Sovereign Power and the Indian Forest Department: The Political Economy of Exceptions
Tags: Bureaucracy, India, History, Ecology, Power

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book the State of Exception speaks of sovereignty as the ability to declare exceptions; as an idea so normalized as a tool of the state to pursue certain objectives that the seriousness of the implications in creating such a space is lost. To Agamben, it seems ironical that the sovereign modern state whether constitutional or dictatorial holds a paradox within by creating a space devoid of law and continually persists in validating the importance of it in both juridical and political senses. The state of exception operates on the principle that necessity has no law and the same has been applied by several modern nation states to dispossess or violate human rights.

As Agamben provides in his book, the state of exception can be witnessed in the Patriot Act passed by the Bush Administration after 9/11 and the subsequent establishment of Guantanamo Bay, the site where a person on the suspicion of terrorism could be stripped off his rights and dignity and is reduced to bare life without even the cover of citizenship (Agamben, 2005). The state of exception can be seen to be operational in the case of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, Indian citizens during the emergency years and closer to us, tribal communities and other dispossessed groups in various resource-rich and forested landscapes of India such as in the southern tip of Chhattisgarh, in Madhya Pradesh and in protected areas that cover vast expanses of the country.

This paper is a meditation on sovereignty as a strategy of the Imperial Forest Department in excluding a large proportion of their Indian subjects from exercising their customary rights over forests in the turn of the nineteenth century and secondly, transgressing and suspending their own policies of systematic extraction of resources for the sake of increasing revenues and supporting the projects of the British in India and abroad. A serious examination of operations of the independent Indian state in the age of market reforms and globalization and its use of eminent domain for the purpose of development (necessity has no law) resembles the actions of the Imperial Forest Department in many ways. This paper will attempt to establish how the importance of sovereignty informed the structure and actions of the forest department using sources that draw heavily from the history of the institution.

1. Turmoil During the Hundred Years’ Peace

The period between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and World War I was characterized by Karl Polanyi as peaceful without serious tensions among the strong colonizing states of that time. However, this was the period that saw the emergence of the industrial revolution in England and the consolidation of colonies across Asia and Africa by the colonizers namely the English, French, Dutch and the Italians.

The British empire which had grown in size and power by the middle of nineteenth century faced a crippling crisis with the complete devastation of forests in England, Ireland, South Africa and north-eastern United States due to its shipbuilding activities, iron-smelting and farming (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). Several records written during that period such as Edward Stebbing’s voluminous record titled the Forests of India and Henry Cleghorn’s work in 1860 speak of the reckless treatment of forests by the British and the hand of natives in the Unites States and later in India who amassed great wealth by supplying timber to the British. In the race for consolidating British power over their colonies, durable Indian teak played a massive role. The quality of Indian timber further led to British search expeditions into the hinterlands of India to add momentum to the supply of teak for the imperial project.

Before the establishment of the Imperial Forest Department, the land policy of the British was unfavourable to the forested areas. Guha explains that forests were thought to be a hindrance to the expansion of cultivation and would bring lesser land under the assessment for revenue collection and thus, entire forests were felled to make way for agriculture. The colonial project began extending its control on a large scale across India with the expansion of the railways from 1853. The demand for railway sleepers exponentially increased the indiscriminate felling of timber and due to the lack of unsupervised felling, the construction of the railways had a devastating effect on the forests of India and it was apparent right from the forests of Kumaon and Garhwal to the forests in the Madras Presidency. Moreover, timber was not the only resource that the railways consumed in a large scale, coal mines too emerged in several parts of the country and carried on a degradation of their own (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). The emergence of the imperial forest department was a necessity without which the British Empire stood endangered. Conservation became an important backbone of the forest department and with the establishment of the department, legitimate forms of control and discipline began to be used in the forests for both the timber and the persons dependent on them.

Simultaneously, a transformation was occurring in the manner in which knowledge about forests were recorded. Knowledge of flora and fauna previously recorded qualitatively were now quantified for the greater cause of precision and efficiency. The issue of importing a method that simplified complex knowledge of landscapes had its own set of problems. The techniques of statistics imported from Germany and France applied to largely homogenous forests were found to be hard to adapt to the biodiversity rich landscape of tropical India and Burma. This led to a conscious effort on part of the foresters from Germany to simplify the forested landscape in India to meet their particular needs and could be viewed in the careful and meticulous nurturing of timber trees over other species of plants and trees (Agrawal, 2006).

2. Establishing and Consolidating Power through the Forest Department

The forest department was established following a conference held in Nainital in 1863 (Agrawal, 2006, p. 70). In the first years of the forest department, a lack of trained foresters allowed for the appointment of military officers, engineers and naturalists in the forest bureaucracy. Dietrich Brandis, a German forester who provided his services in Burma and later served as the Inspector-General of Forests in India provided not only the ideological foundations for the forest department but also envisioned the standards for a highly efficient forest administration. Brandis while responsible for crafting the 1865 and later the controversial Forest Act of 1878 which brought large expanses of unworked and uncultivated land under state control, was also sensitive to the needs of the village community.

3.2 Dietrich Brandis and his Vision for the Forest Department

Brandis in his widely influential letters to Gifford Pinchot advised him on the construction of an effective government forest service. The advice given to Pinchot follows from Brandis’ experience in India as he pushes for a specialized bureaucratic force and stresses on the importance of training for the officials. The letters written in the last decades of the nineteenth century, several years after his retirement as the inspector-general advices Pinchot that in the absence of a specialized force, the control of forests could be wrested in military officers. This comment reflects on the highly policed and militarized nature of the forests in India during and after British rule. Moreover, Brandis emphasizes on the fostering of an ‘espirit de corps’ within the forest bureaucracy just as in the case of the army or the navy. He also provides certain matters that need to be settled with legislation regarding the state being the absolute owner of forests, settling rights within the forest, protecting the forest against fire, grazing and illegally felling of trees and plants and entering reserved areas of forest among others (Anderson, 2005). The advice provided by Brandis is a legacy perpetuated in the forest department even today.

3.3 Organization of the Forest Bureaucracy

The forest bureaucracy is modeled and arranged in the manner of a classical Weberian bureaucracy. Dietrich Brandis had much to do with the formation of this structure of the forest department as it was he who determined the roles of the officials involved. The structure of the department was hierarchical where the positions of the controlling staff was largely the dominion of the white British Conservators, divisional officers and at the base were the foresters and forest guards who were involved in patrolling (Schug, 2000). Despite, Brandis acknowledging the importance of grounding scientific forestry in local knowledge, there was never any scope for dialogue between the controlling officers and the patrolling staff on ground. This was followed by specialized training, security of tenure and a handsome salary to attract talent. The Forest Act 1865 and later the Forest Act of 1878 formed the boundaries for the extent of the bureaucracy’s decisions and rule.

3. Control and Sovereignty in the Forests

The Forest Department effortlessly enabled the consolidation of the fragmented territories of the British government in India through the Forest Act of 1865 and later the Forest Act of 1878. Prior to the formation of the forest department, it was the revenue department that provided the British government with increasing revenues and profits. Once the forest department began rising in power and insisted on the provision of greater flexibility in administering forests, tensions and harsh debates began to rise between the forest department and the revenue department (Agrawal, 2006, pp. 74–75). This part of the paper will discuss firstly, the bitter debate that took place before the passage of the Forest Act of 1878 and secondly, the model of the forest department to extract maximum revenues from its forestry activities. The argument here is that both the components reinforced each other and were paramount in establishing the supreme authority of the forest department over large parts of the country. Legitimacy was provided to the actions of the forest department by the 1878 legislation; all the while they were always under the pressure to present increasing revenues to the British government to protect their position.

The Forest Act of 1865 proved insufficient to the British as it merely established the right of the state over forest lands without extinguishing the rights of the present users (Guha, 1983). The Act was obviously perceived without keeping in mind the larger objectives of the British government in India; what the British needed was an Act that was expansive in its operation and would allow for the unhindered extraction of resources from forested landscapes. The initial draft of the Forest Act of 1878 was prepared by Brandis and his successor in the Forest Department, Baden-Powell. One of the principal agendas of the new act was to remove ambiguity around the ‘absolute proprietary right of the state’ (Gadgil & Guha, 1992, p. 109).

The other important debate that took place was the issue of extinguishing customary rights of the villagers and communities whose rights to the forest preceded the British use of forests. In settling this issue, there emerged three positions- annexationists, pragmatics and the populists. The annexationists vehemently opposed ceding control and management of forests to village communities and advocated for complete state control over all forests. The officials on the annexationist side stated that the customary rights of the villagers were anyway exercised only at the mercy of the monarch (Gadgil & Guha, 1992, pp. 109–110) and used Tipu Sultan’s example of banning the felling of sandalwood as proof of the nature of customary rights in India. Baden-Powell who was on the annexationist side stated that the sovereign power of the ruler over the forests and resources remained even if it was unwritten; it was with this that the intensely problematic issue of rights and privileges over forest use emerged. The British rule in India began to establish exceptions in the manner by which rights were those that were written and recorded in land settlement documents whereas the continuation of privileges depended on the monarch and existed in interstices devoid of law and any order. Moreover, the annexationists claim rested on the theory of oriental despotism where it was believed that the power of the monarch was far greater and unlimited as compared to the rulers in Europe in the medieval period and Baden-Powell attested to the same argument and stated that it was agreeable to the British Government to continue with the same.

The pragmatics on the other hand was the ones with the conservationist agendas. They advocated for state control of forested landscapes for the protection of ecologically sensitive flora and fauna and also ‘strategically valuable forests’ (Gadgil & Guha, 1992) while maintaining that other forests be in the custody of village communities. However, the strongest contenders to the arguments raised by the annexationists were the populists and more specifically, the Madras Presidency was completely against any form of state control and intervention in forests. Countering Baden-Powell on classifying customary rights in the categories of rights and privileges, the Madras Presidency argued that, ‘All instances of the use of the forest by the people should be taken as presumptive evidence of property therein’ (Gadgil & Guha, 1992, p. 111). The debate over the nature of state control, much to the dismay of the moderate Dietrich Brandis who hailed from a country new to the colonial project, was decided in favour of Baden-Powell, the loudest voice in the annexationists.

The Forest Act of 1878 thus granted the forest department control over nearly all uncultivated land in the country. Control over forests depended on the basis of three categories- namely reserved forests, protected forests and village forests. The reserved forests was the category in which state control was at its most severe as all activities of local users such as grazing, collecting forest produce, collecting firewood among others without permission (Agrawal, 2006, p. 72). Reserved forests were also closely connected to towns and serve as fertile ground for sustained extraction (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). Protected forests were characterized by lesser control of the forest department where certain activities were not prohibited and village forests were ones located close to the village in order to fulfil the daily needs of the population.

For the purpose of this paper, the categories of reserved forests and village forests have massive implications on the nature of colonial authority. The creation of reserved forests laid upon the forest department the additional burden of recruiting large number of on-ground and controlling officials to ensure the restriction of people into the forests. In a manner synonymous with warfare and accumulation of more territory, the number of persons employed by the forest department increased from 10, 000 officers to 132, 000 employees in turn of the twentieth century (Schug, 2000). The land amassed under the category of reserved forests grew to over 213, 000 square kilometers; the forest department was controlling over one-fifth of the landmass of the country. The forest department and its mutating army made a concerted effort to reign supreme over vast areas of the country; the British government in India offered them enough leeway to do as they wish as long as the revenues from the department did not plummet. The forest department to continue its reign and ensure stability in shifting sovereignties had to extend its tentacles deeper into the country to continue sustained revenues and the department was very successful in doing the same.

The forest department working on the foundations of scientific forestry created working plans for each forest district. The working plans were rigid documents in which changes could be made only with the approval of the concerned district commissioner. However, by observing the years of World War I, the forest department completely ignored the restrictions laid on the extraction of timber but continued undeterred in the exploitation of timber resources to feed the war. This serves as another important instance of the forest department declaring exceptions on its own policies to maintain and protect their sovereignty.

4. The Tussle for Power

The tussle for power between the forest department and its closest competitor the revenue department was a battle that saw no end. Tensions between the two began to rise in 1860s when the forest department had just begun to take shape and continued till the early decades of the twentieth century. The officials of revenue department continually complained against the gradual appropriation of the duties of the revenue department. In hill tracts of the Kumaon, the forest department was virtually invincible for revenue department as they complained that the district commissioner had no authority because the forest officials had taken over the juridical and civil work in a largely hilly region. Others commented that the forest department ‘apparently did not want all of the forests for themselves but dog-in-the-manger like, did not want anyone else to use the forests either’ (Agrawal, 2006, p. 75). The British government did not intervene since the revenues and surplus generated by the forest department was achieving new highs every year and thus, the forest department further consolidated their power over an unpeopled zone.

5. Fault Lines

Mahesh Rangarajan provides a very important instance after the creation of reserved forests. The forest department while curtailing the movements of persons within the forest wanted desperately to curtail the migration of tribes and other communities away from the forest. Labou, particularly cheap labour was significant was the extraction of timber resources for the forest department and thus, special groups of strategic significance were permitted to stay in the forests so as to aid the British in their exploits (Damodaran, 1998). The forests now had subjects to be governed too.

The deprivation suffered by tribal groups once the 1878 Act attained the force of law was not minimal. In the forests of Chota Nagpur, a famine raged due to the policies of the forest department. In a period of scarcity and increasing prices, tribals and other groups suffered greatly from being prevented access to food in the forests particularly eaten during famine-like conditions (Damodaran, 1998). The conditions of famine, poverty and deprivation that began to appear in stunning regularity in India can be attributed to the sovereign power of the forest department over its resources.

The prevailing conditions of tribals and other minority groups in the southern tip of the state of Chhattisgarh in independent India is similar to the ones suffered by tribal groups under the British Raj. These zones of exception while allowing governmental forces to run amok to bring a semblance of order, simultaneously provides space for rebellion and exercise of alternative modalities of power in the region, as can be seen again in the support for Maoist groups in the districts of Chhattisgarh (Mahaprashasta, 2013). Agamben too, in his discussion of the state of exception invokes Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence where he refers to a violence that is so pure, divine and revolutionary since it lies absolutely beyond the law and would shatter the dialectic between ‘lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 55). Benjamin goes on to suggest that the purpose of revolutionary law is not to preserve or make law but to ‘depose it’ and leading to the birth of a new historical epoch.

References

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Agrawal, A. (2006). Struggles over Kumaon’s Forests, 1815–1916. In A. Agrawal, Environmentality (pp. 32–37). Oxford University Press.

Anderson, S. (2005). Forestry by Correspondence . Forest History Today, 45.

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Damodaran, V. (1998). Famine in a Forest Tract: Ecological change and the Causes of the 1897 Famine in Chota Nagpur, Northern India . In R. Grove, V. Damodaran, & S. Sangwan, Nature and the Orient (p. 856). Oxford University Press.

Gadgil, M., & Guha, R. (1992). This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. Oxford University Press.

Guha, R. (1983). Forestry in British and Post-British India, Part II. Economic and Political Weekly, 1940–1947.

Mahaprashasta, A. A. (2013, June 29). The War in Bastar. Retrieved from Frontline: http://www.frontline.in/social-issues/the-war-in-bastar/article4799755.ece

Schug, D. M. (2000). The Bureaucratization of Forest Management in India . Environment and History , 230–232.