Recalcitrant Lifeworlds

Abstract

This article analyzes how a failed rubber crop from the plantations of British India became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous ecologies in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. While a growing scholarship focuses on plants that became profitable within plantation histories, this article instead shows that failed commodity crops like Ficus elastica, locally known as Jri Bamon in Meghalaya, India, exhibited recalcitrance to a range of state and scientific regimes. In an argument that disrupts the European-centered narrative about the triumphant expansion of knowledge and territory, the author introduces “recalcitrance” as an interspecies co-laboring between humans and plants, unknowable through botanical and capitalist practices emerging in a colonial context. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article first studies the nineteenth-century colonial frontier in Assam in British India, where Jri Bamon was molded as a rubber crop in the plantation regimes. Second, it studies the present-day Indigenous ecologies of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, near India’s international border with Bangladesh, where this tree is historically grown as an infrastructure of mobility, called the living root bridge. The recalcitrant materiality of Jri Bamon surfaces through each of these human-plant encounters, providing pathways for those who would engage with it on its own terms.