| In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan Contributor(s): Gold, Ann Grodzins (Author), Gujar, Bhoju Ram (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822328089 ISBN-13: 9780822328087 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $113.95 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: March 2002 Annotation: "This is an extraordinary history of postcolonial India as told through the lives of peasants and pastoralists, artisans and housewives. Drawing on many years of research, Gold and Gujar explore changing relations between state and subject, changing structures of production and consumption and, most innovatively, changes in the natural world in rural Rajasthan. Their research is rich, their analyses subtle and empathetic, their writing uncommonly evocative. This landmark study is at once a major contribution to environmental history, political anthropology, and folklore."--Ramachandra Guha, author of "The Unquiet Woods" and "Environmentalism: A Global History " "A unique, densely textured historical and ethnographic account. Engaging scholarship on memory, environmental history, oral history, South Asian studies, and ethnographic experimentation, this book works on multiple registers. The authors' observations about the sweat, dust, tears, and delights of fieldwork are also remarkable in their evocative force."--Kirin Narayan, author of "Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social |
| Dewey: 306.095 |
| LCCN: 2001047512 |
| Physical Information: 1.35" H x 6.34" W x 9.08" (1.63 lbs) 432 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In the Time of Trees and Sorrows showcases peasants' memories of everyday life in North India under royal rule and their musings on the contrast between the old days and the unprecedented shifts that a half century of Indian Independence has wrought. It is an oral history of the former Kingdom of Sawar in the modern state of Rajasthan as it was from the 1930s to the 1950s. Based on testimonies from the 1990s, this book stands as a polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate this small rural community's relatively sudden transformation from subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations, and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings) that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing with historical "fact" and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex, and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of kings and what happened to the trees? |