"This book is a serious study of the environmental crisis in India. What has made the present work more introspective is that the author, who needs to be commended for his lucid exposition of the monumental environmental crisis in India, is not an armchair theoretician. He is an activist working with Ananda Niketan Ashram, which provides legal support to forest dwellers of Gujarat ande Madhya Pradesh. Questions raised by Pathak transcend the micro-level of analysis. He feels that environmental problems in India are ignorance and a lack of consciousness among policymakers during the early years of independent India. To help us understand our environs better, Contested Domains needs to be read by both environmentalists and laymen." --The Telegraph "This well-argued short book is a useful addition to forestry literature. Dr.

Pathak brings to the task a lawyer's skills for marshalling and presenting information and arguments. He has produced a book that should be of interest not only to those concerned with Indian forestry but also to those wishing to understand how forestry is influenced by broader political, popular, and other forces that shape development in practice." --Commonwealth Forestry Review "This is a really good book which analyzes the conflicts in policy by different organized social groups towards forests and their inhabitants in modern times. Although the book is totally concerned with India, the issues involved here are relevant to contemporary Australia as well. This is a worthwhile book that ought to be read by those people who believe that the problems of forests can be easily solved by just not destroying any more trees." --South Asia "The study is an excellent one and raises many useful thoughts in the area of forestry." --Asian Economic Review "An important contribution as unlike much of the literature, it attempts to scrutinise more carefully categories often assumed homogenous and static - namely that of the state and peasants - as well as the multiple layers of interactions within and between these actors. The strength of the book, is not so much its theoretical critique of the agrarian change literature, but the application of this critique to illustrate the bipolarity of many of the forest management studies which have posited the forest dweller as either living symbiotically with nature or being completely alienated from it.

This book goes a long way in understanding the complexity of the forest question." --Review of Development and Change Contested Domains is an analytical statement on the state, forest dwellers, and forest discourses in contemporary India. Drawing on state theory it recognizes state and society as organic to each other and different institutions of the state as "asymmetric terrains" where sometimes even conflicting interests crystalize. Critical of the customary approaches to the study of environmental conflict and its explication and of the "new ecologists," the author provides a newer and more complex examination of the nature and dynamics of the relationship between the state and peasant forest dwellers. He analyses actual conflicts over resources and the different meanings attributed to such key categories as state, community, commons, subsistence, and survival. In the context of the state's emerging interests in forests, he explores the nature of forest dwelling societies and investigates the initiation of forestry in the plains.