Reimagining the Plantation (ocene): Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud

Abstract

This article turns to Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) to better map the dynamics of the Plantation (ocene) within the history of the colonial tea industry in India. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Kathryn Yusoff and Ian Baucom, I argue that Anand’s novel provides an ‘alterglobal’ inroad into the world of the tea plantation as a site where the ‘biocentric subject’ and the racialized Other are co-implicated in an ‘energy intensive’ context characteristic of the Anthropocene. The global demand for tea as a commodity is linked by the narrative to the local mesh of human and botanical transplantation, and the resulting transformation of environmental, political and cultural practices in the region. Through a polyvocal narrative approach, Anand's novel works to dismantle the discourse of social and environmental improvement that framed colonial management of the tea plantation and makes visible the ‘plot and plantation’ dynamic of the imperial tea industry and its correlative in the Indian novel in English. The turn to the plantation archive in postcolonial studies provides an opportunity to imagine more just ‘plantation futures’ in an era of environmental crisis shaped by the plantation’s political, economic, environmental and cultural aftermath.