Decolonization, narrowly defined as the end of European empires, is rarely understood as a “dispossession machine.” Instead, it is celebrated as moments of empowerment— of new states, elites, and institutions— that create new forms of legal belonging, such as citizenship. While refugeedom and statelessness are treated as aberrations in this triumphalist narrative of decolonization, an important element is left unexamined, namely, how resettling and eviction of refugees and stateless people in South Asia have made them ecological agents in which they are even further dispossessed, if they survive at all their new surroundings. Based on primary and secondary sources on the resettlement of 1971 refugees from fertile lands of Bangladesh to arid Indigneous lands of Dandakaranya in central India, the 1978 forced eviction of refugees from the protected island of Marichjhapi to protect tigers of Sunderbans, and the most recent resettlement of the Rohingyas on the transient silt island of Bhashan Char, this research foregrounds environmental histories in histories of territoriality of South Asia. It sheds light on how decolonization, in its last phase, became a dispossession machine, uprooting and re-rooting refugees and stateless people making them ecological agents in stories of their own loss.

About the speaker
Jayita Sarkar is Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences. Her research and teaching areas are global and transnational histories of capitalism, infrastructures, and territoriality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022). Before joining Glasgow as senior lecturer (tenured associate professor) in 2022, she was a tenure-track assistant professor at Boston University. She has held research fellowships at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Edinburgh, and Sciences Po, amongst others.

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