An Environmental History of India: from Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century by Michael H. Fisher

Reviewed by: An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century by Michael H. Fisher Joseph Christensen Fisher, Michael H. –An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 301. The task taken on here is a daunting one—synthesizing four millennia of environmental history in South Asia, or the modern nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which today account for around a fifth of the global population. Michael H. Fisher has written a sweeping yet accessible study that achieves this objective effectively, if not admirably, bearing in mind the constraints of a single volume of standard length. The book makes no claim to being an authoritative treatment of its subject matter, if such treatment is indeed possible. Instead, it adopts a holistic framework for illustrating key examples of human-environment interaction and developing the idea that humanity both modifies and is modified by the natural world across long scales of time. The format is broadly chronological, with a weighting toward the post-1900s era, which is appropriate for the Anthropocene and the ecological problems confronting South Asia in the twenty-first century. An opening chapter introduces the physical setting by describing the subcontinent's geomorphology and the nature and impact of the monsoon and monsoonal variability. Evidence for the arrival [End Page 197] of man and the earliest impacts of pastoralism and the harnessing of fire is then reviewed, and the role of "forest dwellers" (p. 25) as historical and contemporary proxies for earlier cultural-ecological adaptations is discussed. The shifting concept and status of Scheduled Tribes since 1931, which exposes the pitfalls of asserting primitive or timeless lifestyles and cultures, demonstrates the utility of a deep-time perspective for socioeconomic problems of the present and recent past. The development of agriculture and the emergence of urban settlements gave rise to the Indus and Vedic civilizations, revealing both the depth and diversity of engagement with past environments in archaeological evidence and oral traditions, which in the case of the Veda or Vedic hymns constitute a source for subsequent ideas about harmony with nature and continue to shape environmentalist ideas today. The monsoon and climatic variability exerted an inexorable influence on human development, and during a more moderate phase of climate history between ca. 600 BCE and ca. 800 CE, Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu communities developed fundamental models of the physical universe and humanity's place within it, as regionally distinct forms of environmental interaction took hold in North India, the Deccan, and peninsular south. After the eighth century CE, this range of ideas and actions was enriched, modified, or transformed by the waves of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic migration. Yet patterns of resource exploitation, human impacts, and susceptibility to environmental change remained regionally based, as illustrated by a case study of the rise and dissipation of the state of Vijayanagar between the mid-fourteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. During the sixteenth century, the expanding Mughal Empire developed into the largest and most powerful state yet established within the region, encompassing most of the subcontinent at its peak. To Fisher, this marks a turning point in South Asian environmental history, as state power to control and exploit natural resources reached unprecedented levels and the volume of source materials relating to environmental management rapidly expanded. From the mid-eighteenth century, the empire fragmented as a result of competition over resources among diverse centres of power, which included European traders, particularly the English East India Company, which further fuelled environmental change. The colonial era marked a new turning point, as the scale and pace of transformation accelerated as industrial technology brought South Asia firmly within the global economic framework, even if large parts of the subcontinent and its peoples remained beyond the effective control of imperial power. A third and no less profound transition emerged through the Gandhian alternative (p. 153) to British control, marked as it was by nonviolent resistance to diverse forms of environmental exploitation, the rejection of capitalist modes of production in favour of communal self-sufficiency, and the push for independence. The book's final third covers the period between Partition (1947) and the...