Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Aparajita Majumdar is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society. Her scholarship focuses on the historical significance of failed crops, multispecies history and ethnography, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage. Through archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory GIS, Majumdar studies the socio-ecological impact of extraction and development in these colonial and postcolonial borderlands, alongside Indigenous regenerative practices of growing living root bridges from F. elastica. She has a Ph.D. in History from Cornell University, an M.Phil. in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and an M.A. in History from the University of Delhi. Her writings have appeared in journals like Environmental Humanities, Indian Historical Review, and an edited volume titled Objects and Frontiers in Modern Asia: Between the Mekong and the Indus (Routledge, 2019). At the Cogut Institute, her project will focus in particular how Ficus elastica, a “failed” rubber crop from the plantations of 19th-century British India, became crucial to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. As the rainiest place on earth, the Khasi hills in India, connected to the floodplains of Sylhet in Bangladesh, represent an extraordinary borderland ecology shaped by extreme climates, extractive economies, and Indigenous regenerative practices.