Future of the Forest

Future of the Forest is the story of legal transformations of forests across India through collective action. Since the nineteenth century, Indian forest dwellers have been unable to enforce their claims to the land on which they live or the products of it that they use. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new national movement led to the passage of the Forest Rights Act, a landmark law that recognizes the tenure and use rights of India's millions of landless forest dwellers.

Anand P. Vaidya tracks the Forest Rights Act from the movements that pushed for its passage to its drafting—and the many revisions it underwent to satisfy coalitions of local peoples, conservationists, and a wide spectrum of political parties and movements—and finally to its impact on two neighboring villages in central India's forest belt. The forests have seen a long history of political authority enacted to the benefit of the powerful; Future of the Forest follows the work of activists and forest dwellers who turned to the law to shift this balance of power.

Anand P. Vaidya is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

Twenty years ago the forest rights act arrived rich with the potential to undo historic injustices that had dispossessed and displaced millions of Adivasis and other forest dwellers since the nineteenth century. In this creative and perceptive book, Anand Vaidya studies the outcomes of implementing this law. We learn that laws raise hopes and unleash turmoil. Alliances are forged, struggles unfold, as battles over property rights are joined. Vaidya provides a much needed examination of the social and political life of a law in India that sought to remedy obdurate and often violently enforced inequalities in land ownership. (Praise for the South Asian edition.)

Nayanika Mathur, author of Paper Tiger:

Through its close focus on the Forest Rights Act and account of the 'problem of the forest,' Future of the Forest shines a new light on struggles over land, property, and rights in India, as well as the nature and power of political authority.

Nusrat S. Chowdhury, author of Paradoxes of the Popular:

Future of the Forest is an important intervention into the debates over land and governance in India. Anand P. Vaidya's detailed ethnography points to the fact that laws are always born of contention and remain contested entities that can be at once tools and weapons.