Environmental Humanities in India (2025)

Contents: Views about the book: i-ii; List of Tables, List of Figures: xi; Foreword: Prof. David Simon: pp. 1-3; Preface: Musing on the Path of Indian Geography: 4-13; Acknowledgements: 14-17; 1. ‘India’, ‘Indianness’ and Geography in India: Cultural domain & Common Grounds for the 21st Century: 18-47; 2. Development and Status of Geography in/of India: Trends in the 20th & 21st Centuries: 48-90; 3. Gaia, Nature and Cosmic Integrity: Perspective and Indian Root: 81-114; 4. Ecospirituality: Organic Vision and Global Message: 115-152; 5. Hindu Pilgrimages: from Roots to Perspectives: 153-191; 6. Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of Sustainable Development: 192-223; 7. East and West coming close together: Towards Reconciliation: 224-254; and three classical essays: 8. Modern Geography and its Meaning for India: Oskar H.K. Spate: 255-269; 9. Towards a rediscovery of India: David E. Sopher: 270-294, and 10. What ails to Indian Geography: A.B. Mukerji: 295-318; index: 319-323; author 325. 1st June 2009, 22cm x 15cm, xii + 325pp., 7 tables, 15 figures (123,100 words).

Environmental Humanities as a Way Forward

EPW, 2023

The Environment in South Asia

The environment has been an important topic in South Asian thought and discourse since the dawn of history. In the classical era, Hindu cosmology, across the various schools of classical philosophy, was integrally connected with the natural environment. 1

Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia . Edited by P AUL G REENOUGH and A NNA L OWENHAUPT T SING . New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003 Civilising Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India . By K AVITA P HILIP . New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003

Modern Asian Studies, 2005

Playing with Nature: history and politics of Environment in North-East India

Asian Ethnicity, Taylor and Francis., 2024

The Construction of India in Some Recent Environmental Philosophy

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 1998

I argue that from its beginning environmental philosophy has held two contrasting views of Eastern thought and of Indian philosophical and religious ideas in particular. Utilising the insights of Edward Said and others I find that these contrasting images are reflective of a duality according to which India has been constituted in Western discourse. I argue that these Western images of India remain a significant feature of writing concerning environmental ethics to the present time. As it appears in some recent scholarship in environmental ethics, this discourse remains an obstacle to an informed appreciation of the significance of Indian thought and of Asian thought more generally for environmental philosophy.

Reading the Entanglements of Nature-culture Conservation and Development in Contemporary India

Journal of South Asian Development, 2021

In this article we argue for greater attention to the practice of (nature-culture) conservation as a specific form of intervention with implications for development. Outlining the dominant frameworks through which the often vexed relationship between conservation and development has been understood, the article offers an alternative analytical framework that is grounded in ethnographic attention to everyday practice. Applying this framework, the three papers in this special section examine conservation-development dilemmas at diverse conservation sites in India—Rushikulya, Orissa, a globally significant site for the conservation of marine turtles; Nagarahole, in southern Karnataka, one of India’s most successful tiger reserves; and the Hampi region, northern Karnataka, where the archaeological remains of the medieval Vijayanagara Empire have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS). The papers reveal a relationship between conservation and development that is paradoxically...

Situating environmental humanities in the New Himalayas

Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker , 2021

The right of Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Rethinking Indian Environmentalism

Rethinking Indian Environmentalism: Industrial Pollution in Delhi and Fisheries in Kerala by Amita Baviskar, Kavita Philip, Subir Sinha

The Human Face of the Land: Why the Past Matters for India's Environmental Future

NMML OCCASIONAL PAPER HISTORY AND SOCIETY New Series 27, 2013

While we often consider precolonial Indian history from the perspectives of culture, religion, and politics, only recently have scholars begun linking these to histories of human-environment engagement. I present here some results from long-term, interdisciplinary research in southern India to show the ways in which people have helped to make the natural world over the last five thousand years. From the Iron Age, when newly-established towns caused large-scale erosion but also created new habitats, to the Middle Period expansion of cities, canals, and tanks, local inhabitants made and remade regional landscapes. Far from the stereotypic notion of ecological romanticism, which suggests that there was once a golden age when humans lived in harmony with the natural environment, we see a variable record of both environmental damage and improvement. Humans not only caused erosion and cut down trees, for example, but also, at times, even enhanced biodiversity and created new forests. The past thus presents us with examples of both failure and success, models and understandings we can use not only to understand how we got where we are, but also to try and develop strategies for creating a more sustainable future.