Capital and Ecology

Rakhee Bhattacharya is Associate Professor at Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She was an Endeavour Post-doctoral fellow in Australia and has worked and taught in other institutes across the country. Her areas of research are political economy, development economics, regional economy, transnational economy and geo-economics, poverty and inequality, geopolitics, India’s Northeast and its neighbourhood. She has authored Development Disparities in Northeast India (2011) and Northeastern India and its Neighbours: Negotiating Security and Development (2015). In addition, she has edited a number of volumes and has written many articles in both national and international journals. She is a regular columnist in The Statesman. Her latest edited volumes are Regional Development and Public Policy Challenges in India (2015) and Developmentalism as Strategy: Interrogating Post-colonial Narratives on North East India (2019). G. Amarjit Sharma is Assistant Professor at the Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. His latest (edited) book, State vs. Society in Northeast India: History, Politics and the Everyday Life, was published in July 2021. His works are published in the journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Peace Print: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Eastern Anthropologist, Man in India.

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section I: Growth Epistemology, Environmental Conjunctures

1. Money, Capital, Power and Nature

Andrew Sheng and Sneha Poddar

2. Economic Growth and Ecological Conundrum

Rakhee Bhattacharya

3. Conflict Over Climate: Trajectory of Environmental Historiography in Northeastern Region of India

Sajal Nag

4. Hardwoods and the British Empire in Assam: Sal and Teak in the Age of Colonialism, 1850s-1940s

Arupjyoti Saikia

Section II: Developmentalism, Extractive Economy and Ecomusculinity

5. Ecological Ruptures in the Eastern Himalaya: The Political Economy of Hydropower Development in Arunachal Pradesh

Deepak K. Mishra

6. “Why the Caged Bird Sings”: Resource Capture and Resistance in the China-Myanmar Borderlands

Nimmi Kurian

7. Ecomusculinity in the Neoliberal Era: Case of Eastern Himalaya and its Degrading Ecology

Anup Shekhar Chakraborty

Section III: Capita, Subjectivities and Human/Non-Human Responses

8. Subjective Capital, Adaptive Capitalism and the Enduring Human-Nature Response

G. Amarjit Sharma

9. Where is the Geopolitical? More-Than-Human Politics, Polities and Poetics in the Bhutan Highlands

Jelle J. Wouters

10. Secret Landscapes, Capitalist Encroachment and the Wrath of the Gods

Subhadra Mitra Channa

11. Buddhism, Animal Ethics, and Environmentalism

Swargajyoti Gohain

12. Ethno-ecologism and the Politics of New Citizenship in India’s Northeast

Samir Kumar Das

13. Work, Women, and Landscape in the Himalayas

Meera Baindur

Section IV: Rights, Regulations and Alternatives

14. Nature’s Rights: Alternatives to the Conventional Frame

Govind Bhattacharjee

15. Advancing People’s Development Alternatives in Asia

Jiten Yumnam

16. Traditional Livelihoods, Diversifications and Sustainable Alternatives

Sikha Dutta

Index