Ecological Shifts, Agrarian Transformations, and Heritage Preservation in Northeast India’s Silk Plantations – Engagement

By Radhika Moral, Department of Anthropology, Brown University

Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2024 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the argument they made in their submission and to situate their work in relation to the field of environmental anthropology.

ABSTRACT: My project examines the uneven relationship between agrarian transformations, capitalist expansion, and environmental shifts through an analysis of sustainable intensification of silk production in Northeast India. It investigates how government policies are made intelligible, deemed effective as well as impeded by agrarian communities who are makers of luxury silk. It further explores the contemporary politics of a seasonal silk plantation that engenders new forms of socioecological precarity while simultaneously yielding desirable agrarian transformations that drive the struggle for local autonomy in Assam. It has been estimated by silkworm rearers and locally based scientists that by the years between 2036 to 2040, the prized Muga silkworm (Antheraea Assama) endemic to Assam in Northeast India, is likely to be extinct, as host plants become less genetically diverse and traditional rearing methods increasingly become ineffectual. Som plantations (Persea bombycina) —food for Muga silkworms—have long been recognized as a defining feature of Assam’s agrarian landscape and a vital source of the region’s political economy of heritage formation. This predicted extinction has invited an urgent call for ethical scaling up of production through revitalization models—government supported and entrepreneurially driven—in the interest of preserving Muga silk. My project, thus, investigates the entangled lives of silk farmers, rearers, and weavers who shift between seasonal and perennial forms of agrarian labor to maintain a habitable landscape for silkworms and their own livability in the face of shifting ecologies and intensification of production.

Silkworm plantation workers in this part of Northeast India often juggle fears of a loss of generational craft inheritance, and their felt need to accommodate state-introduced technoscientific innovations. I pay attention to the microprocesses which shape negotiations, contestations, and agreements amongst diverse stakeholders which eventually configure the dynamic between silk and its socioecological valuation both on and beyond the plantation. Silkworm plantations have generally not figured in commodity plantation studies and are deemed as an isolated phenomenon, often an accessory to agrarian life. Ethnographically situated in Northeast India, I demonstrate the contrary. Silkworm plantations are quite centrally part of a larger intertwined set of resource systems: mustard farming, fisheries, oil fields, and tea plantations that are constantly negotiated, navigated, and organized alongside each other, forming a continuum of agrarian relations and often incongruous ethical orientations. I engage with questions of agrarian ethics and habitability on a seasonal plantation in the context of ecological shifts and revitalization schemes. I map local expressions of agrarian ethical lifeworlds amongst silk rearers and weavers, centered around the concept of ‘habitability’ [baaxjugyota]. Muga silkworm farmers are now assisted in their practice of silkworm rearing by power looms as well as scientifically enhanced disease-free laying Muga silkworm eggs and laborious processes of extraction of the Muga silk yarn, all aimed at bolstering silk production ethically and creating better lives for the Muga rearing communities.

There is an obvious disconnect between these disparate scales: of laboratory science and inheritance of traditional practices; of a desire for material security and ethical notions about protecting a fragile ecosystem; of protecting ancient heritage while also being able to participate in the market autonomously. I pay attention to the immense unevenness between Muga silk being perceived as a stable end-product of capitalist production and the unstable ecologies of the silkworm itself. I demonstrate the merging and unmerging of such phenomena alongside the attendant politics of a plantation where people’s everyday interactions and relatedness with silkworms and crucially, the land, permeate their expressions of belonging to a homeland. I utilize the analytic of a seasonal plantation to pay attention to the ways in which a non-fixed plantation might be at once productive and unyielding owing to the very fluid nature of labor relations on the plantation but also the arboreal fluidity of Som trees, and silkworms’ changing characteristics which can be attributed largely to climatic conditions that are constantly in flux. In the context of small-scale supply chains, I argue that the inheritance of intimate ecological and traditional knowledge often produces paradoxical experiences: on the one hand, the extent of such knowledge and practice creates the very conditions that would make landscapes more habitable. Concomitantly, such knowledge becomes the very grounds on which agro-capitalist projects are often based—that are not entirely rejected, neither are they seamlessly implemented.