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iving with Oil and Coal explores the historical trajectories and everyday realities for people living in a conflict ridden, extractivist zone in north-eastern India. It takes the reader on a journey to experience the entangled meanings of subjectivities and ecological zones, of public authority and extraction of fossil fuels, tea, and labor, showing how simple stories of this region gloss over everyday experience. It is a narrative that could only have been written by Kikon, who speaks several of the local languages and has herself embodied experience of moving between some of the different worlds that transect this part of north-eastern India. Several themes tie together the narrative, here I will focus on borders, the production of subjectivities and authority.
Northeastern India is represented as a borderland, with parts of the foothills and highlands of Assam and Nagaland adjacent to India’s borders with Bhutan and Myanmar. The area has long featured in the state’s political imaginary as a region of unruliness. The Indian state has tried to tap and tame the region, promoting tea plantations, extracting coal and oil; Kikon shows how such efforts have come with militarization, dispossession, civil conflict, land disputes and migration. Fractured subjectivities and landscapes are co-emergent with the borders that are erected around coal and oil extraction. These overlay older fractures first created by tea estates during colonial rule and reinforced by patterns of seasonal and more permanent migration of people seeking land, jobs and security from across north-eastern India. Insurgency led by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) has long had a stronghold in Assam and surrounding states, in part because of the state’s neglect of services and use of the region as a zone of extraction, both historically and into the present day. Simple stories of cause and effect or who started the conflict are belied by the personal stories of belonging, subjection, violence and desires for peace and development that Kikon relates. Insurgents have undermined the state’s claims to authority while private security attached to tea estates and oil installations similarly wield violence to stake their claims, meaning security is a central feature of any efforts to move through this region. The picture that emerges is one of overlapping authorities and a vastly different experience of the state for different people. Kikon’s analysis helps to show the personal and community experiences of state effects (Mitchell 1991), meaning the state cannot be treated as a consistent, monolithic entity. Rather, as the book shows brilliantly, authority emerges from efforts at boundary making, whether that be political, social or environmental (Nightingale 2018).
Border crossing is central to how communities are formed in Assam and Nagaland. State security check points are a constant feature of travel and are often not a simple case of opening one’s bag or showing identity papers. Instead, Kikon describes the suspicion, harassment and potential for arrest or physical violence that each check point represents. Claims to belonging are complex as the state looks with more suspicion on those who have deeper historical roots and kinship ties in the foothills, yet individuals can find security in some communities precisely through those claims to belonging. Private investments in oil similarly creates notions of insiders and outsiders, with security forces protecting oil drilling sites and tea estates profiling and categorising people. She recounts the harassment and torture suffered by a medical doctor in the early 1990s whose practice did not take into account where people came from or how their injuries were sustained, including treating insurgents. His care of people who needed it made him a target for interrogation by the security forces. Poignantly, Kikon shows that such acts are not past tense. Rather, under the guise of social responsibility, violence and dispossession, they continue apace. “For the Indian security forces, the bodies of the residents, or what the ONGC CSR [the Indian state’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Corporate Social Responsibility] officer called the “public”, were a site for making power, violence and authority.” (pg. 147). These complex identities of community, insider, outsider, and good citizen, insurgent, are emergent from land use, history, caste, ethnicity and occupation of land.
Interestingly, here it is the foothills, both as a location and communities with historical claims to the land, which are looked upon with the greatest suspicion by the state. In many other parts of South and Southeast Asia, it is the highlands which are the frontiers considered least governable by the state. In Assam and Nagaland, in contrast, the highlands are a refuge for those who can claim the right to live there. People from certain tribes are able to escape the violence and uncertainties of the foothills where security forces, migrant labor populations, insurgents and trade converge in a tapestry of spatial differentiation and land use. The borders themselves signal sites of struggle and a cementing or realignment of hegemonic social and political relations.
Land use, whether that be pastoralism, agriculture, or even coal extraction, is one way through which cultural identities and belonging to place are established. Gender shapes coal and oil extraction activities, with men overwhelmingly dominating trade, politics, private armies and insurgents. Navigating security check points, or gaining access to land is spatially segregated, and this segregation even at micro scales is paramount in framing identity. Kikon describes the everyday, embodied contestations over fluid and contested subjectivities such as people marrying out of their tribe, women working as coal traders, and people who are able to flee to the comparative peace of the highlands if they have the right kinship ties. Children of so-called mixed ethnic marriages are border crossers, disrupting easy claims to kinship, belonging and spatial segregation of different groups. Yet these same people find themselves targets of suspicion by all sides, needing to constantly engage in border crossing work for their personal security. Working the land is deeply rooted in claims to belonging, but coal and oil extraction encroach on women’s use of agricultural lands and push out local people if the potential for extraction is sufficiently large. The narrative overall provides poignant windows into the way commodity production and trading produce both peace and development as well as violence and dispossession.
Kikon’s story telling is deeply affective. Discussions of love, kinship and village relations, and aspirations of a better future are interspersed with stories of domestic violence and state torture. Domestic and gender violence serve to cement expectations of femininity and masculinity that are difficult for individuals to transcend. Efforts at constructing ethnic purity and community borders are violently policed by the state and community members, despite the fluid nature of kinship ties and settlement. These narrative shifts help the reader experience life in this region. Often emotionally jarring for the reader, the effect is profound. Kikon has managed to describe in words and create an affective response that comes closer to what it feels like to live everyday life in this region. Life is at times joyful, full of meaningful kinship ties, romance and hard work, and at other times environmental pollution, state and insurgent violence, and greed run over community ties. Her story telling reflects the rhythm of the diverse languages in which she originally heard them, and the narrative follows the paths Kikon tread to gain such a unique and deep understanding of a complex region. The region has long been saddled with expectations, fear and myths of a partially conquered frontier, Kikon’s narrative establishes a different kind of storytelling and produces a new imaginary for India’s northeastern borderlands.
References
Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” American Political Science Review 85 (1): 77–96
Nightingale, Andrea J. 2018. “The Socioenvironmental State: Political Authority, Subjects, and Transformative Socionatural Change in an Uncertain World.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (4): 688–711.
Andrea Nightingale is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo
