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Inside small homes and huts throughout the developing world, billions of people burn fires in rudimentary stoves to prepare their meals and heat their homes. Besides providing heat, these stoves also release large amounts of dense black soot, which has a staggeringly negative impact on the health, ecosystems, and advancement of the poor in the developing world. Fires, Fuel, and the Fate of 3 Billion examines the complex nexus of issues at play in the developing world's use of crude cookstoves - factors such as poverty, energy, environment, and gender inequality. Melding succinct prose, scientific synthesis, and unforgettable images of communities in rural India, this multidisciplinary work aims to prompt new awareness of a wicked problem: how families can depend on, and be plagued by, crude cookstoves. What is clear in this visual and scientific treatise is the fact this is not simply a problem of rudimentary stoves; it is a symptom of energy insecurity. The images, narratives, and illustrated scientific data make this book an urgent call to better understand and address energy poverty and household air pollution around the globe.

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The interdisciplinary approaches presented here investigate food in India and Sri Lanka for its wide ranging cultural meaning and uses. The authors examine food in religious and literary contexts, where saints, ritualists, poets, and the divine often provide grounds for a practically inexhaustible hermeneutics. The Eternal Food focuses on reflexive cultural expressions and personal experiences that food elicits in the region. Concerned with food as an "essence" and as an essential experience, the authors give special attention to Hindu saints for whom food, firmly grounded in moral ideals and practice, represents a cosmic divine principle at one level, and a most immediate and intimate material reality at another. In the cultural diversity of India, the authors work with several conceptual models and meanings of food. They demonstrate how it reflects common social understandings about social caste, the cure and prevention of ailments, its ability to alter moods and motivations, or affect innate personal dispositions, personal spiritual pursuits and attainments. In its sweep and depth, food presents a powerful cultural lens for seeing how practical, ritual, and spiritual spheres of life conjoin.

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This is a book about religious conceptions of trees within the cultural world of tree worship at the tree shrines of northern India. Sacred trees have been worshipped for millennia in India and today tree worship continues there among all segments of society. In the past, tree worship was regarded by many Western anthropologists and scholars of religion as a prime example of childish animism or decadent ''popular religion.'' More recently this aspect of world religious cultures is almostcompletely ignored in the theoretical concerns of the day. David Haberman hopes to demonstrate that by seriously investigating the world of Indian tree worship, we can learn much about not only this prominent feature of the landscape of South Asian religion, but also something about the cultural construction of nature as well as religion overall. The title People Trees relates to the content of this book in at least six ways. First, although other sacred trees are examined, the pipal - arguably the most sacred tree in India - receives the greatest attention in this study. The Hindi word ''pipal'' is pronounced similarly to the English word ''people.''Second, the ''personhood'' of trees is a commonly accepted notion in India. Haberman was often told: ''This tree is a person just like you and me.'' Third, this is not a study of isolated trees in some remote wilderness area, but rather a study of trees in densely populated urban environments. This is a study of trees who live withpeople and people who live with trees. Fourth, the trees examined in this book have been planted and nurtured by people for many centuries. They seem to have benefited from human cultivation and flourished in environments managed by humans. Fifth, the book involves an examination of the human experience of trees, of the relationship between people and trees. Haberman is interested in people's sense of trees. And finally, the trees located in the neighborhood tree shrines of northern India are not controlled by a professional or elite class of priests. Common people have direct access to them and are free to worship them in their own way. They are part of the people's religion. Haberman hopes that this book will help readers expand their sense of the possible relationships that exist between humans and trees. By broadening our understanding of this relationship, he says, we may begin to think differently of the value of trees and the impact of deforestation and other human threats to trees.

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Subalterns and Sovereigns traces the expansion of the colonial and the post-colonial state in Bastar, central India between 1854 and 2006. In particular, it looks at the manner in which the state was constituted, focusing on certain critical moments when the structures set into place by the colonial state were contested. The central themes include the growing restrictions on popular access to land and forest, and the changing popular notions of kingship and polity, which act as the matrix through which structures of resistance are defined. The author's account of the region is at once the outcome of an intellectual as well as personal encounter with the "field." It is divided into three parts: section one, "Recreated Pasts," portrays the pre-colonial economy and polity. It dispels notions of dominant history that see Bastar and other such places as untouched and isolated prior to colonialism, showing instead, the degree of social and political fluidity in the region. Section two, "Rebellious Pasts," presents accounts of both "major" and "minor" resistance to the colonizing process. It throws light on the play of multiple histories, differently constructed and differently understood by the actors involved. The final section, "Uncertain Futures," highlights the contradictions faced by tribal society today and the processes of cultural redefinition engendered by these contradictions. This second edition includes an afterword which discusses contemporary issues concerning the formation of the state of Chattisgarh.

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This book explores a crucial dimension of Indian history: the politics of wildness. It suggests that wildness was affirmed in various ways by early nineteenth century forest communities as a way of challenging upper upper caste values. With colonial rule, wildness was marginalized, leading to a new identity: adivasi.

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Gujarat (India) -- History; Gujarat (India) -- Social life and customs; Gujarat (India) -- Ethnic relations

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India's region of Rajasthan has a rich past with its culture, history, and polity. It has been an abode for diverse religions. Over the centuries, the society of Rajasthan has evolved into a well-knit fabric. The economy has a feudal past and presently Rajasthan is trying to come out of its shackles to become a modern economy. This book is a collection of select papers presented at the Fifth International Conference on Rajasthan with the theme "Multiple Histories, Ethnicity, Pluralism, and Institutions." The contributors share their experiences about Rajasthan, focusing on issues related to multiple histories, pluralism, multiculturalism, ethnicity, and socio-cultural institutions. Each paper in this volume, in its own way, significantly adds to the study and understanding of a mosaic that Rajasthan is.

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"This book contains reflective essays on various aspects of environmental awareness in contemporary times. Though contemporary in spirit, many of these essays also draw upon timeless traditional insights, both from the eastern and the western traditions. The book is conceived from the standpoint of multi-perspectival approach to the concept of environment. It is intended for readers who are, at many times, desperately in need of an understanding of the idea of environment much more holistic than what other books on this issue usually provide. Currently enthusiastic research and widespread deliberations on this issue of environment would, it is believed, gain immensely from the multi-dimensional approaches presented in this book. The contributors are drawn from diverse intellectual preoccupations ranging from Philosophy, Religion, Sociology, Biology, Physics to Literature."

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Environmental destruction is seen a matter of worldwide concern but as a Third World problem. Ecology and Equityexplores the most ecologically complex country in the world. India's peoples range from technocrats to hunter-gathers and its environments from dense forest to wasteland. The bookanalyses the use and abuse of nature on the sub-continent to reveal the interconnections of social and environmental conflict on the global scale. The authors argue that the root of this conflict is competition within different social groups and between different economic interests for natural resources. Radical both in its critique of the causes of crisis in India and in its proposals for ecological reform, Ecology and Equityis essential reading for all concerned for the Third World's in the world.

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How do people in different cultural worlds think about relationships with nature? How do religious ideas become formative of landscape? How can indigenous traditions inform current cultural debates? This book explores ways in which religious perceptions and cultural values affect our understandings of relationships with nature and our actions in and upon the environment. Drawing on sources in literature, sacred texts, intellectual history, oral traditions, rituals and anthropological practices, the authors speak of realities in and across world regions including Africa, India, Japan and the USA. Unwilling to reduce the power of symbolic, mythic and cosmological thought, the authors highlight the shifting, illusive and perplexing aspects of the relationship between cosmology and landscape. Examining the interpenetration of religious, environmental, and economic realities, this book includes critically positioned voices of Indigenous people on the cultural politics of ecological recovery. The authors offer a significant contribution to contemporary debates in the study of religion, nature, indigeneity and the challenges to colonialism.

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This Fissured Land, first published in 1992, presents an interpretative history ecological history of the Indian subcontinent. It offers a theory of ecological prudence and profligacy, testing this theory across the wide sweep of South Asian history. The book especially focuses on the use andabuse of forest resources. In Part One, the authors present a general theory of ecological history. Part Two provides a fresh interpretative history of pre-modern India along with an ecological interpretation of the caste system. In Part Three, the authors draw upon a huge wealth of source materialin their socio-ecological analysis of the modes of resource use introduced in India by the British.The Second Edition comes with a new Preface by the authors.

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This book challenges those who argue that we can change the world by changing the way people think. Harris shows that no matter how bizarre a people's behavior may seem, it always stems from concrete social and economic conditions.

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This book looks at the contemporary controversy over the construction of India's largest system of dams. It focuses most specifically on the lives of the tribals who will be displaced by the construction, and at what is being destroyed in the name of `development'. The book forces us to re-examine the politics of representation within the ideology of progressive movements, and will be of equal interest to scholars and social activists concerned about development, environment, and indigenous peoples.

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Milk is the only food mammals produce naturally to feed their offspring. The human species is the only one that takes milk from other animals and consumes it beyond weaning age. Cultures of Milk contrasts the practices of the world's two leading milk producers, India and the United States. In both countries, milk is considered to have special qualities. Drawing on ethnographic and scientific studies, popular media, and government reports, Andrea Wiley reveals that the cultural significance of milk goes well beyond its nutritive value. Shifting socioeconomic and political factors influence how people perceive the importance of milk and how much they consume. In India, where milk is out of reach for many, consumption is rising rapidly among the urban middle class. But milk drinking is declining in America, despite the strength of the dairy industry. Milk is bound up in discussions of food scarcity in India and food abundance in the United States. Promotion of milk as a means to enhance child growth boosted consumption in twentieth-century America and is currently doing the same in India, where average height is low. Wiley considers how variation among populations in the ability to digest lactose and ideas about how milk affects digestion influence the type of milk and milk products consumed. In India, most milk comes from buffalo, but cows have sacred status for Hindus. In the United States, cow's milk has long been a privileged food, but is now facing competition from plant-based milk.

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Case studies of ten villages of Rajasthan, India.

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Since the early 1990s, the achievement of "good governance" has been a dominant discourse in the pursuit of social and economic development. This book presents a critical challenge to the contemporary development paradigm of good governance. Based on original ethnographic fieldwork on urban water governance reforms in south India (Karnataka), the book examines the two propositions that underlie the current good governance debate. The first refers to a claim that good governance is both democratic and pro-market. The second to the claim that commercially-oriented water services, whether private or public, are good for poor and marginalised citizens. The book analyses these propositions as they intersect on three levels: policy, practice (process) and outcome. It argues that a number of tensions and contradictions exist within and between what the discourse promises, the everyday practises of how good governance policies are implemented and in the outcomes of such. It reveals the networks of power and the complexity of local reforms and their relation to global discourses as well as the motivations and every day practises of those who currently possess the power to reform. The book is of interest to academics in the fields of Development Studies, Asian Studies and Comparative Politics.

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Water resources development -- Political aspects -- India; Water-supply -- Political aspects -- India

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A devastating expose of what the globalized agricultural industry is doing to our land and our food.

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In the Time of Trees and Sorrows showcases peasants' memories of everyday life in North India under royal rule and their musings on the contrast between the old days and the unprecedented shifts that a half century of Indian Independence has wrought. It is an oral history of the former Kingdom of Sawar in the modern state of Rajasthan as it was from the 1930s to the 1950s. Based on testimonies from the 1990s, this book stands as a polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate this small rural community's relatively sudden transformation from subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations, and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings) that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing with historical "fact" and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex, and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of kings and what happened to the trees?

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This interdisciplinary book looks at women`s natural resource-based livelihoods in the wider context of development viewed through the lens of citizenship rights. Unravelling the patriarchal social fabric and policy structures in India, it argues that the concept of citizenship needs to be extended to include recognition of ways of life and livelihood, so that women take their legitimate space as productive human beings, entitled to dignity as a political right, and not merely to protection and welfare.The editor weaves together a historical perspective on varied dimensions of livelihood, development and citizenship. Drawing upon rich field-based researches in 13 states across India, the authors deal with complex and inter-related themes: the need to recognise women`s right to resources and their livelihood and employment strategies; the challenges of democratic governance and of restructuring institutional systems to make them responsive; and the role of women`s collective agency in development.Reflecting upon and critically analysing context-specific issues in several less-studied locations, the book shows that there is much to be learnt from empathetic interaction with the collective struggles of poor women, and from action and dialogue on the ground. Further, it suggests that feminist politics has to network strategically with other struggles to counter the resistance of traditional and contemporary patriarchal structures, and to work towards recasting citizenship for a gender-just development that ensures women`s livelihood rights.

This volume studies natural resources through the lens of cultural politics. It emphasizes the role of cultural politics and adds to the existing environmental debates. The essays allow us to think anew the taken-for-granted aspects of natural resources. Each article highlights a differentfacet of the natural resources debate. The term natural resources when examined along with such keywords as waste, scarcity, security, territory, sovereignty, conflict, expertise, and community opens up a distinctive world of meanings. These related keywords chart out the terrain of the culturalpolitics of natural resources.

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This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - which have been bequeathed tous. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls "post-cosmopolitan", and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these duties are owed, non-reciprocally, by those individuals andcommunities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. The first virtue of ecological citizenship is justice, but post-cosmopolitanism follows some feminisms in arguing that care and compassion may be required to meet its special obligations. Dobsonsuggests that ecological citizenship's conception of political space is not the state or the municipality, or the ideal speech community of cosmopolitanism, but the "ecological footprint".Most governments around the world have signed up to sustainable development, and they cannot afford to ignore ecological citizenship as a means of getting there. Government policies usually revolve around financial sticks and carrots, but these leave people uncommitted to the idea of sustainabilityand only to the rewards that are attached to it. Dobson contrasts citizenship with fiscal incentives as a way of encouraging people to act more sustainably, in the belief that the former is more compatible with the long-term and deeper shifts of attitude and behaviour that sustainability requires.Both citizenship and sustainability, though, are often viewed with suspicion in liberal societies because they refuse to accept the inviolability of individual preferences. Dobson therefore offers an original account of the relationship between liberalism and sustainability, arguing that theformer's commitment to a plurality of conceptions of the good entails a commitment to so-called "strong" forms of the latter.How to make an ecological citizen? Dobson examines the potential of formal high school citizenship education programmes through a case study of the recent implementation of the compulsory citizenship curriculum in the UK. He concludes that the Department of Education and Skills has constructed aTrojan horse capable of kick-starting ecological citizenship, if teachers are willing and able to travel in it.This book will be of interest to those working in the fields of environmental political theory, citizenship, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and citizenship education.

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Though the impact of climate change will most likely be greatest with the already poor and vulnerable populations in the developing world, much of the writing about the costs and benefits of different policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is by Western scholars, working in advanced industrialized economies. Drawing the majority of its contributions from authors based at Indian universities and other research centers, India and Global Climate Change provides a developing world perspective on the debate.With a population of over one billion, and an economy that is undergoing substantial restructuring and greatly increased economic growth after a number of years of stagnation, India has an exceptional stake in the debate about climate change policy. Using the Indian example, this volume looks at such policy issues as the energy economy relationships that drive GHG emissions; the options and costs for restricting GHG emissions while promoting sustainable development; and the design of innovative mechanisms for expanded international cooperation with GHG mitigation.

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The costs of industrial agriculture are astonishing in terms of damage to the environment, human health, animal suffering, and social equity, and the situation demands that we expand our ecological imagination to meet this crisis. In response to growing dissatisfaction with the existing food system, farmers and consumers are creating alternate models of production and consumption that are both sustainable and equitable. In Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture, author A. Whitney Sanford uses the story of the deity Balaram and the Yamuna River as a foundation for discussing the global food crisis and illustrating the Hindu origins of agrarian thought. By employing narrative as a means of assessing modern agriculture, Sanford encourages us to reconsider our relationship with the earth. Merely creating new stories is not enough -- she asserts that each story must lead to changed practices. Growing Stories from India demonstrates that conventional agribusiness is only one of many options and engages the work of modern agrarian luminaries to explore how alternative agricultural methods can be implemented.

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This book provides an overview of climate change in India using river basin data and analytical and econometric methods. It, first, makes a quantitative assessment of how climate change affects agricultural and food production systems; second, predicts how these systems may respond to climate change; and third, suggests adaptation measures and strategies to improve the income of farmers, increase production, save water and conserve environment.The work will be greatly useful to policy-makers, researchers and teachers of agricultural economics, environmental studies and economics and development studies as also to research organizations dealing with climate modelling and resource management.

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The forest sector in India is currently going through an unprecedented churning. Every dimension of forest-related decision-making, including rights of local communities, conversion of forests to non-forest uses and setting aside forests for wildlife conservation, has become the subject ofintense scrutiny, debate and change. The involvement of multiple actors, from local communities to the Supreme Court, marks a shift in the discourse from forest management to forest governance. Questions of forest rights, responsibilities, regulatory structures, transparency and accountability haveincreasingly become central to the discourse. The need to democratize all these components of forest governance is being repeatedly articulated. This book highlights this shift in the discourse and analyses the complex issues involved in bringing about democratic governance of forests in India.The essays in this book review developments over the last two decades along four dimensions: forests for local management, forests for wildlife conservation, conversion to non-forest purposes, and the wider socio-economic context and how it poses challenges to the idea of democratic governance. Thethemes range from the relevance of the Joint Forest Management programme, the contribution of the Forest Rights Act, the complexities of the Godavarman case and the changes in the Wildlife Act to challenges posed by shifting cultivation, scientific versus traditional knowledge, and the effect ofeconomic growth on forest dependence.

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This new, expanded edition of The Unquiet Woods, Ramachandra Guha's pathbreaking study of peasant movements against commercial forestry, offers a new epilogue that brings the story of Himalayan social protest up-to-date, reflecting the Chipko movement's continuing influence in the wider world. A new appendix charts the progress of environmental history in India. The bibliography and index have been revised and updated.

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While draught and desertification are intensifying around the world, corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match--or even surpass--the oil wars of the twentieth. In Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian), shines a light on activists who are fighting corporate maneuvers to convert this life-sustaining resource into more gold for the elites. In Water Wars, Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society to outline the emergence of corporate culture and the historical erosion of communal water rights. Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are stripped of rights to a precious common good. In her passionate, feminist style, Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. Shiva calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). She is author of several books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000); Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997); and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, in the International Forum on Globalization. Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India's leading physicists.

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Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the finest and most expensive tea in the world. It is also home to a violent movement for regional autonomy that, like the tea industry, dates back to the days of colonial rule. In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region.  This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations.  Readers in a variety of disciplines--anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies--will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.