As they seek to explore evolving and conflicting ideas of nationhood and modernity, India's writers have often chosen forests as the dramatic setting for stories of national identity. India's Forests, Real and Imagined explores how these settings have been integral to India's sense of national consciousness. Alan Johnson demonstrates that modern writers have drawn on older Indian literary traditions of the forest as a place of exile, trial and danger to shape new ideas of India as a modern nation. The book casts new light on a wide range of modern writers, from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – widely regarded as the first Indian novelist – to contemporary authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie as well as local attitudes to nationhood and the environment across the country.

A visionary look at the evolution and future of India In this momentous book, Nandan Nilekani traces the central ideas that shaped India's past and present and asks the key question of the future: How will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? As a co-founder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, Nilekani has actively participated in the company's rise during the past twenty-seven years. In Imagining India, he uses his global experience and understanding to discuss the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant. Nilekani engages with India's particular obstacles and opportunities, charting a new way forward for the young nation.

Forestry in India during British Era traces the history of the evolution of scientific forestry in India during the British era (1800-1947). A special emphasis of the narration is on the State of Karnataka, which was under British domination partly directly through the Bombay and Madras Presidencies and somewhat indirectly through the Princely States of Mysore, Hyderabad, Sandur and a few others. Besides describing the developments of forestry together with the circumstances that led to these developments, the book assesses their long-term impact on the forests as we see them today. It provides a graphic account of the birth of the forest departments and the hurdles they had to face in their bid to be effective in guarding the forests – the last vestiges of nature – from the verge of imminent extinction. Forestry in India during British Era has critically examined some of the important causes that led to forest destruction, such as the large-scale expansion of agriculture, the heavy withdrawal of biomass, the extensive shifting cultivation in the Ghat forests, etc. It also objectively analyses what the forestry scenario would have been like today had the process of forest reservation not been zealously initiated about 150 years ago and if these forests hadn’t been steadfastly and arduously guarded by the forest departments throughout these years.

Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings. Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country. Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forest shows the origin and development of both.