920s, 200
221 in 1930s, 201–202
livestock populations and, 219– supervisory role of Americans,
220 impact, 199
management aspects, 232–236 Poona People’s Association, 19, 23, 34
medical herbs, 234–235
Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, 3
non-timber botanical resource
Punjab Erosion Committee, 132
use, context of, 222
Punjab Himalaya
peasant resistance, 236–237
during British era, 123–134
rural people’s ‘traditional’ use of
cycle of crop and livestock man-
non-timber forest products,
agement of the Gaddis, 119–
218–219
settlements and terraced agricul- 123
ture, pre-colonial times, 221 and forest law (1865), 125–126
Siwalik hills, 233–234 grazing regulation, 124–126,
study of Ayurvedic and folk 134–138
medicine, 227 growth of human population, 130
traditional hunting patterns, 219 Kangra valley people, 131
Nulkar, K.L., 24, 29 land control, 119
Land Settlement of Kangra dis-
Pant, Govind Ballabh, 100 trict (1854), 124
Parmar, B.S., 134 major timber trees of the region,
Pastoral Politics, xv 116–118
Pathak, Shekhar, xiv management of flocks post inde-
Pearson, R.S., 230 pendence era, 134–138
Peermade Planters Association, 186 market-oriented grazing of
People’s Association of Poona, 17 sheeps and goats, 120–121
Pharmacopoeia of India, 226–227 migration routes during summer,
Philippine logging industry, under and regulation, 126–129, 136
American rule, 196–202
Parmar Report, 134–135
Bureau of Forestry, 198
Pir Panjal region, 118
Cadwallader-Gibson Company,
policy of tax on goats, impacts,
199
133–134
export of rainforest hardwoods,
pre-colonial setting, 116–119
197

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 index

Siwalik foothills, 116–118, 123, commercial forestry, 7–8

132 demography, 3
tea plantation, 226 exploitation of hardwood forests,
Trevor’s reforms, 128–129 5–6
Punjab’s timber trade, 82–83 forested area, percentage, 3
forest tribes, 4–5
railways, primary impact on the lumbered tracts, 5
Himalayan forests, 77–81 railroads, impact of, 6–7
deodar forests, 79–81 subsistence economy, 4
sal forests, 78–81 timber merchants, impact of, 6–7
Rajan, Ravi, xvi village economy, dependency on
Ranade, M.G., 17 forests, 4
Rangarajan, Mahesh, xvi wastelands, 3
Raval, Shishir, xvi Thana Forest Association, 23, 25
“Resident Peoples and Wildlife Re- Tharu tribals, 221
serves,” xvi timber belt of Kumaon, 143–156
resin industry, 85 chir pine belt, 145–146, 149–150
Royle, J.F., 226 distinct zones of topography and
vegetation, 144
sal forests, 49, 86, 841 export earnings from timber sales,
railways, primary impact on, 78– 153–154
81 fuelwood consumption, 154–155
Sangwan, Satpal, xv hill fires, 147–148
Shuttleworth, A.T., 12
and industrialization of India’s
Sierra Club, xii
forests, 151–153
Singh, Bawa Dinga, 59, 195
management of sal and chir for-
Singh, Chetan, xv
ests, 152–153
Siwalik Range of foothills, 38, 73, 75,
planned harvests in the forest re-
116–118, 123, 132, 144, 233–
serves, 147
234
private forest owners, 155–156
Smith, Adam, 149
and resin manufacturing, 149–
Stewart, J. Lindsay, 228
151
Stracey, P.D., 214
sal forests, 144
Sultan, Tipu, 180–181
shortage of forest labor, impact,
147
tea industry, of Assam, 157–158
Siwalik hills, 144
Temple, Richard, xii, 3, 19
timber management in 1940s, 155
Thana controversy, over forests, 1–3
Thana Forest, early nineteenth century, timber production in U.P. in
3–8 1920s, 153

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a forest history of india

timber industry, xi mines’ impact on Siwalik forests,

composition of the work force, 73, 75
83–84 private tea plantation, 71–72
in the pre-railway era, 74–77 railway era and forest department,
Punjab’s timber trade, 82–83 77–81
railway era, 77–81 rural people’s ‘traditional’ use of
Traill, G.W., 40 non-timber forest products,
Travancore Tea Estate Company, 186 218–219
Trevor, C.G., 128 timber harvests, in the pre-rail-
Trotter, H., 230 way era, 74–77
timber operation and trade, 64–
United Provinces Wildlife Preserva- 68, 75–81
tion Society, 210 wildlife conservation
The Unquiet Woods, xiv acceleration movement (1918–
U.P. Private Forests Act (1948), 53, 1939), xi, 208–211
156 in Africa, 209
Upper Level Conifer Research Insti- and modern forestry manage-
tute, Simla, 57 ment, 205–206
New Delhi conference of 1935,
Waring, E.J., 226 210–211
Waste Land Act, 108 nongovernmental conservation
Welsh, James, 181 movement, 207–208
western Himalayas, during British rule post independence, 212–214
colonial administrative system provincial game associations and
and marketing systems, game law, 207–208
81–84 and regulated access to the
control of waste land, 69 Reserved Forests, 206
early twentieth century, 84–87 Wilson, Mr, 76
expansion of agriculture, 65–73 Wyndham, Commissioner, 48, 148
forest depletion in, 66 Wyndham Committee, 52
geography of, 61–63
in hill districts of Kumaon and Yellowstone National Park, 209
Garhwal, 68
landforms, vegetation, and subsis-
tence, 61–65

248
 About the Author

Richard P. Tucker is Adjunct Professor of World Environmental History

at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of
Michigan, USA. He is a specialist on the environmental history of India,
which is a progression of his earlier work on the freedom movement in
Maharashtra. His first book was Ranade and the Roots of Indian Nationalism
(1977). Recently, he has studied the global neoimperial impacts of the
United States in Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological
Degradation of the Tropical World (2000). He is presently the coordinator
of an international network on the environmental impacts of war and
mass violence; his first work in this area was co-edited with Edmund
Russell, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of
War (2004).

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