Amrita Pritam Gogoi's project, 'Rivers and Forests, Mines and Plantations: Women in the Dehing Patkai Landscape', identifies the gendered experiences within the processes of urbanisation, industrialisation, conservation, militarisation and migration in the Dehing Patkai region of Assam. The Dehing Patkai region, named after the Dehing River and the Patkai Hills that form it, has for centuries been a site of high politics involving war, conquest, forced displacement, compulsory mobilisations, massive labour impressments, interactions and exchanges between states and civilisation. The region's geographical location as an inter-state border (Assam - Nagaland, Assam - Arunachal Pradesh) as well as an international border to Myanmar and China along with its complex demography that includes multiple ethnic groups, state and non-state actors ranging from investors, industrialists, migrant workers, military outfits, conservationists and activists, make it a highly active space characterised by urbanisation, in and out migration, and socio-political resistance movements. These processes have exposed women in the Dehing Patkai to a variety of opportunities for personal and professional expression, growth and mobility, as well as vulnerabilities and violences. Using feminist materialist environmentalism, feminist political ecology, and feminist geography as analytical lenses, my research ethnographically unpacks the specific gendered ways in which these processes shape women's roles and identities in the Dehing Patkai region.
Although scholars, novelists, autobiographers, and authors have written about the region, research on the gendered precarities, coping and healing mechanisms of women, owing to its unique historical, geographical, and ecological locationality, goes missing. Amrita's study aims to bridge this gap. It identifies the impact of transformations in land use, social and political relations on women as cultivators, producers, healers, knowledge keepers, and environmental stewards. By identifying the power dynamics and meanings attributed to women's bodies, lives, and labour, the study highlights the multidimensional gendered socio-cultural, political, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities to which women are subjected. The study presents strategies that women have developed to reclaim their subject positions, exercise agency, and heal from the pain inflicted by the various socio-political events of the space where they are located.