Contesting the Colonizer or Hopeless Submission? Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Environmental Thinking in India, 1857–1910

Abstract

This article examines in detail how the forms of national or indigenous consciousness emerged in the sphere of Indian political ecology between 1857 and 1910. The subjects of “ecological indigeneity” and “dispossession” formed as defining characteristics in the articulation of this ecopolitical thinking. The scholarship to date has produced voluminous writings on the political, economic, and social dimension of the histories of colonial unrest, but it has not adequately addressed the issue of how the subtext of environmentalism greatly mattered in shaping some of the resistance movements. Focusing on the period between the 1857 revolt and 1910, this study evaluates three groups – (1) the 1857 Indian rebels and the Gonds; (2) the ādivāsī tribes of Bastar in 1910; and (3) the early Indian Congress Nationalists in the 1880s – to elucidate the emergence of environmentalism and indigenous dispossession in colonial India, which became foundational in critiquing British interventionist policies. This article examines in detail how the forms of national or indigenous consciousness emerged in the sphere of Indian political ecology between 1857 and 1910. The subjects of “ecological indigeneity” and “dispossession” formed as defining characteristics in the articulation of this ecopolitical thinking. The scholarship to date has produced voluminous writings on the political, economic, and social dimension of the histories of colonial unrest, but it has not adequately addressed the issue of how the subtext of environmentalism greatly mattered in shaping some of the resistance movements. Focusing on the period between the 1857 revolt and 1910, this study evaluates three groups – (1) the 1857 Indian rebels and the Gonds; (2) the ādivāsī tribes of Bastar in 1910; and (3) the early Indian Congress Nationalists in the 1880s – to elucidate the emergence of environmentalism and indigenous dispossession in colonial India, which became foundational in critiquing British interventionist policies.