Introduction

Summary

There is little doubt that forests occupy a smaller fraction of the world today than they have done for some millennia, and people living in them form an even smaller, and ever-falling, proportion of the global population. However, as a consequence of the new environmental consciousness, academic inquiry into, and media coverage of these shrunken areas and shrinking populations has, in recent years, vastly increased in every part of the world. The historical dimensions of the issues involved are also increasingly coming to be recognised, as are its regional and local variations. These are the problems that the present book addresses. The book is not about the environment per se, but about the human use of the environment, and about the diverse communities that utilised it in distinct, but complementary, ways. It is also about how these communities sought to define themselves and organise their relations with others, and how they modified natural conditions in that process. The book thus deals both with the formation of ethnic hierarchies and the anthropogenesis of landscapes; hence it is also a contribution to the study of what Schendel has termed ‘ethnic innovation’ or ethnogenesis.

While these processes may be found throughout the world, my inquiry is focused on the margins of agriculture in Central and Western India, or a region slightly larger than the contemporary Indian state of Maharashtra. Those margins were, until the present century, determined largely by physiographic boundary between the plains and the mountains.