Contribution short abstract:

A Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ governs the historic mines of Patkai foothills marked by the presence of the ‘absence of state’ where accusations of violating a biodiversity hotspot is counteracted by upgrading the remaining stretches of India’s only lowland evergreen rainforest to a ‘paper park’.

Contribution long abstract:

When B.C. Allen penned the gazetteer of Lakhimpur a seemingly nondescript district nestled in the then colonial province of Assam in British India’s North Eastern region, he mentioned the presence of damp and dreadful tropical rainforests in the south eastern corner of the province’s Brahmaputra valley in the foothills of the Patkai mountain range that acts as the international boundary between India and Myanmar. The location of these very forests would later see the creation of the first resource frontier for the region as the wilderness made way for the setting up of oil rigs, coal mines and tea plantations which I have termed as the ‘Patkai rainforest frontier’. As the settlements of indigenous tribal communities amidst these forests became the ‘workscapes’ of British industrial capital, the historical mines of Patkai were set up around the newly created town of Margherita which prided itself as the ‘coal queen’. The first colliery which started in 1882 at nearby Ledo would eventually be followed by seven others which saw the use of advanced technologies of extraction. Post independence as the colonial era infrastructure laid in ruins at the turn of the 21st century, an aggressive and chaotic rush now takes over the mining landscape in a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ where the presence of the ‘absence of state’ and the accusations of violating a biodiversity hotspot is counteracted by upgrading the last stretches of India’s last lowland evergreen rainforest to a ‘paper park’ whereby the production of nature is governed purely by the logic of capital accumulation.