Radhika Moral

RADHIKA MORAL, then a graduate student at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Silk Frontiers: Weaving, Work, and the Politics of Belonging in Northeast India,” supervised by Dr. Jessaca Leinaweaver. This project examines a small-scale industry witnessing a “commodity revitalization model” i.e., seemingly sustainable scaling up of silk production — one that is entrepreneurially driven and government-supported in the face of a rapidly changing ecology. The last remaining silkworm plantations of Assam in Northeast India are on a steady decline. Scaling up models have become crucial as they often shape the dynamic between silk commodities and their socioecological referents. They also pose challenges as collective projects related to national/regional belonging both spur and become stymied by rising ecological shifts that are braided with agrarian ethics. The grantee employs the term baaxjugyo in Assamese to humanely and analytically understand habitability, as an agrarian ethical formation — the phenomenon of making an otherwise unstable landscape habitable for humans and non-humans. The central concern amongst the farmers, rearers, and weavers of Assam’s silk belt is embedded in the enduring anxieties over the loss of traditional knowledge and extractive tapping into a fragile ecology. Firstly, the project examines how agrarian communities, and an entrepreneurially driven class negotiate scaling up models in the context of climate change that is perceived both as a threat and promise. Secondly, it observes the shifting value(s) of a commodity in circulation that is itself being transformed due to environmental shifts. And finally, the grantee studies the ethical formations amongst an agrarian community which merge and unmerge from agro-ecological capitalist models. Thus, a central question that guides this project is what it means to inhabit landscapes that are continually redefined and contoured as seasons change, as a commodity itself shifts in value.