Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of
historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner
of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History
of Science In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging
the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging-often for
sewage, transport, or minerals-revealed human remains. Other times,
archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric
fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried
cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and
missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies
and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations,
their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with
another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants-past,
present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti
argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the
earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became
indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The
first book to situate deep history as an expression of political,
economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is
complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global
nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also
provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature
and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became
pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities,
and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies
these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the
Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and
forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of
Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality.
Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights
into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation
of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of
India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny,
Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths,
aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined
Indian antiquity.
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