VOL. 2 .333 Jaan-e-Haseena An essay about the varied temporalities and intensities of māṭam—a form of ritual mourning in Shia Islam—as a way to mark how grief, when dislocated from its centers, takes on different velocities and visual registers. Start Now Paul and Ondine In the Kashmir Valley, the spirit of Kashmiriyat remains resilient. Yet, the ongoing struggle for autonomy often overshadows the region’s many intersecting identities, both religious and sexual. When even the majority struggles to assert itself under New Delhi’s authority, what space remains for those at the margins to live and be who they are? Start Now I Sayed and Rasel This essay traces the afterlife of queer activist Xulhaz Mannan's words. Through the collapse of Hasina's regime, the co-option of gender rights, and the silencing of queer life, it asks: can a new Bangladesh emerge if it continues to deny the existence of those it has tried to erase? Start Now Larayb Abrar and Anamitra Bora From Assam’s National Register of Citizens offices to Lahore’s streets, trans and queer communities confront policing, displacement, and erasure while continuing to build worlds of resistance, care, and possibility.
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ARTIST Latifa Zafar Attaii LATIFA ZAFAR ATTAII is a visual artist whose work examines themes of identity, migration, and memory. Her work has been exhibited in China, Switzerland, the UAE, Italy, Iran, and across South Asia. Her practice has been recognized with the Prince Claus Seed Award 2024, and she has been nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, the Cultures of Resistance Award, and the Second Prize in the Allegro Art Prize. Raised as a refugee in Quetta, Attaii currently lives and works in Tehran. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

POET, ARCHIVIST I Sayed I SAYED is a queer poet and community archivist at the Queer Archives of the Bengal Delta. POET, ARCHIVIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Rahul Tiwari RAHUL TIWARI grew up in Bhadwar, a small Bhojpuri speaking village in Bihar. Rahul received an MFA from Banaras Hindu University in 2018. Strongly informed by his place of origin, his work examines regional ecologies and folklore as they pertain to both societal and environmental wellbeing, justice, and change. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? · FEATURES Essay · Mauritius Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could endure after the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Gardens Planting Subsoil Indigeneity Fungi Botany Horticulture Invasive Practices Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 3rd Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Sabrina Tirvengadum, On the Walk (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. When slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Sabrina Tirvengadum, Fruit (2023) This pattern continued with indentureship. When their indenture contracts expired, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Artist · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Gardening at the End of the World LOCATION Ben Jacob . 3 Feb 2025 rd . Letter from our columnist . Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could endure after the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Sabrina Tirvengadum, On the Walk (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. When slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Sabrina Tirvengadum, Fruit (2023) This pattern continued with indentureship. When their indenture contracts expired, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 BEN JACOB is a writer and historian whose work looks at the relationship between colonialism, labour and the environment. Based in London, he is an academic adviser at the Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies. SABRINA TIRVENGADUM (b. 1984, deaf British Mauritian) is a London-based visual artist and graphic designer. Blending AI-generated art, photography, graphics, collages, and digital illustrations, her work delves into themes of identity, relationships, and heritage. Inspired by her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism, Sabrina's work bridges the past and present, questioning the narratives we accept as truth. She has two upcoming exhibitions: Sabrina Tirvengadum: Who Were They? Who Am I? at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (7th February - 6th April 2025), and I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies at Autograph, London (8 Oct 2025 – 18 Mar 2026). Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Gardens Planting Subsoil Indigeneity Fungi Botany Horticulture Invasive Practices Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Artist Mauritius Ben Jacob 3 Feb 2025 rd · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could endure after the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Sabrina Tirvengadum, On the Walk (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. When slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Sabrina Tirvengadum, Fruit (2023) This pattern continued with indentureship. When their indenture contracts expired, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 BEN JACOB is a writer and historian whose work looks at the relationship between colonialism, labour and the environment. Based in London, he is an academic adviser at the Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies. SABRINA TIRVENGADUM (b. 1984, deaf British Mauritian) is a London-based visual artist and graphic designer. Blending AI-generated art, photography, graphics, collages, and digital illustrations, her work delves into themes of identity, relationships, and heritage. Inspired by her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism, Sabrina's work bridges the past and present, questioning the narratives we accept as truth. She has two upcoming exhibitions: Sabrina Tirvengadum: Who Were They? Who Am I? at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (7th February - 6th April 2025), and I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies at Autograph, London (8 Oct 2025 – 18 Mar 2026). Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Gardens Planting Subsoil Indigeneity Fungi Botany Horticulture Invasive Practices Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

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In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. THE VERTICAL Khabristan AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Reportage Delhi 16th Aug 2025 On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

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In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. THE VERTICAL Khabristan In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. GENERAL REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Delhi 16th Aug 2025 Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5