Dr Megnaa Mehtta – Rules of the Jungle: Human and Nonhuman Sovereigns in the Bengal Delta
About the Talk
The Sundarbans mangrove forests, located in the Bengal Delta, are internationally famous as a habitat to conserve the Bengal tiger. Conservationists and forest department bureaucrats try to protect the tiger, while forest rights activists’ have attempted to campaign against exclusionary conservation practices using the vocabulary of rights. Taking coastal residents’ ways of relating to the forest as a starting point, the talk reveals how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the “rules of the jungle” (jongoler niyam). The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, “cosmic polities”—that, alongside bureaucratic laws and secular activism, also govern life in the Sundarbans. Nonhuman sovereigns act as a source of care and provide the basis of an ecological consciousness but are also capable of exclusion and discrimination. By exploring a set of questions such as what kind of a property is a forest? What are the different means of relating to such a property—as a natural resource to be extracted, a state-owned property to be protected, a commons to subsist on, or a territory governed by sylvan deities and demons, this talk explores the diverse and complementary forces that govern life in a forest.
About the Speaker
Megnaa received her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2020. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Current Anthropology (CA), the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAME). She has two ongoing research projects supported by the AXA-IOC UNESCO Research Fellowship. The first project Centring a Household in a Climate Emergency explores migration, health, marriage, social reproduction and broader ideas of well-being as these themes intersect with climate adaptation policies, land dispossession and long-standing vulnerabilities in the Bengal Delta. Her second research project The Banglascapes of Venice makes legible the lives of the Bangladeshi community in Venice. As racialized imaginaries create panic about impoverished brown and black bodies from the Global South washing up at the shores of Europe (and the United Kingdom), through the microcosm of Venice, the book reveals the ways in which Italy depends on these very bodies for labour. It makes visible a population that is seen yet unseen, known yet unknown—a part of the daily life of Venice that produces and reproduces it, yet remains entirely segregated and often unacknowledged.
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