Spadework: The Artist Terraforms the Soil

At Rabindranath Tagore’s school in Santiniketan, new trees and soil promised to undo the damage of colonialism and to reintroduce trust and cooperation to Indian society. As a science fictional concept, terraforming has long been associated with settler colonialism, resource extraction, and land enclosure. But earthmoving and tree planting at Santiniketan was an anticolonial practice and politics. Terraforming at Santiniketan is useful to think with because it gives new life to the material analysis of the earth. The time is ripe for the study of the modification, mediation, and animacy of soil. Soil revives basic cultural studies questions of how the oppressions of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, caste domination, and environmental destruction are lived, expressed, and negotiated. In the hands of the artists in this essay—Nandalal Bose, The Otolith Group, and Uma Sen—soil is part of the struggle to reorganize the geography, politics, and culture of colonial and postcolonial India. In soil’s constant reform and renewal, there is the possibility of terraforming new social relations of belonging and healing in India and its diasporas.