Book Review

Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar's In the Time of Trees and Sorrows is an acutely observed and painstakingly analyzed ethnographic exploration of Rajasthani villagers' memories and thinking about the final two decades of princely rule in the kingdom of Sawar under the British raj. Gold, a professor of religion and anthropology at Syracuse University, and Gujar, the headmaster at Government Middle School in Maganpura village in Rajasthan, have collaborated on a series of anthropological research projects over a twenty-year period. This book is their first foray into historical studies. It is inspired by the school of subaltern studies, in that it focuses upon lower-caste villagers' stories and recollections about life under the "double administration" of the Rajasthani nobility and the very distant British colonial authority; it charts its own path in that it privileges the tape-recorded memories over the archival collections of written or photographic documentary evidence. The authors' exceptionally clear and evocative writing guides the reader through the cultural meanings of selected conversation fragments and stories that emerge from the deep well of village memory.	1
The opening four chapters are nuanced explorations of the origins of their project, the nature of their collaboration, the regional and historical setting of the kingdom of Sawar with its twenty-seven villages, and the theoretical and practical issues raised by an exploration of cultural memory. The next five chapters group the villagers' interview fragments and recollections into discrete themes: Shoes, Court, Homes, Fields, and Jungle. The final chapter, "Imports," assays the cultural and ecological changes that have influenced the villages in the decades since independence. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Gold and Bujar have set out to explore the exercise of political power in the past and the meanings that changes in the landscape hold for the villagers. The main title, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows, refers to two principal tropes in this harvest of villagers' memories—that life under Rajasthani princely rule was oppressive and that the era of princely rule, before the deforestation and then afforestation that followed independence in 1947, was a time of greater ecological health.	2
Many of the memories are painful. This book exposes the sufferings of villagers who were called on to perform forced labor for the princely court. Lower caste women pounded grain to feed the royal horses and were so poor that they were obliged to sort through the horses' manure to find undigested grain that they could use for their own sustenance. Villagers, forbidden to wear shoes, were required to carry heavy loads over difficult terrain. Those who contravened the will of the prince were threatened with the humiliation of being beaten with an oversize shoe wielded by an untouchable "sweeper" of the court.	3
In the Time of Trees and Sorrows also gathers together memories of an earlier landscape of forests dense with indigenous trees. The last Sawar prince was influenced by British colonial ideas about forest protection and is said to have felt the pain of every tree branch cut. He stationed guards to impede the villagers in their gathering of firewood for cooking and heating. The villagers also recall with bitterness the prince's protection of wild pigs, which were allowed to destroy the villagers' crops. For those living near the edge of subsistence, the effects of these royal policies were cruel.	4
This book makes a major contribution to the fields of memory studies and political anthropology.	5
Reviewed by James L. A. Webb, Jr., associate professor of history at Colby College, and author of Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change Along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) and Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800-1900 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002). He is currently working on a global history of the use of quinine.

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