1st Edition
Capital and Ecology Developmentalism, Subjectivity and the Alternative Life-Worlds
This volume studies the intersection of capital and ecology primarily in one of the most sensitive geographies of the world, the Eastern Himalayan region. It looks at how the region has become a melting ground of neoliberal developmentalism and ecological subjectivities with the penetrating forces of global and state capitalism, economic projects, and complex power relations. The essays in the volume argue that specific focus on energy infrastructure and energy production has pushed technology and capital towards asset building which has had an adverse effect on the environment, labour relations, indigenous knowledge systems, and traditional livelihood practices in the area. They look at assets like mega dams, electricity transmission networks, natural gas grids, infrastructural and developmental projects, and other alternative ventures which require interventions in the natural world and its resource deposits.
Interdisciplinary in approach, the volume adopts a variety of lenses — developmentalism, state strategy, indigenous voices, geopolitics, and environmentalism — to provide a unique and alternative narrative on the various dimensions of the ecological risks and livelihood threats. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, development studies, indigenous studies, and Asian studies.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Section I: Growth Epistemology, Environmental Conjunctures
1. Money, Capital, Power and Nature
Andrew Sheng and Sneha Poddar
2. Economic Growth and Ecological Conundrum
Rakhee Bhattacharya
3. Conflict Over Climate: Trajectory of Environmental Historiography in Northeastern Region of India
Sajal Nag
4. Hardwoods and the British Empire in Assam: Sal and Teak in the Age of Colonialism, 1850s-1940s
Arupjyoti Saikia
Section II: Developmentalism, Extractive Economy and Ecomusculinity
5. Ecological Ruptures in the Eastern Himalaya: The Political Economy of Hydropower Development in Arunachal Pradesh
Deepak K. Mishra
6. “Why the Caged Bird Sings”: Resource Capture and Resistance in the China-Myanmar Borderlands
Nimmi Kurian
7. Ecomusculinity in the Neoliberal Era: Case of Eastern Himalaya and its Degrading Ecology
Anup Shekhar Chakraborty
Section III: Capita, Subjectivities and Human/Non-Human Responses
8. Subjective Capital, Adaptive Capitalism and the Enduring Human-Nature Response
G. Amarjit Sharma
9. Where is the Geopolitical? More-Than-Human Politics, Polities and Poetics in the Bhutan Highlands
Jelle J. Wouters
10. Secret Landscapes, Capitalist Encroachment and the Wrath of the Gods
Subhadra Mitra Channa
11. Buddhism, Animal Ethics, and Environmentalism
Swargajyoti Gohain
12. Ethno-ecologism and the Politics of New Citizenship in India’s Northeast
Samir Kumar Das
13. Work, Women, and Landscape in the Himalayas
Meera Baindur
Section IV: Rights, Regulations and Alternatives
14. Nature’s Rights: Alternatives to the Conventional Frame
Govind Bhattacharjee
15. Advancing People’s Development Alternatives in Asia
Jiten Yumnam
16. Traditional Livelihoods, Diversifications and Sustainable Alternatives
Sikha Dutta
Index
Biography
Rakhee Bhattacharya is Associate Professor at Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She was an Endeavour Post-doctoral fellow in Australia and has worked and taught in other institutes across the country. Her areas of research are political economy, development economics, regional economy, transnational economy and geo-economics, poverty and inequality, geopolitics, India’s Northeast and its neighbourhood. She has authored Development Disparities in Northeast India (2011) and Northeastern India and its Neighbours: Negotiating Security and Development (2015). In addition, she has edited a number of volumes and has written many articles in both national and international journals. She is a regular columnist in The Statesman. Her latest edited volumes are Regional Development and Public Policy Challenges in India (2015) and Developmentalism as Strategy: Interrogating Post-colonial Narratives on North East India (2019).
G. Amarjit Sharma is Assistant Professor at the Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. His latest (edited) book, State vs. Society in Northeast India: History, Politics and the Everyday Life, was published in July 2021. His works are published in the journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Peace Print: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Eastern Anthropologist, Man in India.
