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ndia’s Northeast region, comprising eight states including Nagaland and Assam – the focus of anthropologist Dolly Kikon’s powerful ethnographic work Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019), has often been imagined and written about as an exotic and unruly periphery, marked by secessionist tendencies and strong cultural and linguistic affiliations to Tibet and Southeast Asia. Kikon situates the fears and fantasies cast upon the region within the complex substructures—geologic, affective, embodied—governing the lives and livelihoods of the diverse populations who inhabit the carbon rich states of Nagaland and Assam. Here, extractive oil and coal industries have resulted in decades of violence and strife, fracturing generations of kinship ties and historical bonds between the communities who call this place home. Kikon traces the fraught history of resource exploration and extraction and how it pits Assamese and Naga communities against each other, despite shared oral histories of brotherhood and a love of the landscape. Alongside fractured relations, we find a new set of social and political relations and visions of the future being forged through extractive industries of coal in Nagaland and oil in Assam. 

For geographers unfamiliar with Dolly Kikon, a prominent Indigenous scholar from the Lotha tribe of Nagaland, a brief introduction is necessary. Prior to obtaining her doctoral degree in anthropology from Stanford, Dolly worked as a human rights lawyer and a community-based rights activist in India. Focusing on land rights among Indigenous communities in Northeast India, her advocacy work dealt extensively with the special constitutional provisions dealing with autonomy for Indigenous lands and customary rights. Her human rights advocacy work continues to focus on repealing the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), an extra constitutional regulation that provides impunity to armed forces in India. As an engaged anthropologist, Dolly is one of the lead researchers for the Recover, Restore and Decolonize (RRaD) initiative – a community-led movement to start dialogues on the repatriation of Naga ancestral human remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Her advocacy work and deep commitment to and familiarity with the region, shine through in the book and in Dolly’s intellectual impulses that provide crucial insights into questions of citizenship, indigeneity, gender, and resource politics in contemporary India. 

From early on, Kikon grounds us in the mundane violence and temporal rhythms of an extractive landscape home not only to oil refineries and coal mines but also tea and timber plantations. Since the discovery of petroleum in 1867, Assam’s regional identity has been shaped by the contentious politics of oil and natural gas exploration and extraction. With the exception of its six autonomous territories, the Indian state has complete ownership over all natural resources and minerals in Assam. There is a strong sense among local communities that the Indian state has exploited Assam’s hydrocarbon resources without an equitable distribution of profits and oil royalties – a sentiment that has fueled insurgent groups like the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Just across the state border in Nagaland, special constitutional provisions for tribal majority territories recognize customary practices and titles over natural resources like coal, which means unlike Assam, the community has ownership over the subterranean. This sets up what Kikon refers to a triadic state (Assam, Nagaland, India), with local residents especially those crossing borders, having to carefully navigate each sovereign power as they exert authority over specific territories and extractive industries, often, in ways that lead to conflicts and frictions especially in the dry winter months when coal mining takes place. 

Scholars of political ecology specifically of South and Southeast Asia will be familiar with the spatial demarcation of upland/lowland, hill/valley, and their racialized underpinnings and effects (Forsyth and Walker 2011; Scott 2009). This attention to topography features in and informs Kikon’s analysis, for instance, in how communities think of the state in the language of morom (love) and “state love” as geographically contained in the hills, never trickling down to the foothills. Yet, the power of this book lies in its ability to vividly conjure and theorize how multiple actors experience the foothills – the liminal space between the hills and the valley, as “simultaneously dangerous and desirable” (10). Oral histories, origin mythologies, and local legends inform these relations to both land and others, understood as fractured and in need of mending. The foothills with their liminality, enable “different claims of legitimacy and belonging…(creating) a history that is produced every day in the absence of a recorder, an archive, or photographic documentation.” (44). In this Kikon, offers a sharp insight into both the fragility of these claims but also what might escape both state and scholarly attention. The Assam-Nagaland foothills, far from being merely a “geological and political space” – a reference to the geological maps that aid oil and coal extraction and the jagged edges of crisscrossing international and state lines, are a “thriving space of symbols, meanings, and people’s accounts and connections with the land.” (14)  

The Indian state looms in these accounts as a “militaristic entity” but also as petulant and withholding its “love” especially from those in the foothills. Along with Dolly’s theorization of the foothills, the politics of love in relation to land, intimate relations, and the state, encapsulated in the word morom – is another key theoretical contribution of the book that will resonate in other contexts where the violence of extraction along with ecological degradation has hardened cultural and political boundaries of territory, ethnic difference, and kinship ties. 

It is my great pleasure to host this book review forum, which emerged from a session at the 2023 American Association of Geographers meeting in Denver, Colorado, where fellow geographers engaged with Dolly’s book. Their responses to the book are followed by an author’s response from Dolly. Andrew Curley, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Arizona sees Dolly’s work contributing to scholarship on carbon as a social and material that fuels both state and ordinary people’s desires and fantasies. Andrea Nightingale, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo reflects on key themes from Dolly’s work – border crossings, the violence of multiple extractive regimes, and how land use shapes identity and belonging. Phurwa Dolpopa, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, highlights Dolly’s work as a model for scholarship that centers Indigenous knowledge and methods in theorizations of political economy and political ecology. Tyler McCreary, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Florida State University, shows how Dolly’s focus on the foothills challenges hill/valley dichotomies, bringing to life an embodied and emplaced account of resource politics in the borderlands. And finally, Sara Smith, Professor in the Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill, attends to how Dolly’s theorization of morom provides us new understanding of the intimate and affective dimensions of extractive industries, state projects, and geopolitical relations to territory. Together, these reviews reflect the novel theoretical insights and ethnographic methods in Dolly’s work and invite geographers and scholars of resource politics and indigeneity to engage with it in their own research and teaching.

References:

Forsyth, Tim and Andrew Walker, 2011. Forest guardians, forest destroyers: the politics of environmental knowledge in northern Thailand. University of Washington Press.

Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.

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Mabel Denzin Gergan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies atVanderbilt University

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