Anu Krishna

Tata Institute of Social Sciences

“State, Settlers and Spice Trade: Understanding the Geopolitics of Cardamom Trade and ‘Tribal Settlements’ in the Cardamom Hills of India”

The objective of this paper is to elucidate how space and sovereignty becomes a domain of contestation of the images and imaginings of the state- capitalistic system and lifeworld of the indigenous people. With the illustration of the case of cardamom hills which geographically falls to Western Ghat region in the Southern India, the paper explores how political subjectivity of the Indigenous people to the sovereign power of state distances them from their ancestrally lived spaces, self-determination, territoriality and identity. Known to the antiquity as the abode of various indigenous communities and as natural niche of spices like pepper, cardamom; Cardamom Hills are acclaimed today as plantation belt of the country the producing lion share of Indian cardamom. As plantation capitalism thrives on the hills through colonial masters to post-colonial settlers, the indigenous communities like Mannans are reduced as protectorates under state and settler plantocracy. Therefore, the paper attempts to understand the geopolitics of cardamom trade in the place and how it gets camouflaged as civilizational mission of the state in the orders of developmental projects such as roads, dams and through the manufacturing of ‘tribal settlements’ to settle the ‘unsettled’ indigenous communities. The paper also problematizes the global capital flow around the crop of cardamom and how it subjugates indigenous people to negotiations for survival wherein their life and death gets designed by the state, settlers and spice trade in the place. The arguments made in the paper are based on detailed ethnographic field work and oral traditions of indigenous people in the cardamom hills.

Anu Krishna is a Doctoral student with the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research focuses on the issues of the Indigenous communities in the Cardamom Hills, which belongs to the Western Ghats of India. She uses the frame of social theory in her Doctoral thesis to address the questions of changing self, identity and history among the indigenous people in the colonial and post-colonial era.