Panel No. 13

Panel Title: The stress on culture and ecology by past and present changes in environment

Convenor: Michael Mann, Fern Universität in Hagen, Historisches Institut, Hagen, Germany
Co-convenor: Nils-Axel Mörner, Unit of Palegeophysics and Geodynamics, at Stockholm University, Sweden

    Wednesday 7 July, 8–12 & 13–17

Panel Abstract: Since the 1980s, environmental history has become a popular issue of global academic research, particularly in South Asia. However, the majority of research still operates within the limits of industrial forest management and appropriation of natural resources and the social deprivation of the population living in forests and from their products. Environmental history cannot be restricted to the interrelationship of humankind and its habitat, for this is actually social history, but has to be enriched by ecological as well as cultural aspects. These will have to include research from related sciences as well as natural sciences, in short: interdisciplinary scrutiny is required to open up new fields of analysis and interpretation. For example, only recently problems of water management and air pollution as immediate consequences of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation especially in India were placed on the environmental-cum ecological agenda. Yet, in many instances the long term and even short term historical perspective is missing. For this reason, the panel wants, on the one hand, to enlarge the idea of environment including ecological and its related cultural concerns, and, on the other hand, to concentrate on the historical perspective.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

Paper Giver 1: Nils-Axel Mörner, Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm University

Paper 1 Title: Changes in the Indian Ocean climatic-oceanic system and past-present-future stress on culture and environment

Paper Abstract: Sea level, climate and monsoonal regime have changed significantly in the Indian Ocean region in the past and will continue to change in the future. These changes put both culture and ecology under stress. It is of great interest to record and understand these relations in the past, in order better to be able to understand the present situation and evaluate future expectations. The changes on a decadal to centennial are examined. Clear observations records indicate that sea level by no means are in the process of any significant rise at present. Therefore, we can free the world from the condemnation of flooding in the near future of islands like the Maldives and coastal lowlands.

      Full paper to be downloaded (as a pdf-file)

Paper Giver 2: Golam Mahabub Sarwar, Institute of Environmental Science
University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi Bangladesh

Paper 2 Title: Impacts of Sea level Rise on Bangladesh

Paper Abstract: Rise in the Sea level would be in the range of 15 cm to 95 cm in Bangladesh by 2100 AD. Taking the upper end, the rise would about 30 cm by 2030. Even a 10cm rise, which would most likely happen well before 2030, would inundate 2500 sq. km., about 2% of the total land area. In such a rise, Patuakhali, Khulna and Barisal regions are most at risk. The tidal range along the Bangladesh Coast varies between 3m and 6m. The high tidal wave action, thus contributes to shoreline erosion in Bangladesh. The rise in sea level will move the shoreline further landward and will reduce the bottom friction of the tidal flow and hence the tidal range will increase. Increasing tidal range and tidal wave action due to Sea level Rise is likely to enhance coastal erosion in Bangladesh and to Change the Coastal morpho-dynamics. On an average, the sea would move in about 10km, but in the Khulna region, the sea would likely move in further, resulting the reduction of habitat of fresh water species. It has been seen with a 1.4m rise in sea level, water level rises to about 6m near the Meghna estuary. Even with a 0.2m rise in sea level, water level rise between 4.5m and 5m near the estuary.
Since, most of the coastal area is below 1.5m above Mean Sea Level (MSL) and area near the confluence of the Ganges and Meghna is below 3m above MSL, both depth and area of inundation will increase extensively. About 4% of total land area would inundate by 2050. With the high-end estimates, Sea level Rise in Bangladesh, would inundate 18% area of land of the country by 2100, salinity will be increased. Even by 2050, storm surge goes from 7.1m to 8.6m. Sea level Rise could increase flooding in the floodplain of the Meghna and the Ganges river. Most vulnerable impact categories for Sea level Rise in Bangladesh include Coastal resources, Water resources, Agriculture, and eco-system. With 0.2 m and 0.3m Sea level Rise, it would inundate 0.2 Metric Tons and 0.5 Metric Tons of agricultural production respectively, which is <1% and 2% of current total. The Sundarbans, world heritage site and the largest unique Mangrove forest of the world, would be lost with severe effects on the country’s eco-system, with a 60cm rise in the Sea level.

Paper Giver 3: Khondker Iftekhar Iqbal, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, UK

Paper 3 Title: Railways and the Water Regime of the Eastern Bengal Delta, c. 1905-1943: A Reappraisal

Paper Abstract: My paper will consider mainly the issues relating to the railway embankment in the more active deltaic region of Bengal. There have been debates about the impact of railways in Bengal, most of them considering railway embankments to be injurious to public health or as an imperial design to mobilise raw materials, but the question of railways as factors of ecological and consequently of agrarian decline has generally been overlooked. My paper will focus on the impact of the railway embankments on agrarian production process on the one hand, and on the discursive social space that emerged out of the cultivators’ attempt to access a deteriorating water regime at the local level on the other hand.

      Full paper to be downloaded (as a pdf-file)

Paper Giver 4: Amna Khalid, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford University, UK

Paper 4 Title: Reordering Sacred Space: Colonial Sanitary Strategies and Hindu Pilgrimage Sites, 1867-1894

Paper Abstract: Before the nineteenth century disease was seen as emanating from environmental factors but it was believed that familiarity with the environment would help people acclimatise, making them more resistant to the climate. Understandings of disease underwent significant change in the nineteenth century, as disease became racialised but this racialisation of disease did not entirely displace the environmental explanation for illness. Instead the need to manage the environment to suit Europeans in the colonies became more urgent. The idea was to sanitise insalubrious places and undo the conditions that nurtured disease. Disease was seen as area-specific and dealing with it implied re-ordering the environment.
This paper explores this link between environment and disease by focusing on the cholera epidemics of northern India between 1867 and 1895, which started at pilgrimage sites along the banks of the Ganges in the North-Western Provinces. It examines how these sites were seen as hotbeds of cholera by the colonial authorities, thereby warranting state control over their environment. Furthermore, this paper analyses how medical theories regarding the spread of cholera informed the state instituted environmental changes at these sites
The framework for this paper borrows concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ from Human Geography. The paper analyses how the colonial state viewed pilgrimage sites as mere geographical spaces to be managed to control disease whereas the pilgrims understood them to be ‘places’ i.e. spaces imbued with social meaning. By using this framework to analyse the relationship between Hindu pilgrimage and colonial intervention, I will explore the ecological reshaping of the sites and the consequent changes in the pilgrims’ religious experience. This furthers one’s understanding of the ways in which the colonial management of space shaped the ecology of the region.

Paper Giver 5: Bernardo A. Michael, Department of History, Messiah College, Grantham, USA

Paper 5 Title: Land, Labor, Local Power, and the Constitution of Agrarian Territories on the Anglo-Gorkha Frontier, 1700-1815

Paper Abstract: This paper explores the agency of the environment (malarial forests) and agrarian culture (shortage of labor, migration, politics of little kingdoms) in the organization of territory along the Anglo-Gorkha frontier in early colonial north India. Historically, dense malarial forests restricted access to this frontier at a time when intense efforts were being made by recalcitrant little kingdoms and landed magnates to extend cultivation. Labor too was in short supply. Consequently a shifting forest-field mosaic of agrarian territory emerged produced out of the uneven interactions between ecology, local power, and labor supply.
Together, these environmental and human factors combined to impact the layout, extent, and architecture of administrative divisions along the Anglo-Gorkha frontier causing them to shift, overlap, and break up. Such a scenario of spatial fluidity expressed in the form of patchy, ill-defined administrative divisions persisted when these areas came under the authority of the English East India Company and the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal). I argue that these spatial dynamics, for long ignored by historians of this frontier, provided an important set of circumstances that ultimately led to the Anglo-Gorkha war of 1814-1816. This war led to the defeat of Gorkha and the formal demarcation of the present Anglo-Nepal boundary which it was hoped would permanently fix the adjoining territories of the two states along this fuzzy frontier.

Paper Giver 6: Ananya Mukherjee, Dept. of Sociology, University of Reading, England

Paper 6 Title: Conflicts over Natural Resource Access within National Parks

Paper Abstract: This paper looks at conflicts around national parks ever since forest areas were declared as protected areas by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Conflicts began over dislocation of the indigenous communities who were the resident human population within these forest areas along with the wildlife. As a result of their displacement from the interiors of the forest to the periphery of the park, national park laws imposed restrictions over former practices of using the resources of the forest and its subsequent misuse within the designated protected areas. Plans for protected area management overlooked the interests and needs of the people living inside forests, and other areas rich in biodiversity.
Such efforts in conservation with its emphasis on the exclusion of the local communities, associated with these rural eco-systems for generations, have triggered off violence and conflict between the conservationists and the deprived section of the community. This has necessitated a change in perspective with respect to wildlife conservation. The main argument behind this is that these communities were as much a part of nature as the wildlife and forests and they can be of positive use to conservation. This can be done by providing alternate sources of livelihood, spreading awareness and education and by delegating to them the responsibility for protecting the forest and its resources.

Paper Giver 7: Alpa Shah, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Paper 7 Title: The Problem of Wild Elephants in Jharkhand, India: Conflicting Notions of Environment

Paper Abstract: Between 1997 and 2002, wild elephants in rural Jharkhand have killed at least 230 people, caused more injuries, broken many houses and destroyed much crop. This paper looks at conflicting notions of the environment that are used to explain the problem of wild elephants. On the one hand, the villagers who are victims of the damage understand the presence of the animals to be linked with an increasing density of the forest in the area, a direct result of state protection. Wild elephants, threatening the people’s livelihoods, are thus seen as one more example of the danger of the expanded reach of the state, and the forests inhabited by the wild elephants, is increasingly a dangerous, dark place where humans should not venture.
On the other hand, local elites argue that the wild elephant problem is linked to the increasing degradation of the forests, evidencing the need to further to protect the environment. They argue that rapacious outsiders, dikus, cut the forests for timber, proposing that this forest reduction not only destroyed the natural home and livelihoods of the state’s tribal communities but also led to the depletion of the food and space of the elephants resulting in crop, house and people attack. In showing why the latter view is reproduced as the dominant one in local journalist, academic and social activist accounts, the paper argues that notions of environment often can not be understood without taking into account the political economy of environment and development policy.

Paper Giver 8: K.S. Babu, Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad, India

Paper 8 Title: Globalisation, Ecology and Tribal Life: A Case Study of Yanadi in Andhra Pradesh

Paper Abstract: Yanadi is traditionally a jungle tribe in Andhra Pradesh. Over a period of time, due to the fast depletion of forest cover, sizeable number of them had to change their occupations. Now most of the Yanadis live out of forest. In this paper, an attempt is made to discuss how Yanadis are continued to face the adjustment problems from jungle life (try to explore relation between environment and cultural patterns) to the plain living life despite of various government welfare programmes and overall negative impact of recent liberalisation policies of government. Certainly the limited forest cover (due to deforestation) in no way can sustain the lives of these tribes which have increased their numbers four times compared to their population a century ago. They had to come out of the forests for their livelihood and even lost free access to existing forest due to restricted government policies. Now agriculture labour has become main occupation of Yanadis in the project area as about 83% (as per our survey) of the Yanadis are engaged in agriculture (as wage labourers). Liberalisation linked agro market conditions lead to number of suicide deaths by farmers. The cost of agricultural inputs increased phenomenally. This situation has thrown many farmers into debt trap. More than 300 cotton farmers have committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh during 1997-98.

Paper Giver 9: Fredrik Haag, Programme for Applied Environmental Impact Assessment, Uppsala University, Sweden

Paper 9 Title: Remote sensing as a tool for the study of landscape dynamics:
Two case studies from Tissamaharama and Negombo, Sri Lanka

Paper Abstract: The paper discusses the possibilities and constraints of remote sensing based approaches to studies of landscape dynamics in the Sri Lankan environment. Two cases, one from the Tissamaharama area in south-eastern Sri Lanka, and one from the Negombo lagoon area on the west coast, are used to illustrate the discussion. The complexity and fragmentation of the Sri Lankan landscape with respect to land cover and land use are factors that render conventional use of digital remote sensing techniques difficult to implement in the study of environmental change. In the two case studies, different approaches based on a landscape dynamics perspective has been used to overcome these obstacles, with varying degrees of success.
The Tissamaharama study area is located in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka, and consists of a mainly rural landscape. The area is characterised by paddy cultivation and a large number of tanks for irrigation. Here, a hybrid methodology combining visual and digital remote sensing techniques as well as a traditional geographic landscape (land systems) perspective was used to render high resolution land cover data. In the Negombo area, a similar methodology was used and compared to official land cover data (Urban Development Authority) as well as to a purely visual, raster based methodology. The Negombo area, just north of Colombo, is situated in the Wet Zone and differs from the Tissamaharama area by displaying a landscape characterised by industrialisation and urbanisation processes. In the paper, the possibilities and constraints of the different methodologies and materials are discussed, in relation to the characteristics of the landscapes in the two study areas.

Paper Giver 10: T. Rathnasiri Premathilake, Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology
University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka

Paper 10 Title: Late Quaternary climatic and environmental changes from multi-proxy montane rainforest records in peat from the Horton Plains, Sri Lanka

Paper Abstract: There have been several attempts during the past decade to reconstruct palaeo climate and environment of the Indian region, but not in Sri Lanka. The first detailed study supported by SIDA/SAREC concerning terrestrial environment, an AMS-dated multi-proxy montane rainforest record reveals ~24,000 year history of monsoon climate variability and major environmental changes in central Sri Lanka since the LGM. Earliest tropical warming preceded Northern Hemisphere ice-sheet melting by > 3000 years. Starting ~17,600 yr BP, rainforest diversity increases in-step with four increasingly humid millennial-scale events, reaching optimum diversification during the monsoon precipitation maximum of ~ 8,700 yr BP.
A disruption to these millennial cycles coincided with a gradual monsoon downturn, precipitation and rainforest decline and aridity between 8,100-3,600 yr BP, following which conditions became more humid again for rainforest expansion. Two short wet events centred ~ 650 and 150 years ago are separated by a weaker monsoon, which may correspond to the Little Ice Age (LIA). Broadly synchronous climatic records of the Horton Plains, Arabian Sea-Oman and N. Atlantic regions indicate strong two-way teleconnections between tropical Asian monsoon fluctuations and high latitude events. The above changes reflect vast spatial rearrangements in atmospheric circulation patterns, probably caused by forcing associated with coupled ocean-atmosphere-vegetation feedbacks.
The onset of warmer and wetter climatic conditions after 18,500 yr BP favoured primary settling and development of cultivation. A mobile life form i.e. a hunter-forage culture, predominated in an open landscape, associated with dry forest element e.g. Chenopodium spp ~ 17,500 yr BP. Soon after, incipient cereal plant management, together with slash-and burn techniques, started. Oat (Avena sp. and barley (Hordeum sp.) cultivation began ~13,000 yr BP. The records from the Horton Plains provide the earliest evidence of agriculture so far in Sri Lanka, as well as in southern Asia. In addition, the present study demonstrates several independent centers for initial agriculture in southwest Asia.

Paper Giver 11: Samiksha Sehrawat, Wellcome Unit for History of Medicine, Oxford University

Paper 11 Title: The Urbanization of the Delhi region and Displacement of Village
Communities: the Socio-cultural Aspects of Ecological Change

Paper Abstract: The proposed paper will discuss the rapid and planned urbanization of the Delhi region after the declaration of the transfer of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911. Soon after the decision to make Delhi the new capital of the British Indian Empire, many villages and their agricultural areas around the old city of Delhi were acquired by the British state with theintention of converting them into a planned city. This move transformed the ecology of the region artificially in a relatively short time from a largely rural-agrarian one to an urban one. The first section of the paper seeks to delineate this change within a limited canvass of 1911-1914. It sets the context with a brief discussion of some efforts of the colonial state at changing the ecology of the region.
This section will then explore how the colonial state set out to realize its plan of a grand imperial city through buying all the agricultural land of the region required by the Town-planning Committee and its plans for urbanization. The second section will delve deeper into the socio-cultural stresses that this rapid shift produced for the villagers displaced by the state and the cultural significance of the ecology of the new capital for imperial ideology. The paper will explore the factors involved in the acquisition of the villagers\quote land and their reactions to this as well as the socio- cultural and ideological pressures on the colonial state which motivated the impulse to resettle these people. The paper will examine the imperial vision of the new capital, which seems to have given significance to the ecological aspects of the urban environment. Thus, the renewed attempts to afforest the ridge, the importance of planting trees within the city and the environmental considerations which guided the selection of the site for the capital will all be probed to reveal the underlying cultural and ideological impulses of colonial state officials.

Paper Giver: Michael Mann, Historisches Institut, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany

Paper 12 Title: The Afforestation Scheme of the Delhi Ridge, 1873-1915

Paper Abstract: From the middle of the 1850s onwards, which is also the aftermath of the imperial forest administration and legislation in British-India, several attempts of afforestation measures were started. Most of these schemes took place in the hill regions, yet some of them in the plains of north India. One of these environmental undertakings was the afforestation of Delhi’s Ridge in the 1870s for purely ecological reasons. Yet the scheme had to be dropped for financial reasons. However, the plan was re-introduced after the shift of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi had been announced on the Coronation Darbar in 1911. To complete the planning of the new city, New Delhi’s natural background was to be provided with a dense forest for aesthetic, economic and, to take up the original plans, also for ecological reasons. Though New Delhi and the Delhi Ridge nowadays provide for a ‘green lung’, this was not the main intention of the city planners as environmental concerns were subjected to aesthetic attitudes which also shed some fresh light on the British rule in India.