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The book has a critical anyalysis how the early Europeam environmentalists worked in India and what were their achivements and limitations in the colonial period.The environmentalists includes activists, foresters, missionaries,poets and writers who wrote about Indian nature. The attitudes of these Europeans were complex and critical. Their psychology was not determined either from the passion towards protection of natural resources or from an inherent imperialism. Their attitude was complex and paradoxical. This is important to study these approaches from the perspective of environmental history of India and very little work has been done till now on this subject. The present book has examined this critical attitudes of the European environmentalists in India who framed the forest politics, wrote about the nature of India and after all first thought of Indian environment which started to face critical crisis from the mid nineteenth century.

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Dr Subhasis Biswas is Reader in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He is a specialist in environmental and ecological history.

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