British Scholar Vol.

III, Issue 2, 219-234, September 2010

There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods: The Culture of Forestry in British India
Gregory A. Barton and Brett M. Bennett
In the 1864 the Government of India established the Indian Forest Service.1 The IFS, and the various provincial forestry branches it directed, managed the vast government forests of India and acted as a guide and model for the broader empire forestry movement, one of the precursors to modern environmentalism.2 The IFS and its policies have been the focus of a great deal of scholarship. Scholars of the subaltern school first viewed scientific foresters and their work as a force that encouraged the alienation of Indian society from nature, rupturing a precolonial ecological balance.3 From this perspective, the scientific forestry policies
Gregory A. Barton is a permanent research fellow in environmental history in the Research School of Social Sciences and the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University. Brett M. Bennett is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2011 Brett will take up a position as a lecturer in modern history in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. We would like to thank the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies for funding Bretts International Dissertation Research Fellowship, which allowed us complete this article while he worked as a visiting resident in the Centre for Environmental History at the ANU. 1 The IFS was also known as the Imperial Forest Service and the Imperial Forest Department. These terms have been used differently by scholars and foresters themselves. The Inspector General of the Forests of India presided over the IFS and helped to shape India-wide policies. 2 Richard Grove and Gregory Barton argue that modern environmentalist thought and practicearose in an imperial context when Europeans who witnessed environmental destruction created laws to protect nature. See Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600--1860 (Cambridge, 1995); Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2002).

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3 A few works from this perspective include Gopa Josh, Forests and Forest Policy in In-

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of the IFS alienated Indians from forests, thus pushing Indias economy and society away from its original sustainable and ecological origins and towards an utilitarian and capitalistic view of nature that encouraged the exploitation of forests, leading eventually to deforestation, the removal of peoples from forests, and the loss of biodiversity. However, recent scholarship has critiqued many of these assertions and shows that state foresters and forestry policies in India in fact fought vigorously against deforestation and encouraged the rise of proto-ecological thinking.4 Yet despite decades of research, the views of those who remain the focus of this debate, the foresters themselves, have never been seriously analyzed. A variety of untapped sources, including fiction, prose, and memoirs, offers a glimpse into the ways in which foresters saw themselves. This paper also suggests that the distinctions between preservation and conservation which surround debates about the culture of conservation in India are historically contingent and ultimately do not accurately describe the unique culture Indian foresters built and maintained for almost a century. A cultural history of forestry in India reveals a more complex picture about the forestry profession and its wider resonance that decisively undermines the claim that forestry in India lacked the higher motive of ecological and romantic considerations. America in India: Preservation versus Conservation The first histories analyzing the rise of national parks and forests in late nineteenthcentury America written by American scholars identified two distinct political and intellectual movements: conservation and preservation.5 Scholars often equated conservationists with pragmatic utilitarians, such as Gifford Pinchot, the influential American progressive forester who served as the first chief of the United States Forest Service, and preservationists with romantic writers and lovers of wilderness (a distinctly American idea), such as John Muir, who advocated the protection of nature because of its beauty, uniqueness, and ethical value.6
dia, Social Scientist 11 (1983); Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Oxford, 1989); Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India, Past and Present 123 (1989); Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New Delhi, 1992); Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London, 1989). 4 See especially Gregory A. Barton and Brett M. Bennett, Environmental Conservation and Deforestation in British India, 1855-1947: A Reinterpretation, Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 32 (2008). 5 See in particular, Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA., 1959), pp. 189-98. 6 For American notions wilderness see the classic Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967).

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American historians largely developed the modern practice of environmental history in the 1970s-1990s, naturally giving the field an American-centric bent.7 The American-centric notions of environmental historians and the historically contingent definitions of preservation and conservation remain pervasive in most non-American environmental historiographies, including those focused on the British Empire.8 Ravi Rajan, for instance, rejects the idea that the British Empire had a preservation movement by drawing on an orthodox definition of preservation used by John Passmore: [Preservation is] the attempt to maintain in their present condition such areas of the earths surface as do not yet bear the obvious marks of mans handiwork and to protect form the risk of extinction those species of living beings which man has not yet destroyed.9 Here, both Rajan and Passmore take a historically continent notion of American preservation to describe a universal phenomenon. Yet the distinction, used by some scholars, between utilitarian conservation and romantic preservation, does not hold up. In many instances, there was in fact little separation of preservationist and conservationist thought in America (or elsewhere) during the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries. The figures who represented preservationist ideals did not always fight against the exploitation of the environment, and in fact, often participated in or did not criticize the aggressive destruction of nature.10 Few preservationists actually lived up to the idealistic values they espoused. Nor on the other hand did most conservationists desire to manage or dominate the whole of nature. Historians should see preservation and conservation as a spectrum, not a binary, in which humans understood nature through anthropogenic philosophies and anthropogenic needs. Both conservationists and preservationists advocated the protection of wilderness so that humans could enjoy its beauty, or so forests could provide needed resources to protect human society
7 See in particular the essay of Richard White, Historiographical Essay: American Environmental History: The Development of a New Field, Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985). 8 The great exceptions, Grove, Green Imperialism, and Barton, Empire Forestry, strongly counter this trend. 9 Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Imperial Eco-development 1800-1950 (Oxford, 2006), p. 103. 10 For George Perkin Marsh see David Lowenthal, George Perkin Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle, 2000), pp. 415-17. See Gregory Bartons critique of the notion that Henry David Thoreau was an Arcadian and Gilbert White an imperialist in Empire Forestry, pp. 21-4. The Arcadian versus imperial model is used by Donald Worster in Natures Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas 2nd (Cambridge, 1994). For Muir see Donald Worster, John Muir and the Modern Passion for Nature, Environmental History 10 (2005), p. 16.

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from drastic environmental changesclimate change, not least among them. Nor should environmental historians transpose an idealized history of the United States onto India. The two countries defy easy comparison. Whereas European settlers subdued the indigenous populations and, with the help of slaves from Africa and immigration from around the world, built a modern industrial society, in India only a thin layer of Europeans who worked as administrators and business owners ruled over a vast subcontinent of diverse peoples and cultures. There was no equivalent Frederick Jackson Turner in India who discussed the end of the frontier. India and Central Asias mountains provided a daunting frontier that persisted throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 Much of Indias forests and mountainous regions seemed untouched. Mystery surrounded unexplored Nepal. What lay hidden in the interior of the Himalayas, the roof of the world, could only be guessed. Undiscovered flowers, trees, and animals lay open to discovery well into the twentieth century, on a scale unmatched in the United States. Thus India must be judged on its own unique and incomparable terms. In the 1880s, Richard Temple described a common British-Indian perspective on the uncharted areas of Central Asia and northern India: There remain the mountains, the sea of undulating uplands, which are still among the few important regions not essentially modified by human actions.12 The jungle also created a dense barrier that thwarted the encroachment of human activity. Thomas Webber, a forest surveyor North-West Provinces and Deputy Conservator of Forester in the Central Provinces, compared the western United States with India and concluded that India had less fear of widespread destruction because of the sheer impenetrability of the jungle and because of the protective influence of the IFS. [The] wild animals which a few years back abounded in the vast forests of Africa and Western America are now within measurable distance of becoming extinct, the present generation caring nothing for the next. But it is not so in India. Nature has there provided a safeguard against the entire spoiling of its beautiful and vast forests. During the six months of the rainy season the growth is so luxuriant, and the jungles so impenetrable and unhealthy, that the wild animals have immunity from the persecution of their great enemy, the
11 For but one of many examples, In 1931 Frank Smyth became the first European to describe the valley of flowers in the Garhwal, a mountainous area in north-central India. See Frank Smyth, The Valley of Flowers (London, 1938). This valley later became famous for its scenery. 12 Richard Temple, Oriental Experience (London, 1883), p. 40.

There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods... Saxon man. The natives as a rule do not take animal life; and the paternal rule of the British Government, though it offers a reward for the destruction of snakes and animals dangerous to life, does not encourage the wholesale slaughter of the harmless creatures which the forest produces and nourishes. India will, I hope, long remain a paradise for the true sportsman, as its forests cannot become denuded of all life and so deprived of half their beauty and interest. In establishing a Forest Department and protecting the timber from destruction, the Government has also extended its protecting arm over the game, so that it shall not be exterminated in a ruthless and wasteful manner.13

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Comparison between India and the United States actually illustrates that India moved earlier, and more decisively, toward the protection of forests than did the government of the United States of America.14 In fact, it was foresters in India, such as Webber, who worried that America was depleting its forests and killing its animals, not the other way around. Half a century before Congress founded the federal forest service, Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General laid down a comprehensive system of conservation in the Forest Charter in 1855. Many of the American models of forestry management arose in India and were picked up by Dietrich Brandis and William Schlich, who then imparted them on to Gifford Pinchot, the architect of American forestry.15 Thus rather than historians of India always looking to America, American historians now undergoing the trans-national turn, have much to gain by looking more to India. Romance of the Forests in British India Further undermining the dichotomy between conservation and preservation, Indian foresters extolled the romantic and often sacred nature of the forests of India. They wrote down their thoughts in a variety of venues, including the Indian Forester, private diaries, and published poems and prose. What becomes apparent is that most non-technical literature (i.e. non-professional literature) described the forests in romantic, picturesque terms. Foresters read the romantic poets such as
13 Thomas W. Webber, The Forests of Upper India and Their Inhabitants (London, 1902), pp. 28-9. 14 Ironically, Americans helped introduce more profit-driven forestry methods into India in the 1920s. See Barton and Bennett, Environmental Conservation, p. 88. 15 Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and American Environmentalism, Environment and History 6 (2000).

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Wordsworth and Shelly, and sought to emulate their portrayals of nature while advocating the protection of nature. J. Sykes Gamble, author of a famous work on Indias timbers, opened up a discussion of the forests of the Himalayas in the Indian Forester by quoting Lord Bryons famous lines There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, before then dictating his own ebullient thoughts about Indias forests. . to a lover of vegetation, and that tree vegetation in particular, there are few scenes so attractive, few places where solitude is less felt that in the vast luxuriant semi-tropical forest of the N.E. Himalaya.16 Foresters included poems about nature and expressed sadness over its wasteful destruction. One such poem, W. F. Fishers Effects of disforestment in the Rhone Valley, was by no means atypical. Since recklessly theyve felled the mountain trees, Rain-swollen, roar the torrents to the plain; Meadows, and fields, where peasants dwelt at ease, Untilled, in lonely savagery remain. With sand and boulders covered, not a blade Of rye can grow, where golden crops of wheat In happier times, enriched the fruitful glade. Sleek cattle by the streams, in pastures sweet No longer graze. The forest was the nurse That slowly fed the streamlets, and forbade Their gathring waters downward rush to curse The vales, mid steeps with beech, and fir-trees clad. Doomed to present a wild and rugged scene, Till natures power restore the forest green.17 In India, this love of nature proved especially true of the hill stations where many government officials resided during the summer. They often expressed themselves in terms not unlike John Muirs prose of the mountains of the American west. The love of the hill stations also highlights how the desire to protect forests for aesthetic reasons abetted the creation of forestry reforms in the 1860s. Charles Trevelyan, a member of the executive council of the Viceroy of India, typically advocated the protection of the hill stations for both economic reasons and aesthetic reasons. J.D. Bourdillon, the Secretary to Government, described Trevelyans reaction to seeing the hills of Ootacamund and on March 20, 1860, He [C. Trevelyan] was
478. 16 J. Sykes Gamble, The Darjeeling Forests, Indian Forester 1 (1875), p. 73. 17 W.R. Fisher, Effects of Disforestment in the Rhone Valley, Indian Forester 5 (1880), p.

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thoroughly convinced of the urgent necessity of conservancy, on the one hand to preserve the beautiful shoals which now form the ornament of the hill stations and on the other, to secure Government property from waste and spoliation18 Foresters served as the inspiration for romantic descriptions about India and its nature. Rudyard Kiplings friendships with foresters and experiences in the jungles of India inspired him to write a classic of world literature, The Jungle Book. But his first attempt to popularize forestry began with his short story, In the Rukh, in 1896.19 Published in the widely read American periodical, McClures Magazine, the story recreates the character of the Inspector General of Forests, Berthold Ribbentrop as Muller, the Chief Forester of India. Rukh means forest, and from personal conversation with Ribbentrop Kipling heard tales of colonial heroes who had the reboisement [reforesting] of all India in [their] hands. He presented an adult Mowgli in this first jungle book story as a new Adam, Faunus himself . Mowgli had been nursed on the milk of nature, an angel strayed among the wood. He was strong, honest, with a clear and bell-like voice. He moved through the forest like a soundless ghost, appearing as the morning mist, sporting with birds, snakes, and buffalo. He represented the perfect recruit for the IFS. Accordingly, he is offered employment as a forest guard, and promised, after a lifetime of service, a pension. Engaged in the one of the biggest projects undertaken in human history, he could lend a hand in protecting the forests of the world. Mowgli gratefully accepts because the British protected the forests, his playground and home. In youth, a jungle boy; in maturity, an empire forester.20 In this story, nature is endowed with multiple meanings. Muller, the gigantic German who was the head of the woods and forests of all India, head ranger from Burma to Bombay explains that when I am making reports I am a Free thinker und Atheist, but here in the Rukh I am more than Christian. I am Bagan [pagan] also. He then admits, lounging in his camp chair and waving a cheroot, that I know dot, Bagan or Christian, I shall nefer know der inwardness of der Rukh.21 All these approaches to nature he mixed with the complicated and messianic job of healing a world wounded by human modification. Kipling writes perhaps one of the most romantic descriptions extant on the empire forester. Again it is important to note how the appreciation of wildlife, beauty and the spiritual are mixed effortlessly with utilitarian concerns of harvesting, plantations and the protection of nature. It is worth quoting at some length:
18 Hugh Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens of South India (London, 1861), p. 163. 19 Rudyard Kipling, In the Rukh, In The Writings and Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book (New York, 1899), p. 326. 20 Ibid., p. 343. 21 Ibid., p. 344.

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[Since] a Forest Officers business takes him far from the beaten roads and the regular stations, he learns to grow wise in more than wood-lore alone; to know the people and the polity of the jungle; meeting tiger, bear leopard, wild-dog, and all the deer, not once or twice after days of beating, but again and again in the execution of his duty. He spends much time in saddle or under canvasthe friend of newly planted trees, the associate of uncouth rangers and hairy trackerstill the woods, that show his care, in turn set their mark upon him, and he ceases to sing he naughty French songs he learned at Nancy, and grows silent with the silent tings of the underbrush.22 Twentieth-century portrayals of the forestry profession remained remarkably consistent with those of the late nineteenth century. The popular childrens novels Jungle John and More Adventures With Jungle John aptly highlight this trend.23 These books carried over the high Victorian enthusiasm for imperialism and the environmental romanticism and protection found in Kiplings In the Rukh and the vivid descriptions of Jungle Book. The author John Budden depicted John, the son of an Indian forester, as he journeyed through the jungles and forests of India encountering animals and the surrounding flora and fauna. While Kiplings Jungle Book stories weave a highly anthropomorphic story, Budden brings the detailed eye of the forester to mix romanticism with natural intimacythe sights and sounds of the shikar camp, the intermingling of British and Indian cultures, tribal characters, and the rich bird and animal life in compelling and nostalgic detail.24 Foresters penned their own romantic, naturalistic novels and short stories. Sir Sainthill Eardley-Wilmot served in the IFS for 47 years, including as Inspector General of Forests. He helped found the Forest Research Institute at Dehra Dun in 1906. Known for his technocratic and bureaucratic reforms, scholars have overlooked the memoirs he wrote in retirement that reveal powerful romantic and cultural affinities. He wrote Forest Life and Sport in India, which became a classic text on hunting in India.25 Alongside descriptions of hunting, this book discussed poetically India and its forests. He then published the The Life of a Tiger

22 23 don, 1929). 24 25

Ibid., p. 327. John Budden, Jungle John (London, 1927); The Further Adventures of Jungle John (LonIbid. Sir S. Eardley-Wilmot, Forest Life and Sport in India (London, 1910).

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in 1911 and the Life of an Elephant in 1912.26 In these last two books he created a realistic biography of an individual animal. The forest formed more than a romantic backdrop in these books. He described the forest and its life in terms comparable to Thoreau and Emerson, with a God-in-nature sensibility that moved far beyond a transcendent creator. To him the forest possessed a unity of life and diversity that made it sacred, infused with life and personality. Regarding the home of the tigers he writes that, It was winter in northern India. A haze lay over the arid plains; its sharply defined line showed the elevation beyond which the dust-laden air might not rise, and emphasized the purity of the clear, blue atmosphere above it. It was as if the toil of men and the sufferings of animals were purposely hidden from the abode of the gods27 The personality of the forest he saw its many moods, as with sunset, when The forest stood, silent and somber...The land was one of tall trees and giant grasses, of running streams, and of deep ravines with clear-cut banks. It fought back against the elements of nature, where the vegetation held sway over the waters during the monsoon. The forest was alive even when quiet, as At midday the forest was silent, only the insects and the birds were working and watchful, enlivened by the genial warmth.28 Romance, Naturalism, and Science Contrary to usual interpretations based on scientific literature and official government documents, foresters often saw themselves as broad generalists who disdained an overly scientific or theoretical approach to the forests. Most books tended to omit serious treatments of science. Early forest memoirs discussed hunting primarily.29 This occurred because prior to the 1870s, most foresters in India had little to no professional training in forestry. There was a strong movement by many of the first foresters against Dietrich Brandiss decision to send trainees to continental Europe because it was considered overly theoretical and not focused
26 Sir S. Eardley-Wilmot, The Life of a Tiger (London, 1911) and Life of an Elephant (London, 1912). 27 Sir S. Eardley-Wilmot, The Life of a Tiger (Reprint, London, 1933), p. 1. 28 Ibid., p. 2. 29 See for example Captain J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India and Wild Tribes, Natural History and Sports (London, 1871).

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enough on practice and knowledge of the forests of India.30 Many foresters sought to downplay the theoretical and scientific aspects of forestry, stressing instead the beauty and the wildlife of India. Thomas Webber wrote in the preface of his 1902 book The Forests of Upper India and Their Inhabitants, I do not pretend to any scientific knowledge of these things [the forests], but, being a lover of Nature and all its aspects, I would try and record the results of constant observation made from time to time in the various regions visited, which were to myself highly interesting and instructive, and which I would endeavour to put into intelligible form.31 Webber, recalling his ten years in the forest service in his autobiography, interwove practical forest work and with intense romantic attachment to the forest and to the variety of woodland animals and birdlife that it contained. His prose abounds with adventures that included such romantic and Orientalist phrases as sacred valley, or the sacred Ganges and sacred woodland.32 He interwove groves, ruins, temples, and indigenous tribes into the fabric of his duties to explore, map and create utilitarian working plans. He praised the forest. Entering the forest was like entering a great cathedral, cool and restful because nature placed the arrangement of trees more picturesquely than the most artistic lover of landscape gardening.33 Scholars have stressed the educational background of foresters as an important part of their identity, emphasizing the continental and utilitarian origins of their training.34 Scholars who emphasize continental training miss the brevity of the continental seminar for the foresters who studied forestry after 1885 (when foresters began to study in England at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Coopers Hill)35 and do not take into account the reasons why many students became foresters. Germanic or French methods mattered less to forestry recruits than did the excitement of working in nature.
30 Brett M. Bennett, A Networked Approach to the Origins of Forestry Education in British India, 1855-1885, in Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (eds.), Networks of Science: Science in the British World 1800-1970, under contract Palgrave Macmillan. 31 Webber, The Forests of Upper India, p. x. 32 Ibid., pp. xi, 44. 33 Ibid., pp. 75, 181. 34 Kevin Hannam, Utilitarianism and the Identity of the Indian Forest Service, Environment and History 6 (2000). 35 Coopers Hill closed in 1905 and the forestry school transferred to Oxford University. Soon thereafter Edinburgh University and Cambridge University also began to supply foresters to India.

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Boys in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods learned first about the romantic and rugged aspects of forestry in books that detailed careers abroad. One such book for children that described various careers, Professions For Boys And How to Enter Them, warned that the dubious delights of ordinary Anglo-Indian society, with its gymkhanas, personalities, polo, and storms in teacups, are not for foresters. Yet as dour as this might seem to a social climber, it proved a naturalist paradise: His home, far removed from the stations, is the jungle in the wide reaches of forest and undergrowth, with their teeming animal and vegetable wildlife.36 These romantic popular portrayals of the lives of foresters inspired many. Archibald Stein, who studied at Edinburgh and served as a forester in Central India wrote, My mind was drawn towards the forests of India by an article in The Boys Own Magazine about forestry and what a wonderful life it was for those who joined the IFS.37 Some students chose to study forestry precisely in order to avoid the technical requirements of engineering. After graduating from public school in England, Anthony Wimbushs parents hired him a math tutor so that he could study to be an engineer. Wimbush recounts, It took my tutor a very short time to discover that I was not cut out for an engineer and that all my instincts pointed towards a life in the wide open spaces.38 Thus his parents decided he must cram for the civil service test to gain the qualifications of forestry. Wimbush needed a field sufficiently devoid of more difficult technical and mathematical requirements, and with his obvious inclination toward nature, his tutor agreed with his parents that forestry provided the best career path. Would-be foresters also thought of forestry as a profession for gentlemen. John Rowntree, a forester in Assam who studied at Cambridge wrote, I switched [degrees]to Forestry, partly because I had heard it described as a profession fit for gentlemen.39 Twentieth-century descriptions in the Indian Forester extolled the benefits of a broad education as a gentleman, because the outdoor life reflected the outdoor hunting activities of many large landowners. India, one article stated, is animated by an aristocratic spirit, and likes its rulers to be men of birth and breeding.40 In a discussion, Recruitment of the Imperial Forest Service, the writer warned against producing overly scientific foresters who lacked other qualities, stating that we would prefer a boy of good social standing, of good general
36 M.L. Pechell and James Nolan, Professions For Boys And How to Enter Them (London, 1899), p. 218. 37 Mary Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), p. 66. 38 Cambridge University South Asian Centre Archives, Wimbush papers, Anthony Wimbush, MSS, Life in the IFS, p. 3. 39 John Rowntree, A Chota Sahib: Memoirs of a Forest Officer (Padstow, 1981), p. 2. 40 The Forest Service, Indian Forester 37 (1911), p. 388.

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educationto a callow youth whose one object in life has been the possession of a Science degree41 Being a gentleman of the right background often mattered more than the scientific skills of foresters. Benskin, educated at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, described class discrimination in India when Dehra Dun started a research program: [The president of the research division of Dehra Dun]. told me straight out that I was not the class of man they desired at Dehra Dun, and that if he had it his way he would only have Harrovians and Etonians on his staff .42 All British foresters assigned to India after 1885 studied for at least a summer in Europe after two years of forestry education in Britain. This allowed students to see the management and working plans of the forests of Europe. Yet how much the average forester gained from these experiences remains questionable. The language gap (especially difficulties with German) could make instruction difficult, and the desire to drink and dance often outweighed the focus on technical forestry. Quintus Browne described his European tour as would many modern undergraduates on a study abroad program: It was a quiet country life, and I dont remember having learnt very much.43 His diary reveals cadets more interested in fifteen egg omelettes and burgundy wine in France, and crme filled pastries in Switzerland, than forestry. Others described forestry management only incidentally, recalling fondly the time spent hunting and fishing.44 When foresters did discuss science in literature, it reveals a strong reverence for protecting and preserving nature. No divide between conservation and preservation can be found, for instance, in many articles published in the Indian Forester, the journal of the IFS and the first journal of forestry in the British world, founded in 1875. The journal both discussed utilitarian and romantic concerns. Hundreds of articles from this early period show an intense fascination with the entire household of nature. This includes a focus on the quality of the soil, air, water, game, birds, fungi, insects, and wild animals. Forests offered a Great Laboratory where, according to one author, Romance was found in the soil when it ceased to be thought of as a dead mass and was discovered to be a living, moving world.45
41 Editor, The Recruitment of the Imperial Forest Service, Indian Forester 37 (1911), p. 411. 42 Benskin, Jungle Castaway, pp. 81-2. 43 Quintus Browne, Message in a Bottle: The POW Who Buried His Life Story in a Jar (Bristol, 2004), p. 24. 44 Anthony Wimbush, Life in the IFS, pp. 6-13. 45 See Tautha, A Plea for our Feathered Friends, Indian Forester 18 (1892); Rahdar, Influence of Places on Spirits, Indian Forester 20 (1894); The Restoration of Scenery, Indian Forester 20 (1894); Symbiosis and its Effects on the Planting of Forest Trees, Indian Forester 22 (1896); Forest Officers as Photographers, Indian Forester, 22 (1896); Extraordinary Flight of Butterflies, Indian Forester 26 (1900); Destruction of Game in the C.P., Indian Forester 27 (1901); The Food of Nestling Birds, Indian Forester 28 (1902); The Habitat of the Red Jungle Fowl, Indian Forester

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Descriptions of the beauty and wonder of nature blended with science, and nature often informed science. Eardley-Wilmot described the poetic beauty of forests in India for pages before concluding with these remarks: Nature has a serious task when arranging for the continuance of plant-life, in whose absence animal- life must soon cease, and the study of her methods will surely supply material for never-ending research. In Indian forestry we know but little of the rotation of species, and many silvicultural failures have not improbably been due to our ignorance. 46 Despite being characterized as continental, many foresters, both Britons and their Indian counterparts, rejected outwardly the views of forestry promoted by German and French foresters. At various periods until 1947, both British and Indian foresters criticized supposedly European models and cultures of forestry for trying to homogenize a heterogeneous world. In the Indian Forester, Jangali Bulbul criticized strict theoretical German and French notions of The Ideal Forest because strictly speaking, nothing in nature is abnormal, and, secondly, because the model-forest is a phenomenon confined to the foresters brain, and there abnormal.47 Forests were not just abstractions to foresters; they were sites of great meaning, romanticism, and ecological importance. Naranjan Singh described himself as a tree in his 1931 essay in the Indian Forester, Musings of an Himalayan Jungle: By my death even the soil over my bosom might have been eroded and my animals, beautifully plumaged birds and others, might have had to go together with that fine picturesqueness which my very existence offers.48 Foresters continued to criticize extreme versions of continental plans in the twentieth century.49 But we should also be wary of inscribing modern beliefs about biodiversity onto the past. Many found beauty in green plantations, especially compared with more arid landscapes. The wife of Henry Champion described happily in her diary the
28 (1902); F. Regnault, Deboisment and Decadence, Indian Forester 30 (1904); The Prohibition of Grass Burning and its Effect on the Game of the Country, Indian Forester 31 (1905); The Nilgilri Game and Fish Preservation Association, Indian Forester 31 (1905); The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Indian Forester 33 (1907); British Empire Naturalists Association, Indian Forester 33 (1907). 46 Eardley-Wilmot, Forest Life and Sport in India, p. 146. 47 Technical Terms, Indian Forester 2 (1876), pp. 52-3. 48 Naranjan Singh, Musings of an Himalayan Jungle, Indian Forester (1930), p. 227. 49 O.P. Teak in Burma, Indian Forester 36 (1910), p. 110; and H.C. Walker, Sylviculture in Burma, Indian Forester 37 (1911), p. 674. Cited from Barton and Bennett, Environmental Conservation, p. 91.

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Daphar plantation near Lahore: All the country round here has been transformed from a howling desert to green country by means of irrigation.50 Foresters not only sought to conserve forests, but to preserve the wildlife they harboured.51 Increasingly during the 1920s-1940s they sought to protect animal populations from possible extinction. John Rowntree is not alone when he began [his forestry career] with a rifle in my hands and ended with a camera. 52 Even the impulse to conserve natures worst villainsthe tigerovercame the desire for self-defence and the glory of the kill. Kipling expressed this sentiment when, in his first Mowgli story, he portrayed the scene of a forester who sought nature for its beauty, not its flesh: Then [after hearing tigers in the night] Gisborne laid aside his little-used gun altogether, for it was to him a sin to kill.53 Independence: Remembrance and Romance Right until independence, Indian foresters in British India passionately devoted themselves to India and its forests. Rowntree stayed on until 1947 and wrote the memoirs of his experience after leaving. His memoirs show a strong practical streak, with no real penchant for literature or romantic musings. Yet the smell of the Indian forest, the sights of the exotic flowers, the nature of the sacred groves, the lifestyle and values of the jungle tribes moved him deeply. He missed the pungent odour of elephant dung, the scent of the burnt grass in the hot weather, pine trees in Shillong, and the smell of wet bamboo in the Garo Hills. He missed the pendulous chains of golden yellow flowers from the Indian Laburnum, the scarlet flowers of the flame of the forest and the hushed precincts of sacred groves. He transferred his love of hunting to the love of the camera, saying that his interest in wild life began with a rifle in my hands and ended with a camera. He felt more homesick for India, and hated the fact that he had exchanged forest life for number LFIZ05 5750 in the National Insurance register.54 After the British left India in 1947 and Burma in 1948, former foresters published books about forestry life in India. Displacement served as a strong incentive to memorialize imperial forest service. The memory of India led many
50 Cambridge University, South Asian Centre Archives, MSS Lady Champion Papers, Diary of Life in United Provinces 1925-39, p. 137. 51 This was a broader phenomenon involving popular writers such as Jim Corbett. See Barton and Bennett, Environmental Conservation, p. 94. Corbett was not a forester but his forester friend F.W. Champion helped convince him to begin photographing animals instead of killing them. See F.W. Champion, With a Camera in Tiger Land (London, 1927). 52 Roundtree, A Chota Sahib, p. 70. 53 Kipling, In the Rukh, p. 302. 54 Roundtree, A Chota Sahib, pp. 32, 59, 106, 70, 109, 110.

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foresters to reminisce about their past lives, such as riding on an elephant through the jungle with the family behind. 55 British foresters who lived in India created a romanticized home among the jungles and forests. They cherished their own intellectual and literary history. Yet the emotions and feelings associated with their imperial Indian home rarely resounded among their fellow Britons back home after India became independent and decolonization began in earnest. In a telling example, Anthony Wimbush complained in his unpublished manuscript, One thing that I noticedwas the fact that nobody in England was in the least interested to hear about my experiences in the Indian forests. I had plenty to tell them about elephants and tigers and similar things but I had to keep it all bottled up56 In the manuscript copy he crossed out these lines. The sense of personal loss, a loss of identity, is undeniably strong. This sense of a lost past and home remains with the children of foresters who grew up in India during the last days of the Raj. Even today, the children of foresters write memoirs and visit India, trying to regain some of the romanticism of the forests of India that they lost when their British parents left India for good. One thing is certain about this memory: the memory of forestry that lingers on amongst the now-dead former foresters and their children is not focused on science and economics, but on the appeal of the jungle, the people, and the beauty of India. Conclusion Not only have scholars previously misinterpreted the conservation and preservation movement, but also the dynamics of American history differ so greatly from India history that comparison often bears little fruit. Different conditions created different patterns of history that must be judged on their own terms. In India, conservation and preservation overlapped and were often indistinguishable. What is clear is that many Britons did love Indias nature and believed they were protecting and conserving it for future generations. Foresters held a variety of opinions and beliefs that were not reflected in their day-to-day work. An analysis of memoirs, poetry, and prose written by foresters in India proves that a strong romantic and naturalistic strain pervaded their lives and beliefs. From the middle of the nineteenth century until 1947, many foresters in India believed that forestry was a gentlemens profession that involved an appreciation of nature, vigorous
55 Henry Osmaston described the life of his uncle, Bertram Osmaston, an Indian forester, as responsible for the protection of wild game with an unbounded enthusiasm for exploration and natural history. See Cambridge University South Asian Centre, Henry Osmaston, The Osmaston Family, Commonwealth Forestry Review (March, 1989), p. 2. 56 Wimbush, Life in the IFS, p. 106.

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fieldwork, an extensive naturalistic knowledge, and a deep understanding of local languages and cultures. They remained entranced by the forests and animals within them even if their jobs prescribed scientific, economic, and technical management.