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But our political ascendancy in the country was not premeditated, almost, it may be said, to have been an accident forced upon us. In the words of an old Rajput Prince in conversation with a British official in 1804 (alluding to a kind of melon which bursts asunder when ripe), " You stepped in at a lucky time; the p'foot was ripe, and you had only to take it bit by bit."

The new position which the East India Company was being forced to take up in India proved a difficult one to manage from home. The Court of Directors were ignorant of the real position in the country, and the practice which permitted private trading by their employees from the senior officials downwards led to great abuses. The Company became involved in financial difficulties and were threatened with bankruptcy. They appealed for help to the English Government and a parliamentary investigation was carried out in 1772. This resulted in the first direct connection of the Home Ministry with the management of East India affairs by the measure known as the Regulating Act of 1773. A loan of a million and a half was authorised to the Company and various provisions were made to amend the constitution of the Company at home and in India. A Governor-General (Warren Hastings) was nominated to preside over Bengal, and to control to some extent the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, with four councillors, all nominated for five years. A supreme court of judicature was created in Calcutta, to take the place of the old Mayor's Court. And finally all Company's employees, judges, collectors and military officers, both of the Crown and the Company, were strictly forbidden to trade. This double government was destined to last till the Indian Mutiny.

The influences which the incidence of the successive waves of invasion and immigration into India had on the forests will now be glanced at.

The Aryan invaders, as mentioned, probably entered India some 2000 years B.C., and such evidence as has been collected tends to show that they were an agricultural and pastoral people. In order to carry on their pursuits they commenced burning and clearing away the dense forests in the areas in which they settled in order to obtain land for the growth of crops and on which to graze their cattle. The ancient epic Mahabharata tells of the burning of the great Khundava Forest. This forest appears to have been situated between

the Ganges and Jumna Rivers, and the description forms the first semi-historical evidence of the destruction of the forests by the early settlers.

The legend relates that the burning of the forest was only carried out with great difficulty owing to the frequent rains which Indra poured down to quench the fire. Allusions are numerous in the epic to dark and gloomy, and we may be sure dense and tangled, forests as still covering large portions of the country even within what are now the drier zones along the banks of the Jumna. But it is also made evident in the epic that in other parts the early settlers had already cleared large areas for cultivation, etc., in those ancient times and that a terrible drought and famine had devastated the country, dreaded experiences which were doubtless reproduced more than once. For in the second epic, the Ramayana, dating from the time when an Aryan Empire was established in Oudh, there are allusions to severe droughts, and Sringa, the forestborn, is worshipped as the bringer of rains. Forests, dark as a cloud and very dense in the wilderness of Taraka, are spoken of here.

At the time of the invasion of Alexander the Great the forests in the north of the Punjab were still dense, in spite of this being the part of the country in which the Aryan invaders first developed a stable Government. For we are told that the Salt Range and the country on the banks of the Jhelum were clothed in forests dense enough to conceal the movements of Alexander's armies. Those who accompanied Alexander kept careful notes of the regions he operated in, and in his history of the invasion Arrian, in describing the march east of the Jhelum, says that the forests there extended over an almost boundless tract of country, "shrouding it with umbrageous trees of stateliest growth and of extraordinary height; that the climate was salubrious, as the dense shade mitigated the violence of the heat, and that copious springs supplied the land with abundance of water."

This description would seem to apply to the Pabbi and probably to the low-lying country between that range and the Chenab, over the southern portions of which Dalbergia sissoo and Acacia arabica are still to be found scattered. The evidence is of importance, for Arrian describes the high ber (i.e. the high plains tableland between two rivers), lands of the Punjab west of the Ravi-the Rechnat Doab-as in much the same state as when the British entered the Punjab some twenty-one

centuries later. It is our great new irrigation system which has since turned much of this into valuable agricultural properties.

It appears probable that during the whole of the Brahmin and Buddhist periods, forests still existed over a considerable part of India adapted to the growth of such, the valleys and land areas adjacent to the larger rivers being under an intensive cultivation. The great reduction in the forest areas in the country was slowly brought about by the constant invasions of the Central Asian peoples who brought their flocks with them; and as both people and flocks increased in numbers, wider and wider areas of forest were burnt and destroyed to obtain pastures for them. This period may be said to have culminated with the Mahomedan conquest of a large portion of India. The Mahomedan had no regard for the forests, nor any religious scruples about destroying them. Rather, he was taught that the forest was a free gift of Nature and belonged to anyone, just as water did. The destruction, therefore, proceeded apace. India suffered from Mahomedan incursions just as Persia, Asia Minor, Spain and other countries on the Mediterranean suffered.1 But a part of the destruction of the forests was probably carried out by the original agricultural population who, under the everincreasing stream of invasion, were driven back into the forests and hills and mountains where they took to the method of shifting cultivation, which under various names has been practised in the forests of India during many centuries and still exists in some parts—a pernicious system which is probably as destructive to forests as any other act of man.

On the other hand, the planting of trees either for the fruit which they yielded or for the purposes of obtaining shade was an act which was held in high esteem in Eastern countries, and especially in India, from very early times. The Eastern

1 Whilst out at the Serbian Front in Macedonia in 1916, the writer was given the following curious and interesting reason for the treeless state of Macedonia by a French officer who had been connected with the French Forest Service. He said it was supposed to be due to an old Turkish law which assessed the amount of taxes to be paid by landowners according to the number of trees they had growing on their land. To diminish the amount of taxes to be paid the landlord cleared off all his trees and thus brought the hill-sides to their present bare state. This would be very like the Turk. Its effect, however, combined with the unrestricted grazing of flocks of goats, has been to reduce the value of the agricultural land at the foot of the hills owing to the soil becoming covered up with rocks and debris, the result of erosion in the hills now unprotected by trees, and to render the climate hotter and more unhealthy.

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appreciation of the luxury of shade led to the banks of the canals, constructed by the Mahomedan Emperors, being planted, and the waysides of the Imperial highways being lined with trees of various kinds. In the Sunnud of the Emperor Akbar, it is directed that on both sides of the canal down to Hissar, trees of every description, both for shade and blossom, be planted, so as to make it like the canal under the tree in Paradise; and that the sweet flavour of the rare fruits may reach the mouth of every one, and that from those luxuries a voice may go forth to travellers calling them to rest in the cities where their every want will be supplied" (Calcutta Review, No. 23).

That the wholesale destruction of forests has had a serious deteriorating effect on the climate of India is beyond cavil. What may be termed the historical proof of this contention is furnished by the numerous deserted sites of old towns and villages, now represented by ruins of walls or mounds either buried in the sand of a desert or overgrown by dense jungle, which indicate that the areas were once more or less densely populated, but where present-day human activity is only represented by a scattered population and scanty agriculture. The desertion of these formerly populated areas has not been, in the main, due to depopulation owing to invasion and extermination, nor was the cultivation due to extensive irrigation, for evidence of such works would have remained extant; and there is no such evidence. The disappearance of the people of these old densely populated areas was mainly brought about by the reckless, continuous and wholesale burning of the forests which led to the gradual decrease of water in the larger rivers, to the drying up of springs, small streams and rivers and to a decrease in the rainfall of the country. This result was gradual, the war against the forests being spread over many centuries, probably 3500 years or more; for the Mahomedan rule alone had lasted 750 years at the time the battle of Plassey was fought and won by the English, and the invasions of India by the nomadic tribes from High Asia had continued for many centuries previous to the Mahomedan conquest of the country.

From what has been written above it will be seen that areas once under cultivation have in some cases, since relapsed into jungle again, become reafforested by Nature, in fact, thereby proving that if left undisturbed by man, areas suitable for carrying forests would soon become re-clad, given that the

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other necessary conditions were favourable. proofs that this is the case are to be seen in India, and many Forest Officers will have encountered one or more instances. Ribbentrop mentions that throughout the Gumsur Forests in the Gangam District very old mango and tamarind trees are to be found in groups in the forests, now surrounded with sâl trees, often of very fine growth and probably at least 200 years old. These clumps probably represent the sites of old villages in the area which was once under cultivation. Depopulation may have been due to the descents of the hill tribes (Khonds) of the neighbouring regions, or to drought and famine or pestilence. The people disappeared and the cultivated lands soon became covered with a fine crop of sâl saplings. The writer has seen the same thing in Chota Nagpur and the Central Provinces, where the ruins of old buildings and tanks are not uncommon, now buried in a dense tangle of jungle affording homes to wild animals and in the Chittagong Hills the same ancient ruins of an old civilisation may be seen.

Therefore, although it is certain that the area of forests in existence in the country at the present time is but a fraction of those existing in the early history of the country, and that the destruction of the greater bulk has resulted in a far hotter and more variable climate; yet evidence is not wanting that suitable areas throughout the country if left untouched by man would once again become re-clothed with forests.

The trouble arises in the drier districts where bare, hot, deeply-seamed hill-sides, or great stretches consisting of a network of barren, hot ravines, once clothed with forest, now require to be reafforested in the interests of the people. Nature is unable to do this, and it becomes the work of the scientific Forest Officer to grapple with the problem.

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