Claims on the commons: Political power and natural resources in pre-colonial India

As her diverse oeuvre amply indicates, Dharma Kumar’s restless and eneigetic mind led her to pursue a wide range of scholarly interests and she warmly encouraged my early ventures into environmental history. Though the present paper was written without the benefit of her close reading and clear advice, it connects to one of Dharma Kumar’s long-standing interests-the history of institutions, especially property institutions.’I hope that Dharma would have approved it even as she would have offered suggestions{or its improvement. As confidence in the provision of technocratic solutions to environmental problems waned through the 1980s and 1990s, debates on the way forward necessarily intensified, and the neglect of socio-political as distinct from technical aspects of the problems began to be held responsible for earlier fail6res and current crises. One school of-Ahought then radically questioned the technical’ competence and knowledge-claims of the established experts and argued for a return to the indigen-