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Where the wooded tracts of central India once appeared to colonial officials as places of dark, lurking danger, of malarial madness, and of marksmen whose aim found its way to the heart of the colonial enterprise, they are today areas of denuded scrub whose inhabitants seem engaged in battling each other over the remaining trees. One might argue that with the penetration of sunlight, paradoxically, the potential for violence has increased. Today, in place of the standoff between forest dependent villagers and the state," intimacy and antagonistic interests come packaged together in the social relations of work and daily life"(Sider 1986: 85).

People have thought about violence in relation to forest environments in various ways, some of which are common to India and other parts of the world. In India, both colonial officials and villagers expressed fears about the unknown and uncontrollable aspects of nature and its potential for vengeance in the form of droughts, floods, forest fires, or attacks by wild animals. ¹ For colonial officials, the violence in nature often included the threat of attacks by" savages" whom they associated with nature (in the Indian context see Skaria 1999; Sundar 1995; for colonial anxieties about natives elsewhere see Spurr 1993; Taussig 1987). Colonial foresters looked upon native peasant users of the forest as destructive elements, whose practices caused violence to the environment. In India, scholars like Shiva, Nandy, or Visvanathan have taken an opposite tack, equating the preservation of nature with the activities of the peoples, especially adivasis (“tribals"