Shifting Ground

Shifting Ground explores fresh critical questions about India's environmental past in terms of environmental issues and human intervention. Cutting across divides of prehistory and history and of ancient, medieval, colonial and independent India, this book makes us rethink our premises about ecology, polity and landscape in a land reshaped by human presence across millennia. Analysing current environmental concerns regarding forests, pastures, wild and domesticated animals this volume explores their interconnections with state making and political visions of the future. Tackling a range of questions including palaeographic evidence about history of settlements, their interaction with the environment, the wider shifts in geographical and environmental processes as well as the migratory patterns of people and animals, this volume opens new avenues of research and understanding of the subcontinent and its history. Finally, the essays explore the nineteenth- and twentieth-century interlinkages of environmental consciousness with protest movements, emergence of middle class aspirations, and the writing of environmental histories.