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Paper short abstract:

Enduring influence of British Empire in South Asia has led to environmental shifts that persist post-independence, posing recent challenges. Cultural symbiosis between humans and environment, exemplified by movements i.e, Chipko Andolan, stands in contrast to incongruous inter. legal frameworks.

Paper long abstract:

The enduring legacy of the British Empire in South Asia has engendered profound environmental shifts and institutional practices, persisting through the post-independence era and actively contributing to contemporary ecological challenges. These dynamics stand in stark contrast to the culturally interdependent relationship between human and non-human elements, which remains a vital facet of regional identity. Movements like the Chipko Andolan in post-independence India and the legal recognition of rivers as legal persons in Bangladesh exemplify this cultural symbiosis. While at the state level, the convergence of colonial legacies with climate crises, geopolitical exigencies, and burgeoning populations has exacerbated these fault lines, at the individual level, culturally imprinted identities continue to uphold this symbiotic rapport.

An illuminating illustration of this interplay can also be gleaned through a re-evaluation of literary narratives, of the indigenous stories of tribal communities, as Giles Deleuze elucidates in the context of their "political aim." This dynamic encounters a complex challenge in the form of incongruous international legal frameworks, which inadequately capture the post-colonial cultural identities of the Global South, particularly South Asia. This predicament is compounded by an intransigent call to halt economic progress rather than to promote collaborative approaches.

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Paper short abstract:

India has emphasized urea-spreading smallholders are central to soil decline and nitrogen/carbon overshoot. I call for a more sympathetic view of synthetic nitrogen, arguing that urea vilification sidesteps core questions about the politics of planetary change across global and national scales.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last several years the Indian government has promulgated a vision of chemical free agriculture in India, and particularly focused on farmer self-made alternatives to synthetic nitrogen (i.e., urea), which the government heavily subsidizes for the Indian farmer. Arguing that natural farming is central to address planetary overshoot in both nitrogen/phosphorus flows and atmospheric carbon, it identifies the Indian farmer (a smallholder, to be sure) as a crucial actor in protecting mother earth from modernist decline that comes with “indiscriminate” chemical fertilizer use. This paper draws on ethnographic research and textual analysis to analyze government calls for a form of farmer "lifestyle environmentalism" as a particularly potent form of neoliberal environmentalism that differs from Gandhian notions of self-reliance in the spatialities and temporalities of social change, collectivization, and care. It places this rhetoric within a global politics of responsibility for planetary boundary overshoot and argues the nation-state, as a colonial invention, is an inadequate spatial scale to resolve global environmental injustices - arguing that attempts to destabilize geopolitical hierarchies can come at the expense of reinforcing 'domestic' ones. While debating the politics of responsibility around biogeochemical flows and soil resources, I argue for a more sympathetic treatment of the role synthetic nitrogen might play in sustaining soil-based economies like agriculture and ask how environmental “crises” can do the work of politics in electoral democracies like India.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at how British expansion projects to the mountains of South Asia, especially to Western Ghats resulted in the formation of hybrid knowledge and the reorganization of the natural world, including both non-human and human lives and the role played by tribal and non-tribal populations

Paper long abstract:

The paper looks at how British expansion projects to mountains of South Asia resulted in the formation of hybrid knowledge and the reorganization of the natural world, including both non-human and human populations. The paper focuses on the native lives of the Western Ghats, particularly the region parallel to the Malabar coast, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Western Ghats are a mountain chain with tropical evergreen forests and home to various endemic faunal and floral species, home to hundreds of Adivasi communities, and one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world. Along the lines of Richard Grove and scholars, the paper looks at modern forms of knowledge were not the product of “northwest Europe” but emerged as a result of global encounters across different colonies rather than as a unique fruit of Enlightenment, with the resulting knowledge being hybrid in nature. The paper will trace back both the role played by non-tribal and tribal populations in understanding the extent of the natural world of the Western Ghats and the impacts of colonial/global knowledge transfer on indigenous lives and ecologies. The paper will also try to trace back the forgotten tribal voices that were often missing/drifted in the state-centered postcolonial archives. I will use both South Asian and colonial sources, including oral testimonies, folklore, travel diaries, personal letters, official correspondences, and others, to have a collective understanding of various historical actors.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper attempts to understand how environmental histories of resource politics in this region can move away from conventional histories of ecological change by a focus on how different spatial entities moulded and re-ordered landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to examine how imperatives for the expansion of colonial capital led to the quest for and contestations over natural resources in the Northeast frontier of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It attempts to understand how environmental histories of resource politics in this region can move away from conventional histories of ecological change by a focus on how different spatial entities moulded and re-ordered landscapes. These include moving beyond the colonial archive to visual and textual material produced by anthropologists. Locating the dynamics of colonial trading encounters and resource politics within the intersection of historical studies, critical geographical studies and more-than-human anthropology enables conversations around how the flows of commodities and people shaped the social geography of the region. These include British political officers, migrant traders, indigenous communities, anthropologists who navigated these spaces. The paper attempts to move beyond the confines of empire to understand how the region that encompasses present day Bhutan-Assam-Arunachal Pradesh borders were framed as resource frontiers. These include competition and control over resources such as rubber, timber and of course tea. The project thus tries to demonstrate how mediations among these different actors has been understood and framed in various sources and sees these processes as fluid and being continuously renegotiated rather than static instances of conflict and resistance that conventional histories offer us. In doing so, it seeks to chart the trajectories of resource politics on the fringes of empire, and its consequences thereof.