History Of The Thar Desert Environment Culture & Society

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Manisha Choudhary is teaching history at University of Delhi since 2010. Being a native of Rajasthan who is familiar with the various dialects spoken in different regions of Thar Desert she has been able to collect and analyze the ethnographical data. She is a traveller by spirit and tries to use the data collected during visits to different cities and villages of the Thar Desert and its vicinities. She is trained in history research and exploration and her ability to work with vernacular sources has facilitated her to work on the primary sources for wide ranging themes.

She has many research publications to her credit in which she has tried to combine critical rigour with evolving vision of history.

This historical narrative of Thar Desert reflects the deep and abiding love for nature. The infectious enthusiasm and lucidity for this work came from the constant dismay that was felt while teaching environmental history to the postgraduate students, who were always aghast to hear about the significant contributions of the desert in our lives. They were equally astonished to know about the political and social life in the intense hot and dry desert of Thar. The desert has always been understood as an useless space that is redundant of economic activities. So, this historical work also highlights the economic plethora of the Thar Desert.

The imperial centres were always active to exercise direct (indirect) control over the Thar Desert for keeping the security of mainland intact. The lucrative revenue prospects of the Thar were another motivation for not letting it go. All these factors contributed to the formation of many political and matrimonial alliances. The regional royal powers had their own influence areas that were managed well for revenue harvests. The traders played major role in the economy of the dry desert. Many communities engaged in the raids to ensure hands on resources. The popularity of raids was such that even the rulers executed them with faith and on regular basis. Contributions from all these actors jointly formed the economic panorama of Thar Desert through-trade and raids.

The rich cultural components like religious cults, the environmentalist of desert-Bishnois, nomads, languages, the hero deities, the food habits are essential to understand the acquaintance of the residents with the region inhabited by them. The essence of community life in the environmentally inhospitable region like Thar Desert has also been highlighted with the evidences to propose the fact prakrti rakshtai rakshte!

The saying in the Rajasthani dialect, mentioned above, is one out of many similar kind of wisdom capsules that are helping the people of Thar Desert for centuries to stay contained in their dry and arid habitat but with the hope in place.

In recent years, extremely interesting developments have shaped the historical studies. The most inspiring shift is about the fact that now historians seek a whole history of human experience rather than only digging and hammering at the events. The human experiences were composite result of the interactions of many phenomena, which were either autonomous or partially due to human violations. Thus, the inherited idea here is to understand the individual within a comprehended social context. With the Annals schools interventions, it was believed that external context could be observed, analysed and understood in the same logic as it is employed in the natural sciences. 'Histoire a part entire was therefore a history that sought a synthesis of all the material, physical and mental forces that had shaped the life of man in

"If the direction of wind is from NW to SE in the month of July, from NE to SW in August and from SW to NE in the month of September then the yield will be one quarter more than the regular production or a bumper crop. past societies. So, with the efforts of Bloch and Febver, history became a discipline that brought together geography, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, philology and other relevant natural sciences, pulling up a total picture of the past societies and their surroundings. This permitted an analysis from the mono-causal to multi-dimensional explanation. Further, it helped to perceive about something that was previously perceived as 'without history' or in language turns of history to be unhistorical. With this, the sources for the construction of the unsaid past also expended from the previously accepted conventional and legitimate (considered) material, into a large variety of unwritten and unconventional evidences. And, with these interventions, history became a subject matter and domain of the imaginative and enterprising scholars.

Coming to the sources of the history writing, one has to be careful while picking up evidences. For, the history shall not be webbed without the sources and the source shall be allowed to speak for itself rather than putting each words for it. Some medieval and modern sources are carry-overs from the ancient world as the creators continued to work on the same piece of metal or stone, over and over. The sources that range from 1100 AD onwards till 1800 AD are very unlikely to fill and untangle the whole of medieval span. Thus, to approach the history of any landmass, archeology is one of the most significant sciences, lanced with skills of art. So, rather than running through lists of the main types of primary evidence, the discussion here focuses on some of the reasons why written sources, which are the staple sources for most medieval historians that have survived and, equally on, why we have lost a great deal of tangible materials.

Primary sources are not simply the means to the ends of historical analysis; they are a fundamental part of the story. Nowhere it is more appropriate than it is with medieval history. So even at an early stage of exploration of the subject, it is important for any history researcher to be alive to some of the possibilities that sources open up and the constraints that they impose. To 'think medieval' without 'thinking sources' is impossible. For the medieval India, 'There is no medieval Pompeii frozen in time under volcanic ash. The phase of the medieval ages feels closer to us in some ways, but that only makes it more difficult to see it-in the linear chronology. Therefore, to explore the place of the medieval period in modern popular culture phase involves locating several different strands of ideas and images, many of which do not fit together neatly. But in terms of environment, researchers have said with assertion that the Medieval Ages were simpler and more harmonious times, where people respected nature. Over the course of the medieval period, enormous changes were made to the environment such as vast swathes of forest were felled, marine and land routes were altered, agricultural expansion was at its peak, for the revenue purposes. The different types of sources indicate to the activities of the traders and raiders, who were constantly engaging and negotiating with the natural phenomena.

The environmental history came up as a branch of the intellectual history and later in the decade of 1980s; soon it was able to grasp the approach of historical writings. This branch of history writing didn't leave any dimension of the nature and society untouched. The extension of the environmental history studies into the forests, grasslands, wildlife, reptiles, rivers, etc. made it a much happening ground. The forerunners in the field even proved that the major civilization of the world have landed in destructions due to the environmental factors. The most famous and alarming example of the same had been presented through the decline of the Harappan Civilization. Researchers have proved that the Harappan settlements were pushed into the collapse due to the deforestation which ultimately caused furious and sweeping floods. Similarly many other events of the past have been successfully explored b the historians with the study of the environmental factors.