ABSTRACT
While entering the town of Margherita in upper Assam you are greeted by a huge mural with the text ‘Northeastern Coalfields – Excavating Happiness from the Depth of Darkness’. Underneath you see workers, machines, factories, and powerlines, as well as people enjoying music, theatre, and sports. The mural is reminiscent of the communist aesthetic you would find in the former states of the Soviet Union, celebrating heavy industry, human labour, and ingenuity in taming nature. The message conveyed is that coal, and the extraction of coal, is the very foundation of industrial society in the service of humans. Margherita came into being around the rich coal deposit in this part of the Himalayan foothills. The extraction has being going on for more than a century,
Figure 6.1 Mural in the town of Margherita in upper Assam (source: author).
