Multispecies Monocultures

Organic Agriculture and Resistance on Indian Tea Plantations

Abstract

This article investigates the multiple ontological politics of agriculture on Indian tea plantations from a more-than-human perspective. Plantation agriculture is an ontological politics that enacts authoritative simplifications of plant morphologies and is performed by precarious labour. Each plantation also comprises multiple other practices: the efforts of planters to reform the ecological relationships in their tea fields through organic cultivation techniques, the resistances of workers and supervisors to their working conditions, the unruly growth of tea plants, and the interventions of various other non-human species. The article uses multispecies ethnography to sketch how organic cultivation, labour resistance, and non-human agency negotiate monoculture production. This approach probes the potential of ontological perspectives to evoke multiple variations and minor contestations, while also accounting for the persistence of dominating ontologies.