Sociality, Science, and Surveillance: Plantations in the 21st Century
October 9-10 at UC Santa Cruz
A partnership between the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Clara University, this two-day workshop at CSAS explores the effects and imprints of the plantation complex on life and land in South Asia and beyond.
South Asia has had a long, complicated history with plantations. The creation of plantations necessitated the sequestering of large tracts of land for monocropping and coerced labor movement from one part of the subcontinent to different locations across the British Empire. Slavery was abolished across British colonial dominions in the early 19th century; however, this did not stop the expansion of plantations, nor did it reduce the demand for lowly paid manual labor to work on the various monocropping systems that had emerged across Britain’s colonial possessions. Much of the capital for such enterprise was raised across European metropolitan centers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As geographer Maan Barua asserts, plantations in South Asia and the indentured world that it engineered took every form of life under its control. Its owners pored over every financial transaction that went into running it; a body of science and scientists emerged to look after the plants that grew on plantations; managers scrutinized every aspect of work and leisure that workers were assigned to; its workers lived rigid, regimented lives; the plants that grew on it were subjected to regular sprays of chemicals; its soil was injected with artificial nutrients, and its pests were summarily removed to prevent loss of crops.
The plantation complex, with its intact economic, scientific, social, cultural, and social aspects, survived into the post-colonial period in South Asia and among its historically displaced communities worldwide. Plantations flourished because they provided ready foreign exchange and regular employment for an impoverished workforce of newly independent countries in the twentieth century. They also provided the continuity of regimentation and militarization of public life, primarily where the economy depended entirely on plantation monocropping (as in Sri Lanka and Assam). However, as political and economic challenges emerged in the twenty-first century, the plantation complex underwent several shifts in its operations and capacity to influence the lifeworld it once controlled. It is no longer seen as a viable investment for metropolitan capital. Instead of global capital investments from European capitals, funding for plantations today comes from local sources. As the work of sociologist Saturnino Borras shows, it involves small and middle farmers willing to convert their lands to monocropping initiatives.
In our workshop, we will discuss this shift to understand the persistence of the plantation complex in South Asia and across the world in the context of three pathways–sociality, science, and surveillance:
Sociality: How does the plantation as a complex live beyond its socio-ecological, physiological, and geographically bound forms? Where does it surface in and through memory work, migration, and movement across bodies of water and borders, the archives (familial, government, diasporic, industrial, legal, and labor-driven), intergenerational knowledge, kinship investment, birth and death, gender and sexual relations, caste, religion, ritual, and life materialities? What other forms of life and labor, speculative and aspirational, take on and embody the plantation’s socialites? And how do these forms challenge the ways in which we think about categories of time, space, and the body?
Science: Beyond the agro-technical, what kinds of science and scientific knowledge has the plantation complex moved forward? How have projects concerning water management, architecture, housing, sanitation and waste management, medicine, human reproduction, human and human-environmental disease, food and nourishment, and multispecies interactions evolved and taken hold? How did such enduring projects of regimentation engage concepts of risk, valuation of life, humanitarianism, obligation, and care? Despite the totalizing force of scrutinization exerted by colonial and later postcolonial management (through technical institutes, scientific research, data extraction, etc.), in what ways did these scientific projects also present potential synergies and/or uses, and exploitations of the labor and Indigenous forms of knowledge of the land, climate, and human-environmental relations prior to and in order to secure the plantation breaking ground?
Surveillance: How does the plantation in South Asia continue to serve projects of surveillance and policing through its ecologies, labor segmentation, and modes of production? In places like Assam, Darjeeling, and Sri Lanka, how are the plantation’s commitments to policing and surveillance nested within other state, technological, and militarized governance projects, securitization, and development? Following the work of Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne, we gesture towards how the plantation provides carceral architectures that ground, complement, and often coincide with the contemporary state’s desire to maintain control over its civilians and subjects. Following the works of Sujit Sivasundaram and Kalyani Ramnath, we ask how – by looking outward from the plantation’s capitalist aspirations to rely on migration across ocean waters – plantation modes of governance and the border work of surveillance on islands such as Fiji, Mauritius and Sri Lanka, within bordering coastlines such as in Guyana, and in borderlands such as Assam and Darjeeling.
While not exclusive to our individual projects, these foundational themes profoundly impact social and cultural lives across South Asia and beyond. At a time when authoritarianism, militarized violence, dissent, and economic and political transitions are marking South Asia’s political landscapes and future collectives, this workshop and its outputs will serve as a timely engagement and collaboration in the region.
Details
Dates
October 9th, 9am – 6:30pm
October 10th, 9am – 5:30pm
Venue
In Person at UC Santa Cruz
Humanities 1
Workshop in Room 210
Food and Receptions in Room 202
Organizers
Center for South Asian Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Clara University
Parking
Lot #109 and #110 at Stevenson College
ADA Accessable Parking at Lot #106
Agenda
October 9, 2025
9:00-9:30 am
Introductions and Breakfast for Workshop Participants and Attendees
9:30-10:00 am
Welcoming Remarks by Workshop Co-Conveners:
Sanjay Barbora (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Mythri Jegathesan (Santa Clara University)
Dolly Kikon (Director, Center for South Asian Studies; University of California, Santa Cruz)
10:00 am-12 pm
Panel 1: Scientific and Human-Environmental Knowledge Production: Projecting the Past and Future
Bengt G Karlsson (Stockholm University): “One Crop Science: the Role of Tea Research After the Plantation”
Sanjay Barbora (University of California, Santa Cruz): “‘Tocklai, Talk Lies:’ Science, Society, and Persuasion in Tea Plantations of Northeast India”
12-1:30 pm
Lunch for Workshop Participants and Attendees
2-4 pm
Panel 2: Beyond Borders: Negotiating Nationalism, Social Reproduction, and the Politics of Recognition
Debarati Sen (University of Houston): “What Fuels a Plantation? Energy, Labor, and the Parallel Economies of Alcohol in the Darjeeling Himalayas”
Ipsita Dey (University of Washington, Seattle): “Hands in the Soil: Indo-Fijian Embodied Knowledge and the Living Plantation”
4:30-6:30 pm
Reception and Dinner for Workshop Participants and Attendees
Merrill Provost House
October 10, 2025
9:30-10:00 am
Breakfast for Workshop Presenters and Attendees
10 am-12 pm
Panel 3: Voyages of Indenture: Archives and Genealogies of Caste and Labor
Anjali Arondekar (University of California, Santa Cruz): “As Intimate As History: The Evidence of Indenture”
Gaurika Mehta (Santa Clara University): “Fugitive Archives: A View of South Asian Studies and Black Studies from the Sugar Plantations of the Caribbean”
Virginius Xaxa (Visiting Professor, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi)
12-1:30pm
Lunch for Workshop Participants and Attendees
2-4pm
Panel 4: Dignity and Settlement: Life Histories of Gender, Caste, and Labor
Sharika Thiranagama (Stanford University): “Enslavement in Kerala, the Pre-Life of the Plantation”
Mythri Jegathesan (Santa Clara University): “Life Beyond Plaster: Plot Lines of Homemaking and Resettlement in Northern Sri Lanka”
Jayaseelan Raj (King’s College London): “Kangāni 2.0: Crisis, Contracts, and Informality in Plantation Capitalism”
4-4:30pm
Tea and Reception for Workshop Attendees and Participants
4:30-5:30pm
Closing Discussion: Moving Forward (for Workshop Presenters)
Presenters
Anjali Arondekar is Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the founding Director, Center for South Asian Studies, 2020-24. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016), and (with Sherene Seikaly) of “Pandemic Histories,” History of the Present (2022). Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023, Orient Blackswan, 2023), grows out of her interest in the archival figurations of sexuality, caste and historiography in British and Portuguese colonial India. Arondekar is currently working on a third project, tentatively entitled, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture, that couples the archival forms of indenture with the oceanic voyages of caste and sexuality.
Sanjay Barbora is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC, Santa Cruz. His research work explores agrarian change, class formation, conflicts, and reconciliation processes in South Asia and its eastern frontiers..
Ipsita Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department at the University of Washington, and an affiliate of both the South Asia Center and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Environmental Studies from Princeton University. Her work sits at the intersection of environmental anthropology, religion, diaspora, and post/plantation studies, with fieldwork grounded in the Pacific Islands.
Mythri Jegathesan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Santa Clara University. She is author of Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2019) and her research looks at the politics of land attachment and transitional justice for Malaiyaka Tamil.
Bengt Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His work mainly concerns Indigenous livelihoods and conflicts relating to land and natural resources, and most recently, issues pertaining to tea plantations.
Gaurika Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. In her current book project, she combines ethnographic and archival research in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia to trace transcontinental histories of labor, migration, religion, and diaspora across the dark waters (kalapani).
Jayaseelan Raj is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Anthropology and Development at King’s College London, and a Fellow in the GRNPP at SOAS, University of London.
Debarati Sen is a feminist anthropologist of labor in the Darjeeling Himalayas and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston. Her award-winning monograph Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017; Series: Praxis: Theory in Action) examines gendered mobilizations around sustainable development in Darjeeling’s plantations and small farms, drawing attention to issues of social sustainability at the community level.
Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, she works on caste, race, ethnicity, family, war, political violence, and political movements in Sri Lanka and Kerala, South India.
Virginius Xaxa is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development (IHD) in New Delhi. Prior to this, he was a professor at Tezpur University, and Professor and Deputy Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati. He has also taught sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.