This fissured land: ecological history of India

This book represents the first ecological history of India. Madhav Gadgil, an ecologist, and Ramachandra Guha, a social historian, offer in this volume a collaborative perspective on the Indian subcontinent which is rare, pathbreaking, and overdue.

In the first part, the authors present a general theory of ecological history which constitutes a paradigm shift from Weberian and Marxian theories of human society. Juxtaposing data from India with the ecological literature on lifestyles as diverse as those of modern Americans and Amazon Indians, they ask under what conditions humans exercise prudence in their use of natural resources; they then examine technologies, property systems, political ideologies, religions, and the social idioms that characterize human interactions with resource bases; they go on to analyse the varieties of social conflict that emerge over the exploitation of natural resources; and, finally, they explore the impact of changing patterns of resource use upon human societies. By this application of ecological ideas to the study of different human histories, they arrive at a theory of the social uses of nature which considerably expands the existing boundaries of conceptual thinking within the social sciences as a whole.

In the second part the authors look more specifically at the subcontinent, and here they provide a fresh interpretive history of pre-modern India. Drawing on their own field research, they speculate on the ways in which the cultural and ecological mosaic of the country came together, as well as provide an ecological interpretation of the caste system; here, again, their use of ideas from ecology adds a significant dimension to mainstream notions of caste.