Contemporary South Asia
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsa20
Destroying one’s own home: resource frontiers
and indigenous governance in Northeast India
Bengt G. Karlsson
To cite this article: Bengt G. Karlsson (2022) Destroying one’s own home: resource frontiers
and indigenous governance in Northeast India, Contemporary South Asia, 30:2, 298-300, DOI:
10.1080/09584935.2022.2060344
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2022.2060344
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CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA
2022, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 298–300
https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2022.2060344
BOOK FORUM
Destroying one’s own home: resource frontiers and indigenous
governance in Northeast India
Bengt G. Karlsson
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah’s book In the Sovereignty; kinship;
Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum resource frontier; indigeneity
consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested and hybrid regimes
scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read
individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which
together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and
arguments in the book.
In In the Name of the Nation (2020) Sanjib Baruah returns to several issues discussed in his earlier
books (1999, 2005). Novel insights are provided to rethink conventional wisdom regarding Northeast
India. Baruah combines theoretical brilliance with empirical detail in teasing out historical trajec-
tories and political challenges that continue to haunt the region. Baruah’s scholarship is driven by
a genuine concern for the well-being of people that inhabit or have made Northeast India their
home, passionately seeking to foster a democratic, inclusive and peaceful co-existence and future
in these troubled borderlands. I subscribe to this endeavor and have been fortunate to have
Sanjib as a close friend and critical interlocutor. Yet, in this short commentary, I will dwell on our
important points of disagreement. I concentrate on the third chapter of In the Name specifically
to explore these divergences.
The chapter builds on one of Baruah’s key arguments: many of the problems in Northeast India
stems from the postcolonial scheme of granting autonomy to hill peoples through the establishment
of autonomous district councils and fully fledged ‘tribal’ states carved out from the earlier province/
state of Assam. Baruah holds (if I can simplify), that India reproduces the colonial scheme of divide
and rule, separating ‘tribals’ in the hills from the majority communities in the plains. Baruah calls for
an alternative political imaginary that undoes these forms of ethnic territorialization:: ‘Northeast
India urgently needs a politics on citizenship based not on memories of a real or imagined past
but on a vision of a common future for the people who live in the region today’ (2020, 192).
It is hard not to embrace this compassionate call, not only in the case of Northeast India, but also
more generally. But it also begs the question if there are circumstances under which a particular group
of people can ethically claim exclusive rights to a particular territory? This is especially critical in relation
to communities that assert recognition and rights as indigenous peoples, basing such claims on his-
torical attachments to ancestral territories and shared experiences of genocide, displacement and mar-
ginalization. Indigenous rights might stand in opposition to the rights of migrants. My work explores
issues related to indigeneity where I expressed a general readiness to acknowledge indigenous rights
claims (2003). This can be challenged on the grounds that it gives legitimation to the politics of ethnic
homelands that perpetuate ‘durable disorder,’ the very mess Baruah wrestles with.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 299
Chapter 3 opens with a quote from anthropologist Anna Tsing, ‘How do ordinary people get
involved in destroying their own environments, even their own home places?’ (Baruah 2020, 76).
Baruah raises the question in relation to the environmental destruction going on in Meghalaya
and other tribal hills states, where the indigenous elite in collaboration with outside contractors
are busy extracting coal, felling trees and building dams. They do this without any concern for
the environment or for the migrant laborers that are excavating coal by hand from narrow
tunnels or ratholes, nor for the less fortunate in the community who ‘lose their traditional ways of
making a living’ (Baruah 2020, 78). None of the existing governance structures has done anything
to regulate the extraction of coal. Ultimately the Indian Supreme Court intervened and put a mor-
atorium on ‘unscientific’ coal mining. Instead of supporting the Court’s intervention, people in
Meghalaya took to the streets protesting that the mining ban jeopardized indigenous livelihoods.
Baruah sums up: ‘(T)he language is stunning … (T)hese were clearly not voices of an indigenous com-
munity still moored to its subsistence commons’ (2020, 85).
I support the general description that Baruah provides, perhaps unsurprisingly as he generously
draws on my Unruly Hills (2011), where I point to the formation of an indigenous elite that together
with outside contractors engage in unsustainable resource extraction. Through revenue from timber,
coal and limestone, the indigenous elite have taken possession of large tracts of village land, turning
it into private property, and pushing a large section of the rural population into situations where they
no longer have access to sufficient (or any) land to farm. The economic resources have also enabled
the elite to control decision-making in the state. However problematic, should we route these pro-
blems back to the ‘fateful’ decision by the Indian government to retain aspects of ‘colonial indirect
rule’ and granting special constitutional rights to hill peoples who inhabited formerly excluded and
partly excluded areas? I don’t think so.
Let’s recall Tsing’s description of a capitalist resource frontier as a ‘zone of not yet’ (2003, 5100).
The frontier is unsettled, ‘not yet regulated’, with different legal idioms that clash and compete for
legitimation. Land in Meghalaya has during the last hundred years been converted into a commod-
ity. But that is only a partial story. There are still important socio-cultural barriers legitimated by cus-
tomary laws and ideas about custodianship where matrilineage, the clan or the wider community
can intervene and regulate access, usage and sale. With the penetration of capitalist relations,
such community checks have often proven ineffective in preventing unsustainable resource use.
This has major socio-environmental consequences undoubtedly. However, the intervention by an
outside actor like the Supreme Court still becomes problematic. Those within the indigenous com-
munities who are critical of mining – there are many such groups – need to balance the approval and
legitimation of statist institutional rights with the rights of indigenous peoples to govern themselves,
which is backed by the 6th Schedule of the Indian Constitution. This is a delicate balancing act, and
different situations call for different strategic interventions.
With coal mining, there are numerous indigenous voices that support the ban, most clearly articu-
lated in the two-volume citizen’s report Curse of Unregulated Coal Mining in Meghalaya (2018), a pub-
lication Baruah also mentions. In the opening of the report, the wider socio-ecological consequences
of coal mining are broached clearly:
The boom has had a major impact on land, livelihoods, and wealth inequalities. Families who own land where
coal has been mined and those able to use District Council/Traditional Institutions to claim title or lease on land
in these coal rich areas have become very wealthy, exacerbating the divisions between rich and poor, between
those who own land and those who do not and has also resulted in land grabbing and illegalities therein. (2018,
5)
This reveals an internal discussion and critique of unsustainable and socially unjust forms of resource
extraction, and not the blanket popular support to coal mining. This can also be related to other
cases, for example, the controversial issue of uranium mining in Khasi Hills. Here we find an interest-
ing alliance between the Khasi Students Union and various urban based organizations supporting
the landowner, now late Spillity Langri Lyngdoh and her matri-kin, who consistently opposed
300 B. G. KARLSSON
uranium mining. But there is a strong pro-mining lobby too, most vocally led by the previous chair-
man of the Khasi Autonomous District Council. Indigenous communities, like all other communities,
are not homogenous entities that speak univocally.
An underlying argument of Chapter 3, in my reading, is that indigenous rights morally rest on
environmental stewardship or how well one manages one’s own home. If you destroy your environ-
ment, you lose the moral right to the land. This argument often surfaces in the case of indigenous
peoples that inhabit spaces of particular significance for biodiversity and wildlife conservation. It
rests on what Povinelli (2002) describes as the need for indigenous peoples in liberal democratic
settler contexts to perform their cultural difference to gain public recognition and rights. Baruah
is stunned by the lack of reverence for the subsistence commons among the indigenous elite and
their followers. Indeed, coal has become the fastest way for some to become rich – coal propels
‘carbon fantasies’ (Kikon 2019). But unsustainable resource extraction is a universal problem. We,
especially in the Global North, are in the process of destroying the planet and the different ecosys-
tems that humans and other living beings depend on. The planetary environmental crisis, however,
cannot be dropped into the lap of those who seek control over ancestral territories. Further,
in opposing mining, the activists also evoke other ways of inhabiting the land.
Chapter 3 ends with the story of the share-cropper Jamir Ali in Arunachal Pradesh. As with many
Muslims in Northeast India, their situation is grim, lacking any rights and increasingly being targeted
as deportable illegal Bangladeshis. Their plight supports Baruah’s call for a common vision for all
people in the region. Yet, the larger politics of citizenship that he advocates comes with its own pro-
blems, not least in relation to indigenous peoples’ universally shared aspiration to govern
themselves.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Bengt G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is mainly working on issues relating
indigenous peoples and the environment, presently on food sovereignty in Eastern Himalayas.
References
Baruah, Sanjib. 1999. India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Baruah, Sanjib. 2005. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. New Delhi: OUP.
Baruah, Sanjib. 2011. Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast. New York: Berghahn Books.
Baruah, Sanjib. 2020. In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Karlsson, Bengt G. 2003. “Anthropology and the ‘Indigenous Slot’: Claims to and Debates About Indigenous Peoples’
Status in India’.” Critique of Anthropology 23 (4): 403–423.
Kikon, Dolly. 2019. Living with Coal and Oil: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna L. 2003. “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers.” Economic and Political Weekly 38 (48): 5100–5106.
