Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Arpitha Kodiveri, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India's Forests"

Host: Raghavi Vishwanath
Guest: Arpitha Kodiveri
Date: November 22, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode dives into Arpitha Kodiveri’s book, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India's Forests," which examines the evolving relationship between communities, the Indian state, and legal regimes governing forests. Through stories from the field across multiple Indian states, Kodiveri unpacks colonial inheritances in forest law, eco-casteism, resource extractivism, and the shifts brought by legislations like the Forest Rights Act (FRA). At the heart of her work is a push for “negotiated sovereignty” and a forest jurisprudence anchored in care and repair—viewing laws not just as tools for management but as living practices imbued with community affect and participation.

Main Themes and Purpose

• Reconciliation of legal practice, scholarship, and activism in the field of environmental law
• Colonial and postcolonial histories of forest governance in India
• The tension between conservation, extractivism, and Adivasi (indigenous) sovereignty
• The role of state and non-state actors, including NGOs and fixers, in shaping on-ground realities
• The evolution toward a more participatory, reparative legal framework for forests—centered in care, negotiation, and community agency

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Ethics and Practice of Environmental Lawyering

Kodiveri discusses her journey from being a lawyer to an academic, often grappling with the duality of serving communities while maintaining scholarly distance:

"The only way to kind of reconcile a lot of these voices is to be able to tell that story of tension ... get comfortable with this contestation and talk about it."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (05:15)

• The legal discipline’s insularity and "gatekeeping" tendencies (09:20)
• Anthropology’s influence in highlighting the law’s limitations and opening new perspectives (10:30)
• Returning to law with "healthy skepticism" and a new vision of legal practice

2. Teaching and the Classroom as a Site of Legal Imagination

Kodiveri describes her classroom as a therapeutic, experimental space for working out new legal ideas and engaging with generational shifts in climate anxiety and activism.

"I get paid to experience therapy with my students."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (14:28)

• Noting drastic changes in student attitudes toward the climate crisis over a decade
• Classroom generosity and the symbiotic evolution of her teaching and research (16:40)

3. Colonial Forest Law and the Invention of Legal Categories

A deep dive into the Indian Forest Act (1927) and the colonial toolkit for managing forests:

• The Act’s creation of the "rights vs. privileges" dichotomy, placing Adivasi rights under bureaucratic discretion
• How excluded/partially excluded areas mediated sovereignty, consolidating colonial authority while discursively presenting protection
• Lasting consequences: unresolved tensions persist even after the Forest Rights Act (FRA) (22:30)

"The colonial state wanted discretionary authority of making that choice... once rights transition into the legal arena of privileges, then it becomes a much more complicated question for forest dwelling communities."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (19:10)

4. Sovereignty as a Legal Battleground

The discussion problematizes how "sovereignty" is designated through law—not always as empowerment:

• Boundaries imposed by legal understandings of sovereignty vs. fluid, affective conceptions held by communities (28:40)
• The shift in burden: communities must now prove their stewardship per legalistic norms (30:55)
• Bureaucratic capacity as primary justification for state sovereignty; erasure of indigenous legal systems

5. The Postcolonial Shift: Extraction and Citizenship

Exploring the Coal Bearing Areas Act and post-independence nationalism:

• Extraction cast as central to nation-building and citizenship
• Communities internalize their sacrifices ("we've fulfilled our duties as citizens")—citizenship mediated through dispossession (35:15)
• Law’s inheritance of colonial frameworks, with minor “cosmetic” change in forest signification (41:00)

6. Conservation, Civilization, and Ecocasteism

A powerful critique of the Wildlife Protection Act and the prioritization of "cosmopolitan" conservation:

• Caste and the grammar of "purity and pollution" become fused with ecological exclusion—particularly visible in the Wildlife Protection Act (46:50)
• Conservation as an elite project: “the lives of the tigers ... could come at the cost of the loss of human dignity of these communities.” (47:31)
• Overt and subtle manifestations of eco-casteism, including the rationales of civil society actors

7. The Forest Rights Act and Negotiated Sovereignty

Examining the FRA as a "rebellious law" with mixed reception:

"The way the Forest Rights act was received by wildlife NGOs ... was a threat, right? ... ecology and equity have gone too far in this piece of legislation."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (56:20)

• Resistance from wildlife NGOs, who challenged the law in the Supreme Court
• Businesses viewing the FRA as a “big roadblock” to development
• Complications of legal categories (Scheduled Tribe vs. Other Traditional Forest Dwellers) and their implications on access to rights

8. Urban Exclusion and the Limits of Advocacy

• Advocacy and legal strategies often leave out town planning and urban redevelopment laws, despite their significant impact on forests and communities (63:02)
• Persistent rarefication of the forest as a legal site, while neglecting urban entanglements

9. Climate Crisis and New Modes of Dispossession

• Climate discourse places new burdens on Adivasi communities—expected to be "good stewards" but without sovereignty (67:12)
• Mechanisms like carbon sinks prompt new dispossessions under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act and other climate-driven programs (69:22)

"Climate solutions immediately globalize the very local geography, because ... we're talking about the global carbon stock being reduced because of these areas being conserved. And unfortunately, that's allowed for more dispossession."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (70:36)

10. Community Agency, Legal Interpretation, & the Politics of Affect

Stories from the ground reveal how communities operationalize and even subvert laws for their benefit:

• Rural actors interpret the FRA dynamically, sometimes sidestepping individual rights in favor of community rights (75:00)
• Affect (grief, hope, sacred connection to land) becomes a legal force—Niyamgiri case as an emblem
• Law as both site of betrayal and hope; communities do not give up on law but continually renegotiate with it (84:00)

11. Fixers (“Dalals”) and New Governmentalities

The emergence of “fixers” as mediators between state, private capital, and communities:

"They’re sort of clever ethnographers. They start to study the community, the division ... their entire playbook is devised on this notion that if we can convince half the community ... the rest will follow."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (89:40)

• Fixers as both benevolent actors (helping, protecting) and agents of strategic corporate interests
• Communities operate with pragmatic negotiation: co-opting, refusing, or leveraging law and legal proxies as needed

12. Repair and Care as Legal Futures

Kodiveri’s culminating vision is a participatory, reparative, and affective approach to forest governance:

"Care and repair ... is about the degree of harm ... and always about negotiating that ... power and politics ... constantly shift ... the room for those big conversations exist ... it’s not just an intimate account, but is a much richer account of politics where the state is not seen as something that happens to us, but rather where agentic parts of creating it."
— Arpitha Kodiveri (99:00)

• Legal repair as ongoing, relational, not an endpoint
• Calls for “a constitution within a constitution”—dynamic, always open to renegotiation and the radical politics of care and repair (101:00)

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On reconciling lawyering and scholarship:
  "The scholarly voice or the scholarly possibility became my refuge. Where I was like, here I'm at least devoid of those pressures, and I can just tell the story as is." (06:30)
• On community-driven legal interpretation:
  "Those who are at the forefront of being victimized by a particular law have the sharpest reading of those laws and have the sharpest understanding of legal interpretation..." (74:40)
• On the “politics of care”:
  "Adivasi communities would often talk about the law as a very hard site that they had to soften through their interpretations, through the affective, through the notion of healing and challenge the inevitability of extraction." (102:40)
• On the future of the work:
  "Now I'm trying to find ways, both in my scholarship and in my writing, to see how I can take the learning from Adivasi communities and the learning from queer communities and see what that can do for the law specifically." (106:00)

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:43 — Kodiveri on entering environmental law and the dilemmas of fieldwork
• 09:20 — Interrogating legal disciplinary boundaries and anthropological influence
• 14:19 — Role of teaching and generational shifts in climate legalism
• 18:45 — Colonial legal innovations and Adivasi sovereignty
• 28:14 — Sovereignty as battleground and its limitations
• 33:53 — Postcolonial extraction, sovereignty, and citizenship
• 46:50 — Eco-casteism and the Wildlife Protection Act
• 56:09 — Forest Rights Act: reception by NGOs and business
• 63:02 — Neglect of urban legal frameworks in forest law advocacy
• 67:12 — Climate crisis, burdens of stewardship, and emerging dispossession
• 74:36 — Community responses, legal innovation, and negotiated sovereignty
• 83:55 — Affect, grief, and love—infusing law with community emotion
• 87:54 — Fixers/dalals and new governmentality in land acquisition
• 98:17 — The “constitution within a constitution” and radical legal repair
• 105:34 — Future directions: queer environmentalism and legal care

Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced and deeply humanizing glimpse into the layered legal ecologies of India’s forests. Kodiveri’s blend of on-the-ground activism, rigorous scholarship, and affect-driven theorizing points to a reparative, participatory future for environmental jurisprudence. Forest governance, in her telling, is not merely about legal categories or bureaucratic routines, but about negotiating sovereignty, care, grief, and hope—together with communities who refuse to be silent, even in the face of extraction.