In the Time of Trees and Sorrows is an engaging and elegant exploration of the history of the former kingdom of Sawar, an area of twenty-seven villages in Rajasthan. The authors focus on the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, an era of dramatic changes in Sawar's (and India's) political and ecological landscape. Drawing on interviews with subjects of the former kingdom, mostly non-literate farmers, herders, and laborers, the authors provide a textured account of the pre-independence period (pre-1947) marked by what they term the “double oppression under colonial and regional rulers,” and a landscape rich with trees and wildlife, albeit resources to which the king's subjects were mostly denied access (p. 1). This period is contrasted with the post-independence period, during which India's princely kingdoms were absorbed in the Indian Republic, and the subjects of Sawar experienced “the sudden and radical transformation to democracy and modernity” (1). This latter period also witnessed, as the authors draw attention to from the outset, the complete devastation of Sawar's landscape which “transformed from one of rich biodiversity of trees and growth to one where hillsides have been stripped of indigenous growth and are now dominated by a single alien species” (3). In bringing political and ecological history into the same frame, Gold and Gujar explore a compelling paradox of the area's postcolonial history: as the residents of Sawar gained political rights, their environment was transformed and, in many ways, devastated.

The first four of the book's ten chapters engage a range of scholarly interests, including currents in anthropology (particularly the relationship between anthropology and history), historiography (pointing to the influence of subaltern studies), memory studies, and issues surrounding authorial voice. Each of these discussions draws effectively on existing studies, and points to the text's divergences from and contributions to a wide body of scholarship. The chapter devoted to questions of authorial voice is particularly compelling given the complex relationship between the authors. Gold is Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Syracuse University and Gujar is Headmaster of a Middle School in Rajasthan. The English-language text is composed by Gold, while both Gujar and Gold conducted a majority of the interviews transcribed in the text (in Hindi and Rajasthani). The care they give to elaborating the relationship between them—their varied influences on the course of research, interviews, and writing—gives depth to the reader's understanding of both the process of this work and the resulting monograph. Despite the careful attention they devote to describing the nature of this collaboration, however, Gold's voice permeates the text more obviously than Gujar's. This, perhaps, is inevitable given the language of the text and the broader theoretical literature with which it engages (which is principally in English).

The last six chapters of the book are largely devoted to ethnographic accounts of life in Princely and post-independence Sawar. These are interspersed with limited archival research that provides further context for the interviewees' responses to questions about begar (unpaid labor), courtly punishment, revenue demands, access to natural resources in princely/colonial Sawar, and the political and environmental circumstances in which they live in postcolonial India. Through these chapters the authors illustrate one of their central concerns: that for the residents of Sawar the benefits of democracy are inextricably tied to detrimental changes in their environment. The presentation of ethnographic material is coupled with detailed analysis that successfully links the discussion, grounded in its local context, to the broader intellectual themes with which the work is concerned.

In the Time of Trees and Sorrows, given the detail of its ethnographic account, its careful analysis, and its engagement with a broad array of intellectual currents, will be valuable to students of anthropology, history, the study of memory, and environmental and ecological studies. This book was awarded the A. K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize (for English-language work on South Asian Studies) by the Association of Asian Studies in March 2004, and, as this suggests, its will also interest many readers outside of these fields.