Aparajita Majumdar (Author)
Ghosh, Durba (Advisor)
Cornell University
Ghosh, Durba
Physical Details: 281
Language: English
I study a tree, botanically called Ficus elastica, that grows in the political borderlands of India and Bangladesh. F. elastica was identified as the ‘rubber tree’ in 1810 by the colonial botanists of British India. After being unsuccessful in extracting latex from the tree in the plantations of colonial Assam, the botanists discarded it as a ‘failed crop’. However, in the Khasi hills of Meghalaya, near the present-day India-Bangladesh borderlands, F. elastica holds socio-ecological significance as a ‘living root bridge’. The living root bridges are suspension bridges built by the Indigenous War Khasi and War Jaintia communities by weaving the aerial roots of the F. elastica across rivers and gorges. Existing for more than 200 years, these bridges form part of a generations-old network through which people and goods move across the deep gorges of the Meghalaya hills (India) into the unfenced floodplains of Bangladesh. In 2022, the living root bridges have been nominated for the UNESCO World Heritage Site by the Indian Government on account of their spectacular growth patterns. By combining archival research in India with ethnographic fieldwork in the India-Bangladesh borderlands, my dissertation studies the changing story of human-plant relations across colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous contexts. In doing so, I ask the overarching question: How do human-plant relations, articulated in Indigenous modes of being, subvert modernist regimes of control? I argue that there is a recalcitrance to the material growth pattern of the F. elastica, which although incomprehensible to the British botanists, was legible to the Indigenous War plant experts, who harnessed it to build literal and figurative bridges across human and nonhuman worlds. Today, as the living root bridges become sites of national and global heritage, my dissertation demonstrates the importance of ‘more-than-human’ ideas of heritage, expressed by Indigenous conservation societies dissenting against the state appropriation of these structures.
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