INTRODUCTION

Historians have long struggled with the task of interpreting narratives that although written in the past tense are yet hard, if not impossible to reconcile with each other or indeed, the modern historical sense of there having been a singular past. The usual response has been to ‘mine’ them for historical knowledge as ‘such consciousness is not always visible and has to be prised from sources which tend to conceal it’. Alternatively, we can treat historical texts as literary ones and allow them all to benefit from the suspension of disbelief available to the literary understanding. Thus, Hayden White proposed in 1966 to treat historical explanation as something that ‘can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation’ because, after all, ‘there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object’.

Gabrielle Spiegel, an important scholar of pre-modern narrative has sought a middle ground between these opposed positions arguing that the ‘alternative between seeing language as either perfectly transparent or completely opaque is simply too rigidly framed’. She then pointed out a vital difference between the way that historians and literary scholars needed to approach texts.

There is little doubt that forests occupy a smaller fraction of the world today than they have done for some millennia, and people living in them form an even smaller, and ever-falling, proportion of the global population. However, as a consequence of the new environmental consciousness, academic inquiry into, and media coverage of these shrunken areas and shrinking populations has, in recent years, vastly increased in every part of the world. The historical dimensions of the issues involved are also increasingly coming to be recognised, as are its regional and local variations. These are the problems that the present book addresses. The book is not about the environment per se, but about the human use of the environment, and about the diverse communities that utilised it in distinct, but complementary, ways. It is also about how these communities sought to define themselves and organise their relations with others, and how they modified natural conditions in that process. The book thus deals both with the formation of ethnic hierarchies and the anthropogenesis of landscapes; hence it is also a contribution to the study of what Schendel has termed ‘ethnic innovation’ or ethnogenesis.

While these processes may be found throughout the world, my inquiry is focused on the margins of agriculture in Central and Western India, or a region slightly larger than the contemporary Indian state of Maharashtra. Those margins were, until the present century, determined largely by physiographic boundary between the plains and the mountains.

Introduction: strategic location and regional power

The previous chapter looked at peripatetic ethnicities that moved across considerable distances; we now turn to a much more localised exemplar of the same processes. Immediately east of the coastal plain that stretches south from the gulf of Cambay is a triangular knot of difficult mountains through which the Narmada and Tapti cut their way to the sea at the important harbours of Bharuch and Surat respectively. East of the mountains lies more open country, long the seat of established agrarian regimes which needed access to the seaports and trade of the Indian Ocean and which also needed, therefore, to maintain transit through the forests and mountains. But if these forested hills were an obstacle from one point of view, they were a resource from another: they could be strongholds, bases and customs posts, and in their recesses grew the great timbers needed for mansions and ships. Not surprisingly, therefore, the expansion of trade in the Indian Ocean region in the early centuries of the current era was accompanied by settlement and stateformation. Cave-shrines began to be excavated at suitable locations for holy men to take their cut from the tolls and booty, and villages granted to Brahmans – for example, Pimpalner in western Khandesh granted by a Chalukya king in 377–8 CE.