State Formation in Community Spaces? Decentralization of Control over Forests in the Kumaon Himalaya, India

In the early part of this century, 1916 and 1921 were especially dry years in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalaya. In each of these years, forest fires racked the countryside, burning beyond the power of the colonial British government to control or extinguish. It was not just the dry weather that was to blame. Villagers in Kumaon set the forest on fire; the dry weather merely helped their efforts along. The containment of this “planned incendiarism” was one of the main planks of the scientific forestry that the colonial state had begun to introduce in the hills in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially from around 1910.