HTTP://ForestMovement.Org

Environmental Renewal of Jharkhand

A rather poetic observation of a colonial officer of Jharkhand by the turn of the last century goes like this, “Chotanagpur is one long undulating sweep of hills throughout…Its centre is a vast plateau… All are covered with more or less with thick tree jungle…while the lower and more undulating slopes grow vast tree forests that stretch over the land for miles around.. The whole forms one of the most charming series of views imaginable. The far-off hills in the background, in exquisite tints of blue or purple as the light falls; the nearer hills picturesquely shaped and luxuriant in every shade of green, with their bold escarpments in black or grey; and the plains below furnishing their quota of color in the tender green of the early rice, the brilliant yellow of the sirguja, or the gold of the fields at harvest, - present a panorama of perfect charm and beauty” (Bradley-Brit, F.B. 2:1910). The writer was Mr. F. B. Bradley-Brit. His famous book the Chotanagpur: A Little-Known Province of the Empire (1903) gives the wayfarer’s description of the country of forests and hills and the social milieu of the land. He is, however, not an exception to his genre. Whoever wrote about the land and the people of the country could not but be impressed by the co-existence of nature and culture in a perfect balance.

End of the Ulgulan in 1900 was not just the termination of a chain of resistance to the colonial aggression against the people but more so against the symbiosis between human and nature that evolved in this land over a period unknown to history. The social-ecological history of the post-Ulgulan times in Jharkhand has been the history of the development of a destructiveculture at the cost of protective nature. The Bengal Nagpur Railway ( year?)and the coal mines of Manbhum (year) signaled the beginning of an era of devastation of the old equations between the ‘Ancestors – Human – Nature’ that sums up the cosmology (the philosophy of the universe) and cosmogony (the theory of the creation of the universe or the world) of the indigenous society of the land. The phenomenon of the out-transportation of minerals and the in-transportation of men of other cultures continued to flourish under the colonial state. The little known province of Bradley-Brit became well known as the ‘Rurh’ of India (Rurh in Germany is a mineral rich area).

Colonialism alienated people from the forest along with land and water. It exposed them to the larger economy of the imperialist state. The hunting gathering and swidden agriculturists were forced to be sedentary. Large scale deforestation coupled with Zamindari exploitation led to food insecurity and eventually famine. The hundred years of British occupation of Jharkhand from the second half of the 19th century to its withdrawal in 1947 witnessed chains of famine especially in those places that were once clad with thick dense forests before its advent. In another context the Viceroy of Bengal admitted that the ‘chief factor’ of the Great Bengal famine of 1943 was ‘morale’ (as quoted by Sen, Amartya.1981. Poverty and Famine). In Jharkhand the famines exposed a much deeper moral hollowness of the colonial rule. The rulers took advantage of the drought conditions to ‘create’ famines with a view to alienate the indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and forests (Sing, K.S. 72:1996). Large scale out-migration to Asam and Bhutan was the beginning of a never ending process. This immorality of the colonial culture perpetuated in the years to come.

Post-colonial Jharkhand having remained divided into four neighbourig states surfaced as the largest internal-colony of the new nation-state of India. Mining- industrialization-urbanization – the trident of development that replaced colonialism (Kothari) drastically devastated the landscape that SanjibChottopadhya delineated in his famous book Palau. The formation of the Jharkhand state has now decidedly taken up the responsibility of accelerating the speed of the victorious chariot of development that is going to trample over the remnants of all the relationships between human and nature that the indigenous societies of Jharkhand have been able to protect at the cost of their lives.

Jharkhand movement raised the demand of the restoration of peoples’ rights over land, water and forest on the face of this onslaught. The Indian nation-state very correctly identified this demand as anti-development and therefore, anti-national. Political autonomy devoid of cultural identity is being proved to be the husk without the grain in it. The new state of Jharkhand has obviously not been formed to fulfill this demand of the people but in response to the demand of development. In this paper we will try to focus on the popular demand of environmental renewal of Jharkhand as an integral part of the reconstruction of its cultural identity.

Development Discourse
West European ruling classes, with the discovery of the New World and a large part of the Old one so far unexplored by them, imagined themselves to be the distinct agents in a progressive history. The relationship between human and nature provided the ground in the emergence of the notion of progress and backwardness. An increase in domination over nature was considered to be an indicator of progress. The dynamic of that progress in turn justified the treatment of nature and in extension the societies closer to nature as objects of domination. It divided the world into modern or developed, on the one hand, and traditional or under-developed, on the other. Thus it legitimized colonialism and when colonialism was forced to be withdrawn by the rest of the world development took over the task of colonial power of the west to modernize the under-developed third world (Blaser, Mario. 27-8:2004). Development today has become synonymous to neo-colonialism.

Pages: 1 2