Himalayan Research Bulletin | January 2001
This paper traces the first attempts by the colonial state in the Indian Western Himalayas to draw boundaries around forests and define the rights of local populations. The process, which intensified with the publication of a Forest Department report in 1876, was fraught with obstacles at several levels throughout its course. It met sustained resistance from the peasants, who fought restrictions on their use of the forests. More importantly, horizontal tensions across different departments and vertical tensions between local knowledge professed by provincial bureaucracy on the one hand, and central direction emanating from the scientific establishment around forest management on the other, frustrated any attempt at uniformity in state responses. All these factors worked in tandem over the last quarter of the 19th century in Kulu sub-division, a site saliently embedded in the emerging political economy as seen in expanding canal irrigation in the Punjab as well as rising demand for the prized timber abundant in Kulu.
I argue that the project to create permanent boundaries around forests was never accomplished in Kulu, with the Forest Settlement Report of 1897 failing both to keep the people out of forests and to bridge intra-state divisions. This triumvirate of mutual tensions—local resistance, local knowledge, and central direction—was instrumental in constituting the 'state' and proved to be the salient feature of later state-society interactions.
Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.
Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.
He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.
