Mahesh Rangarajan will deliver a lecture on ‘Empire and India's Forests: Towards a Longer View’ on 16 October 2026 at CSDS Seminar Room. It is the annual lecture of the journal Reading the Archive. The lecture will be chaired by Awadhendra Sharan. Dhirendra Datt Dangwal will be the discussant.

Forests loom large in India's environmental histories and with good reason. They have often been a keenly contested space as also critical to state building, and as an economic resource. But equally so the diversity of the forests of the sub-continent also saw them imagined and embedded in different kinds of relations that were cultural, social and political. Much of the scholarship has rightly focussed on the colonial and British imperial era that saw major changes in the ecological fabric as much as the legal and administrative systems of the forest. Many of the changes and their reverberations would live on in the post 1947 era. Yet to make sense of the enormity and impact of the colonial eras we need to take into account the immense diversity of India in terms of ecology and economy. How the imperial forestry system worked differently in various regions requires careful consideration. Equally so, the longer engagements of states, societies and nature  require more careful consideration. All too often, this longer history has been seen as mere backdrop. But both textual and archaeological evidence suggests a rich tapestry of change prior to the modern colonial era. Taking these into account can throw light on the imperial impact and legacy but it can do a lot more. We can then pose much more clearly how far and in what ways the colonial era marked a break with the past.

Mahesh Rangarajan is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, Haryana where he is also Chair of the Archives of Contemporary India. He was Chair of the Elephant Task Force of the Government of India in 2010 and a member of the Forest Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Environment, Government of India (2008-2012). His books include Fencing the Forest (1996), India's Wildlife History (2001) and Nature and Nation (2015).  He has edited and co-edited a number of works the most recent being Nature without Borders, and Shifting Ground (2014), At Nature's Edge (2018),  India's Forests (Penguin 2026) and Nature Contested (Orient Black Swan, 2026).

Friday, 16 October 2026, 4 pm, CSDS Seminar Room, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054