HSS649: Themes in Environmental Histories of India

        [Cr:4, Lc:3, Tt:0, Lb:0]

Course Outline

This course is a critical survey of themes in environmental histories of India, the complex interactions among its people, institutions, other living beings and the material world. Recognizing the growing body of scholarship on India’s environmental history, the course aims to introduce some of the seminal works on four broad themes – (a) history of wildlife and forest (b) river, ecology, and urbanization (c) environmentalism of the excluded (d) environmental thought. More than a mere chronological recounting of past, the course is an attempt to critically identify and examine themes central to historiography of the environmental history as well as concerns of the present.

Recommended Readings

• Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009.
• Ambika Aiyadurai, 'The Multiple Meanings of Nature Conservation: Insights from Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh', Economic and Political Weekly, Sep 29, 2018.
• Archana Prasad, Verrier Elwin and the Making of an Anti-Modern Tribal Identity, Three Essays Collective, 2003.
• Awadhendra Sharan, Dust and Smoke: Air Pollution and Colonial Urbanism, India, c.1860- c.1940, Orient Blackswan, 2020.
• Christopher V. Hill, South Asia: An Environmental History, ABC-CLIO, Inc, 2008.
• David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History, University of California Press, 2015.
• Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Irfan Habib, Man and Environment: The Ecological History of India, Tulika, 2015.
• Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, India’s Environmental History: A Reader, 2 Volumes, Permanent Black, 2013.
• Mahesh Rangarajan, Nature and Nation: Essays on Environmental History, Permanent Black, 2015.
• Malini Ranganathan and Carolina Balazs, ‘Water marginalization at the urban fringe: environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide’, Urban Geography, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2015, pp. 403–423
• Michael H. Fisher, An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Mukul Sharma, Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Policies, Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Shibani Bose, Mega Mammals in Ancient India: Rhinos, Tigers and Elephants, Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History, University of Chicago Press, 2015.