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Paper short abstract

I examine how contemporary efforts to revitalize endangered silk plantations in Assam–through technoscientific interventions, land reforms, and sustainability schemes–reshape multispecies landscapes, producing new forms of (im)mobility and sovereignty while unevenly sustaining agrarian commons.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research across plantation and agricultural landscapes, laboratories, and governmental institutions in Northeast India, this paper examines contemporary efforts to revitalize Muga silk production in the state of Assam as projects of sustaining agrarian commons under conditions of ecological, economic, and political polarization in the region. I show how technoscientific interventions, land reforms, and sustainability schemes rework nineteenth-century plantation expertise into new regimes of environmental governance that alternately enclose and sustain fragile multispecies landscapes.

Rather than treating Muga silk as an emblem of regional heritage or peasant tradition, the paper traces the life of a biotic resource—silkworms, host trees, soils, and human labor—whose survival depends on precarious relations of care, access, and mobility. In agrarian zones in these eastern Himalayan borderlands, where agricultural commons and forest land continue to shrink despite formal land reforms, silk landscapes emerge as contested sites where indigenous communities negotiate the conditions under which human and nonhuman lives can endure. Attending to the everyday struggles of farmers and their interface with plantation managers, and state institutions, I argue plantations are continually reterritorialized through conservation regimes and development projects that recast land as a site of ecological risk and regulatory intervention. These processes often produce uneven possibilities for multispecies survival while also generating practices of repair that partially reconfigure agrarian commons without resolving the structural inequalities that threaten them. The paper argues that silkworm plantations function less as stable infrastructures of extraction than as unstable assemblages through which life is collectively maintained, contested, and remade.