D

olly Kikon’s book, Living with Oil & Coal explores the layered and lived experiences of India’s northeast tribal and Indigenous peoples who find themselves entangled in coal and oil production. It is a story of community conflict, citizenship, and ultimately state formation. Kikon is a thoughtful writer, but also a careful ethnographer. Her book is a rich and detailed study that tells us the multiple ways resources shape the lives of people. It is not a book telling us about coal production or oil exploration, or the meaning of hydrocarbons for India, it is about how the contested meaning of these ideas structure the lives of peoples and communities captured in the definitions of these things, where coal is, and how India covets it, how oil can enrich the peoples whose lands are found above it, and how the state sees this region as a site of military control and violent police repression. 

The book starts in 2009 at the border of Assam and Nagaland, among coal traders making their way through a security check point and the book ends with a violent shakedown at one of these checkpoints. The work demonstrates the nature of citizenship for people at the margins of India’s imperial claims, it’s furthermost frontier far from the capital cities, tourist attraction, and sites of Hindu cultural production. At the frontiers of the state, citizenship, and broader “social relations … are forged through a web of oil and coal mining activities, against the backdrop of a militarized extractive economy,” (pg. 7). As Kikon writes, these are carbon connections, and these connections inform carbon citizenship. 

Kikon’s book is among a few historical and ethnographic work that focuses on the idea of “carbon” as a social and material force, one that has the capability to structure the worlds we inhabit (Mitchell 2011; Seow 2022; Curley 2023). There are clear material interests involved. Powerful states’ violent drive for resources isn’t a new phenomenon. It informs how we think about imperialism, colonialism, and settler colonialism. Yet, what is useful here is the date of the work; 2009, an era of energy transition, post-Kyoto world when the world is supposed to be phasing out carbon intensive energy sources. 

Here we have documentation, empirical evidence of the opposite, of a powerful state enforcing a regime of resource extraction. Carbon is not just a feature of energy production, something that state lawmakers, economists, and engineers are trying to phase out, but it is also an expanded feature of our social world. Kikon’s book focuses on the latter, how some of us are marked as carbon citizens. As Kikon concludes in the Introduction, “contestations over issues of citizenship, sovereignty, and ethnic alliances in a militarized land were tied to extraction and flows of natural resources, which defined relations and shaped the outline of a carbon future” (pg. 27). The book isn’t a critique from afar against the forces of colonialism and violence inherent in resource politics, it’s grounded in the experiences of the people who deal with resources, the people whose hand get dirty from handling coal. They don’t define themselves as victims of these processes, but like many Indigenous peoples are hyper aware of the wily ways of colonial overseers, their capriciousness, and intoxicated resort to violence. Kikon tells us a story of land and narratives that inform the local political geographies, where community boundaries are more important than state boundaries. As she writes, “contrary to the perceptions of state officials in Assam and Nagaland, of Indian security forces who view the foothill border through the prism of law enforcement, for residents it’s a place where social histories and communities change every four miles” (pg. 44). 

As one might be able to tell at this point, Kikon’s book isn’t simply about coal and oil, or even extraction, it is also about state formation – how the state manifests in remote regions. The subtitle refers to “northeast India” but in the forward, K. Sivaramakrishnan calls it a “political frontier”, and this is how I was imagining the region. Kikon advances a fascinating idea, one that come directly out of her fieldnotes, the concept of “love,” or morom shaping people’s impressions of how the state functions in these places, in the hills or in the foothills. The emotional salience of love, state love or what people think the state loves, shapes political subjectivity and citizenship. Love isn’t just about desire or longing, but also feelings of abandonment. Again and again, Kikon finds her informants contextualizing political priorities in the language of love. She writes: “whether a village fell under the jurisdiction of Nagaland or Assam, residents had similar complaints. They often said that the state’s love was trapped either in the hills of Nagaland or in the Brahmaputra Valley” (pg. 64).

There is more to say about marketplaces, kinship, and coal that are found in the text, but by way of conclusion let’s focus on another important insight from the book, it’s play with people’s ideas and fantasies about the future. Hydrocarbons figure into these prominently. Perhaps it is our ever changing understand of what carbon will do to us or for us in the future that most informs our present-day responses to it; whether to dig for coal and oil or propose reduction in carbon emissions. As Kikon writes, “oil and natural gas fantasies play a large role in the everyday desires and traumas of militarized communities engaged in resource extraction” (pg. 120). This has to do with the layered jurisdiction in sites of extraction, where the state claimed ownership over coal and oil in Assam, oil and gas development in Nagaland benefits private landowners. This difference accounts for fantasies of financial windfall coming to village households if they strike oil. In a broader sense, coal, oil, and love from the state are fantasies, and this book shows how we consistently think hydrocarbon resources are going to improve our lives despite the fact they keep letting us down. 

References

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London; New York: Verso. Print. 

Seow, Victor. 2022. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2022. Print.

Curley, Andrew. 2023 Carbon sovereignty: coal, development, and energy transition in the Navajo Nation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Print.

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Andrew Curley is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Arizona, and author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation.