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Agrarian urbanisation has gathered pace and intensity in the last few decades after economic liberalisation in India. A faster rate of economic growth has exacerbated the extraction of rural natural resources to supply increased urban demands. At the same time, rural landscapes have been transformed by expanded infrastructure, new industrial ventures, conservation projects and urban sprawl. These processes have been mediated by shifting patterns of caste power and political mobilisation. However, they also seem to have exacerbated social inequality while making historically marginalised groups such as Dalits and Adivasis suffer greater dispossession and livelihood precarity. Case studies from different regions of India reveal both the socio-economic dynamics of regional variation in these broad outcomes of agrarian urbanism, and the cross-regional patterns of environmental degradation, exacerbated inequality and difficulties faced by agrarian society in reproducing itself as an integral part of Indian prosperity and progress.

AbstractThis article considers the formation of moral and ethical worlds in India, drawing largely on cases reporting on modern times, as people interact with or imagine the landscapes in which they live. Questions of ethics, and how they are animated in practical existence through the experience of emotional ties and affective attachments to nature, near and far, have not always informed the writing of environmental history in India. In contrast, scholars in disciplines other than history have often paid attention to ethical and religious ideas about landscape and nature. This review argues that ethics of nature are developed in historical processes of community formation and identity-expression or self-making that occur in and through the imagination and experience of the natural world in religious and political action. Historical perspectives on these topics are useful and necessary, even as careful examination of how affect and worship shape attitudes to being in particular landscapes can enrich the understanding of meaningful relations to landscape and nature in environmental history. The argument is developed by a close examination of a handful of recent studies that have provided an empirical basis for this synthesis, review, and conceptual elaboration of the ethics of nature in India. The article considers the formation of ethical ideas and practical values of nature in realms of worship, natural resources management, rural development, conservation science, natural resources policy, and legal disputes relating to nature protection in India.

What has been the relationship of nationalism to nature in India? Starting with this basic yet hitherto unexamined question, this article examines the varieties of nationalism that can be associated with nature love and ideas of nature conservation in India through the 20th century. After identifying the limitations of the dichotomised approach that explains nationalism as either statist or culturalist, this article also examines the extent to which this dualist and oppositional view of nationalism informs and constrains public debate on ideas of nature and environmental management in India. A key argument made here is that nationalism that is thin and exclusive, and thereby inherently the source of conflict and confrontation, is not a new problem in India, and the tendencies for the emergence of thin nationalisms around ideas of nature and their relation to heritage and conservation were already present in the ecological debates and post-War conditions of the mid 20th century as the sun finally set on the British empire.

By studying and writing about social revolutions and popular protest, James Scott has provided anthropologists and social theorists with a wide‐ranging analytical vocabulary for speaking about peace and its inseparable twin—violence. His particular area of expertise has been the arts of repressive peace, and the artfulness of those who elude or defy such silencing technologies. The publication of The Moral Economy of the Peasant in 1976 initiated the first interactions between Scott's unique brand of political theory and anthropology in the shared topical space of peasant studies and the shared geographic space of Asian studies. The authors of this "In Focus" have assembled this special collection to celebrate and evaluate those and subsequent interactions covering a quarter of a century and spanning the publication of at least three other books: Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Seeing Like a State (1998).

Concerns with how cultural factors influenced agrarian social change remained an abiding interest in the work of James Scott. I begin by sketching out the context of debates in Marxist theory, development studies, and social and political anthropology that, during the 1980s, turned to relations between ideas, power, and processes of conflict and change in a world of new postcolonial nations and rapid agrarian development. In the article, then, I carefully examine the ideas Scott developed about resistance and hegemony in conversation with the work of E. P. Thompson. Tracing the genealogy of Scott's ideas about hegemony and rural social protest, I comment in some detail on the literature on resistance that arose in anthropology during the 1980s and the role of Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) in shaping that literature while interacting with Subaltern Studies (Guha 1982–87), studies of social movements, and examinations of power in interpersonal relations.

Sivaramakrishnan reviews MIGRATION, COMMON PROPERTY, RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION: Interlinkages in India's Arid and Semi-arid Regions by Kanchan Chopra and S. C. Gulati.

Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Thomas Blom Hansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 280 pp.

Informed by debates on development discourse, local knowledge, and the history of colonial conservation, this article argues for a careful historical investigation of the manner in which scientific managerial knowledge emerges in the field of forestry. It makes its case by focusing on the specific period in the history of Bengal (1893–1937) when scientific forestry was formalized and institutionalized. The processes and conflicts through which local knowledge gets encoded as scientific canon have to be understood to generate effective managerial devolution in participatory projects. This requires an engagement with public understandings of science as practice that arises from a dynamic critique of static, and undifferentiated, notions of development discourse or local knowledge.