Shifting Ground explores fresh critical questions about India's environmental past in terms of environmental issues and human intervention. Cutting across divides of prehistory and history and of ancient, medieval, colonial and independent India, this book makes us rethink our premises about ecology, polity and landscape in a land reshaped by human presence across millennia. Analyzing current environmental concerns regarding forests, pastures, wild and domesticated animals this volume explores their interconnections with state making and political visions of the future.

Suitable for: This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of environmental history, ecology, modern Indian-colonial history, cultural studies, anthropology.

1. Introduction: People, Animals, and
Mobility in India's
Environmental History
MAHESH RANGARAJAN AND
K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
2. Conceiving Ecology and Stopping
the Clock: Narratives of Balance,
Loss, and Degradation
KATHLEEN MORRISON
3. From Eminence to Near Extinction:
The Journey of the Greater
One-Horned Rhino
SHIBANI BOSE
4. Lions, Cheetahs, and Others the Mughal Landscape
D IVYABHANUSINH
5. Environmental Status and
Wild Boars in Princely India
JULIE HUGHES
6. The Imperial Ambition of Science
and Its Discontents: Animal
Breeding in Nineteenth-Century
Punjab
BRIAN CATON
7. Making Room Inside Forests:
Grazing and Agrarian Conflicts
in Colonial Assam
ARUPJYOTI SAIKIA
8. Nature and Politics at the End of
the Raj: Environmental Management
and Political Legitimacy in Late
Colonial India, 1919-47
DANIEL KLINGENSMITH
9. How to Be Hindu in the Himalayas:
Confl icts over Animal Sacrifice in
Uttarakhand
RADHIKA GOVINDRAJAN

10 . Logjam: Peasantization Caused
Deforestation in Narmada Valley
V IKRAMADITYA THAKUR

11 . The Tiger Crisis and the Response:
Reclaiming the Wilderness in
Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan
GHAZALA SHAHABUDDIN

Select Bibliography
About the Editors and Contributors

Index