Abstract
The descriptive title of Dolly Kikon’s book Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India gives the reader a clear sense of the subject of the book. The author identifies this book as a multi-perspective ethnography based in the foothills of Assam and Nagaland in Northeast India. Kikon does not conceptualise the foothills just as a geographical or a political space or a space of conflict. The complex politics of resource extraction in the foothills of Northeast India remains the central focus of this book but it also provides a new understanding of ‘forms of heterogeneity, citizenship, indigeneity, legitimacy, and gender relations in contemporary India’ (p. 10).
Kikon explores how ‘politics of purity, ethnic nationalism, mining, the plantation economy and poverty’ (p. 62) influence social relationships. The author sets the tone of this book in the first chapter which has been titled as Storytellers. Here she makes a conscious effort to record the narratives of the people, many of whom came from other parts of the country, settled in the borderland of Assam and Nagaland. In this chapter, the reader gets an understanding of how storytelling plays an important role for a community to establish its relationship and legitimacy over the land in which they are living.
In the third chapter of the book, the author starts unpacking the Asamese term morom which becomes the central theme of this book. Morom is a very broad concept of love and affection which has been used in this context to explain the relationship of the residents of the foothills ‘with the state or the absence of it allude to everyday sovereignty, power networks, and expectations against the backdrop of resource extraction in the foothills’ (p. 63). The complex nature and the relationship of the people of the foothills with the Indian state and other external actors has been explored in the light of extractive capitalism which dominates the region. Though the seventh chapter is titled as Carbon Citizenship, the essence of the interesting concept of ‘carbon citizenship’ gets lost after a brief explanation. The reader may find it difficult to connect with this concept in the rest of the chapter.
Kikon has crafted the book skilfully with her narrative writing style. This book also brings into the forefront what kind of challenges a researcher face while doing fieldwork in a highly militarised zone in a democratic country. The author skilfully teases out the contradictions of the Indian state and its authoritative control over its citizen in the Northeast, which has been influenced by ruthless extractive capitalism. This book is an essential reading for those who want to understand the complex state-society dynamics in Northeast India.
