O
il, coal, and tea have induced an endemic cycle of militarization, violence, and extraction and dramatically transformed the landscape and livelihoods of diverse groups of people who inhabit a resource-rich border world in Northeast India. The extraction of these resources is tied to long histories of external and internal colonizations and shapes the identities, relations, and politics of various actors. In Living with Oil and Coal, Dolly Kikon investigates how these high-value natural resources define nature-state-society relations and index histories of dispossession and struggles for self-determination in Northeast India. In the process, she takes us to the everyday and intimate spaces of oil rigs, coal plants, tea plantations, government offices, peoples’ homes, and other sites of social gathering to tell the interwoven stories of a range of people—geoengineers, planners, miners, laborers, farmers, traders, politicians, insurgents, security forces. Through rich ethnographic storytelling, she shows that ordinary stories of love and intimacy provide extraordinary insights into broader questions of sociality, politics, and aspirations, particularly as they relate to the role of high-value natural resources in shaping nature-state-society relations in Northeast India.
The book is too vast and rich to be covered in a review. I will pick up on what came across as a few of its salient features and central themes. The first is Kikon’s skillful exploration of how ordinary people make their livelihoods in such hostile political economies. She highlights intimate stories and place-making practices of a range of people that transpire from within and despite ongoing processes of extraction, militarization, and the permanent state of emergency in the region. Through stories of people, she demonstrates that geographies of hope and aspirations intertwine with geographies of marginalization. The hopes and aspirations she portrays are unromantic in that they are ambivalent and fragile. Their contours are simultaneously stretched and limited by the (post)colonial present. Although the perpetual conditions of violence and extractivism continually extinguish every flicker of hope and aspirations, it is the f[r]iction of hopes and aspirations that propels the drive to live and survive. Such is the cruel optimism of extractivism or the colonial present more generally. While I appreciate this take, I also wondered whether (or not) there have been any local imaginations and struggles for a more just post-extractivist future in which coal and oil are not just commodities to be extracted for profit but vital parts of the land that sustain human and nonhuman life.
Kikon doesn’t answer this question directly, but her analysis of living with extractivism is incisive. Organized or collective efforts towards a more autonomous future in the Northeast remains essential. Yet she is perhaps hinting that no sweeping revolutions can undo the entrenched violence of resource extractivism and state-making. Instead, she suggests that the most viable and radical option available for most foothill residents has been to cultivate an art of “living with” oil and coal, the overarching framework of this book that refers to the inventive ways diverse groups of people navigate and make do with their lives that are inescapably defined by oil and coal within the overlapping and competing sovereignties of tribal groups and insurgents, the states of Assam and Nagaland, and the central Indian state. “Living with” is a nuanced analysis of everyday survival and resistance that is attentive to the unexpected workings of entangled state power and how multiple overlapping identities and interests emerge through everyday resource use and political struggles. In addition to foregrounding various embodied realities, intimate relations, and textured human stories of the contested landscape, Kikon also gestures more subtly towards how the materiality of these critical resources shape the foothills as a landscape. Oil and coal sometimes escape human expropriation when their deposits or mines eludes explorers and investors (Chap 6). The materiality of coal is also palpable when workers “felt coal through their senses” (p. 123) in the serpentine tunnels. Likewise, the ruins of an “oily landscape” (pg.124) continue to find unexpected afterlives in the landscape, people’s houses, and scrap metal factories. Oil and coal thus not only shape the terms of their own extraction but also structure the social lives and relations that constitute the landscape.
I read the book while I was conducting my dissertation field research on resource governance, indigeneity and state building in Dolpo, my home and field site. It served as an excellent guide for thinking through research that are simultaneously grounded in Indigenous methodologies and ways of knowing and attentive to the broader political economic structures. The juxtaposition of oral literature, folk stories and ethnographic storytelling with structural analysis distinguishes the narrative of the book. Kikon insists that oral literature, such as the legend of the Ahom King gifting paan to the Phoms who offered him refuge, constitutes “an integral part of the political economy” (pg. 15). Local legends and stories serve as a cultural framework of place-making and enable the residents to make sense of and shape interactions and tensions between the hill and plains communities. The origin myths about the two brothers and their divergent yet linked destinies speak to contemporary networks of alliance and mobility regarding resource control and access along the hill-valley continuum. The legend of Dalimi, a Naga woman married to Gadapani, an Ahom (Assamese) king – helps forge alternative communal histories of intimacy and a shared past, as well as challenges the exclusionary politics of ethnic purity.
For the foothill residents, oral literature and stories are, therefore, world-making devices that allow them to challenge dominant history and make sense of the landscape that is produced by resource extraction, exclusion, and violence. Kikon’s analysis of the interlinkages of legends and folk stories with political economy shows a way of producing knowledge that centers Indigenous knowledge, methods, and struggles in understanding political ecologies of nature-state-society relations. Kikon treats Indigenous knowledge neither as a form of scientific data nor as a static body of knowledge that is past-oriented. Instead, she takes them as dynamic ways of knowing that are inevitably shaped by and speak to current questions of socioenvironmental change. This approach to Indigenous knowledge is not bothered by the question of its authenticity nor the fear of loss; knowledge interweaves with everyday lives and is produced through people’s relational enactments on land. It is evident that Kikon’s multi-linguistic and cultural fluency in the region has enabled such deep engagement with local ways of knowing. Critical awareness of her distinct positionality and open engagement with pluralistic knowledge and methods make this book valuable, especially for Indigenous scholars researching resource extraction and governance in Indigenous territories.
As a central affective framework, Kikon employs morom to understand the relationship between intimacy and territoriality and the role of gender and body in the politics of space. Acts of morom, which are defined based on masculine notions of ethnic purity and are disproportionately mapped onto women’s bodies, become integral to land ownership and access to resources. As such, tribal authorities strive to construct and maintain the myth of ethnic purity as the basis of their claims to resources by policing women’s bodies and perceived acts of transgression. Stories of morom demonstrate that intimate relations and the scale of the body are central to political economy and the operation of power. Security surveillance and military infrastructures throughout the region contain the everyday mobilities and interactions of people who navigate the sovereign powers of multiple authorities that compete for legitimacy through acts of affection or violence. While readers might easily assume that “the state” in zones of exception, such as the Northeast, always operates as a coherent body of sovereign power that distinguishes itself by inflicting moments of direct violence, Dr. Kikkon shows that everyday sovereignty in Northeast India is also “produced through performances that are ritualistic, public, spectacular, mundane, and violent” (p. 66). Dr. Kikkon thus uses morom as an analytic to understand the operations of overlapping and contested sovereignties in intimate everyday spaces.
Morom also captures a common language for foothill residents to describe their multifaceted relationship with the state. The use of love and affect to analyze development as an operation of power that reinforces social inequality and produces state space is insightful and innovative. State love—marked by development gifts such as food, vehicles, water trucks, roads, and radio programs—is commonly understood to have been concentrated in the Nagaland hills, where a long colonial legacy of defining hill purity and state protection governs present-day state-society relations. In contrast, corruption and development failures characterize state neglect in the adjacent foothill villages of Nagaland. State love thus serves as an apt concept to understand “the state” not solely as a monolithic sovereign body of violence but also as the mediator of everyday lives that constructs the feeling of being cared for or neglected altogether. This approach provides distinct insights into how the state consolidates its power and legitimacy through actions and processes that are at once intimate and distant, mundane and spectacular!
Phurwa D Dolpopa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia
