Abstract
In India, most studies on environmental history focus on diverse themes in the colonial period but fall into a stereotypical explanation. Nature’s degradation is mainly depicted from the archival documents. However, forest subjects glorify the colonial past even though the colonial authority destroyed the forests and uprooted their habitation. To question this stereotype, two questions have been drawn from the memory of Kanikkaran community; why does the community glorify the colonial past? If the community has positive light on the colonial past, what is their conception about nature? If these questions are addressed, the static understanding about the forest subjects and the unidimensional understanding of nature could be avoided in the historiography.
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Murugeshapandian, A. (2017). Beyond Colonialism: Towards a New Environmental History of India. In: Vaz, E., Joanaz de Melo, C., Costa Pinto, L. (eds) Environmental History in the Making. Environmental History, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41085-2_10
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