‘Today’s climate crisis is rooted in British imperial rule — this impacted India’s nature’
Mahesh Rangarajan is professor of history and environmental studies at Ashoka University. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke, he discusses how imperial Britain shaped the world’s environment: Colonialism in India was mostly defined by the crown — how did this encounter with royalty change our view of nature? There were two major points of departure. First, from about 1760 to 1940, India became part of a transcontinental political formation, initially with the East India Company, then with the crown. India played a critical role in the protection of British power worldwide — the forces recruited from here came from the agrarian hinterland. By 1800, there were around 2,00,000 such troops. By WWII, there were two million. Creating this military manpower impacted India’s culture, society — and agro-economy. Consider a linked strategic intervention with large ecological consequences — this was the making of the Canal Colonies in Punjab. In the late 19th century, the Raj began the largest irrigation project in the world, with Punjab being watered via the Indus River. This replaced the existing agro-pastoral landscape, dry-land agriculture and animal raising with sedentary farming. This is the terrain from where the crown could draw its peasant soldier. Neeladri Bhattacharya has written of the great agrarian conquest — this was a fundamental ecological remaking of Punjab. There were other huge schisms — in the late 19th century, the reservations of the forests, after the 1878 Act particularly, meant a takeover of almost 6,00,000 square kilometres of land. By the early 20th century, the world’s largest forest enterprise was in British India, creating the base for supplying railway timber. It meant an intense extraction of resources and the exclusion of local communities. There was also a marked change in agroecology, with animals like wolves and tigers eliminated on a much wider scale, many species also killed as bounty. As society changed from having many nomadic communities with flocks — Banjaras with bullocks, Gaddis with sheep, Raikas with camels, etc. — to a sedentary state, the continuum of Indian ecological life was broken. But this was not done along a very sharp line. Much of the bounty killing of lions, tigers, leopards and wolves, for instance, was done by Indians themselves. As they changed our ecological landscape, the British brought many Indians on board as subsidiaries in this system — the landed gentry were directly linked to them but there were others too. The strategy of non-cooperation aimed to break this chain, by disobeying, for instance, the forest laws. This was extremely important in British India which didn’t use a white settler model displacing the local population, as in South Africa or Australia. Are there echoes of this imperial approach to nature in postcolonial nations? Around WWII, the idea that development meant the conquest of nature took a concrete shape. The two great powers emerging after the War, the US and USSR, had similar visions of progress, based on steel, atomic energy, large dams and fertiliser factories. Newly independent nations seeking economic autonomy also adopted these artefacts. India was among these but it didn’t undergo what occurred in China under Mao — we retained attempts to balance our use of resources. The Gandhian ethos about nature and the reconciliation of all life explains the enduring diversity of forms of production and ways of relating to land, water, air, flora and fauna continuing in India. In contrast, China’s vision of nature was of breaking and completely remaking it. Do the origins of the current climate crisis lie within such imperialism? From 1780 to 1850, Britain emerged as the supreme world power. Importantly, this was also the period of coal and steam power and the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of production in Britain was matched by the capture of a very important piece of land in India in 1765 — Bengal. The British draw vast land revenues from here and broke up textiles and local enterprises to develop their own industries. The sharp divide between what is now called the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world lies in the long colonial period, from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. About 15% of the population in this industrialised world — comprising Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and later Japan — accounts historically for the bulk of fossil fuel emissions, starting around the 1800s. Therefore, climate justice today must deal with the legacy of that imperial past. The notion of global warming impacting a deeply unequal world was articulated 30 years ago by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain. It remains valid and there must be redressal for developing countries. Is there a special significance in King Charles III being an environmental votary and biodiversity protector? Well, for many years, he apparently went fox hunting himself. This practice was described by the writer Oscar Wilde as ‘the unspeakable in search of the inedible’. The history of Britain’s landed aristocracy included the domination of large parts of the countryside for elite purposes. Balmoral Castle in Scotland is located amidst a backdrop of uprooting crofting communities, grabbing commons and dispossessing very poor people to create deer hunting grounds. Alongside contemporary global environmental facts, Britain’s King Charles could also consider this past.