Prologue

Growing up in colonial bungalows with manicured lawns speckled with flowers and wide driveways amid Assam's verdant tea estates—a landscape that could easily have been mistaken for frames from a Merchant–Ivory film or passages from a Jane Austen novel—I luxuriated in the sensory pleasures of the natural world. My childhood spaces were peaceful and beautiful, where I could imagine adventures while remaining oblivious to the exploitation that had enabled their creation: the forced planting of tea by the British (a crop they privileged over any other) and the immense violence against indigenous communities that led to the making and functioning of tea plantations. Indeed, the tea plantations were tamed and romanticized in language by using the phrase tea gardens. When I left these scenic environs for the urban milieu of Delhi in the 1980s to meet extended family, I was ensconced once again within the green lawns, trees, and meandering roads—this time those of the Qutb mosque complex where my grandfather loved to take our family for picnics to enjoy the warm winter sun. Amidst the mosque's columns, I did not think it curious that a group of historical Islamic structures, built in the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries by the Afghan rulers of north India, should be surrounded by a quintessentially English picturesque landscape consisting of undulating green lawns, trimmed by neat hedges, a circular driveway, and trees strategically placed to frame the Qutb mosque complex. I did not give much thought to this landscape's provenance; at six years old and as a young adult, I simply delighted in it, blissfully enveloped in the enticingly pretty scenery, which took me back to my tea garden home.