The book critically examines the development of indigenous cultural ideologies in South Asia, revealing their origins in nineteenth-century racial and colonial anthropology rather than a notion of untouched ethnicity. The author, Sumit Guha, explores how the seemingly fixed identities of South Asian populations were formed through interactions with neighboring civilizations. This insightful analysis not only contributes to the understanding of South Asian history but also enriches the discourse on ethnicity.
This book analyzes how the word "tribe" has morphed and spread through the centuries. It goes behind the label to bring out the social, military, and environmental settings that gave it its various meanings.
The construction of historical memory: sites and processes -- The many pasts of the Indian subcontinent -- Social structure and historical narration in western India -- Western historiography and colonial history in British India.
The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental knowledge itself. The establishment of imperial control transforms local knowledge of the world into the aggregated information that reproduces centralized power over it. That is the political ecology that reshapes entire biomes. Animals and plants are translocated; human communities are displaced or destroyed. Some species proliferate; others disappear. But these state projects are overlaid upon the many local and regional geographies made by sacred cosmologies and local sites, pilgrimage routes and river fords, hot springs and fluctuating aquifers, hunting ranges and nesting grounds, notable trees and striking rocks. Guha uncovers these ecological histories by scrutinizing little-used archival sources. His historically based political ecology demonstrates how the biomes of a vast subcontinent were changed by struggles to make and to resist empire.
