Speaker: Dr. Aparajita Majumdar, Brown University
Outline: This talk 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. The region’s 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 botanical, meteorological, and colonial administrative archives with ethnographic interviews, this talk reaches for a natureculture worldmaking in the Khasi hills that endured amid colonial violence and extreme weather conditions.
Speaker Bio: Aparajita Majumdar is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She is an environmental historian specializing in failed commodity crops, climate change, borderlands, and heritage in South Asia. Her current book project, Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland, studies how Ficus elastica, a ‘failed’ rubber crop from the plantations of nineteenth-century British India, became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the Khasi hills of India-Bangladesh borderlands. She earned a doctorate in History from Cornell University, an MPhil in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and an MA in History from the University of Delhi. Aparajita spent the first eighteen years of her life in Assam and continues to maintain residence in the region.