The idea that the soil was being robbed by nutrients and India of its riches by its colonial administrators was shared by anti-colonial nationalist writers, thinkers, and artists in the early 1900s. This talk starts with a group of artists and agronomists in the 1920s and ends with a group of artists and agrarian activists in the 2020s. Land relations in India were and continue to be inflected with caste and class hierarchies, even in anti-colonial contexts. Thinking through soil exhaustion and agrarian politics in modern India through a history of art and ideas, the talk links the contemporary agrarian crisis to a colonial and nationalist agrarian past.
Sria Chatterjee (she/her) is Head of Research and Learning at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, where she directs the multi-year research project, Climate & Colonialism. She is currently a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Sria received her PhD from the department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2019 and her research interests lie at the intersection of art, science, and environment. Her work has been published widely in academic journals, museum catalogues, and public facing outlets.