Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Women in Pastoralist and Shifting Cultivation Communities 43
‘These erratic and wasteful clearings’, exclaimed the first Inspector-General
of forests, Dietrich Brandis, ‘give unsettled habits to the people, and make
all improvements of their moral and material well-being difficult if not
possible.’ (Guha 1994: 25)
And, in a similar vein, on pastoralists:
In Colonial description pastoralists were represented as lazy, improvident,
‘wretched’ as cultivators, lawless, wild, mean and cowardly. They
were associated with all that was considered evil, ugly and miserable.
(Bhattacharya 1995: 70–71)
They are utterly devoid of energy and are the most apathetic, unsatisfactory
race of people I have ever had anything to do with. They will exert themselves
occasionally to go on cattle stealing expeditions or to plunder some
of the quite well-conducted Arians … but their exertions are seldom
directed toward a better end. (Ferozepur Settlement Report, 1853: 4,
quoted in Bhattacharya 1995: 71)
During the last famine, most of the States with reserved forests threw
them open to free grazing, but the invasion that followed produced lamentable
results, and the GoI have observed that in future famines all grazing
should be strictly controlled and that the sheep and goat should be excluded,
the injury caused by goats being all out off proportion to the relief
offered to the people. (Revenue and Agriculture [Famine] File No. 94,
Dec. 1905, pp. 10/8, quoted in Kavoori 1999: 148)
The Banjaras (traditional grazers/pastoralists across the Deccan Plateau)
were perceived as a threat to the state and subjected to police surveillance
and legal persecution. (Satya 2004: 75).
Researchers have vividly described the dominant colonial worldview
and discussed the perspective that both pastoralism and shifting cultivation
were inherently ecologically destructive, and that pastoralists and
shifting cultivators needed to be settled. (See, for example, on pastoralism:
Bhattacharya 1995; Kavoori 1999; Saberwal 1999; Satya 2004; and on shifting
cultivation: Guha 1994; Jyotishi 2003; Pouchepadass 1995; Pratap
2000; Rangarajan 1996)
The colonial state introduced the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, to take
legal action against ‘wanderers’. It implemented Forest Acts, imposed
systems of taxation on grazing lands and expanded settled agriculture,
severely curtailing the mobility and restricting the traditional resource