ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Earthly Rural: Colonial State-Making and ‘Opacity’ of Nature-Culture Worlds in the Rainiest Place on Earth

• In Event: Beyond 'Botany': Plant Knowledges across South Asia

English Abstract

The paper draws on plant-human-climate histories in the borderlands of British India to theorize the concept of an ‘earthly rural.’ Moving beyond binary representations of the rural world as either forested/wild or agrarian/domesticated, an ‘earthly rural’ reaches for an ‘opaque’ natureculture world in the Khasi hills and Sylhet floodplains (presently India-Bangladesh borderlands) that remained inaccessible to colonial-capitalist logics of statemaking. In 1832, English East India Company established its headquarters in the Khasi hills in Cherrapunji (known presently as Sohra). As a rural hamlet in the hills, close to the bazaars of Sylhet, Cherrapunji seemed like the perfect hill station to the colonial administration. Its cool subtropical climate offered respite from the hot and humid floodplains below. Its biodiversity in plants and minerals made it a botanical curiosity and a strategic hold for extracting resources. However, just a few years after its establishment, this seemingly perfect place turned ominous. Incessant rains, steep terrains, unknowable plant-human infrastructures, and Indigenous guerilla leaders made Cherrapunji recalcitrant to colonial governance. By combining archival research with ethnographic interviews, the paper reaches for a natureculture worldmaking in the rainiest place on earth amid colonial political violence and resource extraction

Author

• Aparajita Majumdar, Brown University