GEO Seminar: Tilling new grounds: Exploring the changing roles of maize cultivation in Tibetan refugee resettlement in South India.
Welcome to GEO Seminar with Hanna Geschewski, PhD Candidate Chr. Michelsen Institute and Department of Geography.
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Speaker: Hanna Geschewski (Chr. Michelsen Institute)
Topic: Tilling new grounds: Exploring the changing roles of maize cultivation in Tibetan refugee resettlement in South India
Time: 7 September 12:15-13:00
Place: Department of Geography, room 744 or ZOOM
Maize has shaped the livelihoods of Tibetan refugees in southern India, their host communities, and local landscapes like few other crops. Its increasing incidence can be traced to the arrival of thousands of Tibetan refugees in the State of Karnataka in the 1960s and 1970s as part of wider rehabilitation initiatives for Tibetans who had come to India and neighbouring countries fleeing Chinese occupation.
During this period, both foreign and Indian aid agencies introduced hybrid maize variants (Zea mays) as an easy-to-farm cash crop intended to pave the way for Tibetan self-sufficiency. Gradually, it also prominence among nearby Indian farmers, including tribal communities, replacing the hitherto common cultivation of finger millet and local varieties of sorghum and variegated maize – a shift that continues to this day, despite gradual signs that the crop’s dominance is waning.
Building on findings from five months of field work, this talk delves into the emergence of hybrid maize and the multifaceted implications of its spread among Tibetan and Indian farmers. Drawing on in-depth interviews, oral histories, narrative walks, and crop surveys, transitions in maize cultivation are employed as a spatial-temporal analytic lens for exploring refugee resettlement processes. Studying why, when, where and how maize has been cultivated offers insights into exchange of knowledge, labour, and resources between refugee and host communities, as well as into larger processes of emplacement and reterritorialization among Tibetan refugees in India.
This study is part of the presenter’s doctoral research on refugee-land relations taking the case of Tibetan resettlement in South India under the NCR-funded project Prioritizing the Displacement-Environment Nexus: Refugee and IDP settlements as social-ecological systems, based at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen.
