Ayan Sharma

The violent Partition of India in 1947 has largely been understood through a history of political conflicts between the two largest religious communities of South Asia. This dissertation project situates this epoch-making event in the history of rapid environmental and economic transformations in eastern South Asia that shaped the final trajectories of the breakup of the subcontinent. By focusing on jute—the prized commodity crop of the British Empire in India—this project reveals myriad connections; those between the migration of hundreds of thousands of jute cultivators from the Bengal Delta to the Brahmaputra Valley, the changing fortunes of British and Indian businesses, and the emergent conflict between different modes of agrarian production that fundamentally reshaped questions of property, territory, and nationality in eastern South Asia. This new history, combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, sheds light on the entanglements between the environment, economy, and politics in the making of the postcolonial world.