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Sumit Guha, has intended to place his book against the global context of the evershrinking extent of the forest ecosystem and its dependent ethnic groups. It is a study of the historical dimensions of the use of forest ecosystem forming the boundary between the high ranges and agrarian plains in Central and Western India over the past few centuries. How the diverse communities in the region utilised the forest in distinct, but complimentary ways, how the communities sought to define themselves and organise their relations with others, and how they modified natural conditions in that process, constitute his focus. The avowed goals of the study include exploration of the roots of the forest peoples' ethnic identity, the formation of ethnic hierarchies and the anthropogenesis of landscape.
The book embodies evidence of the fact that temporally the peoples and their habitats were in constant flux. Neither the composition nor the location of any particular community was fixed in history. Lands once cleared for agriculture got reforested sometimes; trade routes once opened up got abandoned at other times; cities emerged and also vanished. Certain habitats persisted through time, but their geographical locations and human occupants were in recurrent flux. The patterns that persisted through this flux get unraveled as we go through the chapters of the book.
The book has nine chapters in all with novel titles and subtitles. The first chapter titled as "From the archaeology of mind to the archaeology of matter" is a brief critique of the Social Darwinist characterisation of forest peoples as static societies and changeless races by colonial/missionary ethnographers. The general assumption that the forest peoples belonged to archaic races and the advanced agriculturists to the later ones is rejected, and so is the assumption that they were forced to make a retreat into forests in order to evade exploitation. What is suggested is...