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Book Review
| Environmentality, Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. By Arun Agrawal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005, 344 pp. Photos, tables, figures. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.
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| This is a rare and valuable book with an easy style that interweaves interconnected but separate themes. The plot unfolds in the hill forests and mountains of the Kumaon Himalaya, but has implications that resonate far beyond that little world. The creation of vast forest reserves in imperial India was a spectacular if early instance of the expansion of governmental power beyond cultivated land. By 1904, more than 230,000 square miles of India were under the administrative control of the Forest Department. The process of securing control over resources, land, and labor in the late nineteenth century was followed by intense and complex low-intensity conflicts involving those who were denied access to the forest space. Foresters saw themselves as "guardians of the forest" which evolved into a full-blown ideology precisely at the time when their own depredations of the woods were of an unprecedented degree. As Agrawal explains, the more threatened nature was seen to be, the more imperative it became to protect it. Ironically, this made it even more difficult to see the realm of nature as distinct from that of the human world. |
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The early 1920s saw an increase in protest, especially by peasant incendiaries (who burned over 200,000 acres of forest), a theme familiar to scholars since the pioneering work of Ramachandra Guha, but Agrawal follows up on these acts of rebellious hill men and women. Nature's cycles played a key role—1916 was an unusually dry year and the fires burned long and ranged wide. The government was plagued by critical internal fissures, with the revenue officers constantly berating foresters for being so rigid as to invite such protest and consequently slowing rates of regeneration and cutting into revenue receipts. The very logic of commercial forestry proved to be its Achilles' heel. Reforms included surrendering power to the forest councils or van panchayats. The village councils of Kumaon of the 1930s thus represent, "the world's oldest surviving instance of formal state-community partnerships to govern forests." It is here that the book is at its best, tracing the changes in form and content of these village councils over time. In the heavily forested Uttarakhand state where the Kumaon region now lies, only a small fraction of forests are under village councils, but they have provided significant instances of innovative forms of self-governance and environmental renewal. Agrawal quotes, for example, one villager who originally opposed conservation as saying, "We protect our forests better than government can. For them it is a job. For us it is life." The shift toward custodianship has not been and is not a smooth and seamless transition, but is nevertheless an important one that enhances protection and self respect while negotiating with the wider structures of power. |
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One advantage in this analysis is the synthesis of three different strands of scholarship, namely feminist economics, political ecology, and common property studies. The Foucauldian approach drives home a central point about how community systems can work even if not driven by coercion or exchange-based systems. |
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The making of the environmental subject in Kumaon emerges as a rich, multi-layered process. It helps in answering a larger dilemma of our times, namely the distinction between those who do and others who do not care about their environment. This is that rare work that combines the longer view with a sense of the immediate and the intimate. Its resonances and consequences will occupy scholars, students, and citizens for some time to come. |
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Mahesh Rangarajan is visiting professor, Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. |
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