Unruly Indigo? Plants, Plantations, and Partitions

Can landscapes be unruly? Taking my cue from this question, my essay looks at indigo plantations in colonial Bengal as dynamic sites of negotiations between plants, land, and human bodies. Specifically, it analyzes how material, spatial, and corporeal engagements with the indigo plant rendered plantations unruly landscapes. Finally, it follows the unruliness of plantations to the colonial city of Calcutta where the violence of plantation life made its way into the social spaces of the city’s elite. Interwoven with plantations and the plantocracy, the urban trajectories through which indigo dye was ushered through the cityscape became sites of resistance and revolt, turning Calcutta itself into an unruly metropolitan landscape

BENGAL · Cityscape · Colonialism · Indigo · Metropolitan area · Negotiation · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · South Asian Studies and Diaspora