I am an environmental historian specializing in failed commodity crops, multispecies ethnography, climate change, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage in South Asia. My current book project, Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland, studies how Ficus elastica, a ‘failed’ rubber crop from the plantations of nineteenth-century British India, became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the Khasi hills of India-Bangladesh borderlands. As the rainiest place on earth, the Khasi hills in India connected to the floodplains of Sylhet in Bangladesh, represent an extraordinary borderland ecology shaped by extreme climates, extractive economies and Indigenous regenerative practices. Through archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory GIS, my book project studies the socio-ecological and climatic impact of extraction and development in these colonial and postcolonial borderlands, alongside the regenerative human-plant relations of Indigenous communities.
