Vinita Damodaran

Broken promises: Popular protest, Indian nationalism and the Congress party in Bihar, 1935-1946

Concentrating on a nine-year period, this study examines the changing relationship between the Congress and its mass base in the penultimate phase of the Raj. This phase of the national movement was particularly important as, in the course of it, the Congress changed from being a movement of opposition to being a party in power. Twice within the period, in 1937-39 and again in 1946, the Congress accepted office. This had far-reaching implications for the nature of the organization and its relationship with its mass constituency. Soon after the Congress assumed office in 1937 a large-scale peasant agitation emerged which aimed to persuade the Congress to abide by its promises to the people and restore peasant rights eroded by landlord attacks and a growing resource crisis. The book highlights the critical ecological context of these agitations. Following the withdrawal from office in 1939, the pressures on the Congress shifted dramatically. This process was to culminate in the Quit India movement in 1942. Immediately after this mass upsurge, the Congress retreated underground and became a more amorphous organization allied to dacoit gangs in the countryside. The activities of these underground organizations, known as the Azad Dastas, have not been described previously, and provide an instructive picture of the nature of popular nationalism.

The politics of marginality and the construction of indigeneity in Chotanagpur

This article explores the way in which the different ethnic and national groups living on and impinging on the Chotanagpur plateau, in eastern India, perceived and used the landscape as a symbolic terrain for definitions of Chotanagpuri identity. It explores the plateau as an economic, ethnic, religious and ecological terrain, and looks at the ways in which landscape was reclaimed and reconstituted. In doing so, it unfolds the relationship between the history of the sacralisation of the landscape by local communities and the explosion of emotions guiding contemporary ethnic autonomy movements in the region. It is important to note in this context that some current revisionism in environmental history and ecological anthropology has been focused on dismantling such long-established terms as ‘tribe’, ‘forest’, ‘indigenous’, and so forth. The revisionist argument that earlier ethnographers and colonial administrators had mistakenly thought that ‘tribes’ were static entities led many of the revisionist critics to conclude that distinct tribes never existed and that the claims of indigenous people for autonomy must have no theoretical legitimacy or historical validity. Work on ethnicity in other contexts has moved beyond assumptions of the historical invalidity of such categories and has effectively argued that ethnicity and ethnic ideologies are historically contingent creations. The recognition of the ‘invented’ nature of many traditions and the notion of the constructed nature of culture, race and ethnicity allows us to approach these questions meaningfully through a historical lens. What emerges then is the links between culture and power and culture and resistance: culture as a medium in which power is both constituted and resisted. One is thinking here of political separatist movements in a global context which use the notion of a separate ethnic identity to challenge the notion of a homogenous national culture. Instances of dramatic resistance to cultural hegemony and power of a particular class or group or western capitalism show also that culture need not always be on the side of power. Indigenous peoples’ movements strikingly demonstrate this. For example, while it may be true that the Chakmas of the Chittagong hill tracts were by no means the first people to enter these regions*/in fact, they were only one of a succession of immigrant cultures following the Arakanese and Tripurans into the area*/today Chakma identity is firmly linked to the hill

Introduction: human-nature interactions through a multispecies lens

This introduction brings together a group of papers focusing on conservation theory and practice, and argues strongly for a new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens. Honouring the work of Brian Morris, a scholar who has consistently forged a persuasive set of conceptual connections between science and society, and building on his insights into environmental history and human-nature interactions, we outline a vision of conservation that incorporates new narratives – at the intersection between the ecological and the social – to reimagine the world in the Anthropocene. This includes challenging the persistence of fortress, neoprotectionist and other top-down forms of conservation, through a recognition that conservation is deeply rooted in (human, nonhuman and more-than- human) senses of place. The introduction urges scholars to focus on landscapes as units of analysis: ‘multispecies assemblages’ that are easily overlooked at other spatial and historical scales. It calls for increased attention to the contact zones where the lives of humans and other species biologically, culturally and politically intersect, as a counterpoint to the dominant planetary perspective of earth systems and conservation science. It underlines the importance of deep relational analyses of human interactions with other life forms, through renewed attention to multispecies histories, locality, and forms of knowledge rooted in place. It is at this level, through historically nuanced accounts founded on a more place-based conception of ourselves as a species, that new narratives and answers to our current predicament will emerge.

The East India Company and the natural world

The East India Company and the Natural World is the first work to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company, on the natural environment. The EIC both contributed to and recorded environmental change during the first era of globalization. From the small island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and as far off as New Zealand, the Company presence profoundly altered the environment by introducing plants and animals, felling forests, and redirecting rivers. The threats of famine and disease encouraged experiments with agriculture and the recording of the virtues of medicinal plants. The EIC records of the weather, the soils, and the flora provide modern climate scientists with invaluable data. The contributors – drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - use the lens of the Company to illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.

Famine in Bengal A Comparison of the 1770 Famine in Bengal and the 1897 Famine in Chotanagpur

Famine research has gained ground in both Asia and Africa in recent times and it is well known that British India experienced a series of subsistence crises particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, analyses of these famines by historians have rarely included a study of environmental changes. A knowledge of the ecological basis of different peasant economies is crucial to an understanding of the capacity of certain communities to withstand drought and other famine related hazards. It is argued in this article that modernisation and commercialisation were accompanied by pauperisation and vulnerability to famine in large parts of India but the process affected regions differently as the evidence from Bengal shows. It was only by the later nineteenth century that the drastic effects of taxation, modernisation and ecological transformation caught up with outlying areas of Bengal and Bihar resulting in a permanent destabilisation of tribal society in the region. That these processes had occurred in central Bengal over a century previously emphasises the fact that the transition from pre-modern to modern was affected in India, differentially, and a regional focus reveals the uneven nature of development, local resistance to the forces of modernisation and the survival of husbandry techniques and coping strategies in times of scarcity that withstood the threats of modernisation well into the nineteenth century.

Colonial Constructions of the ‘Tribe’ in India: The Case of Chotanagpur

I. Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformations II. Power and Culture: Hegemony, Interaction and Dissent III. Religion, Ritual and Mythology. Aspects of Identity Formation in Europe IV. Professions and Social Identity. New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society V. Frontiers and Identities: Exploring the Research Area VI. Europe and the World in European Historiography

Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change; Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History

On 28 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina burst the levees of New Orleans.1 The storm and resulting flood brought about one of the three most serious natural disasters in American history.2 In comparison to other past natural disasters perhaps only the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Asian tsunami of 26 December 2004 will have made such a decisive psychical impression on popular memory and attitudes. But the 2005 flood had two almost equally sizeable predecessors; the Mississippi floods of 1927 and 1937; events that certainly loomed large in American history and in landmark works in the written history of the global environment. In particular these floods prompted Gordon East to write The geography behind history, published the year after the 1937 flood.3 In it East warned that: If only by its more dramatic interventions, a relentless nature makes us painfully aware of the uneasy terms on which human groups occupy and utilise the earth. The common boast that man has become master of his world has a hollow ring to it when we recall the recurrent floods and famines which afflict the peasants of northern China, the devastating floods of the Mississippi in 1937, the more recent destruction by ice of View Falls bridge across the Niagara river, the assertion that in Central Africa ‘the desert is on the move’, the widespread soil erosion in parts of Africa and the Middle West of the United States and finally the continual threat of drought which hangs over the great grain lands of the world — alike in the United States, Canada and South Russia. These and similar happenings or forebodings serve to emphasise the fact that, even for peoples which have reached high levels of material culture, the physical environment remains a veritable Pandora’s Box, ever ready to burst out and scatter its noxious contents.

Azad Dastas and Dacoit Gangs: The Congress and Underground Activity in Bihar, 1942–44

This paper attempts to examine the nature of underground activity in Bihar in the 1940s. It outlines, for the first time, the dynamics of the Congress underground movement as it emerged after the imprisonment of Gandhi and the established Congress leadership in 1942. No historian has, to my knowledge, attempted to study the nature of the underground activity and its implications for the Congress organization in Bihar, or elsewhere, in this period. Most of the studies of the Quit India movement examine only the few days in August when the mass movement erupted with full force and then neglect the more significant following period. This includes the studies of Stephen Henningham and Max Harcourt who have examined the nature of popular protest in Bihar in some detail. This neglect is surprising, for the underground movement was very active and proved to be a major ‘law and order’ problem to the British well into 1944. As an underground activist, Havildar Tripathi, told me in an interview in Patna in March 1986, ‘The mass movement lasted for only 2 weeks in August, we carried it much beyond that’.

Gender, Forests and Famine in 19th-Century Chotanagpur, India:

This paper examines the links between deforestation and famine in the context of the late-19th-century food crisis in Chotanagpur. It attempts to understand the phenomenon famine as a gendered one, and explores the cultural and gendered meanings of hunger. In doing so it looks at the symbolism of the landscape and the gendering of it by local communities in Chotanagpur.

The 1780s: Global Climate Anomalies, Floods, Droughts, and Famines

This handbook offers the first comprehensive, state-of-the-field guide to past weather and climate and their role in human societies. Bringing together dozens of international specialists from the sciences and humanities, this volume describes the methods, sources, and major findings of historical climate reconstruction and impact research. Its chapters take the reader through each key source of past climate and weather information and each technique of analysis; through each historical period and region of the world; through the major topics of climate and history and core case studies; and finally through the history of climate ideas and science. Using clear, non-technical language, The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History serves as a textbook for students, a reference guide for specialists and an introduction to climate history for scholars and interested readers.