Recalcitrance: Co-laboring Histories of Humans and Plants in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands
Aparajita Majumdar, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society, Brown University
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
This talk analyzes how a failed rubber crop from the plantations of British India became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous ecologies in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. While a growing body of scholarship focuses on plants that became profitable within plantation histories, this study instead examines how failed commodity crops like Ficus elastica, locally known as Jri Bamon in the Khasi hills of northeast India, exhibited recalcitrance to a range of state and scientific regimes. The concept of “recalcitrance” is introduced as an interspecies co-laboring between humans and plants that historically remained unknowable to botanical and capitalist practices emerging in a colonial context.
Drawing on archival and ethnographic insights, the analysis first explores the recalcitrant growth patterns of Jri Bamon within the rubber plantations of Assam in British India. It then turns to the ways in which the War Khasi communities of the India-Bangladesh borderlands have historically relied on Jri Bamon’s recalcitrance to construct unique infrastructures of mobility known as “living root bridges” across steep and slippery gorges. As environmental disasters intensify in the Khasi hills due to limestone and coal mining, and as the living root bridges have been nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status, this study considers what forms of working-class-Indigenous activism might emerge from these recalcitrant plant-human worlds.
About our speaker: Aparajita Majumdar is Majumdar is an environmental historian specializing in failed commodity crops, multispecies ethnography, climate change, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage in South Asia. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.