Ecologies of Land and Labour in colonial Bengal 

Research Project 2021

Material: Text and line drawing 

 

Ecologies of land and labour in colonial Bengal explores the lineage of anti-productive biological forces and how they intersect with systems of labour, brittle policies of governance and the absorption of liability in times of uncertainty and deficit.

 

The Bengal Famine of 1943 is considered to be anthropogenic with wartime colonial policies creating and then exacerbating the crisis. However its lesser-known causes are attritional in character. They can be seen to track back over one hundred and fifty years, lying within the social and spatial displacements provoked by much older colonial policies. We shall reveal how these ‘reforms’ reconfigure relationships of labour and land providing the foundations for the Famine through: designation, waste, ownership, debt-relations, land fragmentation and precariousness.

 

Bengal was reorganised through colonial ideologies of efficiency, order and industry in order to maximise its production. Its agricultural systems were reshaped and pushed to its limits, left without any space or buffer, without judicial access and legal protection for the most vulnerable. The foundations for the Bengal Famine were already formed by colonial policies before the wartime policies even began.

 

The project takes the form of an essay and line drawing, excavating the spaces and pathways of colonial Bengal through readings of history and legal documentation, through studies of cultural objects such as the clay models of an indigo farm, stamps commemorating displaced communities, maps of a fragmented land, newspaper illustrations of the famine, and through contemporary literature, such as the play Nabanna.