Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019) by Dolly Kikon
Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman writes a commentary on Dolly Kikon's ethnography of the extraction, love and militarization in the Assam-Nagaland border in Northeast India. Following this commentary, we showcase an excerpt from Kikon’s fourth chapter, The Haats, on periodic border markets, as an invitation to delve further into Living with Oil and Coal.
On the way to exchange produce in a haat at the Bangladesh-Meghalaya international border. Photo by Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman.
I. Making Time for Gooseberries: Haats, Memory, Belonging, Conflict by Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman
Meandering down from the rolling Naga Hills, on the banks of the Bhogdoi, one of the southern tributaries of the Brahmaputra, the coming together of two bustling ‘haats’ or markets came to be known as Jorhat. It was roughly the same routes along the flow of the river, that the Ao farmers, one of the larger Naga tribes, native to the hills of Mokokchung, made the long trek to the plains of Jorhat. The Aos were traditionally jhum cultivators, and they travelled to barter their jhum produce in exchange for other daily essentials not found in the hills as the haats of Jorhat were well-supplied and better connected with other larger markets and towns of Assam and beyond. The stories and testimonies around haats, spun excellently by Dolly Kikon in Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India, brings out layers of understanding for the reader while bearing testimony to spaces of exchange, memory, belonging, and of the ever-changing perceptions and narratives of conflict in the borderlands of Northeast India.
My ancestral home in Jorhat sits near a pond known as Mithapukhuri, literally meaning a ‘sweet pond’, which was built by the Ahoms, a dynasty which ruled these parts of Assam from 1228 AD to 1826 AD. My father used to narrate stories about how the pond was named by Ao guests from Mokokchung who had come to the fortnightly haat nearby. There was a gooseberry tree beside the pond, around which these farmers from Mokokchung would rest after completing their transactions at the haat. After eating freshly plucked gooseberries, they would drink the water from the pond, and when they found a sweet aftertaste (as one does when drinking water after eating gooseberries) they fondly named the pond as Mithapukhuri: the pond with sweet water. The surroundings of the pond provided the space for leisure, meeting-up with old friends, a time for relaxation after a tiring day at the haat, and a moment of respite before the long trek back to Mokokchung. The name Mithapukhuri stuck, and by extension, the neighborhood and the road leading up to the pond are still called by that same name today by locals and visitors alike.
Spaces around haats are suffused with memories such as this story about how Mithapukhuri came to get its name. These haats that Kikon focuses on in the excerpted chapter below, are located where hills and plains meet. Yet, these haats not only represent the points where farmers from the surrounding hills and plains visit for exchange, but also spaces where these people, otherwise separated by various boundaries, have come to develop a shared sense of belonging. This is portrayed in the natural interdependencies in the basket of bartered goods between communities inhabiting hill areas and plains. These communities understand the natural geography and they adapt to its demands. However, they have to constantly grapple over the legacies of the hill-valley divide that exemplified British colonial demarcations of such natural geographies in present day Northeast India. These colonial administrative lines along the hills and adjoining valleys have sown the seeds of border disputes like the ones ongoing between Assam and its neighboring ‘hill’ states.
It is the sentiments that are attached to spaces like haats that enable visitors from the hills to make time for gooseberries, and subsequently, give them the ability to name ponds in adjoining valleys such as Jorhat. Such sentiments and sense of association to natural spaces are held by the haat-goers collectively. These associations are kept alive by haat-goers who catch-up with each other, recall stories, as they haggle and negotiate in the hustle and bustle of the haat. The unique names, sights, sounds and smells associated with the spaces surrounding a haat are an integral part of the histories, memories, sentiments and sense of belonging to the haat for the haat-goers. These are rooted in shared stories of belonging and narratives built over a period of time.
Kikon’s depiction of the transient, yet affect-laden, engagements around the Rajabari weekly haat brings about such memories and belonging, which she puts across as “an assembly point where commoditized goods and sentiments shaping people’s ability to adapt in entangled social worlds” (p. 86). The participants of a haat, at various levels, perceive the haat as an iterative space of engagement, a regular and continuous marker of social relations, and not as a one-time fleeting engagement. The haat-goers plan for their next visit to the haat, in the hope of meeting friends and acquaintances, people they love and hate for various reasons, but hold a relationship tied to the space and existence of the haat. Such iterative nature of relationships are based on the level of trust people have in the interactions and transactions at the haat over time. Such engagements and spaces are rooted in memory, shaped by navigating and negotiating social encounters of the haat-goers over time.
Kikon sketches out the sense of belonging to the spaces of haats beautifully through narratives of friendship, relations of affection, sharing of betel nuts, tea, food and blankets. The social fabric of the haats is laced with a sense of leisure, of finding friends, spending time with them, and making time for eating gooseberries with them. It is exactly this sense of time, pace and belonging to this space, through peaceful times and through conflict, and multiple border layers, that differentiates the space of a haat from regular markets (cf. Boyle and Rahman 2019).
There are also scores of haats along international borders, which bring about its own complexities. Along Northeast India’s borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar, some of these haats are officially recognized and notified by both countries across the border. These are meeting spaces persisting despite existence of border fences regulated through allowing traffic of haat goers and goods via gates manned by the Border Security Force and Customs officials on the Indian side. Non-official haats also exist along international borders but are often sites for small-scale border exchanges.
Some of these informal haats, the existence and functioning of which have been over time navigated and negotiated by communities with their respective government agencies, pre-date the formation of the modern nation-states in the region. They signify local networks of exchange across the hills, valleys and plains of Northeast India, flow of goods, community interactions and negotiations within national and across international borders.
Given the relatively smaller scale at which local networks of exchange operate in these borderlands, the critical mass is generated within a framework of functional market linkages, production, traditional trading routes and inter-community relations. This critical mass may converge at the international borders, while some may just remain within, as is evidenced by the narratives that Kikon brings out along the Assam-Nagaland border. A fuzzy yet functional framing of haats in the context of Northeast India sits at the edges of the multiplicity of border regimes. These regimes take shape between state anxieties of control, authority and calculation of rigid fixed international borders and fluid, often contested, intra-national borders at one level. At another level, they are marked by relations between communities who constantly navigate meandering borderland spaces while negotiating with state sovereignties.
Some years back, a friend, who lives in Mokokchung in Nagaland, came to buy some home refurbishing material from Jorhat, my hometown, in Assam. I asked him to stay over for dinner, but he refused saying that he will have to rush back after completing his purchases. He was apprehensive of the security situation at the Assam-Nagaland border, as there was a flare-up of violence between Naga and Assamese student activists regarding an old boundary dispute. As he was about to start his journey back, a traffic cop detained his vehicle, with a Nagaland number plate, for over two hours at the Jorhat police station on some flimsy ground. I had to go to the police station and persuade the traffic in-charge to release the car on time, so that he could make his journey back to Mokokchung. This incident made me reflect that there was no longer any time for gooseberries by the Mithapukhuri. The spaces that were once marked by a sense of attachment and association through iterative engagements of haat-goers have to now contend with fractious geopolitics between Assam and Nagaland, that makes Nagas ‘suspicious’ when they visit Assam, and vice versa. The stories of belonging woven through the memories of the names, sights, sounds and smells of the haat seems to have lost their earlier resonance. The leisure of being able to stay back for a meal, to have gooseberries afterwards and to name places and share stories about them, was no longer possible. We have fallen behind the artificial bordered lines of partition and conflict, towards a morass of trust deficit, which we need to overcome by reclaiming the community spaces and the spirit of haats more actively. There is an overwhelming sense of loss of taste, time, leisure and collective space of friendship.
Mithapukhuri, Jorhat, after the local elected representative made a boundary wall with decorative lights around the pond. Photo by Mirza Zunaid Rahman.
A Khasi woman packing up after her purchases at a local haat in Meghalaya. Photo by Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman.
II. Excerpt from Living with Oil and Coal
Chapter 4, “The Haats,” (p. 86-95)
People advised me to get to the haats early. “You have to get there before 6 a.m. to catch the action,” explained Jayanta, the haatkhawa (tax collector) of the Rajabari weekly market. Activities started early at the haat. By 5:30 a.m. on that November morning, Jayanta and his assistant tax collector were collecting taxes and organizing the traders who emerged from the mist to set up their stalls. Trucks loaded with traders and goods, overcrowded buses stacked with people and sacks, hand carts brimming with bananas and vegetables, bicycles balancing baskets of chicken and roast pig, and cultivators with bamboo baskets filled with papayas and ferns perched on their heads arrived at the market. The retreating monsoon rains turned the space into a muddy plaza. Bicyclists and handcarts got stuck in the slush, and laborers lined up to offer their services, as trucks and buses rolled in with clothing and food. Sellers carried sacks of potatoes, garlic, rice, and vegetables on their backs into the market area.
Along with the buyers and sellers, children also came to the market. Some of them came with friends in school uniforms; others followed their parents, grandparents, and relatives. The small children tried to keep up with their parents as they hurried along the stalls. At each puddle, parents effortlessly lifted the children over it. Teenage girls and boys carried bags of vegetables and goods and helped their parents. Beside a cobbler, a group of students in school uniforms stood in line—some to fix their bags, others to mend their shoes.
These weekly markets cater to hundreds of villages far from urban centers and markets. They function as an assembly point where commoditized goods and sentiments shape people’s ability to adapt in entangled social worlds. The interplay of exchange and commerce in the weekly markets captured the richly layered world of secrets, taboos, and transgressions in the foothills. Recalling the origin of the haats, village elders said, “Little, very little. We were little.” They looked at their hands nostalgically and talked about their experiences. A state administrator in Assam who complained about the unruly behavior of buyers and sellers at the haat described them as “a natural happening” and continued, “These are from ancient times, and we cannot just uproot these institutions.” But, apart from a few haats dating back to the early twentieth century, most were relatively new. Significantly, the haats had arisen in the wake of land conflicts. For example, in 2009, after a conflict between a Naga coal mining village and an Assamese village over a boundary issue, the regular haat shut down for several months. Buyers and sellers began to meet secretly in a neighboring village to trade. Gradually, the neighboring villagers noticed the activity and arrived there. This was the origin of the Bekajan haat, a weekly market that assembles outside the wall of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation unit in Borholla.
The haats are a vital sign of the social life here. The market transactions highlight how power relations are reinforced and amplified through touch, smell, and taste. Thus, the haats are not solely about the produce. Visually, they resemble rural markets anywhere in the world. Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera (1990: 25) underline how the basis of the rural economy—the household—in the highlands of rural Colombia is dependent on the relationship between the peasant and the land. This connection is founded on social relations, and not solely on the produce. The social world of the Colombian markets that Gudeman and Rivera present is homogenous, integrated, and clean. By contrast, the haats scattered across the foothills function as zones of social interaction mediated through networks of power and alliance founded on extractive activities.
Although products such as mats, tea, and clocks are sold at the haats, the market is swamped with the color and smell of food being sold and filled with the noise of the crowd. Items sold at the haat, such as bananas, chickens, and pumpkins, embody the social relations here. Sensory feelings such disgust, fear, or excitement are localized and become visible. Therefore, beneath the buying and selling of goods at the haats, these markets mask the social signs and meanings of the foothills. As Henri Lefebvre puts it, “Things and products that are measured, that is to say reduced to the common measure of money, do not speak the truth about themselves. On the contrary, it is in their nature as things and products to conceal that truth” (1991: 80).
Expectations
“Are you lost?” I asked a young boy in school uniform. He appeared anxious as he sat alone in a tea shop. Madhuja Hazarika was eleven years old and lived in a village near the Rajabari haat. He had arrived with his father earlier that day with a basket of bananas. His father left him at the tea shop and entered the market to sell his produce. “My father will come back and take me to a cloth stall,” Madhuja said, frequently scanning the crowd for his father. When I left the tea shop later that afternoon, Madhuja was still waiting for his father to return. The market was filled with expectations: finding a new shirt, a good bargain, high profits, delicious food, or reunions with families, neighbors, and friends. It was a place where one could fix old shoes and flat tires, or mend flashlights and broken umbrellas. It was also a place where people came to experience different tastes and indulge in the excitement the market generated.
Attracting hundreds of villagers who had no access to big towns and cities, these haats brought their sensual pleasures and thrills to the villages and towns. Shuffling feet, ringing laughter, passionate haggling, aromatic rice beers, spicy pork dishes, crispy fried fish, clucking chickens, and mooing cattle all came together to produce the sounds and smells of the foothill weekly market. Different ethnic groups in their mekhalas and chadors exploding with radiant colors clung to their prejudices about one another or momentarily left them behind as they participated in the social frolicking at the haat. Ahom women in their silk attire crowded the stalls selling jewelry and cosmetics. Adivasi women in colorful saris with brilliant ribbons in their hair browsed through sandals and shoes. Young boys from Assamese villages flaunted their trendy jeans and ate street food. Cultivators from Old Tssori and New Tssori villages in Nagaland carrying beautiful bamboo baskets over their shoulders leisurely strolled around the stalls. Village priests, coal traders, security guards, schoolteachers, farmers, council members, and policemen all assembled at the haat. When they saw a familiar face, they exclaimed, “Oh, you are also here!” and rushed toward each other with outstretched arms.
Goods at the Rajabari haat were carefully separated: fresh vegetables, clothes, poultry and meat, utensils, sandals, fermented fish, and clothes. At the entrance of the haat sat the cobblers, cycle mechanics, blacksmiths, and medicine men. In the next lane, colorful nail polish bottles, lipsticks, and jewelry were laid out for inspection. A group of young girls, hypnotized by brilliant hair ribbons and bells in a stall, ignored the stray dogs that sniffed their feet and licked their hands. It was the clothes stalls that attracted the largest numbers of buyers. “There are no clothing stores in the Rajabari area,” one resident said as she picked out woolen cardigans for her household. Not every item came with fixed price. Produce from the Naga villages were weighed, checked, and given an exchange value. As goods were translated into monetary values, tensions ran high.
Loss
“It is a loss for you,” Nrilo reprimanded her grandfather. He had just sold four pumpkins for ten rupees (eighteen cents) at the Nagabat haat. When an Assamese customer said to him, “You cannot carry it back, can you?” the old man quickly sold his produce. Buyers from Assam constantly reminded the Naga traders about the risks of carrying the produce back to the hills. These uphill journeys took three to five hours depending on the season. Explaining the logic of profit and loss, Toshi, a Naga cultivator selling his produce, said, “The present trading practices between the hill and plains are this: for example, if there is a good chili harvest and we sell for ten rupees per kilogram, then the traders from the plains get together and say, ‘This is a good harvest, do not buy the chili for ten rupees per kilogram, pay only four or five rupees. Better still, do not buy their produce, so that they will lower their price and we can buy it cheaper.’”
Such frustrations were expressions of what it meant to traverse the foothills. These haats featured not only fun and excitement but bitter accounts of loss and dismay. Amenla, a Naga trader from the coal mining village of Anaki, sold her produce at the Singibil haat for many years. In 2007, she stopped going. She was tired of the journey and said, “The biggest loss for us is that all the traders in the hills carry their produce on their heads.” The absence of roads caused Naga traders to incur losses, and traders from Assam took advantage of this to make handsome profits in the upland Naga villages. For example, traders in Assam factored labor and time into the price of the produce every time they climbed the hills to sell their goods. Lima, a frustrated Naga trader, said, “The plains traders always profit, even when they are selling the same chilies back to us. This is because they calculate their carrying charges, the time they spent carrying it, the service tax, among other things.” This was not the case when Naga traders from the upland villages came down to the haats. He explained how such negotiations unfolded: “They say our hill chilies are not spicy and so they will pay half of the current market price. Next time when we go down to the market with the chilies, they say, ‘Oh, last time we paid you too much, we paid you ten rupees. So, this time we are willing to buy your produce only for eight rupees per kilogram.’ Once we take our produce to the foothill markets, we have to sell it there. How can we bring it back?”
Abemo, a resident from Bhandari town, described the transactions at the haats as “senseless.” He said that traders from Assam hoarded the produce and sold it back to them at higher prices. Describing the irony, he commented, “We are happy to buy it back, we are very happy to buy it back!” These profit-making schemes, according to Abemo, mirrored tactics of the state of Assam: “They think how they can harm us by running us into huge losses. Just like the traders from Assam cheat us, the state of Assam will, given a chance, take away everything we have in Nagaland for free.”
Yet, the separation between “us” and “them” was porous. Coal traders from the Naga and Assamese villages worked together. Similarly, cattle traders and brokers from Nagaland and Assam worked together. For example, cattle traders from Assam and cattle brokers from Nagaland who delivered huge consignments during festivals and weddings across the foothills, were known for being unscrupulous. Chumbemo described the Naga cattle brokers from his neighborhood in Bhandari town: “Whenever we go down to buy a cow in the foothill haats, especially in Merapani, our own people will go down and become brokers between us and the sellers in Assam. They will hike up the price of the cows and share the profit with the plains traders.” This story about cattle brokers disrupted the image of the gullible Naga tribesman from the hills versus the cunning plains trader from the Brahmaputra Valley, and revealed a social life of exchanges and negotiations based on alliances and partnerships.
During the harvest season in November 2009, women traders from Nagaland arrived at the Nagabat haat with sacks of chilies. One day, I found myself at the center of a chili deal. “I am not in charge of payments!” a young trader explained to the Naga women. There were chilies everywhere—radiant green, white, red, and black chilies heaped on the ground, nestled in bamboo baskets, packed in jute sacks, wrapped in shawls and scarves, and stashed in shoulder bags. The air was thick with the aroma of fresh chilies.
“We sell it for fifty rupees per kilogram, but after it reaches Jorhat or Golaghat, it will become one hundred to two hundred rupees per kilogram,” the women traders told me as they waited for their payment. When the produce agent from the Assamese town of Golaghat failed to include the produce of one of the traders, a squabble broke out between the agent and the women. “You should have taken a piece of paper to write down the quantities and the amount,” the women argued. The trader whose produce remained unaccounted for claimed she had given the agent sixteen kilograms of chilies, but he dismissed her claims. As the argument became heated, the women made an additional demand. They insisted that the produce agent not only should pay the woman he had left out but should make sure that all of them were paid the same rate. The agent responded, “That is not the point. I have fixed different prices with different traders. That is the way I operate.” The price of chilies at the haat depended upon the negotiating skill of each trader. For the same produce, some got forty rupees a kilogram, others forty-five, and the most persuasive traders got fifty rupees. The price of the goods was dependent on the bargaining skill of each trader.
The women traders asserted that everyone should be paid fifty rupees. Surprised at the behavior of the women, the produce agent and his assistants raised their hands to signal that they refused to negotiate. The women stood firm. Unless they were all paid the same rate, they would take back their chilies. Eventually, the agent paid a standard rate to all the traders, including the woman whose produce was previously unaccounted for.
Conflict
Sometimes squabbles inside the haat took on antagonistic overtones. Given the nature of land conflicts in the foothills, a personal fight between Nagas and non-Nagas inside the haat often turned into a border fight between Assam and Nagaland. The consequences were immediately felt in the haat. In 2005, Naga traders were banned from entering the Singibil haat in Assam after a trader named Atul Rajkhowa from an Assamese village went missing. People from Rajkhowa’s village suspected that a Naga village was responsible for his disappearance. Soon after, the Assam police erected an additional checkpoint to stop Naga traders from entering the haat.
When I went to the Singibil haat in 2009, the adjoining villagers said, “Meeting patibo lage” (There should be a meeting), for resuming trade with the Naga villages. One day, a member of the Singibil village council invited me to Yonlok, one of the Naga villages that had been banned from the haat. On our way to the village, we crossed several trucks loaded with coal and timber heading toward Singibil village. The heavy traffic suggested that extractive trade between Naga villages and Assamese towns continued despite the sanction on Naga traders.
People at the Singibil haat said that Atul Rajkhowa had been on his way to a Naga village in the upper elevations to buy betel leaves and collect a debt. A few days later, news of his death reached his village. Some traders said that people from Nagaland had sent a message that Rajkhowa’s body was in a Naga village, but they were unable to go because there was a curfew in the foothill border due to a land conflict. As the conversation went on, some insinuated that the deceased should not have gone to the hills if he was a law-abiding citizen. They raised doubts about his connections in the Naga villages. At that point, Rajkhowa’s neighbor said he was a good man. “He was not a troublemaker or a thief. He did not even drink,” the neighbor commented. Rajkhowa was a man with no vices. His only fault was that he went to the Naga villages in search of betel leaves, a prized commodity that fetched a handsome profit in the haats.
A group of young traders from Singibil spoke about seeking revenge, but in the same breath they reminisced about how Nagas were also friends. Singibil village, like the neighboring town of Gelakey, was connected to the coal mining trade here. Many youth from Singibil were coal traders and made regular trips to the Naga coal mines in the upper elevations of the foothills. Therefore, memories of friendships seemed to increase the feelings of betrayal. Several residents suspected that Rajkhowa was killed because of the border dispute between Assam and Nagaland. Rajkhowa’s family and friends connected his disappearance in 2005 to an incident that had taken place a year earlier.
Apparently, social relations in the Singibil haat became tense in 2004 after an Assam Police Battalion checkpoint was set up outside the weekly market. Soon, state officials from Nagaland came down and warned the Assam administration not to encroach upon land that belonged to Nagaland. A village elder reflected on the behavior of an officer-in-charge (OC) from the Assam Police who was stationed at the new checkpoint. The OC began to harass the Naga villages as well as the traders who came down to the market.
The police checkpoint was put up to resolve a land dispute between the Naijung tea plantation, which was under the jurisdiction of Assam, and the village of Simising in Nagaland. The residents of Singibil village described how the events unfolded. When the tea plantation started expanding toward the uplands, the Naga village asked the management to pay a tax before extending the plantation onto village land. The plantation manager reported this to the Assam police as a case of extortion, and the administration in Assam arrested and imprisoned the village chairman. “In those days the situation on the border was tense, so the Assam government set up an Assam Battalion camp near the Singibil haat,” the resident continued. “The Assam Battalion closed the path Nagas took to come to the Singibil haat.”
This was not the first time the market in Singibil was affected by the border conflict. The Singibil haat originally took place in the upper elevations of the foothills, but it was moved to the village after a conflict in the 1960s. “There, over there. Do you see those hillocks? The haat bazaar used to sit there before it was moved near Nogan Gogoi’s house in Singibil village,” Rahman said. It seems Nagas came down to attack Assamese villages during the land conflict, and villagers came running to Rahman’s house shouting, “The Nagas have come from the hills again!” This statement seemed to reiterate the stereotypical image of Naga tribes as a warlike savages who regularly raided Assamese villages. During this period, the Assam government posted the Armed Police and the Special Reserve Battalion from Assam near Singibil village.
The haats were filled with stories. Accounts of boundary disputes were an integral part of the markets. When I inquired how certain ethnic groups had been banned from the haat, villagers in Assam could not name any legitimate authority that had passed these regulations. Referring to the 2005 incident that banned Naga traders from the Singibil haat, the tax collector said, “Someone in the haat must have told them not to come because there is trouble. Something might happen anytime.” The conversation about the ban sparked a heated exchange between an Assamese trader and the tax collector:
Tax collector: You asked Nagas not to come to the haat.
Trader: Who said so?
Tax collector: You did.
Trader: If someone said that to the Nagas, I do not know. But I did not tell them that. Whoever has told the Nagas not to come said that one of their people has been killed in their hills. There should be a meeting to settle the matter.
Tax collector: But what can we do now?
Trader: Then who will come and show the guilty person?
Tax collector: The Nagas will point out the murderer.
Trader: Nagas will never be allowed to step foot in this haat again. No, they are not coming here. We are also human. If we see a Naga, we want to kill them or beat them up.
Tax collector: Hey, you are talking very big!
Eventually the argument subsided. The tax collector announced, “The Nagas should come down to the haat again. The economy will be better if they start coming to the haat.” The tax collector was concerned about the loss of revenue since the Nagas had been banned because there was a steep decline in revenue. Twelve Naga villages who came down to trade at the Singibil haat had stopped coming down after 2005. In December 2010, administrators from Assam and Nagaland held a meeting in Singibil village. Traders from Naga and Assamese villages, including Atul Rajkhowa’s family, attended the gathering and welcomed the Nagas to the haat. Yet not all hostilities could be reconciled because these markets were also spaces where people defended their cultural practices and beliefs as superior to others. Experiences of humiliation and transgression were recurring themes in conversations about the haats in the foothills.
Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman is a researcher working on boundaries, ecology and waterways in Northeast India. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, and is currently a Visiting Associate Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.
Dolly Kikon is a Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology and Development Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. She has recently co-authored Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism and Urbanism in Dimapur (2021) and completed a collaborative exhibition celebrating artwork by vulnerable children in Nagaland during the Covid19 pandemic.
Commissioned by Rishav Thakur and produced with editorial assistance from Tara Giangrande.