Towards Crisis

Recently, a revisionist scholarship has emerged, which emphasises re-examining the earlier held notion of the disruptive role of colonialism. It is argued that there are continuities in many aspects of the society and economy of India from pre-colonial to colonial and then to postcolonial periods. There is no doubt that many aspects of the society and the economy reflect uncanny continuities. But this should not lead us to believe that colonialism was inconsequential. The impact of colonialism on the environment is too serious to be dismissed lightly. We had started this work with the premise that the role of scientific forestry in ecological dislocation of the Indian society cannot be underplayed. This work has demonstrated two things very clearly–firstly, that scientific forestry and its attitude towards forests represented a total break from the past and, secondly, that scientific forestry transformed the agro-ecological systemof Uttarakhand during the colonial period, thereby profoundly affecting the society and the economy.

In Uttarakhand, there is a strong belief among people that the society has seen a decline in the recent past. However, people fail to clearly identify the time from which the decline started. Many scholars have identified it with the British rule. The situation that prevailed prior to the decline is not clearly defined, but Rangan refers to that as the ‘golden past’ or ‘idyllic world’. Rangan however rejects the notion of the ‘golden past’ and calls it a myth.