This piece by Aadita Chaudhury is the ninth post in the Emotional Ecologies series edited by Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt. In this series, contributors were asked to reflect on what role emotion plays in connecting humans to their environment and more-than-human beings.
The “khoai” is the name colloquially given to describe the soils or geological formations that span many of the landmasses in and around the Chotanagpur Plateau in eastern India.
Rich in iron oxide, these laterite soils are marked by a rugged and often undulating topography, resulting from millennia of erosion from monsoon rains, the many winding rivers that populate the region and action of winds from summer thunderstorms, popularly termed in Bengali as “Kalboishakhi.” The winds and the rains of the kalboishakhi dance across the lands adjoining the Bay of Bengal, often arriving at the horizon with ominous dark clouds right before sunset. In the past, this would spell doom for sailors and fishermen. These days, it can signify relief after a hot day, or if one is unlucky, warn of floods to come.
The winds and the rains of the kalboishakhi dance across the lands adjoining the Bay of Bengal, often arriving at the horizon with ominous dark clouds right before sunset.
The khoai is a charismatic frontier in an ongoing conversation within South Asian developmentalist imaginaries that call for optimal land use for the purposes of economic growth. But for the hearts of poets and ascetics, it is that which connects the blood that pumps through human veins to that of the earth.
As the lateritic soil of the region is not suited for intensive agriculture, efforts have been made to make vast sections of the region arable by manipulating the conditions of the soil. And so, slowly, the red soils get taken over the green, over decades.
This is often done by breaking gullies and hoodoo-like structures that appear in the landscape in order to flatten the lands so as to facilitate the kind of soil engineering and irrigation works that enable farmers to create a hybrid soil that fosters rice and vegetable cultivation. There is a fight between the red and the green, and the green usually wins. And as much as we love the green, the heart misses the rawness of the red.
There is a fight between the red and the green, and the green usually wins. And as much as we love the green, the heart misses the rawness of the red.
The ongoing project to turn such “deserts” green has a long history. Yet alongside these projects, is the place that the khoai have in the literary, cultural, and spiritual imagination of many of the ethnic groups that inhabit the Chotanagpur Plateau.
The vastly open and hilly topography, dotted with sal forests that once marked these landscapes has often been the fodder for songs of longing and initiation into mystical traditions. The horizon of the sky meeting the red gullies of the badlands also form many a narrative that appear in local folk songs and stories. Even while they have remained “empty” of active human intervention intended to make these lands productive and legible to capital, they have been and remain a resonant part of the cultural imaginary and cultural landscape of the region. They have also been sites of community-based agroforestry.
Recently, such badlands have been termed unproductive in and around my hometown of Santiniketan, India. As South Asian developmental imaginaries wholly absorb the understanding of terra nullius from modern Euro-American conceptions of land, the idea that “badlands” are necessarily “wastelands” become cemented. Once beloved as the open expanses of curiosity and wonder, animated by a chorus of sounds and smells of a community of people, birds and animals that highlighted to the relationships between a seismically active past and a rainy and watery present, the dark brown-red hoodoos and gullies today are seen as wasted potential that are depriving the public of much-needed resources, and the possibility of the coming of civilization in accordance with upper-caste aspirations. Khoai today have become sites for proposed plantations facilitated by local forestry authorities, holiday homes and cafes for upper caste urban bhadraloks, luxury resorts for tourists, and even coal mining.
The ethos of invoking terra nullius has travelled into discourses surrounding “practicality” and the absolute necessity for villagers and small town folks in the area to be saved by their urban-dwelling upper caste counterparts – the bhadraloks – who are interested in their cultural practices, seemingly idyllic agricultural lifeways and the simplicity away from the stresses of cities such as Kolkata. But in this framework, the imaginaries of development are necessarily embedded in compulsory extraction, whether that be of cultural economies, minerals, timber, or land for development.
The imaginaries of development are necessarily embedded in compulsory extraction, whether that be of cultural economies, minerals, timber, or land for development.
City folks longing for a rural escape have turned towards the khoai and pivoted their vacation aspirations into a nearly humanitarian mission. As rural land is grabbed by the local “land mafia,” badlands get turned into places that need saving from being “wasted” by the carelessness and unimaginative shortsightedness of villagers and Adivasis, who are simply seen as ill-equipped to deal with the progression of the global economy.
These days, it is hard to find a piece of the “khoai” that has not been subjected to projects of agriculture, forestry, or have been subjugated to domestication and contained within the forms of bourgeois property ownership aesthetics. As the figures of the plantation and its attendant cultures of enclosure and theft of commons creep into places previously overlooked by the tentacles of global extractive forces, many, if not most khoai areas are mobilized to be “redeemed” into productive little plots legible to capital.
I have to wonder about the processes of consent and negotiation that have informed such projects. Lands that have for millennia, resisted domestication and classification, that have avoided being forcefully extracted from the commons, and have been so insubordinate and untameable that they have animated the lore of the region and beyond, are now being treated as the final frontier to the civilizing mission of the region that started many millennia before.
These areas were in the past predominantly inhabited by Adivasis or Indigenous peoples of India, who had resisted the cultures of caste and dis-embodied ways of relating to each other and the more-than-human world that necessitate the creation and cementing of hierarchies that have come about after decades of interference from both European colonial forces and attempts at installing Brahminical patriarchy, and their associated property relations.
Which entities had been enlisted to make this happen, to overwrite the agency of lands and soils that had the audacity to say an embodied, resounding “no” thus far to such schemes? Prior stories too, must now change, to account for the triumph of development over the right of the land to remain barren and arid. The eroded red behemoths have been tamed!
As the monocultures, mining initiatives, luxury resorts, and property developments begin to usurp the open skies over these soils, what, instead, is actually wasted, in fostering cultivation in the badlands? Has the emptiness of the horizon not ushered in words, maybe poems, maybe a dream, to weave into our beings, in this ocean of red, in the past? Where will these visions trickle into now?
Has the emptiness of the horizon not ushered in words, maybe poems, maybe a dream, to weave into our beings, in this ocean of red, in the past? Where will these visions trickle into now?
Badlands such as the “khoai” present a challenge to capitalist imaginaries because they defy its temporalities and its compulsion to make all aspects of being productive and legible to exchanges that foster logics of uninhibited growth.
What, then, does it mean to care for wastelands? What is “wasted” in places termed as such?
What histories are paved over by concrete? What does development mean in places where inequality is still rife, but there are shiny new roads?
What does a future look like, where we can let badlands and “wastelands” just be, as part of ecological and cultural commons?
In the meantime, the ghosts of khoai past continue to haunt my peripheral visions in places far away, as if, if I could convince myself that I have caught one last glimpse of them, unbothered by a bulldozer, I can believe that their spirit lives on.
All photography by Aadita Chaudhury.
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