This paper narrates key episodes in the institution of science of forestry in Tiruvitamkur, a princely state in British India from 1850s to 1940s. The process is looked upon as a process of providing new vocabulary and conceptual tools for thinking and acting on the forests. In this new scheme forests of Tiruvitamkur were envisioned as an exhaustible resource which needed improvement by adopting specific scientifically informed measures. Extraction of timber was the overarching concern and continuous or sustained production of it was set as the measure of ‘success’ of forest conservation. The rationale and modalities of achieving this end required institutionalisation of practices in compliance with Maximum Sustained Yield Principle championed in the discipline of continental forestry. Means of institutionalisation of this principle required enunciation of legislations and policies, creation of a legible Forest Estate, enumeration of trees, assessment of growing stock and strict adherence to the forest working plans. These thinking and imaginations were derived of the larger colonial discourses of progress and improvement; a precursor to the modern temporality of development thinking.

Reservation of forest for the use of government was the first step in the normalisation of the forest. This was followed by making forests amenable to measurement and calculation through survey and demarcation of the reserved forests. Preparation of working plans by estimation of timber value, annual increment of timber volume and phasing of timber extraction in the well-demarcated forest space formed the subsequent strategy for making forest legible. This paper demonstrates that the desire for creation of the legible forest estate was never achieved fully. The system of preparing working plan itself had to be compromised as simplified working schemes prepared with subjective judgements was considered apt after trial working.

Some of these local factors such as need for cultivable land also challenged forestry ideals. This upset the inviolable prescriptions of the forester and honey combed the forest estate with forest lands “disafforested” and opened up for cultivation. Though the forestry ideals were imported from France and Germany they were mediated through the British Imperial processes and local situations. The forestry as it was practiced in the late colonial phase had local and European elements suffused in it. The knowledge developed for sustained wood extraction from non-tropical forests could not capture the complexity involved in the tropical forests. This does not mean that colonial forestry was a total failure though some of the most celebrated ideals of the continental forestry were proved impractical in Tiruvitamkur. Like the flawed ideal of the trigonometrical survey, the colonial forestry created a myth of the forests as knowable and legible and amenable entity to the particular modes of manipulative interventions preached by its proponents.

Keywords: Colonial Forestry, Sustained Yield Forestry, Travancore, Tiruvitamkur, Environmental History