. Forests and Tribes . Beyond settled villages There was more to rural India than sedentary agriculture. Apart from the intensively cultivated provinces in northern and north-western India, huge swathes of forests – dense forest ( jangal ) or scrubland ( kharbandi ) – existed all over eastern India, central India, northern India (including the Terai on the Indo-Nepal border), Jharkhand, and in peninsular India down the Western Ghats and the Deccan plateau.
Though it is nearly impossible to set an all-India average of the forest cover for this period, informed conjectures based on contemporary sources suggest an average of per cent. Forest dwellers were termed jangli in contemporary texts. Being jangli, however, did not mean an absence of “civilisation”, as popular usage of the term today seems to connote. Rather, the term described those whose livelihood came from the gathering of forest produce, hunting and shifting agriculture.
These activities were largely season specific. Among the Bhils, for example, spring was reserved for collecting forest produce, summer for fishing, the monsoon months for cultivation, and autumn and winter for hunting. Such a sequence presumed and perpetuated mobility, which was a distinctive feature of tribes inhabiting these forests. For the state, the forest was a subversive place – a place of refuge ( mawas ) for troublemakers.
Once again, we turn to Babur who says that jungles provided a good defence “behind which the people of the pargana become stubbornly rebellious and pay no taxes”. . Inroads into forests External forces entered the forest in different ways. For instance, the state required elephants for the army.
So the peshkash levied from forest people often included a supply of elephants. Fig. . Painting of Shah Jahan hunting nilgais (from the Badshah Nama) Ü Describe what you see in this painting.
What is the symbolic element that helps establish the connection between the hunt and ideal justice?