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ABSTRACT
This article turns to Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) to better map the dynamics of the Plantation (ocene) within the history of the colonial tea industry in India. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Kathryn Yusoff and Ian Baucom, I argue that Anand’s novel provides an ‘alterglobal’ inroad into the world of the tea plantation as a site where the ‘biocentric subject’ and the racialized Other are co-implicated in an ‘energy intensive’ context characteristic of the Anthropocene. The global demand for tea as a commodity is linked by the narrative to the local mesh of human and botanical transplantation, and the resulting transformation of environmental, political and cultural practices in the region. Through a polyvocal narrative approach, Anand's novel works to dismantle the discourse of social and environmental improvement that framed colonial management of the tea plantation and makes visible the ‘plot and plantation’ dynamic of the imperial tea industry and its correlative in the Indian novel in English. The turn to the plantation archive in postcolonial studies provides an opportunity to imagine more just ‘plantation futures’ in an era of environmental crisis shaped by the plantation’s political, economic, environmental and cultural aftermath.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Rob Nixon, ‘The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea’, in Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero and Robert S Emmet (eds), The Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018, p 8.
2 Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 17(3), November 2013, p 5, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378892.
3 As a recent article in Nature notes, ‘The formal process [of adopting the term as a geological epoch] has moved much more slowly than has popular culture, which has already embraced the Anthropocene and used the term on everything from record albums to magazine covers’ (Nature, 572, 2019, pp 168–170). For example, The Economist used the phrase ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ on its 28 May 2011, issue, Canadian pop musician Grimes released Miss Anthropocene in early 2020, and the ‘Anthropocene: The Human Epoch’ exhibition was co-hosted by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada in autumn 2018 and winter 2019, respectively. This exhibition featured the photographic, film and augmented-reality works of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, and invited ‘reflection upon the environmental and ethical issues surrounding our exploitation of Earth’s resources’.
4 Nixon, ‘The Anthropocene’, p 11.
5 J Davis, A A Moulton, L Van Sant and B Williams, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises’, Geography Compass, 13(5), May 2019, pp 3, 2, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12438.
6 See for example a selection of monographs, edited collections and special issues spanning the last 30 years, including Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy (1992), Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living (1999), Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (1996), Richard Drayton’s Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (2000), the work of Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan (‘Green Postcolonialism’: Interventions (2007) and Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals (2010)), Pablo Upamanyu Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010), Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies: Literature and the Environment (2011), Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan’s Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015).
7 Ian Baucom, ‘The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science’, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, 2(1), April 2012, pp 3, 2, 3, https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0001.
8 Baucom, ‘The Human Shore’, p 4.
9 Baucom, ‘The Human Shore’, p 4.
10 Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6(1), May 2015, p 162, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.
11 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 1.
12 Anand’s memoir Conversation in Bloomsbury captures his ambivalent relationship to writers such as E M Forster, T S Elliot, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf wherein he gently corrects their misguided views on India. See also Delia Jarrett-Macauley and Susheila Nasta’s ‘Mobile Modernisms: Black and Asian Articulations’, in The Cambridge History of Black and Asian Writing, for a fuller sense of the complexity of these conversations.
13 Ben Conisbee Baer, ‘Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modernism/Modernity, 16(3), October 2009, p 576, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.0.0104.
14 Following Jegathesan, my paper engages ‘Black feminist scholars and anthropologists alongside South Asian, Dalit feminist, and queer framings of politics, time and kin making’ to help make visible the intersection of ‘anti-Blackness and Brahmanical patriarchy’ that informs class and caste dynamics on the colonial tea plantation. Mythri Jegathesan, ‘Black Feminist Plots Before the Plantationocene and Anthropology’s “Regional Closets”’, Feminist Anthropology, 2(1), May 2021, p 79, https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12037.
15 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 2.
16 Kathryn Yusoff, ‘The Inhumanities’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(3), 2021, p 668, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1814688.
17 Davis et al., ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene’, p 5.
18 Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene’, p 162.
19 Davis et al., ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene’, p 3.
20 Simon L Lewis and Mark Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature, 519(7542), March 2015, pp 171, 173, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258.
21 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp 25–26.
22 Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, p 173.
23 Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, pp 174, 175.
24 Wallerstein’s work focuses on the ‘rise of the capitalist world-economy’.
25 Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, p 175.
26 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, pp 30, 30, 30, 33, 61, 61, 33.
27 Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene’, p 160.
28 Jegathesan, ‘Black Feminist Plots’, pp 79, 81, 78, 85.
29 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, pp 55, 56.
30 Davis et al., ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene’, p 7.
31 Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Penguin, 1986, p 47.
32 Angela Last, ‘We Are the World? Anthropocene Cultural Production Between Geopoetics and Geopolitics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 34(2–3), 2017, p 148, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0263276415598626.
33 Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, pp 28, 27, 29, 31, 34.
34 Gerhard Stilz, ‘Buds or Leaves? The Moral and Aesthetic Dialectics of South Asian Tea Plantations in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing’, in Zbigniew Bialas and Krzysztof Kowalczyk (eds), Ebony, Ivory & Tea, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego, 2004, p 116.
35 A A Purcell and J Hallsworth, Report on Labour Conditions in India, London: Trades Union Congress, General Council, 1928, p 36.
36 This assemblage subplot in the novel also shares something with what Alex Trexler has referred to in a more generic sense as ‘Anthropocene fiction’.
37 Arnab Dey, Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, p 10.
38 Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937, pp 113, 82.
39 Dey, Tea Environments, p 3.
40 Dey, Tea Environments, pp 3–4.
41 ‘Whether or not such migration stemmed from volition or coercion’, Dey emphasizes, ‘historians on both sides of the debate have drawn attention to the structural forms of exploitation, conditions of work and travel, the cycles of debt-bondage, and subsistence wages that underpinned these sites of European agribusiness’. Dey, Tea Environments, p 4.
42 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 3.
43 Jonathan Highfield, ‘Finding the Voice of the Peasant: Agriculture, Neocolonialism and Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab Trilogy’, Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 1(2), November 2009, p 129.
44 Toral Jain Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, p 72.
45 Jayeeta Sharma documents how tea-growing areas were first referred to as ‘tea forests’ and then later ‘tea gardens’ with the transfer of tea cultivation in the frontier lands of the ‘aboriginal’ Singpho people to Upper Assam in the 1830s. ‘The British abandonment of the wild tea zone on the Sadiya frontier’, Sharma writes, ‘illustrates how the emergent terminology of the garden distinguishes between the wild “jungly” variety of tea and the superior strain cultivated by Europeans. In this vision savage forests would be transmuted to European capital and science into a cultivated tea expanse’. The East India Company surgeon John MacCosh was particularly influential here: ‘His idyllic vision of unordered Nature blooming in ordered gardens’, Sharma notes, ‘openly articulated the doctrine of imperial expansion and improvement which Drayton calls the “economics of Eden”’. Sharma, Empire’s Garden, p 43.
46 Anand, Two Leaves, pp 6–7.
47 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, Savacou, 5(1), 1971, p 97.
48 Highfield, ‘Finding the Voice of the Peasant’, p 115.
49 Wynter, ‘Novel and History’, pp 95, 97, 99, 97.
50 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 14.
51 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 12.
52 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 10.
53 Dey, Tea Environments, pp 8–9, 110.
54 Anand, Two Leaves, pp 130, 132, 133, 134.
55 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 11.
56 McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, p 11.
57 Sarah Besky, ‘The Plantation’s Outsides: The Work of Settlement in Kalimpong, India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63(2), 2021, p 436, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000104.
58 Anand, Two Leaves, p 132.
59 Besky, ‘Plantation’s Outsides’, p 438.
60 Sharma, Empire’s Garden, p 78.
61 Besky, ‘Plantation’s Outsides’, pp 450, 439.
62 Anand, Two Leaves, pp 134, 154, 155.
63 Anand, Two Leaves, p 189.
64 Jessica Berman, ‘Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand’, Modern Fiction Studies, 55(1), March 2009, p 142, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.1591.
65 Sharma, Empire’s Garden, p 78.
66 Baer, ‘Shit Writing’, p 577.
67 Anand, Two Leaves, pp 14, 17, 24, 30.
68 Baer, ‘Shit Writing’, pp 576, 585.
69 Baer, ‘Shit Writing’, pp 579–580.
70 Anand, Two Leaves, p 149.
71 Baer, ‘Shit Writing’, p 580.
72 As Stilz points out, ‘Gangu’s perspective (including that of his family – his wife Sajani, his daughter Leila, and his son Buddhu) only dominates about half of the 26 chapters in the 200-page novel. The others are reserved for a multifaceted insight into the controversial group of Europeans’. Stilz, ‘Buds or Leaves?, p 114.
73 Baucom, ‘Human Shore’, p 3.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jill Didur
Jill Didur is a full Professor in English at Concordia University, Montreal. She is co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches and the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant, Greening Narrative (2014–2022), that explores how locative and mobile media can enhance our understanding of the relationship between the discourses of natural history, globalization, and contemporary perceptions of the environment and sustainability. She is also completing a book about imperialism, gardening and the environment in postcolonial literature and travel writing.