| Summary: | This thesis is a colonial and post-colonial study of forest policies in North-East India (NEI) that constituted Assam during the colonial period and the seven states of NEI in the post-colonial period. Focussed on the policies peculiar to the region during the colonial period, it sought to explore policies during the post-colonial period in relation to timber ban and Forest Rights Act. In doing so, this thesis perceives these policies through decolonial lens. Decolonial in this study refers to the act of the researcher in studying the forest policies and prioritisation the tribal indigenous perspectives on forest and their traditional governance system of land and forests.
This research has deployed archival and ethnographic research. Archival materials from the British Library, London, National Archives of India (NAI) and Assam State Archives (ASA) have informed the study about the colonial stereotyping of forest policies that continued until the contemporary period and policies peculiar to the region. Ethnographic work has been conducted in the Village Forests of Baghmara Reserved Forest in the state of Meghalaya, which are Ethnographic materials feed straight into decolonising attempts of the forest villagers against the colonial and post-colonial forest policies that are silent in the archival records. By incorporating Quijano (1991), Mignolo’s (2007), Mignolo (2011), Radcliffe’s (2022) in decolonisation of forest- based identity and practices of the traditional forest users and dwellers.
This study reveals that through forest practices and place making the forest dwellers have been decolonising forest policies since the colonial period. The other way of decolonising is in the form of resistance against the forest policies. In the process of establishment of colonial Village Forests, the villagers made sense of the place by carrying the name of the place to the new Village Forests. Despite coloniality of spaces, cultures and forest governance, it has been found that through interweaving of tribal animist and Christian beliefs, the forest dwellers have been conserving forests that are considered ‘forbidden’ and ‘sacred’. The methods of resistance deployed by the forest-dependent communities during colonial and post-colonial periods bring to light that coloniality of power and governance over forests was unable to create absolute dominion over forest-related practices of the people. It suggests that people have been adopting three modes of resistance against the forest policies that include open, institutional and subtle forms of resistance. The study of resistance in Baghmara Reserved Forest has produced resistant discourses of the forest villagers’ attempts to resist site-specific forest laws, which are absent in institutionalised archives from the colonial period.
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