This interview with the editors was published on Moneycontrol on 29 April 2026. Here is the screenshot of the header. Given that many readers outside India are unable to access the interview easily, I am copy-pasting it here.

Arupjyoti Saikia & Mahesh Rangarajan (Eds.) India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House India, 2026. Hb. Pp.360.

India’s Forests brings together essays by some of the country’s leading scholars with a fresh view of nature and history. These reappraisals of Indian forests and their many lives in past and present matter more than ever today. Born of years of sustained reflection, the essays here view forests not as passive unchanging backdrops to the past but as living, contested spaces.
Forests were shaped and in turn deeply influenced by power, culture and society. They could mean very different things to different people who often were in contest over meaning as much as control of the space or the resource. The volume spans from prehistory through ancient and early modern India into the present. It is also alive to the impact of the colonial era while tracing the changing fortunes of tribal and hill peoples. They are ecological lifelines and sites of legend, memory, and scientific knowledge. Material remains and life cycles of animals and plants matter, so too do social and literary imaginations.
Forests have been continually redefined through conflict, negotiation, and care. Attentive to the changing meanings across time and place, the book asks us fundamental and unsettling questions: what are forests for?

Contributors include: Shibani Bose “ ‘Digging’ Tales from Sylvan Trails: Perspectives from Archaeology”; Kumkum Roy, “People, Produce and the Political: Engaging with the Forest through the Arthashastra”; Aloka Parasher Sen “Multiple ‘Forests’ and Changing Borderlands: The Varied Indian Landscapes in Early India”; Meera Anna Oommen & Kathleen D. Morrison “Famines, Flagships and Floods: Historical and Contemporary Identities of Central Travancore’s Eastern Forest Frontier”; Mayank Kumar “Forest and Communities: Negotiations of Early Modern Monsoon Ecologies in India”; Divyabhanusinh “The Lion and the Unicorn: Fighting for Survival”; Sudha Vasan “Shifting Cultivator, Peasant, Forest-Dweller: Legacies and Landscapes of Improvement in the Baigachak”; Mukul Sharma “’God of the First Class’: Politics of Sacred Groves and Sarna in Jharkhand” and Vasudha Pande “Interrogating Ram Guha’s The Unquiet Woods: Thirty Years Later”.

Harini Nagendra, director, School of Climate Change and Sustainability, Azim Premji Universityendorses it saying “India’s Forests is a grand tour of the shifting forms, shapes and meanings taken by the country’s woods and jungles across the great arc of history. This integrative volume synthesizes information from a fascinating array of sources, from Mesolithic cave art and the Arthashastra to field trips and contemporary wildlife surveys; and captures a wide range of geographies from the Himalayas to the forests of Kerala. A must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the role forests play in our cultures, histories and imaginations.”

Arupjyoti Saikia is a professor of history at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He held the Agrarian Studies Programme Fellowship at Yale University, and visiting fellow positions a Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research spans across the economic, political and ecological histories of Assam. His published works include Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826 to 2000 AD (2011), The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (2019) and The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942–2000 (2023).

Mahesh Rangarajan is professor of history and environmental studies and chair of the HDFC Archives of Contemporary India at Ashoka University in Haryana. Previously, he has taught at Cornell University, University of Delhi, Krea University and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. His notable works include Fencing the Forest (1996) and Nature and Nation (2015). He has edited the Oxford Anthology of Indian Wildlife (1999) and Environmental Issues in India (2007). His co-edited works include Shifting Ground (2014) and At Nature’s Edge (2018).

The following interview with the authors was conducted via email. It was lightly edited before publication.

1. How do you define a forest? Has the definition changed over the years? Who defines it? What is it today as recognised by the government of India and international authorities? Also, what are the different technical definitions of a forest as determined by these bodies?

MR & AS: The book India’s Forests makes clear that ‘forest’ is, as one of our authors Kathleen Morrison puts it, a “vexed object, poorly defined yet meaningfully rich”. Forest is a space conceived differently across disciplines, eras, and political systems. For instance, in ancient India, forests had many roles. Each shaped by their use and location. The Arthashastra distinguished hasti vana, the area for elephants, from mriga vana, forests for enjoyment, organising woodlands by their strategic and economic value. If Sanskrit texts drew a clear line between grama, the organised village, and aranya, the wild forest, Tamil Sangam poetry described a continuous landscape where hills, bushes, and thick forests blended, reflecting human feelings and mixing wild and farmed land. More changes came in the later centuries.

The colonial period set legal limits on forests. The Indian Forest Act of 1878 turned forests into government-run lands, defined not by their trees but by who owned and controlled them. Forests became a political site instead of living nature. A major change came in more recent time. The Supreme Court of India expanded the definition of forests to include all wooded areas, regardless of ownership or classification in the Godavarman judgment of 1996. This important decision shifted the focus from official documents to the natural environment. This sparked strong debate about the future of communities living in forests without legal ownership. 

India’s Forests takes on the challenge of defining ‘forest’ clearly. Forests in this book cover a wide variety of landscapes, from rich rainforests to dry thorn forests and tall-grass savannahs, excluding only deserts and the tallest mountains. Forests are living nature made not just of trees but also herbs, fungi, orchids, and macro-fauna embedded in socio-cultural matrices. The book does not specify the exact technical definition used by the government though such reports are referred to as an important source of current government data. The idea of forests has made many journeys across time, space, ancient texts or modern legal lenses. This helps to secure the legal and proprietary lens of colonial rule, to the ecologically expansive definitions of recent times. Even now, the meaning of ‘forest’ is still considered by scientists, lawmakers, forest conservators, and activists-conservationists.

2. How did this book come about? How long was it in the making? What was the principle defining the commissioning of the articles? What are the key issues in this narrative that you wished to highlight? 

MR: We chose a range from prehistory to the current era and while all regions and ecotypes could not be covered, we have attempted to get a collection that is original, thoughtful, critical and stimulating. The occasion was the anniversary of the publication of a key work, The Unquiet Woods by Ramachandra Guha in 1989 a foundational work on environmental history, mainly a study of the Chipko movement. The essays engage with themes opened up by the book but in a critical if appreciative light. Much has happened in the study of forest histories in the last 35 years or so and we try in the introduction to look back and in the volume to point possible ways to go forward with fresh lines of enquiry.

AS: As Mahesh mentioned, Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods opened up many layers of India’s pasts through the bright lenses of our nature, specially the woodlands. Since then, an enormous corpus of works have critically investigated India’s forested pasts. This trend continues to grow. These works’ geographical range and temporal scale is wide and deep! Equally historians have now explored newer archives and have engaged with newer methods inspired by other scholarly disciplines. All of these have helped us to get a nuanced understanding of India’s complex pasts and their evolving relations with the environment. We also wanted our readers to discover India’s forests as living landscapes shaped by agriculture and the ever-shifting worlds of trade across centuries and regions. We thought of bringing some of these newer works into one single frame which can help us to give a collective view of India’s forested pasts.

3. How will these academic essays on the history of India’s forests and Nature at various points of history help in future environmental action? How do you propose to bridge the communication gaps between this impressive evidence collated and action on the ground? 

MR: Such a work can inform debate, as it is not prescriptive or a call to action directly. But all authors are sensitive to these concerns and some have engaged with the issues for long, years even decades.  There is no short cut method to reaching out and we will try. Initial responses are very positive.

AS: Readers find here not prescriptions, but a firmer and a clearer picture of the variegated life of India’s forests. The essays in this book reveal that India’s forests have always been alive with activity and meaning. Far from being silent backdrops, these woodlands have witnessed centuries of struggle, bargaining, survival, and authority, stretching from the detailed forest classifications of the Arthashastra to the major changes brought by the Forest Rights Act of 2006. They go on to suggest that today’s decisions about conservation, community rights, and the restoration of ecosystems are quietly guided by echoes from centuries past. The creation of colonial forest reserves, the gradual loss of traditional rights, and the privileging of timber over biodiversity did not simply happen; they were crafted by history. The past of India’s forests may not hand us a roadmap, but it does reveal the pitfalls that once tripped up those who came before us.

4. What are the pros and cons of the colonial narrative for ecological histories that we inherited? How did it affect the development of a region, conservation methods, and impacted human behaviour. 

MR: There is no one unified colonial or imperial narrative.  Just as there is no one global or national one today. Certainly not on the forest. The colonial interlude in India was still critical in many ways.

There were indeed Abharanyas (forest reserves) in early India and in early modern India, there were hunting reserves, such as the well-known shikar gahs of the Mughals. Landed groups had pig sticking grounds. But the extent and scale and scope of state forestry was never of the level of imperial China. In this sense the kind of property rights with state forestry in the later years of the East India Company and then under Crown rule post 1858 was far more intrusive.

In order to secure the forest land and its wealth, there was a legal frame and an executive branch for taking land over. This was like enclosure (not literally with fences) but through punitive actions and penalties. There was a major attempt via silviculture to upgrade forest stock to yields more timber and other forests products. This meant many strictures on hunting, fishing, grazing collection and on opening up fresh land for cultivation. This enclosure of commons and open access lands had deep even wrenching effects that are felt to this day. A remarkable administrative accomplishment, the Imperial Forest Service secured the forest and protected it. But it was not conservation for its own sake but in service of empire.

AS: I agree with Mahesh that the colonial era left behind not only vast stretches of forest but also lasting scars on the people who had cared for these lands for generations. But that narrative cannot be so straightforward and each part of India will tell something different. There were undeniable gains: from the 1860s, new laws and policies curbed deforestation and established the framework of forest departments, protected zones, and wildlife safeguards that independent India would later expand. Without this groundwork, the dramatic and yet stable resurgence of the lion in Gir and the greater one-horned rhinoceros in Assam would have been unimaginable.

But these gains came at a steep price. Colonial forestry put profits above conservation [though this was not too simple] or timber above the rich diversity of life, replacing the trees that villages relied on with fast-growing, marketable trees which produced logs. Swidden cultivation simply was branded as a criminal act while pastoralists lost their age-old rights to graze in mountain meadows. Generations of customary rights vanished with a single law. Forests became sites for extraction, stripped of the intricate and emotive bonds that communities had woven over centuries. This imbalance still lingers in many ways but so is the challenging legacies of our environmental past.

5. India’s Forests focuses on the history of an age-old culture of peasant-pastoral wisdom that has been eroded by modernity, consumerism and a variety of vested interests.  Will the preservation and the commendable efforts of keeping this knowledge visible in academic discourses impact key stakeholders, policymakers, perhaps result in afforestation practices? 

MR: Kings, peasants, land owners, merchants and forest peoples looked at forests in different, often contrary ways. There were also times their interests or ideas coincided. It is true industry, commerce and so on have transformed not only forests but the earth system since the late 18^th century, the time Britain embarked on the Industrial Revolution and eastern India came under the East India Company. The colonial era had far reached impact on animals, peoples and trees and plants and water as much as on land. What is notable, and this matters, is that the Western Ghats were a source of pepper and ivory makings it way to Rome 2000 years ago so the exchange economy is not new even if modern capitalism is. Oommen and Morrison show pepper collectors in the hills and ivory hunters and the ecosystems very much part of wider networks. In similar ways, the work of Dr Mayank Kumar on the early modern era shows how Rajasthan had records on conflict and control over animals and trees in rural areas by dominant groups and state authorities. There was still room to manoeuvre because peoples beyond or the edge of cultivated arable mattered to rulers. Their knowledge and wealth (animal or other produce) was taken and ties were not equal. But the kind of fixity of property, tenure and settling in the colonial and British imperial era had a ferocity all of its own. It is well illustrated in the novels of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay on the clearance of the forest and the later continuities in the works of Mahasweta Devi.

This is of course a short response. For the richness of the stories the book has many voices, explores many forest paths and tracks.

On the last, time will tell. We are delighted at the early reception to the work and hopeful it will help inform if in small way the wider debate. This is not a book about what to set right and how. That calls for a different kind of book and work.

It is meant to be wake up call on ways of thinking most so about what forests mean and why issues of how to relate to nature are as much about the past as the future. How we got here matters no matter where we may want to go. The forests of today are as much as product of human history as of biological processes.

AS: The book does not paint a rosy picture of a missing rural landscape. Instead, India’s Forests reveals how peasant and forest communities were always entangled with power. That they bargained with kings, paid taxes, endured punishments, and constantly adapted. The essays in this book encourage readers to confront the many histories of India’s forests. As Mukul Sharma demonstrates in this volume, India’s sacred groves are also sites of contest, hierarchy, and ecological complexity, as well as a resounding tool for conservation templates. We cannot afford to overlook these tangled pasts, or risk falling into the old colonial trap of imposing one-size-fits-all solutions on richly varied lands and peoples.

As said earlier, one can think of the jhum farmers in the highlands of India’s North East. They observed the land’s slope, soil moisture, rainfall patterns, ecological pasts, and the many worlds of insects before deciding where to burn and where to grow. This complex ecological practice and wisdom had developed over many generations. Anthropological works of the 20th century provided a clearer, more detailed understanding of such ecological practices. The British imperial foresters called it wasteful and tried to stop it. What was challenged there was not just a farming method but a whole way of understanding how to live with forests. 

The essays in this book argue that such intimate encounters with nature were never unchanging or perfect. They changed, adapted, or regularly dealt with power at every step. Along with the measures adopted by the state, the rhinoceroses in Kaziranga also survived because the peasant communities knew about this flooded and forested habitat. For the peasant communities, the wet grasslands of the Brahmaputra floodplain are socio-ecological formations which they understood intimately. India’s Forests thus offers the readers a more critical view about human and nature relations.

6. Where and how did we lose our traditional knowledge bases, especially that exists within our culture? They have a deeper understanding than outsiders who impose their views. What proportion of these information repositories that exist in a micro-culture, stories, cultivation practices etc can we recover?

MR: This is best I defer to Prof Saikia.

AS: The loss happened in layers. Colonial legislation quickly criminalised community forest practices. Postcolonial development deepened the wound. We cannot recover everything. But the epistemological framework survives: the understanding that forests are social-ecological relationships, not timber warehouses.

7. Why are we moving or have we already developed an economy of exclusion and inequality at the cost of depriving traditional knowledge? What are the rights of local communities? Can these be exercised, enforced and implemented?  (As is being done in Brazil, if I am not mistaken.)

A lot of this can be traced to the legal frame, the practice and norms of imperial forestry instituted the 1860s and 1870s on wards. In the early years, while the most senior Inspector General was German for 35 years almost in many provinces, they got former military men to take charge. So, exclusion was built in very early. It was not and cannot be total as labour was required for a variety of reasons, such as cutting fire lines, making roads and felling trees. Until the Forest Rights Act of 2006, the rights of Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers had no real legal space. Since then, it has been an uphill struggle between the official mind set and the securing of rights. It is important to acknowledge here that the Act had unanimous support not merely as critics feel to give away land or forest for votes but as a corrective. The land reform process of cultivable land of the 1950s had no counterpart for over 60 years with regard to forests.

Brazil has had a different history and the nature of indigeneity is different. It also has far fewer people in say the Amazon than India’s forests. Closer to home one can look at Nepal that has far more decentralised and participatory approaches via vis parks, forests and water than almost anywhere in India. But there are attempts at change in many cases at the state level so there are grounds for hope yet.

AS: I agree with Mahesh that India’s land reform programme including the abolition of zamindari in the 1950s which were largely done based on the political inspiration of India’s freedom movement had little parallel since then. Mahesh rightly highlighted that the exclusion was not accidental — it was architectured. Colonial forestry-built inequality into its legal foundations, erasing customary rights and replacing multi-layered community relationships with a single extractive logic serving the colonial state. Independent India largely inherited this framework with very limited transformation. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, we do need to note, was a historic corrective. It recognised for the first time both individual and community rights of forest dwellers — but implementation remains bitterly contested. There is little doubt that decentralised forest governance can deliver desirable results.

8. Forest cover has reduced to 21% in India. CSR efforts to plant trees in different parts of the country have been an ongoing practice for a while now. But do these initiatives in any way, take into account the symbiotic relationship between local communities and the forest that are outlined in the book? Will these planting drives help us recover our forests? 

MR: Having not directly worked on this, cannot say much. But replanting is not the same as regeneration. A mixed multi species formation is different from a plantation. A lot of work by ecologists in fact shows this and it might help value protection and prevention over plantation. The latter is needed but as a complement.

AS: The choice of species may of course not at all be in accord with livelihoods. The late Anil Agarwal illustrated how different regions have key trees for livelihood and ecology such as khejri in the Thar desert, banj and moru oak in the western Himalaya, Mahu and tendu in Central India and the peninsular highlands and one might add the Palmyra Palm on the Coromandel coast. These are not planted often but are grown or grow and if fostered with care yield multiple benefits and also play a role ecologically.

9. India’s Forests outlines the significance of forests to communities that has been mentioned in texts like the Arthashastra or preserving the practice of sacred groves in Jharkhand. People had a vested interest in preservation of Nature. We need forests to maintain our climate and weather patterns, most notably, our unique monsoon. This is imperative given the rapid climate change. Yet, large chunks of forests are being cleared for mining, growing cash crops, land banks, and urbanisation. How do we bring back this sense of belonging and enable a collective action to preserve rather than it becoming only the purview of environmental activists/academics? 

MR: Just to be clear, the Arthashastra is about extending and expanding the state role in and over the forest. The aranya or vana is not beyond the ambit of power but extending authority was a challenge. While enumerating multiple productive roles of the forest and kinds of forests, and kinds of peoples, there is a clear sense of power and hierarchy. This is especially clear with the Atavika Rajas or forest chiefs who are to be loyal and guard borders. Ashoka no less in an Edict warns that those who do not behave and obey will be punished.

The collective sense you refer to is strongest perhaps in hill, forest and Adivasi or Scheduled Tribe societies. One of the things we have to be careful about is not to romanticise or generalise. There are many who see this is as either/or choice national park or sacred grove or state versus community.

There is no doubt much to learn from local and communitarian ideas and practices, most so in keeping the systems productive and habitable over long periods. The actions you refer to such as mining and industry are often giving priority to short term extraction without much thought to the biota, top soil or water or to those they displace directly or indirectly. A different way of seeing is the starting point surely. Aside from specific cases or protests, a more holistic appreciation of ecologies and also of producer knowledge. The latter is helpful because if one thinks of mahua or tendu so important in central and main land India, you get a different view of the forest as entity than simply as land for mining.

Scholars and others are learning from real life situations and practices. Yes of course, there should be more informed discussion and the level of awareness all round of the linkages and connections needs to be part of larger discourse.

AS: Think of India’s many highland communities, who named their forest areas not by how much wood they could get but by the spirits living there, or the Van Gujjars of the Shivalik foothills, whose seasonal moves followed not government borders but the memory of grass and pastures. These were not just old traditions; they were exact, proven, living maps for survival. What replaced them when British imperial forestry began was a different kind of exactness the surveyor’s chain, the forest section number, the mining rights planned in colonial offices far from the sound of rain on sal leaves. The hills of Meghalaya lost not just trees and bushes but also a whole way of understanding nature when jhum cycles were restricted by official rules.

Despite those challenges across India, community-owned forests today protect biodiversity, while others struggle to do the same. For many, the Khasi clan’s ancestral forest remains a more effectively conserved landscape than many protected areas. 

The starting point is neither nostalgia nor laws alone; it is listening. When a floodplain dweller describes flood patterns along a river in eastern India, she is sharing climate information that no satellite has yet recorded. 

10. Forest / environment has a specific vocabulary. Why is it not more in vogue? Will it not help preserve and respect trees and forests if people recognise and understand their environment?

MR: In general, yes. But there are different terms in various regions, jangal in Hindustani is common parlance, Kadu in Tamil. Once you get to the local level, there are variety of terms for different kinds of uncultivated land scape: the rakhs for instance in central and western India is a grassland that may be dotted with trees. These were often cleared away and cultivated after independence though vital for diverse fauna and flora and for local livelihoods especially the rural poor. Similarly, despite the Kadu/Nadu dichotomy in Tamil, goat droppings (from their browse off grass, shrubs and herbs) was prized for the nutrient value for the cultivated land.

The problem is in a narrow view if you like a monochromatic view of a multifaceted entity. The forest can be habitat for bats and birds, mammals and insects, and diverse flora. It is not simply waste land to be carved up for cultivation or for industrial projects.

With all their faults, this was realised as early as the 1830s by some East India company surgeons as studied by the late great Dr Richard Grove. The early links of forests and climate were also first drawn in the Indian Ocean by such men and they were men. It is a different matter such ideas were not always acted on and when so only partially.

We still have an immense challenge when forests are viewed only in terms of timer i.e. Net Potential Value or NPV. Useful for forest products it hardly captures or does justice to multiple ecological and social functions or roles or relationships.

AS: Language moulds the way we see, and when words vanish, entire worlds slip away. The people of Arunachal Pradesh hold a treasury of names for forests along the mountain slopes, each term capturing the moisture, soil, seasons and how people relate these to them. Reduce all this to just ‘forest cover, and you erase a living map of relationships between humans and the natural world. When a place loses its name, it is already halfway to being lost.  Despite odds, these forest vocabularies survive in song or in rituals. Their return to the mainstream will be greatly helpful. This is what the earth desperately needs.

11. With the rapid technological growth, especially as the demand for AI grows exponentially, tech companies are being given permission to construct data centres in urban areas as well as agricultural and in some cases, forests. These centres are land, fresh water, and mineral guzzlers. Is there hope for the future of forests in this dismal context?   

MR: Modern industry and this certainly include AI very prominently so did not and does not budget for water. Not only is surface water scarce much of the year in most of India, ground water takes years to accumulate and has to be renewed as it is used. Meeting drinking eater view renewal is possible but more that calls for prudence.

On the other count, if you take a longer view, there has been woodland retreat and resurgence in the past. If we have more productive agriculture and more water prudent forms of use, both urban and rural, given there are less cattle now and pastoralism contrary to popular image can integrate with open land, scrub and open land ecosystems, there is lot of ground for hope.

It is important to note the success of grassroots regeneration of ecologies and also the positive government community partnerships. None are ideal and multiple challenges remain.

But you are correct the resource destructive path way is not prudent or just in such a land mostly of long dry and short wet seasons. Maybe we should look at this from the long-term perspective say a long-lived tree than a human life span. That will give sense of perspective a balance sheet cannot.

AS: I agree with Mahesh.

30 April 2026