In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest Rights Act 2006, a law enacted to secure the largest redistribution of property in independent India by recognising the tenure and use rights of millions of landless forest dwellers.

Beginning with the devastating destruction of a north Indian village Vaidya calls Ramnagar, inhabited by landless Dalits and Adivasis, the book follows the interventions of activists, forest dwelling communities, political parties, and corporations during the drafting of the law and traces how each of these coalitions shapes the law’s implementation. Vaidya shows how this ambitious law became a battleground of competing legal potentialities — at once a tool of exclusion, dividing forest dwellers along caste and class lines, and yet a platform for resistance, enabling forest dwellers to challenge State domination.

A multi-scalar study, Future of the Forest is attentive to the everyday politics of staking a forest rights claim, revealing how the law opens space for fluid (and often extralegal) interpretations, shifting political authority, and diverging aspirations.

Anand Vaidya is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email: rv13@soas.ac.uk

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Futures of the Forest

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