Ficus elastica beyond the plantation

Aparajita Majumdar

A wild Ficus elastica tree about of 120 feet high. Photo, Ficus Elastica: Its Natural Growth and Artificial Propagation, 1906, E. M. Coventry.

An indigenous rubber tapper collecting latex from a wild Ficus elastica in colonial Assam. Photo, Ficus Elastica: Its Natural Growth and Artificial Propagation, 1906, E. M. Coventry.

Ficus elastica—an Asian species of the rubber tree—is often ignored by the historians of rubber, because it failed to make a mark in the plantation economy. Its untold story, however, reveals a complex tale about resource extraction at the frontiers of the British Empire, which displaced earlier, environmentally-sustainable, indigenous ways of being, forgotten by postcolonial regimes.

In the Khasi and Jaintia hills of Meghalaya in northeast India, close to the borders of Bangladesh, Ficus elastica has many names. In the village of Rangthylliang, the tree is called Jri Bamon, suggesting a wilful, moody tree that grows only where it wishes (mostly on steep, wet terrains like the edges of rocky waterfalls and the brinks of flowing streams). Morningstar Khongthaw, an indigenous activist from Rangthylliang, describes how their ancestors guided the Jri Bamon to make the jing kieng jri: the living root bridge. Jri Bamon’s pliable aerial roots were woven around dead wood like bamboo and betel nut trunks, and then placed across a river. Once woven, the roots continuously renew and regenerate themselves, making the bridge an animated, durable structure that can survive for several centuries.

A several centuries-old living root bridge located in the East Khasi Hills District, Meghalaya, Northeast India. Photo, Aparajita Majumdar.

Historically, living root bridges allowed people and goods to traverse the deep gorges of the Khasi hills, and down into the floodplains of Bangladesh. With the drawing of new borders between northeast India and Bangladesh, however, many of these pathways were obstructed and the old root bridges were lost in the jungle, forgotten. Morningstar’s grassroots organization—the Living Bridge Foundation—is now campaigning to revive the indigenous culture of ‘growing’ root bridges in Meghalaya. The region, in the past decades, has seen intense environmental degradation due to a proliferation of government and big corporation-led limestone extraction and cement plants in its hills. Countering this extractive culture, the Foundation is disseminating the knowledge of older indigenous experts to a younger generation for the purpose of growing new, living infrastructures in the region.

Morningstar’s work inspires a reimagining of humanity’s relationship with technology and growth. A Jri Bamon takes, on average, several decades to span a gorge and become a bridge. Once established, however, its roots hold fast, even in slippery soil. The root bridge is an antithesis of the fast growth-oriented “plantationocene era” — a term proposed by scholars like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing for a historical epoch dominated by extractive logics and monoculture-cropping for the quick production of commodities in bulk. 

In the nineteenth century, British botanists categorized Jri Bamon as the rubber tree—Ficus elastica—and unleashed a colonizing extractive logic in the north-eastern frontiers of British India. Forests in Assam were leased by the colonial government to the highest bidder, who within a short time extracted maximum latex from the wild trees to feed the rapidly-growing rubber industries. For several decades this system worked profitably for the government and the bidders, but in the 1870s, reports about the trees dying from over-extraction emerged. Around the same time, the colonial government also worried about what it called the ‘contraband’ rubber trade between indigenous peoples and independent speculators who entered the frontier market.

Morningstar Khongthaw (in the middle) with his friends, standing in the backdrop of a 200 to 300-year-old Jri Bamon, to campaign for the ‘preservation,’ ‘protection’ and ‘multiplication’ of living root bridges. Photo, Morningstar Khongthaw.

This supposedly illegal activity, however, reflects resilience from Assam’s indigenous rubber-tappers, who were participating in the trade on their own terms. Their resilience thrived in frontier areas like hills, gorges and canyons (including present-day Meghalaya) where colonial authority ceased to exist. This was the steep and slippery territory of the Jri Bamon, controlled by the indigenous chiefdoms, where the tree’s value went beyond its rubber-secreting quality. To subdue these autonomous human-plant ecologies, the colonial state waged violent military expeditions in the 1870s, destroying several indigenous villages. The first rubber plantations in Assam were established around this time. Plantations, one must understand, are not simply spaces for growing commodity crops. They are, in fact, exercises in disciplining both people and plants for profit maximization.

Ficus elastica, however, was still moody. Gustav Mann, a colonial botanist working in Assam plantations, understood that the tree grew in the wild as an epiphyte, sprouting roots mid-air that became trees on reaching ground. However, when he tried replicating this natural growth pattern, most saplings died without a discernible cause. The few trees that eventually did survive took several decades to mature, too slow for the plantation-based rubber economy. Ficus elastica plantations were ultimately a failed experiment, over-shadowed by fast-growing species like the South American Hevea brasiliensis (successfully cultivated in the plantations of Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth century).

Today, in Meghalaya, as the postcolonial state leases hills/forests to limestone-extraction companies, just like the colonial government, Jri Bamon’s forgotten legacies are brought to the fore, once again, by indigenous activists and organizations. In the beautiful, organic complexity of the jing kieng jri, perhaps we can see the outlines of a new future for human-plant relations.

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Aparajita Majumdar is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Cornell University. She researches the history of plantations in British India, studying cultures that develop around resource extraction. Currently, she is investigating how marginalized communities of the India-Bangladesh borderlands have shaped their own ecologies through the ‘failed’ rubber crop, Ficus elastica, locally known in Northeast India by a variety of names like Borgach, Borgos, and Jri Bamon.