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iving with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India is a startlingly complex story of oil and coal in relation to lived experience and the land. Dolly Kikon is a careful writer, thinker, and person, and that comes through in every page of the book. Dolly shows us the power structures of state suppression, the complications of militarization, and the complexity of land disputes, but she never allows power structures to obscure people’s intentions and aspirations. I read and commented on the book in March of 2023 for the American Association of Geographers conference in Denver, Colorado. Four months later, several of Dolly’s concepts have lingered with me, shifting how I have perceived the world this summer as I traveled from North Carolina back up to Ladakh in the northwest of the Indian Himalaya. Dolly has given us questions that we can carry with us across worlds – questions that both illuminate the uneven differences we encounter and the need to place our understanding of planetary change in historical and political context, but also how certain kinds of questions now bind us together. Dolly’s book encourages us to ask ourselves:

How does carbon structure our relations to one another in ways that we may not fully realize?

And 

What does it mean to fall in love in a place like this? 

There is something both vivid and ordinary about Dolly’s ethnographic writing style that makes me feel as though I’m traveling with her across this unfamiliar-to-me landscape, as she notes the shifts in crops, the shifts in form that signal borders between Assam and Nagaland, between hills, valleys, foothills, between coal and oil land. The power of her writing is that she gives us this demarcation of hills and valleys and foothills as territorial and temporal and subject to their own rules and logics, but she never makes them exotic or remote or unruly; the tropes we are so accustomed to from much writing about this region. Dolly carefully emphasizes the physical landscape overlaid with what she calls the “triadic state landscape” (Assam, Nagaland, and India) landscape. She writes, “Social relations in the foothills of Assam are forged through a web of oil and coal mining activities, against the backdrop of a militarized extractive economy regime” (Kikon 2019:7). 

Oil extraction in Assam and coal mining in Nagaland shift the landscape between people – changing relations, networks, alliances and rivalries. In this context, carbon futures and carbon fantasies shape people’s present day lives, as they think of the world that carbon might make for them and their children – how do we prepare our children for this future? What language must they speak, who should they be? 

Dolly starts us with the story of how in the beginning of the world there were two brothers: the older Naga one, the younger Assamese, the Naga naïve, the Assamese shrewd: one ends up living in the mountains in a more wild landscape, one in the plains with an opulent life. This story sets up a complex familial relationship between coal traders of Assam and the Naga villages involved in coal mining, and the story of this book is a story of relationships between people, abundance and scarcity of different kinds, and the land. 

There is desire for the land there is a geology of desire, and then there are ways that people tell stories claiming the land. The chapter “Storytellers” beautifully illustrates not only how people want their memories kept and fear the ways that state records erase name and then claim to place, but also Dolly’s capacity for ethnography, to spend time waiting to see what story someone wants to tell her. Through this listening she can hear and share with us the nuanced and multiple strategies through which people claim land and belonging against the threats of time and the state. When the man she speaks with insists she attend to mistakes in the records and correct in particular the misspelling of his ancestor’s name, she sees that these small errors for him allow for the risk of greater errors – the possibility of losing disputed land to the state of Assam. In a reverberation of the kinship tale of conflicted brothers, here questions of kinship are tied to the possibility of loss and dispossession.  

Like “storytellers,” each chapter is a little of a revelation – as a chapter about difficult loves complicates love across the Naga concept of morom, which structures social relations – she writes, “in the foothills, affection and love are framed to iterate a cultural and political understanding of territoriality, violence, and power…often mapped onto women’s bodies” (Kikon 2019:45). The ways that some loves that are interethnic are defined as “not love” as part of social regulation is woven in with how in one man’s life, his relationship with his wife can begin from her English declaration using the word love, to his reflecting on their life together as morom. In tracing his life and how the English word love is a break in time that changes the course of his life to how morom comprises a different form of love that both binds him to his wife but also animates politics of ethnic difference, Dolly provided me with a different understanding of how to think of the politics of love: that love is not only structuring geopolitical relations to territory (which resonates with my book, Intimate geopolitics), but that geopolitical struggle also defines what love itself is.

This theorization of love is extended and complicated in the definition of “state loves,” the things the state does and does not do for your place and the ways this is tied to landscape, to agriculture, to coal, to elevation, is all a story about how people live when the state doesn’t love you. This helped me to think about the political work that love does more expansively. We find ourselves in a constellation of relationships of love and violence, both between the foothills and India but also within homes, families, villages, and within Assam. One of the most heart wrenching parts of the book for me was the one about raising children for an imagined carbon future. Children were made to speak only English, and wear signs saying they are a donkey for speaking Naga or other local languages. In this way, the land, relations, and children are being disciplined to fit a future that doesn’t arrive. Dolly teaches us to understand carbon as a substance that is subject to political entanglements but also makes them. 

Through these engagements, with laborers in the mine, with government workers, with husbands, with parents, and through her movement in the geologic landscape itself, Dolly brings us these questions that remain with me, and which we can use to animate new understandings of our own places: What does it mean to love in a place like this? And what is the political work of love in relation to land? What makes a border between land and people? How does carbon itself both structure our relations to one another? Lastly, by tracing the worlds that people imagine carbon can make, Dolly prompts us to ask, what kind of life do carbon fantasies about the future create for us in the present? 

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Sara H. Smith is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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