A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation 9780822380153

Citation preview

A Time for Tea

A John Hope Franklin Center book

A Time for Tea women, labor, and post/colonial politics on an indian plantation

Piya Chatterjee

Duke University Press Durham and London 2001

© 2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by C. H.Westmoreland Typeset in Fournier by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

for Baba, my father who mothers me for Kaki, who does the same for Kaku, who is gentle and in memory of my mother, Dipti Chatterjee, who wished it

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Alap 1 2 Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 20 3 Cultivating the Garden 51 4 The Raj Baroque 84 5 Estates of a New Raj 115 6 Discipline and Labor 168 7 Village Politics 235 8 Protest 289 9 A Last Act 325 Appendix 327 Glossary 333 Notes 335 Bibliography 383 Index 411

Illustrations

1. A box of Brooke Bond tea 3 2. A box of Brooke Bond PG Tips teabags 3 3. ‘‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’’ 18 4. A box of Celestial Seasonings tea 23 5a and 5b. ‘‘Like Sons of the Forest’’ 36 6. ‘‘The Colonies as a Captive Maiden Forced to Drink Tea’’ 37 7. Taking Tea in England 39 8. The High Life, or Taste à la Mode 39 9. A Comfortable Dish of Tea, 1782 48 10. ‘‘A Harlot’s Progress’’ 48 11a. Portrait of Sir Thomas Lipton 66 11b. Garden scene 66 11c. Sacks of tea on a Ceylon plantation 67 12.Women pluckers on the plantation waiting for their leaf to be weighed 79 13. ‘‘From the Tea Gardens to the Tea Pot’’ 93 14. ‘‘The refreshment that maintains stamina’’ 96 15. ‘‘The vital drink for the Indian worker’’ 96 16. ‘‘Keep your family strong and healthy with Indian tea’’ 111 17. ‘‘It’s your privilege and pride’’ 111 18a. ‘‘When only a certain flavour will reflect your unique taste’’ 113 18b. ‘‘Contemporary Tea Hand Book’’ 113 18c. ‘‘The Lore of Tea’’ 113 19. Two leaves and a bud 169 20. Attendance log 184 21. ‘‘First Apparatus Used in the Manufacture of Tea in India’’ 211 22. ‘‘Supremely yours’’ 218

Acknowledgments

Or Another Kind of Introduction The paradoxes and realpolitik of patronage, power, and labor build the bedrock upon which the stories of plantation women are told. A Time for Tea inhabits many spaces and undulates through and beyond the borders of a seemingly distant landscape. It is an ethnography about postcolonial diaspora as much as it is about some dot on the map that I script into terms of familiarity. These oscillations have charted the contours of its production, its telling times. Such authorial movements suggest a highly individualized cartography of the imagination. This is, indeed, the peril of authorship as singularity. Yet this individuation is illusory because these are narratives thickly peopled with the energy, kindness, and forbearance of many who have sustained me in the years since I began my journey into the story of tea. All have been my teachers. In ineffable ways, they too script this tale, even when they have resisted its intrusions, its naivete, its grandiosities, and its positions. My teachers inhabit the world.They live in Calcutta,Chicago, Jos, Jalpaiguri, Siliguri, Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate, Debpara Tea Estate, Riverside, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Amherst, New York, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Wellesley, Greenwich. They map a terrain of connection and loss: a kinship intended to assist me in telling a story that is fragmented, celebratory, and sad; to weave a cosmology both paradoxical and possible. Their pedagogy of compassion and kindness marks this text in indelible ways. To say I am ‘‘indebted’’ might reduce their acts of generosity to tactile measures of value and in so doing, take away the important ways in which they inhabit this text. It is ironic then—as I beg your indulgence in ploughing through the many words to follow—that I begin by registering the inadequacy of these very words. In India, kinship and patronage made it possible for me to embark on my various journeys into North Bengal plantations. Many planters, and their

kinswomen, have given their valuable time. For offering me their hospitality in Calcutta, I thank Bimal and Monica Guha-Sircar, Renu and Pronoy Saharia, Monoj and Sheila Banerjee, the late S. K. Banerjee and Deepu Banerjee, Mahavir Kanoi, Padma Kanoria, Ronnie Babaycon, the late David Smith,Gulshan Bagai, and Bhaskar Gupta. Lata Bajoria’s friendship enabled me to meet many Marwari maliks (owners) in Calcutta, and for her generous networking I give my thanks. She and her daughters, Nidhi, Puja, and Babli have provided a cool space of ribald welcome during many hot Calcutta summers when I wrote and rewrote these stories of tea. Shanti Bannerjee— grandmother, teacher, and friend—introduced me to some of her tea kin, though her influence on my work extends well into the territories of my childhood, a time when her example of pragmatic grace and wisdom made an indelible impact on my nascent understanding of privilege and its many effects. In North Bengal, I was hosted by many families, particularly on initial nomadic visits in 1991, and then again in 1998 and 1999. I extend my appreciation to Leonard and Sonali Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Bose, Samar Chatterjee and Diju Chakrabarty of the Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association (who readily made available some rare colonial planter journals), Dr. D. N. Chatterjee of the undp family planning project in the Dooars, Mr. L. P. Rai of Mim Tea Estate in Darjeeling, Mr. Teddy Young of Tumsung Tea Estate, Darjeeling, Mr. Pran Choudhury, Mr. Ravi Singh, Joydip Bose, and Pranjal Neog of dbita who gathered information for me with efficient generosity. However, it is the kindness and hospitality of two planting families who, despite knowing the objectives of this study, made it possible for me to stay in the Dooars forextended periods of time. Ashok, Bonny, Mimi, and Madhu Sen bailed me out on numerous occasions and for their energetic kindness, I will be always grateful. Kanwarjit and Guddi Singh embraced me as another daughterand friend. Mr. Singh enabled me to do this work byoffering me his patronage and protection while Mrs. Singh opened up her treasure trove of material on tea histories. Her own scholarly interest in plantation women’s issues prompted fruitful dialogues.Without the Singhs’ support and generosity, the fieldwork on two separate occasions (1991–1992, 1999) could not have happened. It is, however, a few women and men from the ‘‘other side of the lines,’’ to whom I owe my deepest gratitude. They negotiated my intrusions with unease, even anger, but more often than not, with a remarkable generosity of spirit. To ‘‘thank’’ them for making possible a text that rests on the backbone of their lives might appear a facile gesture. It is a gesture, however, not made simply. (Imagine, for a moment, an intricate movement of hand xii

and eye. Imagine the suggestion of patterns traced in the air.) For their resilient laughter and embrace of my uninvited presence, I wish to name their central place in the stories which follow: Julekha Sheikh and her dol (gang) at Moraghat Tea Estate, Munnu Kujoor and Bikha Kujoor, Bhagirathi Mahato, Baldo Mahato, Anjali Mirdha and Arun Mirdha, Agapit, Christopher Pracher, B. Gop, Rita Chhetri and her friends at Debpara, Kaki of Katalguri (who took me to meet her legendary mother, Lachmi Maya Chhetri), Madan Shaikh, Dilip Tamang, Uma Gop, Durga Mata of Chamurchi (who shared her sacred gifts and with a flourish of hands waved away some winds of misfortune), Sannicharwa Lohra, Moniki Mosi, Menu Mosi, and all the other women leaders of the Cha Bagan Mahila Seva Samity (Tea Garden Women’s Service Society) who honor me with their trust. Elsewhere in North Bengal, I was welcomed as kin by others who taught me equally important lessons about the remarkable political theaterof North Bengal. Vasanthi Raman, Vaskar Nandy, Dr. M. N. Nandy, Dida, and Mini of Kadamtala More in Jalpaiguri opened their home in ways that made such a political theater immediate, actual, and urgent. (Oh, for those cups of hot sweet tea on the verandah, upstairs, by the roof with its potted plants.) Rupak Mukherjee, Bithi Chakravarty, and Shukra Rautiya (who took me to the remarkable Lal Shukra Oraon) welcomed me on various travels in the region. Nirmala Pandey also assisted me with translations and transcriptions of songs and oral histories. Father Sebastian Martis, whom I met in 1999, is a partner with whom some grassroots dreams are being sown. Thank you, Sebastian, for your charity. The staff of many libraries in North Bengal, Calcutta, and New Delhi have assisted with this research, and I extend my appreciation to the following: Mrs. Meera Chatterjee of the National Library, Calcutta, who has walked the bureaucratic labyrinth for many years and always found books for her anxious niece; the Jalpaiguri District Library; the North Bengal University Library, Bagdogra; the superb Himalayan Studies Documentation Centerat the North Bengal University; the District Commissioner’s Library, Jalpaiguri; the Central Secretariat Library, New Delhi; and the Ministry of Labour Documentation Centre, New Delhi. In Calcutta, many members of the Hooghly Mills staff have let me take their time, space, and energy when they had better things to do: they have photocopied material; driven me to travel agencies when I had to ship pounds of that same material to the United States; served me tea and food at Moran Shahib er bagan bari (Moran Sahib’s garden house) when I wrote theater and sat by the Ganges with an old oil lantern; and made things immeasurably easier during my Calcutta sojourns. I am aware that my father’s Acknowledgments xiii

wish and order (hukum) made their ‘‘giving’’ imperative, not a choice. Such are the ways of feudal patronage.Yet they have done so with an affection and respect for my father and family that contains and exceeds the terms of such neofeudal power. I extend, then, my deepest gratitude to Sri Nimai Mondal and his family; Sri Raj Narain; Mr. Samanta; Sri Bhim; Sri Bhagirath; Rabi; the staff of the Hooghly Mills computer room; Mr. Mukherjee who tends the fax machine; and Sri Romesh. Back in the United States, other kin networks spun their webs of support and encouragement. Barbara Lazarus (who always urged me to let the songs sing) and Marvin Sirbu have helped me navigate the shoals of immigration. Barbara, simply, has made it possible for me to complete my studies in the United States; Barbara, Led, and Kristen Day have been family in absentia; Martha Loiter has believed in similar passions; Anissa and Yasmina Bouziane have probed with me the creative vicissitudes of chosen exile; Karima Saleh’s dogged commitment to grassroots practice and her compassion in a time of great terror, has defined the meaning of true friendship; Omar Qureshi’s gentle perseverance has remained, also, a benediction.One friend has stepped, literally, on this path to and from the plantations. She has not only met some of the remarkable women and men in the plantation I have called Sarah’s Hope, she has on one memorable afternoon danced with them. Cathy O’Leary’s faith and connection to these other worlds of the actual imagination has nurtured this tea time over its long gestation. For introducing to me the notion that writing and telling women’s stories within the academy is an act of power, against power, I wish to thank my first professors in the United States: Amrita Basu, Barbara Lazarus, and Sally Merry. Their lessons helped me immeasurably in graduate school when I often felt that ‘‘women’s politics,’’ particularly if passionately wrought, was not welcome in the detached disembodied towers of scholarly enterprise. I was lucky, however, to find teachers who understood my unease, and anger, with such forms of epistemic violence. For their acts of compassion during moments when I thought I was not going to ‘‘make it,’’ I offer my deepest gratitude and respect to Bernard S. Cohn, Jean Comaroff, Raymond T. Smith, John Comaroff, Susanne Rudolph, and Lloyd Rudolph. Since 1999, Chandra Mohanty has honored me with her kindness and support. Because her writing onThird World feminisms was a pivotal part of my subterranean training in feminist theory, her mentorship during these years has been both poignant and invaluable. Such are the blessings of a wonderful pedagogy. At Riverside, colleagues and friends have given their labor of time and patience, which I hope has been deserved. In 1998, Erla Maria Marteinsdottir created the first data base for the bibliography and offered her energies xiv

when her own commitments were burdensome. Her labor as my research assistant, and its value, are beyond price. Likewise, Gina Crivello, Larisa Broyles, Pam Cantine, Susan Mazur, Konane Martinez, and Janni Aragon cleared the decks during heavy teaching quarters and plumbed the library for additional sources. Most importantly, they have offered me wine, bread, and solace when things seemed unbearable. Darlene Suarez, Narges Erami, Raj Balasubramanian, and Ramona Pérez also offered their friendship with large doses of toughness, wisdom, and compassion. For that common and wrenching experience of immigrant displacement, such acts of kindness constitute the life blood of possibility and place. Other colleagues have erased the scrolls of abjection with ready encouragement and have offered their own intellectual practice as models of a brilliant and powerful pedagogy. Parama Roy’s keen and ironic wit, her humility, and her scrupulous and ethical attention to the scholarlyendeavor has offered a tender example; Kathleen McHugh has urged me, with passionate faith, to find my writing soul; Devra Weber has offered her solidarity and wisdom; Ethan Nasreddin-Longo’s brotherly patience and his compositions of mind and music have been a gift; Jennifer Brady laid out tea and served me many moments of kindness. Michelle Bloom has shared Proust and tisane; Christine Gailey remains an inspiration in the way she brings a certain joy into her ambit of leadership. She, Marguerite Waller, Amalia Cabezas, Irma Kemp, and Roxene Davis make Women’s Studies a unique place in which laughter is combined with innovative pedagogy and its writing work. Funding for this research, conducted between 1991 and 1993, 1998, 1999, and 2000 has come from various sources.They include the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship, Regents Faculty Fellowship, University of California Riverside, Faculty Research Incentive Grant, (UCR), and several Academic Senate Grants for extramural research from the University of California–Riverside awarded between 1997 and 2000. Ken Wissoker’s interest in tea has sparked a happy association with Duke University Press. My debt to him, for his patient encouragement, and his remarkable editorial team is a large one. I would like to thank Katie Courtland, Leigh Anne Couch, and Justin Faerber, as well as all the unnamed folks who have cooked this leaf into a product. Maura High’s copyediting has taught me again how much collective labor goes into the crafting of a book. Her editorial eye has pruned astonishing snarls of syntax and metaphor to strengthen the book immeasurably. Cherie Westmoreland’s visual imagination of the design has captured the leaves of text beautifully. Nancy Zibman provided the index.Two anonymous reviewers of the raw manuscript made this journey possible.Their substantial commentaries, their close reading of Acknowledgments xv

the earlier versions, and their encouragement was deeply appreciated, and I hope has made what now stands more worthy. Ellen Gentry took the photographs for the illustrations that are included in the book. Anik Dhonobad, thank you, to all. My family in Calcutta has made everything possible. My siblings— Dada (Chayan), Bappa (Mayukh), and Priya—have wondered at the fuss, shrugged, and laughed uproariously. I trace my impulse to follow the plantation story to my father, Rama Prasad Chatterjee, who—transgressing all the codes of patriarchal propriety—would take his six-year-old daughter through the floors of the jute factory under his managerial purview. By encouraging me always to push past the borders of my own upbringing, even allowing me to fly away, Baba will always remain my first teacher. Kaki, Jharna Chatterjee, has walked many routes of transgression with me and for me: allowing me to run like a jungli (uncivilized) child through the good neighborhoods of the city. For her many invocations of the divine arsenal, for our raucous ritual laughters, and mostly for her maternal love, I have been immensely blessed. To her, Kaku, Mriganka Shekhar Chatterjee, and Baba, I dedicate this bit of tea. And also to the memory of my mother, Dipti Chatterjee, who left us too early, whose ghost may have sat on my right shoulder, and who wished it.

xvi

chapter 1 Alap 1

A Time for Tea: The Play Dramatis personae: She/Narrator; Alice, of Wonderland fame, and companions; British burra sahib; 2 British memsahib; Indian sahib; Indian memsahib; four women pluckers as a chorus; ‘‘Son of the Forest’’; goddess; dancers; and other incidental characters.

act 1, scene 1 The stage is horseshoe-shaped. It curves, a crescent embrace, around you. On the far stage right, suspended from the ceiling, an empty picture frame.On the stage, at an angle behind the picture frame, an ornate wooden table and chair. On the table, an oil lantern.To one side, a large oval-shaped mirror in a highly baroque bronze gilt frame. Next to the chair, a stool. Next to the stool, a pirhi (small wooden seat). The backdrop is a cream gauze cloth, stretched loosely across the back of center stage. The stage is dark. There are hints of shadows. Slow drumming begins: dham dham dham. Then a sound of keening, ‘‘continuous like the lonely wailing of an old witch . . . an unsettling, unsettling’’ sound.3 This wailing rises to a crescendo, reaches an unbearable pitch, and then stops suddenly. Absolute silence. A woman (Narrator) steps out stage right, which curves out like a strange pier, into you (the audience). She wears a long, dark red cloak of some lustrous material. The robe has a cowl; it falls low on her forehead, shadowing her eyes. She wears gloves the same color as her cloak. Her mouth is outlined in red and black. She stands by the desk, in front of the chair. With exaggerated motions, she removes some objects from a deep pocket in the cloak, moving as if she were a magician: slowly, with flair and precision. A quill pen, a bottle of india ink, a silver sickle, a bottle of nail polish, a clutter of false fingernails, a porcelain teapot with a long pouring spout, a porcelain cup, and some tea bags. She turns

to you, with an intimate and welcoming smile, as if noticing you for the first time watching her place this strange collection on the table. she: Nomoshkar. Hello. May I sit? (She sits drawing the folds of cloth around her.) I am weary. My journey here has been long and its tale most peculiar. So strange that as it is told, you may keen, you may sigh, you may not be able to tell the difference between a wail and a whisper. So piercing its cacophony, you may twist your fingers into your ears. So unbearably beautiful, the sorrow of a body curved into its shadow, you will forget to breathe. (She takes a deep breath, exhaling it into a sigh, ending in a wry laugh.) Oh, let us not be so serious, so serious. This is a jatra,4 a dance, a shadow play, a sitting-room drama. Such kichdi,5 such higgledy-piggledy, you will elbow your neighbor and whisper for a crystal ball. You will look under the chair for a flotation device.What is this, what is this? You will fasten your seat belt more tightly and look out into cerulean space. You will find the ball, you will toss it in the air; you will cover your face with your hands and shake your head. ‘‘What is this, what is this?’’ you will say in despair. (Pause.) Let the tale unfold as it will. Don’t panic. There are some plots, some roads with milestones, a cartography of words. If it is all too much, and the path disappears into the light thrown by the headlights, and you think you are not moving—then shut your eyes.The illusion of such stillness in the rush of the road underneath your wheels offers such dissonance. (Pause.) Let yourself fall into the rabbit hole. Dream, Dream. Imagine, within the crucible behind your eyelids, a porcelain cup. Imagine, after a breath, silence resting on its lips. The lights dim. She leans forward and lights the lantern to a low flame. She pours liquid from the tea pot in her cup. She is barely discernible as she rests back in the chair’s shadow.The cup seems to warm her fingers. For a minute, you hear the sound of rain and then again the dham dham dham of the drums, a distant wailing. It fades.

january 1992 Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate,West Bengal, India There are two packets of Brooke Bond tea I have brought with me from Chicago that I show to Anjali Mirdha and Bhagirathi Mahato, two of three

2

1. and 2. ‘‘Choicest Blend,’’ from the outer packaging of a box of Brooke Bond tea, bought in London, England, circa 1994, courtesy Jean Comaroff; ‘‘Finger/Tips,’’ from the outer packaging of a box of Brooke Bond PG Tips teabags, bought in Riverside, California, circa 1999.

women in the tea plantation who have befriended me in this first month at my bungalow. The packets have on their covers two women, one a photograph/painting, another an etching. They appear ‘‘Asian,’’ their heads are covered, the wrists braceleted.The hands are poised over a flutter of leaves. With one hand, they lift a leaf. There is precision in that stilled movement, in that carefully held and bodied point. Puzzled at my offering of two empty tea packets, and somewhat amused by this two-dimensional rendition of their work, Anjali and Bhagirathi laugh. It is one of many texts that I offer to them as one way to introduce my research project and uneasy presence in the plantation. My questions run

Alap 3

pell-mell: ‘‘What do you do? Look where the tea travels. Is there a story here?’’ We have already had some conversations about their tea plucking: the suggestions of delicacy, their ‘‘nimble’’ fingers. Theiramusement is frank, welcoming, and derisive: ‘‘Sowhat dowe think about this tea box? . . . Didi [older sister],’’ says Bhagirathi, ‘‘this woman looks like a film star. Like Madhuri.’’ 6 We laugh. She continues, ‘‘Who makes this box? Hath dekho [Look at (our) hands].The bushes cut into them, and the tea juice makes them black. Feel how hard they are. Yeh kam [This work] . . . yeh natak nahi he, didi [this is no theater, didi ]. But what do you memsahibs know anyway? 7 Come to the garden one day and maybe you will see.’’ Seven years from this initial encounter over tea, I reread our conversations in field diaries and the tea box as feminized texts: the box of tea, first, as fetishized commodity, of woman-as-tea gesturing toward a long story of empire. Women and labor made picturesque lie at the heart of tales about Chinese emperors, Japanese tea ceremonies, the East India Company, and the colonial tea plantations of a British Planter Raj.8 There are stories of many empires entangled in this orange landscape of pagodas and slender, poised wrists. There are narratives that meet and congeal in this image of woman, labor, and its suggestions of the exotic. A cartography of desire traces this picture of commodity and its display of feminized labor. Distance charts the lure of a consuming gaze. Yet Anjali and Bhagarathi remind us that these are historical narratives that are corporeal, and that what I shall call a ‘‘feminization of the commodity’’ is made possible because of gendered and racialized practices of ‘‘the body’’—fingers hard, dark, and understood within frameworks of endurance and heretical laughter.These too are the feminized texts of empire, of colony, of neocolonial plantations at the end of a millennium. Histories, imperial and subterranean, fold into each other, and I will, in the narratives that follow, search for the strands of a longue dureé 9 that connect corporeal memories and practices to larger global processes and the material themes they entail. An ethnography of the quotidian, privileging the pragmatic and contemporary worlds of women and men working in the tea fields of North Bengal, will constitute the narrative seedbed of the book.10 It will, however, be in constant play with the colonial and imperial histories that continue to imbue the structural compulsions of plantation production.

4

Patronage, Patriarchy, Power: Toward the Moral Economies of Rule This plantation ethnography offers plural and thickly textured stories about the political and cultural economies of labor and village life in the tea plantations of North Bengal, India. Labor bends into the very core of an enclave economy that has dominated northeastern and southern India for over a century. While the raison d’être of labor procurement and discipline constitutes its material bases, its colonial cultures of management and political isolation chart a particular economy of rule. Indeed, the terms of indigenous feudal norms are grafted through the colonial imperative into a hybrid cultural politics.The sociocultural and political distance of plantations from townships and urban centers creates a cultural history unique to itself. The postcolonial plantation suggests a mimesis of the colonial Planter Raj (kingdom). Yet the political cultures of this postcolonial fief are inextricably connected to regional processes through dialectical connections among labor, commoditization, and the circulation of international and domestic capital. As a primary foreign exchange earner, tea’s significance for the national exchequer cannot be underestimated. Because of such fiscal imperatives, this ethnography does not settle into an analytic enclave that rests neatly on one side of the binary between the global and the local. Much like the commodity’s circulation through the international and national marketplace, its narratives do not draw, or assume, impermeable borders. Rather, through ethnographic details ‘‘within,’’ the ‘‘without’’ is always gestured. The ‘‘global’’ is not a hazy backdrop for a thickly textured ‘‘local’’ cultural economy. The ethnographic details of the so-called local margins are not placed as a foil to the dynamic histories of the truly ‘‘global’’ and its neoimperial centers.11 Indeed, through a constant shuttling between different narrative registers, the multiple dialectics between ‘‘center’’ and ‘‘margin’’ will be underscored. The effects of such shuttling may be disconcerting, even violent. Their oscillation serves to displace the binary into moments of dissonance and the actuality of disjunctures.

Fathers and Families of Labor The unit in India is the family, not the nation, as it is with us.Why, one of the rules of their religion is that the family must see one another through thick and thin. After all, what does a coolie call any of us when he wants help: mai-baap, meaning father and mother.12

Alap 5

The feminization of labor and commodity is produced through a culture of patronage in which the personhood of the planter-manager-sahib stands tall. The construction of a benevolent father figure within the organizing rubric of the laboring family draws the basic parameters of the patronage system. It blunts the coercive practices of the work regimes and creates an aura of legitimation. It cements a ‘‘moral economy,’’ 13 through which the plantocracy and working class consent to, legitimate, and resist the terms of wage labor. The politics of patronage and the construction of the planter mai-baap (mother-father) is a metaphoric and pragmatic ‘‘core’’ that has been in place since the colonial period.The contemporary burra sahib is a hybrid figure of imperial and neocolonial lordship. He reinvents himself and the cultivated centers of his rule through ritual acts that invoke the style and symbol of the British Raj. It is a mimesis that enacts the terms of a post- and neocolonial social world. The plantation is a fiefdom, and the rule of the postcolonial and Indian mai-baap creates its coercions within masks of benevolence. It is a neofeudalism that grafts the political symbolisms of nineteenth-century British imperial and manorial lordship on to Indian upper-caste notions of zamindari (landowning) power. Striding through his domain in safari shorts while a worker hastily alights from a bicycle, the postcolonial planter will also attend a harvest ritual taking place in the field during the beginning of the plucking season. His attendance will not be a mere gesture, for he too may believe in similar divinities of the earth. The bodily distance that he might maintain in the ritual will be tinged with ideologies of social distance that are upper-caste and colonial Victorian. These are the terms of postcolonial feudalism. Diffusions of planter and mai-baap power cohere around social practices that are explicitly patriarchal.The planter sits astride a pyramid whose base is field labor. It is a base constituted by women who dominate the necessary site of the plantation’s political and cultural economy. Simultaneously fetishized (in the commodity picturesque) and pragmatically devalued (in lower wages) women’s fieldwork—tea plucking—creates the outer perimeter of the plantation field. The planter’s management of work sustains this as the outer perimeter through a hierarchy of overseers and supervisors who are all men.14 Work disciplines through the manager’s hukum (order) trickle through layers of surveillance that reenact his will in decidedly gendered terms. Because overseers are often high-status men in the plantation villages and ‘‘labor lines,’’ the patriarchal and paternal disciplining within plucking regimes is double-pronged. Though the overlordship of the burra sahib remains distant in the villages, it resonates within the immediacy of 6

community-rooted and customary norms of village patriarchy. Patriarchies rest within patriarchies. Patriarchal acts of labor management, through the hukum, are the warp and woof of the plantation’s political and cultural economy. They create the vivid strands of plantation patronage. Through them emerges a feminized habitus of labor that connects imperial trade, commodity fetishisms, and rituals of domesticity in Victorian, colonial, and postcolonial parlors. The corporeal and remembered oral texts of women in their fields are situated as counterstances to these dominant discourses of fetishism.15 They question the compartmentalization of time and space in the stories of tea. What are the symbolic, historical and material threads that weave together commodification and rituals of labor? How can the spaces of field and factory, village and the global market, be imagined as overlapping and layered domains? When women’s subordination is essential to these fields of production and consumption, the circulation of patriarchies shapes the hegemonic and counterhegemonic contours of the postcolonial plantation.

october 1992 Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate Anjali Mirdha, Munnu Kujoor, Moniki Mahato, some of their children, and I hustle past the clubhouse and temple on our way to someone’s house in a distant section of the Labor Lines. We are late, but we pause to buy some sweets at a small paan (betelnut) shop.16 I stand next to two men who are buying cigarettes. One man, nudging the other, moves away from me in an exaggerated motion. ‘‘Ay, memsahib,’’ he says, ‘‘don’t stand too close to me. We people are jungli people. You may touch us and turn black. Be careful.’’ His sarcasm is palpable. Disconcerted, I pull back. Munnu glares at him and grabs my elbow to move me away. ‘‘Don’t pay attention, didi,’’ she murmurs kindly. I am immediately aware of a corporeal history in this index of gendered status: of a memsahib who might be polluted to blackness, of caste/class and race politics embedded in his response to my unwitting transgression of bodily and gendered space. His sarcasm, however, suggests that this ontology of fallen status might be illusory. Jungli is derived from the Hindi vernacular jangal, the roots of the English ‘‘jungle.’’ Thus, a connotation of ‘‘wildness’’ was inscribed upon communities searching for work during labor recruitment forcolonial tea plantaAlap 7

tions. It indexes the construction of an essentialist ontologyof primitiveness upon populations classified as ‘‘tribal.’’ Within labor immigration policies, administrators created typologies through which capacities for ‘‘manual’’ work were measured by customary occupations, physicality, and places of origin. ‘‘Tribals’’ were viewed as most suited for the most physical tasks, such as the clearing of jungles and cultivation. Since nineteenth-century anthropology of colonial documents classified Indian ‘‘tribes’’ on the basis of an evolutionary telos, the local apellation jungli signified their place on this pragmatic telos of labor procurement and management.17 She is the iconic body of wildness and primitivism. Her essence demands a civilizing and disciplining mission. Her body, marked by the stigmata of a topographical connection—of Nature unbound—is the site of excess and constraint. Her placement as the laboring ‘‘primitive’’ lays the foundations for the elaborate and racialized sociology of plantation work. Cultural practices of social distance are baroque, deeply relational, and in constant flux.They disperse and cohere through work disciplines in factory and field, and shape village politics. Upper-caste understandings of racialized and class superiority seize Victorian and European constructions of ‘‘primitiveness’’ and combine them with far older, precolonial Hindu caste notions of pollution and hierarchy. It is a conceptual and political hybridity that rests at the core of plantation patronage and its feudalisms. Patronage, and its patriarchies, cannot be unhooked from the historical taxonomies of race and caste that constitute the sinews of social power.

Woman/Body: Displacement and Excess A woman’s labor, her tea plucking, is located on one side of the international division of labor. She is variously labeled as Third World, subaltern, working-class. She signals the margin. She is emblematic of a certain silence. Her stories sit in the shadows of impossible representations.18 Yet this ethnographic fleshing of her stories, this calligraphy of body/silence/word, suggests that her body creates the inextricable bridge across the illusory abyss between margin and center. She constitutes the chain-link fence on one edge of the international division of labor, the borderline of the hinterland’s enclave. The bridge of the woman’s body is created by historical and cultural acts: fetishisms of both labor practice and commodity and the cultures of consumption thus constituted. Bodily acts of cultivation and production script the terms of its desire. The fetishism of her ‘‘nimble fingers’’ narrates the desires of consumption crafted as imperially feminine. While such an aesthetic foregrounds another coporeal and feminized story, a postcolonial 8

laboring woman’s body bends in its shadow. Between cup and lip is the breath of another tale. A body stretches out its possibilities. The analogue of the woman’s body-as-bridge linking the divides of the international labor is not easily made. Consumption is not transparently constructed.The bridge is not a metaphor easily deployed.Consider driving over a corporeal bridge.Consider its rush of violence. Labor becomes product and commodity through congealments of flesh, not pillars or stone.The feminized connections among the tales of empire, colony, and post colony are constructed through the mundane and seemingly insignificant gestures of the body enabling power, paradox, and silence. Its script remains in flesh. A plucking woman’s body does not permit such easy analogues of bridging links. It signals its own negation.

Writing Power The commentary of the anonymous man by the small shop, as well as Anjali and Bhagirathi’s laughter, gestures toward dissonances in the stories of tea to be told. A man’s body moves quickly away from mine. Such deferrals of body and space provide an explicit commentary about my politics of location:19 a memsahib, Bengali, upper-caste. The politics of patronage and the terms of coercive power that undergird plantation work and its social worlds permitted me access to some plantations in North Bengal, and it permitted me to remain in the one I have called Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate. Deeply benevolent, planter patronage embraced me because I was a bhadralog’s (Bengali gentleman’s) daughter, and I exuded a heady connection to the new empire, the United States. I was also embraced as a friend and fictive kin by two planting families, who enabled this work in significant ways.While encounters with other members of the planter elite decreased dramatically as the research continued (and snagged in some jagged, political shoals), it was a kind paternalism and maternalism that also made this work possible. However, I also remember edgy commentaries from a planter associate, an elderly Bengali man, whom I had met at the regional planters’ association while searching for archival material. ‘‘So, Miss Chatterjee,’’ he said with some asperity. ‘‘Where have you been? I haven’t seen you for a while. Are you still doing research on women workers? My goodness, are you going out into the field with them? This is why you have become so black.’’ His was a striking commentary about my perceived transgression: another rendition of fallen status, marked by the fiction of my ‘‘fieldwork’’ Alap 9

and my suddenly explicitly racialized and gendered position. Patriarchal comments such as these laced most aspects of my research, sometimes with a splintering power, because my transgression—as a Bengali woman from a ‘‘good family’’—was that of an ‘‘insider.’’ My ontology was now inscribed as dishonor. I was betraying the ‘‘family.’’ The contradictions of the insider/outsider 20 as a gendered, classed, and racialized subject fissured every encounter over tea in North Bengal. Patronage and power was simultaneously the methodology of field research and the substance of the text. Translation of method into text and ethnography has to take into account these inevitable contradictions, in no simple way. The politics of the ethnographic translation of women’s lives is situated in a series of conversations about the relationship between feminism(s) and anthropology, and more recently, the theoretical practices of feminist ethnography.21 The substance and style of this ethnography is indebted to these important debates about feminism(s) that continue to raise important questions about the relationship of textual production to anthropological practice. It engages the perils and possibilities of feminist ethnographic production through a writing voice that is postcolonial and ‘‘Third World’’ in vexed and contradictory ways. In the past decade, the interrogation of the Third World as a primary site of investigation has been partly compelled by the changing face of disciplinary practitioners, many of whom come from ‘‘there’’ and who themselves embody the absent but still powerfully resonant space of nativism. For many women anthropologists trained in the U.S. academy who are from the ‘‘there’’ of the dominant episteme, ethnographic production and writing are fraught with colonizing dissonance. How can the ‘‘native’’ woman write within and against the here/there without reifing the exoticism that she may embody for the paradigmatic gaze? How can she write herself, beyond the re-visions of such a dichotomy, into the space of an integral, though not transparent, praxis? How can she be accountable to her privilege and the paradoxes of her own de/colonization? 22 Coming to the writing voice, within and against the binary, is a process shot through with variegated threads.The text it produces traverses the herethere-here-there. Its dance is an exquisite ad infinitum.Yet, its voices may be dis/abled by the very oscillations that make these hybridities.These are not only calligraphic gestures to movements across maps. They speak through the body, in flight, traversing borders defined by global, national, and regional state-power. Transnational anthropology is a given for those of us

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who came here to be trained, but our entry into the here (of a U.S. ‘‘center’’) from the there (of the periphery) is itself compelled by specific postcolonial and imperial histories.23 Yet such transnational moves are mediated by ‘‘actual’’ power plays: the contradictions of class location, state, and juridical power, the politics of nationhood and citizenship.24 To then claim where we come ‘‘from’’ as an ethnographic site, to engage the home-as-field, gestures to a counterparadigmatic dance. Yet its practice is implicated within the actualities of late-twentieth-century globalization and its imperial orders. It is simultaneously, and perhaps contradictorily, inflected by the bourgeois, feudal, and regional particularities embedded within the larger matrix. Through these moments of encounter and contest, I reflect on the shared codification of my specific authorial positioning as a postcolonial, Third World, feminist anthropologist. Through this ethnography, I push into the membranes of these categories because of my desire to destabilize them. My desire is fueled by the need to understand the relationship between reflection and practice, the ontologies of worlds in theword, of writing as an act of despair, celebration, enablement, and im/possibility. I do so, however, in an open-ended way, employing rhetorical strategies to speak up, against, and about the silences that many of us inhabit because our dizzying oscillations do not allow the safety of fixed categorical boundaries. De/colonization is the sharp-edged frame within which the act of writing and the politics of the plantation experience is narrated. I am, however, most interested in viewing these destabilizing meditations as a corridor through which we can reflect on ethnographic writing as an act always embedded in the mother lode of its actualities. I offer them walking on paths paved by contrary philosophers of field and text to whom they owe many debts. They are poets, singers, raconteurs, scholars, theorists, and activists. They are crafters of the spoken and written word, narrators of the possible.They sit on my shoulders with folded wings and urge me to think beyond the confinements of borders.They push me to imagine, and theorize, the work of writing-action-power as an integral matrix. They ask me to explore the dialectics between language games and the worlds to which they gesture. They suggest that perhaps writing, and ethnographic writing in particular, is a re-presentation of human experience that is not only about violence/betrayal/appropriation.Yes, these are important characters in my theater of silences and silencing. Writing, like the body, can sway in the paradoxes of its own making. Perhaps, with folded wings, it can honor.

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De/Colonization and Textual Strategies Writing subterranean histories within a compelling ‘‘present’’ from an authorial site of power and privilege suggests that ethnographic ‘‘method’’ (field research) and textual ‘‘analytics’’ (ethnography) are deeply entangled.25 How can one claim this politics of location—a space of actual ‘‘situated knowledge’’ 26—without reducing the stories to be re/presented into congealed, angst-ridden ethnographic selfhood? 27 Because of the integral circuits of textual production, anthropological practice, and issues of accountability, I have ‘‘theorized’’ through various narrative registers. The text’s prose style moves between explicit authorial presence and third-voice displacements. The ‘‘I’’ of authorship is always begged. When shifts are made between each mode of narration, the effect might be jagged. This is purposeful. Its shuttling seeks to destabilize epistemic assumptions about a ‘‘master’’ narrative voice. The conventions of dialogue, of quoted conversations in which my own voice is often placed, are culled from detailed notes and some tapes. This prose modality of dialogue assumes the elliptical and porous nature of ethnographic writing.28 Interpretation of notes, diaries, and tapes are editorial tasks of choice, elision, and emphasis. By re-presenting the dialogues through the text (rather than inset quotes), I indicate the specific and detailed conditions of their ‘‘making.’’ In so doing, I seek to highlight the manufacture of the stories, the artifice of the narrative. As such, the prose dialogues are offered as re-presentations rather than as perfectly captured ‘‘talk.’’ The use of the theater to introduce, interrupt, and frame chapters presents another indexing of narrative ‘‘voice.’’ It breaks apart from the other prose by employing a different kind of language game. At one moment, it serves as an allegory of plantation history in which certain archetypes are constituted: the planter, women workers, the drunkard. At another, it weaves together other historical narratives, ranging from primary documents to novels, through the freedom of ‘‘voice’’ that theater allows. The play can be staged separately, but I have written it as an integral part of the ethnography because it forces the writing voice into imagining itself as working with bodies, gestures, dance, sounds, light, shadows, and silence. In thinking about theater-and-ethnography and theater-as-history, but also about theater’s power to celebrate and disrupt the limits and frames of language, I am indebted to Antonin Artaud who wrote that the ‘‘theatre is no thing but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.’’ 29 By staging the play as

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text, through text, I am seeking a language of interruptions: one that begins to de/colonize paradigms that do not easily permit the expression of anguish and desperation, the body’s scripts of labor, silence, alienation. In making these assertions, I honor Artaud’s exultation of Balinese theater’s capacity to ‘‘lead us unceasingly along roads rough and difficult for the mind, plung(ing) us into that state of uncertainty and ineffable anguish which is the characteristic of poetry.’’ 30 The drama, like poetry, is a process continuously open to its own sad ruptures. This is its only claim.

Situated Knowledges In the first weeks of 1992, when I finally find a place to stay, I am rarely alone. Embraced by honest curiosity, I am invited to many rituals of welcome. Anjali Mirdha, assigned to the small bungalow that is to be my home in this first sojourn in the plantation, brings me to the homes of friends and kin. A kinswoman sips from a steel tumbler of red liquor tea.The tea offered to me comes in a small china cup. She smiles, ‘‘This is not Darjeeling tea but our own espeshal [special] lal cha [red tea] served to guests.’’ Everyone laughs at my bewilderment. Anjali explains that this is the tea rationed to workers and made from the lowest grade of tea powder at the end of factory manufacture. The espeshal tea is offered with its own product brand of good-humored sarcasm. Anjali introduces me to Bhagirathi Mahato, a neighbor, and very soon I meet her older kinswomen. A week after my arrival, a few of us take a walk to the Bhutanese border. It is winter, and I am fortunate that they give so generously of their ‘‘free’’ time. The rhythms of labor, even in absence, create the backbeat of the spaces within which we will meet and talk. It is telling that they choose to take me to a place so far from the plantation and its villages. Except for kinsmen of the small network of women who draw me slowly into their lives, most plantation men measure a conspicuous distance from me in my short journeys through the villages. Trade union leaders know about the patronage that has brought me to this plantation, and the trickledown effects of this information engenders hostility and suspicion. However, it would be a mistake to interpret such sharply gendered acts of distancing as connected only to trade-union-inflected perceptions. When an old man jumps away, startled as I walk by him, his surprise registers the fact that women of my class/status, memsahibs, do not come into the Labor Lines.The garden fence of the bungalow precincts is an absolute border for the women who reside inside. The bewilderment, surprise, and fear, in the

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eyes of an old man register the histories of class and power. When I enter their homes, men’s absences assert also a sense of mutual izzat (honor).When I ask Bhagirathi about men’s deferrals, she remarks, ‘‘You are a woman, a memsahib from a higher caste.They are shy to be around when we talk. But they ask many questions.’’ In striking contrast to this gendered and class distancing, my initial encounters with many plantation women are characterized by immediacy and frankness. At first, I consider this difference in response a reflection of women’s distance from organized labor politics. I learn quickly that such assumptions about women’s ignorance of my connections with the plantocracy, and its possible ramifications, is simplistic and wrong. Anjali tells me what is being whispered in the villages: I am a spy for the company in Calcutta, for the Amrikis (Americans), and a welfare officer of the state government.When I ask what they think of these commentaries, Munnu Kujoor comments, ‘‘They are worried because you are from the outside. They do think it is political party work. But you are a spy, aren’t you? If you write down things you see and hear and you tell others, isn’t that spying?’’ Women’s knowledges of village politics, and their own reflections about this research, teach me the most important lessons about the politics of ethnographic production: that knowledges are gendered and women’s analysis, and insights about this work is premised on the collective and mundane chatter through which their communities make decisions about uninvited strangers in their midst. Through numerous conversations about perceptions and interpretations of my presence, we sift through the contradictions of my research. Questions about its product, the thesis or book, occur. More often, the daily effects of our growing kinship is discussed. Anjali tells me that she is distraught because some from her community are saying that ‘‘Anjali walks behind the memsahib because she is getting better food.’’ A Nepali overseer has asked Bhagirathi where her masterji (teacher) is. Both Anjali and Bhagirathi are defiant when they share these anecdotes with me. They underscore that this is the ‘‘way of the village, of jealousy. Why should it bother anyone what we do and where we go?’’ Yet the commentary about food, and the analysis of jealousy, gestures to the strands of a political economy within which, for many, getting enough to eat is a constant struggle. As such, perceptions about gendered and cross-class solidarity within the immediate context of this research are written within the syntax of power and its moral economies. Hunger is its ineffable script. Translating this mise-en-scène of collective and dialogic static against the grain of the text is in one way impossible. Yet it cannot be deferred. Grinding against the sieve of authorship are commentaries, interrogations, 14

and discussions offered by some plantation women, and men, upon whose living knowledges this ethnographic analysis is built. Through their questions, they deployed a strategy about anthropological learning that decentered any easy assumptions I may have harbored about anthropological and textual authority. Un/learning and re/learning the terms of anthropological expertise and authorship is constant work. It is a pedagogy, in Paulo Freire’s terms, that requires its own decolonization. As such, this particular narrative remains connected to the fault lines of memory, to the richness of experience, the historical imagination, and finally to the hope of connections to collective and emancipatory social practice.31

march 1999 Seven years have passed. Seven years of absence and return. Munnu, Anjali, and I walk quickly to Gita’s house for a meeting. We will be met there by Moniki and Menu Mosi, who want to introduce me to a woman from their clan ‘‘who has suffered much.’’ As we head to the meeting, Munnu tells me that the dol (labor gang), while plucking in the field, has decided to move ahead with other income generation activities. Their meeting-in-labor is organic and powerful. When we meet at Gita’s house with the rest of the group, we decide to hold another meeting to discuss registration. Perhaps a more collaborative politics of translation has begun. These are stories of the plantation that need to be told. They are more important than the medium of selfhood through which they are partially filtered and understood. Their translation is multiply inflected by power. These narratives do not assert the nostalgia of lost origins. Neither do they shriek the clarion call of good intentions. The politics of translation are drawn too sharply for the miasma of innocent intent.32 When orality itself is translated into a literate text, into a language (English) twice removed in power from the languages spoken by plantation women (Sadri, Hindi, and Nepali), then the act of writing congeals power and difference in a space never transparent.33 Captured into the written words of an academic text that will circulate in the global marketplace, this ethnography will perform an ironic fetishistic act. Like the tea box circumnavigating the market, this book will commodify into print the stories of women and tea. It too will circulate as product, as commodity, as a reified tale of power and paradox: another feminized tale to be read in and against the grain of its own moment. As a postcolonial ethnographer navigating the cartographies of new emAlap 15

pire in the production of this text, I have enacted various refusals. For many years, paralyzed by the contradictions of its manufacture, I have been unable to come to the written word. The silence through which I have come to this text has forced me to question that-which-is-not-said, refusal, in more general terms. Silence traffics on psychic lands, between the external and internal, through the stunned words that lie, breathing, within.The refusal of others to speak charts the terrain of interpretation, as much as the words uttered.34 Memory is not so fully dismembered by the contradictions of postcolonial displacements: the plottings of silence and word map the suffocating terrains of imperial power.With fingers, and the word, these stories trace fault lines. A woman’s body stretches on the rack between utterance and void.

Calligraphies Anjali Mirdha, Munnu Kujoor, Bhagirathi Mahato, and their kinswomen remind me with honesty and compassion, that ‘‘telling stories’’ emerges from the most basic of human impulses to communicate, to commune. We have numerous conversations about the text: its literacy, its language, its circulations. Picking up my pen, Anjali rushes over to a map of the plantation I have been sketching on the wall. Scribbling her name in Hindi, she hands me the pen and watches while I write her name again, in Hindi and English. She tells me that this is all she could write and that she had finished up through class 2 in the local plantation school. This, she says with pride. Taking the pen from me, she ran her fingers up its length, weighing it in her hands. ‘‘Is me shakti he [there is power in this]. Didi, how great it is that you can write. I would have liked so much to write.’’ Her explicit recognition of the power contained in the pen, in writing, is tangible; her desire to claim authorship, poignant and powerful. It is also celebratory. Months later, Munnu and I return from a remarkable day with a legendary trade union leader who is a woman, Lachmi Maya Chhetri. After an hour of rest, we meet for dinner. Grabbing my arm, Munnu asks: ‘‘Have you written what she said? Have you? Can you believe the stories she told us about the English period? Have you written it down yet? Have you?’’ The intensely tangible understanding of power in ‘‘writing stories’’ was always underscored when we had explicit conversations about the research project and the ‘‘book’’ that would come out of it. Anjali told me she did not understand this as a book but as a film, that I was making a film with scenes that were like photographs in my mind. Still pictures. 16

Yet they also understood that their stories would circulate among ‘‘bara aadmi [big people] like yourself.’’ ‘‘Perhaps,’’ Bhagirathi shrugs, ‘‘there might be some benefit for us’’ (she pauses). ‘‘But probably not.’’ She understands the limits of trickle-down theory. She continues, ‘‘You people are big people after all.You live in America. But you are not kicking me in the stomach, so what is wrong with sharing some stories?’’ Then patting me on the head consolingly, she says, ‘‘Ah, didi, don’t worry so much.Tell your stories about the garden.’’ 35 Their critiques were polyvalent: trenchant, critical, humorous. Their commentaries inform the textual method through which these stories of tea are written. Weaving between different kinds of telling/writing, I enact a dissonance that suggests an edgy sound, a cacophonous trill poised on the borders of a melody. The narratives make no claim for a paradise lost, of an innocence or diasporic nostalgia to be naively scripted, a required redemption. The metaphors of cultivation, of gardens, and indeed of the Eden to be planted in the new colony create a template of colonial inscriptions about tea plantations in northeastern India. There was a paradise to be gained, new fields of edenic cultivation: of landscapes to be ‘‘settled’’ and made ‘‘human’’ through a vision of empire and light on a ‘‘savage’’ frontier. So the ‘‘gardens’’ were planted, harnessing people for the hard task of cultivation, making an even, emerald landscape—which to this day remains curiously unpeopled from the distance of the road.The bushes stretch undulating and green, bordering the paddy fields, against the Himalayan foothills. The ‘‘field’’ takes on many meanings: its Cartesian emptiness to be explained with a corporeal history, its cartographies made temporally human. For an anthropologist, these fields take on other meanings. ‘‘Fieldwork’’ has a darker and imperial resonance.36 Indeed, it is a field of vision to splinter through landscapes laced with memory and power. I dig up old boxes from inside the earth: lacquered and cloisonné, ebony, mother-of-pearl. Caddies of tea that do not appear exotic or sacred, merely infinite. Frames within frames of liquid lines dissolving into spirals, into circles, into flame. There are words to be summoned from ether, ground whose earth I must touch. There are caravans and ships to join, worlds to map. What spoils to spin? What cartographies to learn and unlearn? What terrain to conquer again with word and noise? Let me ask you to lift a gray veil and imagine Alice in her Wonderland. Let me ask you to imagine for a moment, Alice setting out the porcelain cups.Who is the Mad Hatter, and where to begin? Alap 17

3. ‘‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,’’ from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Illustration by Sir John Tenniel. Reproduced in The Calcutta Tea Trader’s Almanac, 1978.

act 1, scene 2 A spotlight sweeps in a steady arc around the stage, moving stage right to where the Narrator stands on the stage. She is hunched and unmoving. The light stops almost questioningly, then moves upward toward the left. Harpsichord music in the background and the chirping of birds. The light stops at a frozen tableau. There, spread out, is the Mad Tea Party from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: a table set under a tree, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter having tea at it, and Doormouse between them, fast asleep, that the other two are using as a cushion, resting their elbows on.37 Alice sits with a petulant and sulky look on her face. On the table, with its paraphernalia of tarts, cups, and teapot, is a small roll of paper tied with a ribbon. The Narrator moves from her dark corner. Drawing the folds of her robe, she picks up the mora (wicker stool) and places it next to Alice, who looks at her with curious annoyance. The Narrator reaches across and picks up the small roll of paper with a questioning glance at Alice. Alice shrugs with indifference. Unrolling it, the Narrator reads the text, slowly, and with increasing puzzlement. she: I am an oriental Alice, I say. My tea party is peopled with dark faces and caravans that wind through the steppes of my mother/continent. The slash suggests this winding. Like a scalpel it cleaves the tale. I am an oriental Alice, I say: I disdain the flat hyphen, its Cartesian plane. The 18

horizon of my party is not a line, but shimmers possible circles. Disorder lies liquid in its veins. I ask you to sip subversions. I ask you to transgress the shadowlines of place, to vault the borders of time and continental space. (Pause) Imagine the Himalaya. I sip tea with cardamom, piping hot from a cup, sitting on the edge of a hillside. The mist wraps everything, everything. The old caravans bearing silk and tea plied close to this place—I know now. I am aware in my memory of sweet heat and shrouded hills. History is quicksilver mercury in my cup. The Narrator sits quietly for a moment. She rolls the paper up, ties the ribbon, and places it in the deep pocket-fold of her cloak. Alice is looking straight ahead, unresponsive. The Narrator turns to you, lifts her shoulders in an exaggerated question mark, turning out her palms. Light fades out completely. Silence.

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chapter 2 Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire

act 2, scene 1 Spotlight focuses on the Mad Tea Party. Alice, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and Doormouse rub their eyes as if coming out of a trance. The Narrator sits on the wicker stool and turns to you. she: Poor, poor Alice. How she shrinks! How she expands! How she searches fora way to get into the perfect garden.Considerall her journeys: the caucus race, the doormouse’s tail/tale, the caterpillar encounter. Wouldn’t you be a little tired if you swam in a pool of tears? Aha! They are waking up. (She picks up her lantern and stool. She moves back to her section of the stage.) mad hatter: (as if continuing a story from a dream he is waking from) ‘‘Well, I had hardly finished the first verse, when the Queen bawled out ‘He is murdering the time! Off with his head!’ ’’ alice: (exclaiming) ‘‘How dreadfully savage!’’ mad hatter: (in a mournful tone) ‘‘And ever since that, he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’’ alice: (brightly) ‘‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?’’ mad hatter: (sighing) ‘‘Yes, that’s it . . . it’s always tea-time, and we’ve not time to wash the things between whiles.’’ alice: ‘‘Then you keep moving around, I suppose?’’ mad hatter: ‘‘Exactly so, as the things get used up.’’ alice: ‘‘But what happens when you come to the beginning again?’’ march hare: (interrupting with a yawn) ‘‘Suppose we change the subject. I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.’’ 1 Light fades out. Only the glow from the Narrator’s lantern remains. Silence. The history of tea juxtaposes images of imperial refinement and imperial rupture: folktales of ‘‘civilization’’ and conquest that made possible the cultivated landscapes of its longue durée. Imagine, if you will, mari-

time legends of tea clippers racing their packed chests to the thirsty docks of London and Boston. Consider the desire of the first sip in grand parlors, the quiet tinkle of spoons against porcelain. Picture one night in Boston, where men dressed as Native Americans toss tea chests in the harbor.2 What a tea party this is, imbued with the overt symbols of political battle and the more hidden suggestions of a wildness to be imagined, appropriated, and conquered. Cultural refinement and political rebellion inform these tea parties, and the beverage—its leaf and liquid—becomes a medium through which the chronicles of global expansion and conquest can be told. Layered into these more visible political economies of European expansion are tales of imagination and desire that fed a burgeoning demand and sparked tea’s journey into the grandest parlors of Europe. From the late sixteenth century, tea titillated European palates, by virtue of its consummate connection to the riches of the celestial kingdom itself: the secret and shadow empire of the great ‘‘Orient,’’ China, which would keep European trade at bay for over two centuries. Curtailed supply would make the commodity more dear, and indeed, more desirable. With all its accoutrements of porcelain jars and delicate cups, bamboo whisks and brocade, the culture around tea drinking would come to signify the consuming pleasures of discovery. From within such a cradle of splendor, tea would take on an aura of exoticism that would be domesticated and made quintessentially ‘‘English.’’ 3 A commodity that was alluring because of its very distance from the familiar would be slowly transformed into the signifier of a quotidian and very English definition of civil manners, genteel taste: the penultimate icon of civilization itself. Indeed, hidden in such consummate navigations from ‘‘strange’’ to ‘‘familiar’’ are the histories of empire: the mappings of exoticism, the continuous struggles over symbol and sign, and the cultural cartographies of conquest. The social economies of Chinese and European tea histories embroider this chronicle of tea. Using the tea leaf as a medium, so to speak, I offer a layered cultural history of the ‘‘world system’’ that, as Marshall Sahlins argues, cannot be reduced in any simple sense to the economic compulsions of early modern trade.4 Certainly, it is difficult to dispute the importance of tea in the regional economies of Asia and its emergence as the most important commodity to feed the coffers of the East India Company.The immense potential profit promised by trade in Chinese tea was a primary impetus for its navigation through the choppy waters of the South China Sea. Yet, compulsions of lucre cannot wholly explain tea’s emergence as such a singular commodity player in the theater of early modern maritime trade. Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 21

Cultures of consumption, fed by the very wealth of trade expansion, now demanded commodities that signified the success of ‘‘discovery.’’ The remarkable demand for tea was enacted through a symbolic praxis that indicates the material rewards of its trade. Through rituals of consumption, tea signified a new domain of desire: of emerging femininity and its leisures. If the imagination, fed by the fantasy of a fabled exterior landscape, trickled into the drink itself, then its rituals of consumption signaled the emergence of new interior worlds. This interiority indexed gender and class transformations that came to mark the dominant ideals of Victorian domesticity and its idealized and feminized domains of the ‘‘private.’’ By the end of the eighteenth century, tea’s iconic status as a drink of aristocratic women had expanded beyond the parlor. Its popularity among the emerging middle class and a growing urban working class ensured further commercial expansion and demand. Cultural economies of consumption would push the mercantile and administrative impetus toward British plantation settlements in their Indian colony. Such a task would thus intricately connect the consuming histories of taste to the fruitful disciplines of colonial enterprise. Images of refinement within metropolitan consumption in these tales of tea would then translate into a laboring cultivation on another imperial frontier: an imagined and actual wildness from which gardens of civilization were to be planted. The ‘‘tea gardens’’ of eighteenth-century Vauxhall were an imperial and colonial metaphor, framing the realpolitik that made the postcolonial ‘‘garden’’ a promise and possibility. This early chronicle of tea is, then, not a detached prelude to the laboring histories of postcolonial Indian tea plantations. It offers the themes and tropes of conquest and civilization, which continue to underwrite the empires of the millennium and their elysian gardens.

A Liquid Trade: Tea and Asian Mercantilism

Celestial Seasonings The woman etched brightly on the box of Chinese herbal tea in a southern California supermarket invokes an imagined Asian landscape.Through a commodification that is baroque, bright, and exotic, the packet gestures toward millennial economies. It scripts a two-dimensional text about a cultural economy of consumption within which the allure of an exotic picturesque remains an enduring theme. There is considerable debate about the precise time period when tea cul22

4. ‘‘Spice and Flowers,’’ from the outer packaging of a box of Celestial Seasonings tea, bought in Chicago, Illinois, circa 1993.

tivation became widespread in China. Villagers in Sichuan were known to cultivate the camellia plant around 1600 b.c., and tea concentrate sealed in earthenware jars circulated within agrarian markets of southern China’s mountain provinces. By the late Zhou dynasty (1100–800 b.c.), these earthenware jars signaled a flourishing trade on the Yangtze River. Tea is important in Chinese legend: the discovery of its medicinal properties is credited to the Emperor Shen Nung, a figure of mythic proportions, considered the father of Chinese agriculture.This legendary ancestral figure noted the clear and subtle flavor of the green liquid around 2737 b.c. 5 In another textual etching, the character t’u, which referred to a popular herbal drink, appeared in a book of songs dated 600 b.c. It was a mere stroke away from the character ch’a, the Chinese word for tea.These early linguistic referents of tea in the literary texts of early Chinese empires do suggest that if tea had ‘‘trickled up’’ from the rural countrysides into the locus of textual refinement, it enjoyed widespread acceptance in China’s vast rural and cultural economies. Certainly, the circulation of tea long antedates its entrance into the shipholds of sixteenth-century East India clipper ships. During the Confucian era (571–479 b.c.), tea’s reputation as drink of ‘‘moderation’’ was already being forged. Indeed, the tight weave between the spiritual and the political, and the cosmologyof celestial and social order that would indelibly mark Confucian practice, became symbolized within rituals of tea drinking. Though idealized within the mannered rites of aristocratic consumption, the connection of tea making and drinking to the folk-religious practices of China’s villages cannot be underestimated. In one folktale, Lao Tzu, traveling through Sichuan around 600 b.c., was Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 23

offered a cup of tea, which he drank with great relish. His enjoyment, and the attendant act of deference through which the tea had been offered, suffused tea drinking with a decidedly Taoist flavor. It marks Chinese hospitality to this day. Other folktales connected tea to Buddhist journeys from India to China and Japan. The Buddhist monk Darma, or Dharuma, left India for Nanjing around a.d. 520, vowing to meditate for seven years without sleeping. In his fifth year, the hapless monk, overcome, struggling against his mortal weakness of sleep, tore off his eyelids. When they fell to the earth, they became tea plants, whose herbal offering ushered him into the enlightenment he sought.6 These folk histories, rooted in the earth and the wanderings of monks, suggest that tea drinking was a potent and quotidian presence in the social worlds of rural China.

The ‘‘Dignity of Government’’ By a.d. 479, Chinese imperial bureaucrats were calling attention to the importance of regional trade in tea.The ‘‘sale of vinegar, noodles, cabbage and tea in the west gardens was a reflection upon the dignity of government.’’ 7 Cultivation on small family-owned plots of land and circulation on river routes created expanding trade networks in southern China. Wholesalers bought tea from small farmholdings and sold consignments to merchants, who paid their tax obligations in home provinces in cash at the capital. In return, wholesale retailers received bills of exchange known as ‘‘flying money’’ ( feiqan), which guaranteed repayment by local authorities after the merchants returned home.8 This system of credit, connecting tax revenue payments of merchants with the southern Chinese tea economy, signals the significant role of tea cultivation in T’ang state bureaucracy and the revenue collection it managed. Indeed, the linkage between northern capitals and southern kingdoms was to forge tea’s fiscal importance to Chinese imperial policy for many centuries. Imperial policies of the southern Song era (1127–1279) enhanced tea’s commoditization and visibility in the rites of popular and elite consumption.9 Because of the rule of a rival dynasty in northern China, the Jin (1115– 1234), the southern Chinese tea trade was monopolized by the Song aristocracy.The thirst for lacha (wax tea), together with the epicurean standards of taste that grew around tea drinking, ensured a boom in the production of tea in the region. Small, government-run plantations in Minbei (northwest Fujian) where wax tea was grown and processed, invigorated local economies. So lucrativewas this trade that these small plantations created a system

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of labor organization that anticipated the vast plantation systems of colonial South Asia. Imperial ‘‘estates’’ monopolized the production of lacha, but the ripple effects of the state monopoly also ensured a boom in microproprietorship. Buddhist and Taoist monasteries underwrote their texts of spiritual consumption with tea cultivation. Indeed, these temple plantations spun the threads of a ritual political economy that crossed the borders into Japan and Korea. However, fiscal consolidation by Song bureaucrats led to the displacement of local sharecroppers from lacha production, and as a result this monopoly was not a seamless business. Tea bandits, known as chakoyu, led attacks against government officials and tea merchants.10 Tea’s importance as a staple of intraregional circulation was firmly established in the Song dynasty, but its role in the border trade with central Asia is equally significant. Sichuan tea had entered the caravans of Tibetan and Central Asian nomads long before the T’ang dynasty, but the Song instituted a carefully regulated barter system on its northern borders, a trade that was to become a focus of the later Ming and early Qing administration (1368–1644).11 However, the Mongol invasion and the subsequent Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) interrupted such successful fiscal strategies.The southern Song and Jin dynasties collapsed, as did state-controlled lacha production. It was in this period of dynastic upheaval that the production of leaf tea, instead of compressed or powder tea, became most popular. State-run imperial plantations would be expanded again by the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644). Imperial bureaucrats of the Ming dynasty focused on the border trade with Central Asia and a powerful cartel, the Horse and Tea Commission, premised on the barter of horses and tea, emerged. A million jin of state monopoly tea from Sichuan was traded for fourteen thousand Mongolian horses at trade stations on northern borders. Indeed, this immense barter economy created the backbone of the Chinese imperial cavalry.12 Alongside the state-controlled barter system, the caravan trade through Central Asia and Russia followed an old route, introducing tea to Russia and lands further west. Ming trade expansion was not limited to its terrestrial northern borders, and rulers like the famed emperor Yung Lo (1403–34) sent naval armadas of trade as far west as Persia and south into Java, Sumatra,Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and even Malabar.13 The barter system and caravan trades, coupled with maritime explorations, fed the imperial treasure chests. Tea, with silk and other precious wares, helped to rebuild the Great Wall and opened the imperial canal connecting the trade routes of northern and southern China’s great rivers.

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 25

Rituals of Consumption: Women, Labor, and Imperial Teas During T’ang dynastic rule, the growing demand for tea compelled state and private expansion into larger systems of labor organization. Merchants and large landholders employed sharecroppers on large farm holdings or bought supplies of tea from individual family farms through a contract system. Women worked in family-owned plots, and their participation as tea pickers in larger arrangements of production was prominent. In some of the largest farms, as many as three hundred women sorted tea leaves by hand and cooked the leaf in roasting sheds.While men assisted in leaf sorting and the processing of tea bricks, the ranks of those working on the first crucial phase of cultivation, the plucking of leaf, were almost exclusively women.

Pure Labor, Innocent Value Women’s visibility in plucking was most pronounced in the imperial plantations of the T’ang and the dynasties that followed. From these sites of production—and the texts extolling connoisseurship around the finest grades of tea—a certain fetishized aroma arose: an aroma of ‘‘romance’’ indelibly connected to women and to their plucking labor. Indeed, suggestions of a flowery and transcendental romance are noted in a tenth-century poem from Minbei. It is narrated by women: ‘‘So joyously, each household enters the clouds, / To where the dewy buds grow in dense profusion. / A morning’s picking cannot fill our baskets, / We have to pluck the finest / And not yield to greed.’’ 14 Tea’s value, the poem suggests, begins with affective crafts(wo)manship that transports it, beyond ‘‘greed,’’ into its own celestial markets. Romanticized labor and the commodity worth that it suggested were premised on the disciplines of women’s bodies. In one account of labor management, tea pickers were required to abstain from eating fish and certain kinds of meat so that their breath might not affect the bouquet of leaves.15 Some overseers believed that young girls, preferably virgins, picked the best tea.They were thought to be more ‘‘dexterous’’ and ‘‘keener eyed’’ than the other women.16 Women’s hands and fingernails were carefully scrutinized to ensure scrupulous cleanliness: body oils, perspiration, and heat, they believed, contaminated the quality of leaf.17 Fukien’s finest teas were given as a tribute to the imperial courts during the Song dynasty. They took their name from Pei Yuan, one of the most famous of forty-six imperial plantations. Consider the following observation of labor organization: ‘‘The pickers, controlled by drum and cymbal signals, had to work in the chilly hours 26

preceding dawn, the quality of leaf being more highly valued than quantity. These highly trained girls wore labels so that tea thieves could not mingle with them unnoticed.’’ 18 Thus, virgin women’s plucking defined some of the finest grades of tea leaf: cleanliness connoted purity, clean silk-clad fingers, a pristine delicacy. Notions of purity (of a clean, nonsexual female body) constructed against the grain of its other (female sexuality qua pollution) idealized women’s labor through a powerful set of cultural codifications about bodily purity, contamination, and constructions of feminized virtue. These codes of ‘‘feminine’’ discipline imbue both labor practice and the product’s emerging measurements of worth. Tea was valued through a corporeal mythography of labor: the idealized purity of a woman’s body, whose act of labor would permit the leaf to remain in an original state—a natural state of innocence—even when plucked out of that state through the tainting action of human labor. Indeed, some grades of tea destined for the imperial household could not be touched even by virgin fingers.Clipped with gold scissors, the ‘‘imperial cut’’ was expressly reserved for the emperor’s precious and discerning palate.19

act 2, scene 2 Spotlight on the Narrator who sits quietly in her chair. It moves to focus on her hands. She leans forward to turn up the lantern’s flame. Tinkling music in the background, a breeze that makes the gau muslin backdrop move. She takes off both gloves. The movements should be elaborate and slow. Leisured. She flexes her hand.Then, from the table, she picks up the false fingernails and begins fixing them on one hand. As she does this, the light turns on behind the backdrop, center stage. Three dancers move, slowly as if doing tai chi, but only their shadows can be seen: they bend forward, they throw out their hands, in repetitious movements.The Narrator paints her nails, holding them out against the light so they look elongated, almost grotesque. The music fades as the lights dim, the dance behind the muslin continues till that area of the stage is pitch black. The Narrator leans forward and with the hand not adorned with the false fingernails, she turns down her lantern. Again, she is left in the near dark. The observations of Chinese women’s labor practice on imperial plantations offers an intriguing cultural codification of plucking as essentially ‘‘feminine.’’ What I call ‘‘significations of the feminine’’ emerge through ascriptions of purity within explicitly feminized bodily disciplines. From these emerged the iconic image of dismemberment and allure: women’s fingers Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 27

poised over a flutter of green leaves. Metaphoric dismemberment and actual acts of dismemberment feminize the history of tea. Tea ‘‘cultivation’’ is imbued, for now, with a slight gesture toward the violence of descriptive dismemberment, the transcendence of poems. Later, it will fold into analogues of nimbleness and delicacy, inflecting the consumption and planting rituals of a still distant European empire and its Indian colony.

Valued Tastes The demands of epicureans, tasters, and masters of the teahouse would demarcate the kinds of tea to be plucked and processed in the imperial plantations. Perhaps spaces of aristocratic consumption were created into cultivated domains of social refinement because they refracted the ostensibly pristine conditions of labor in one site of production. These were idealized cosmologies of labor, immaculate myths, if you will, which underscored the romance of feminized work and permeated the rarefied domains of aristocratic tea consumption. Different grades of tea speak a language of legends, folktales, and local histories in evocative ways. For example, among the finest grades of Sichuan tea is Meng-Ting (Hidden Peak); its name constructed from topographic and poetic referents. During the Song era, numerous tea plantations were cultivated on Mount Meng and ‘‘the heavy mists blanketing the peak were believed to conjure the Immortals so as to protect the tea trees from marauding strangers.’’ 20 Another tea, a semifermented (oolong) tea from Fukien’s Mount Wu-I, is called T’ieh-Kuan-Yin (Iron Goddess of Mercy), because it is grown near the temple of the goddess Kuan Yin. The story, passed into legend, is as follows: A disciple of the goddess cared for a ramshackled and ruined temple.The goddess, pleased at his devotion, appeared to him in a dream, telling him of a treasure he would find in a nearby cave that he should share with everyone. Discovering a small tea sapling, the disappointed devotee nevertheless tended it to its fullness and thereupon discovered its golden aroma. Soon, he had a thriving business in tea. Connected forever to a revered feminine figure of Chinese mythology, the tea T’ieh-Kuan-Yin takes on divine value.

Patron Saints and Aristocratic Refinement If tea fed the ‘‘dignity of government,’’ 21 it was the elegant rites of aristocrats and scholars that threaded the cultural economies of its consumption. Private teahouses of the wealthy were surrounded by gardens with lotus 28

ponds, grottoes, bamboo groves, and miniature trees. Nature, thus transformed to an exquisite art, would be the perfect site for the imbibement of tea. This was a poetic landscape, which distilled the more plebian folktales of tea into a microcosmology of celestial order and refinement. Harmony, silence, and order marked this cultivated landscape. Etiquettes of tea drinking within this landscape were written into didactic manuals from the T’ang dynasty onward. Most famous is the Ch’a Ching, a three-volume treatise on tea drinking written by Lu Yü, considered the patron saint of Chinese tea merchants.This eighth-century text codifies tea etiquette by elaborating on proper cultivation, comportment, equipment, and taste. ‘‘The first cup of tea,’’ Lu Yü remarks, ‘‘should have a haunting flavor, strange and lasting.When you drink tea, sip only, otherwise you will dissipate the flavor. Moderation is the very essence of tea.Tea does not lend itself to extravagance.’’ 22 Two centuries after Lu Yü’s text, the emperor Hui Tsung (1101–1125) wrote the Ta Kuan Ch’a Lun, which offered detailed information about tea production and consumption. From an emperor-scholar ostensibly isolated in the northern courts, the book offers a detailed ethnographic study of fieldwork.23 Unfortunately, the emperor was fated to suffer for his epicurean ethnology, when he was deposed for not attending to matters of the state.Yet when this Son of Heaven wrote, ‘‘When I am at leisure, I too like to go into all the intricacies of tea,’’ 24 his words suggest that tea had reached the absolute apex of social cultivation and cultural refinement. Imperial desire was acted through the choreographies of leisure, through the rituals of timeless ease. Indeed, for what reason should man work? Notes Lu Yü: ‘‘It is only for ease and comfort that man works at things. He sequesters himself in a house. So the house he refines to the perfection of his own taste. He covers himself with clothing.The clothing he refines to perfection. He consumes with both food and drink.These also he cultivates and refines to the utmost.Thus with tea.’’ 25 The elaborate meditation on tea equipment and service wrote in its turn a Confucian philosophy of leisure, marking the tempos of ‘‘self restraint and good conduct.’’ 26

act 2, scene 3 A bright spotlight center stage in front of the muslin curtain. The light should be angled so that it does not wholly illuminate the figures behind the screen.The dancers continue to move, barely.Two figures, a monk and a gorgeously dressed imperial figure in red and gold silk, arrive with trumpet soundings: the Emperor and the patron saint of tea, Lu Yü. The figures move slowly as the Narrator speaks from her corner. Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 29

she: The emperor comes in a rustle of brocade, a herald of trumpets. Into the summer court of splendor. He is the center of the sun; the mirror dazzles his countenance.Who sits in the south corner wielding his brush and a catty of tea? Who bears pearl dust and golden whisk to stir his gift from the south gardens? The emperor will rest soon. He turns his face to each corner, receiving the tributes of sandalwood, musk, and inlaid marble. At last he faces the south. Bowing low, Lu Yü offers his gift in silence. The emperor leaves, walking behind the curtain.The light turns low.The patron saint Lu Yü, who now sits, is joined by another figure. The newcomer wears the robes of a Trappist monk. Both monks are dressed with the greatest simplicity. Each draws out a cup and places it in front of him. trappist monk: ‘‘The old Zen writer Suzuki, when asked to speak in a scientific symposium on ‘New Knowledge in Human Values,’ handled it with all the wisdom and innocent, latent irony of Zen: the humble, serious, matter-of-fact humor of emptiness. His contribution to this scientific inquiry was . . . .’’ lu yü: (breaking into the slowcadences of his guest) ‘‘If anything newcan come out of human values it is from the cup of tea taken by two monks.’’ 27 Light fades out. Only the narrator’s lantern with its low light is left on. If the emperor himself relished the finest teas, then his courtiers could claim their allegiance to the celestial throne, creating it through the high culture of tea drinking in their parlors and teahouses.These aesthetics of tea would enact with courtly mien the imperial manners of the Chinese nobility, the consummate and immaculate gentility of the host. Indeed, eight centuries after the inscription of these aristocratic codes of consumption, as if through a strange mimesis, another set of ritual aesthetics would be played out in the royal parlors of another vast and powerful empire. The association of tea drinking with the detached moderation of Buddhism is well established. Monasteries and temples entered tea cultivation for their livelihood, and the material rewards of such enterprise infused tea’s spiritual aroma. It was in Japan, however, that rituals of tea consumption reached the apogee of spiritual formalism. Tea trickled into Japan through Chinese Buddhists, and in the eighth century small parcels of tea were sent as gifts from the Chinese imperial court.28 In early years, consumption was limited to Buddhist temples, and the tea ceremonies that emerged from this

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time combined bodily refinement explicitly with Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. Chanoyu (‘‘the way of tea’’) thus expressed through silence and simplicity the harmony of not only a social encounter but the spiritual universe itself. Kakuzo Okakura describes it as such: ‘‘Not a color to disturb the tone of the room, not a sound to mar the rhythm of things, not a gesture to obtrude on the harmony, not a word to break the unity of surroundings, all movements to be performed simply and naturally—such were the aims of the tea ceremony. And strangely enough, it was often successful; a subtle philosophy lay behind it all.Teaism was Taoism in disguise.’’ 29 The simplicity of movement in space expressed not only social and cosmic harmony; it symbolized the soul’s actualization.The tea master, like the haiku poet,30 gestured (with restraint and reticence) toward a domain lying beyond the finite world of the visible and the spoken. Through silent grace, s/he offered a cup of infinity and suggested in that gift the attainment of nirvana itself.

A Liquid Trade: Tea Clippers and Global Expansion The barter trade in tea with Central Asia from the T’ang dynasty onward only supplemented the ancient caravan trade networks into that region, Tibet, Russia, and beyond.The Silk Route established by Chandragupta and Selecas I of Macedonia also invigorated trade with China, though Chinese goods had traveled the overland routes of Indian, Persian, and Arab merchants long before this.31 Encounters between intrepid papal envoys such as Giovanni de Piano Carpini and Marco Polo and the Chinese imperial courts occurred as early as 1275. Though no direct reference to a tea trade was made, Marco Polo did note the dismissal of a Chinese finance minister in 1285, who had dared to raise the tax on tea.32 Three centuries later, Giovanni Botero wrote in his 1589 essay, ‘‘On the Causes of Greatness in Cities,’’ that ‘‘the Chinese have a herb out of which they press a delicate juice which serves them for drink instead of wine; it also preserves their health and forces from those evils that the immoderate use of wine doth breed in us.’’ 33 Through these early European references, positive inscriptions of its moderating value were charting tea’s travels overland to Europe. Travel accounts of papal envoys and even a Jesuit priest who settled in ‘‘Cathay’’ wove a narrative into yet another grade of tea: padre souchong 34 names a particularly fine grade of tea made and relished by the earliest Catholic missionaries in southern China.35

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 31

By the sixteenth century, then, European commercial and imaginative interest in China and Chinese trade was growing rapidly. Porcelain and much of the fine equipage around tea were entering European courts, as papal and royal envoys brought back tributes for their wealthy patrons.The ‘‘Orient’’ mapped a locus of desire in the push and imagination of ‘‘discovery’’: the fragmentary knowledges of these early travels would help create the spectacle of material possibility and economic lucre, which would feed that desire.Very quickly, these journeys of discovery would turn upon royal patronage of oceanic travels and a maritime mercantilism that would create the anchor of a European empire in the ‘‘East.’’ Yet, if the stage of European expansion of maritime trade in Asia was now being set, it is important to recall that Chinese emperors were also sending scouting expeditions and naval armadas into Southeast Asia and as far west as East Africa, on the same Indian ocean trade routes to be traversed by Vasco Da Gama. The Chinese imperial court also received what they viewed as tributary offerings from European envoys. Jesuit travelers stocked the emperor’s summer palaces in Jehol and Yuang Ming Yuan. In these palaces, the ‘‘occidental’’ goods were placed in baroque displays 36 like inverse precursors of Victorian museums that would offer to their public a visual catalogue of the material signs of travel, trade, and conquest. If Chinese imperial displays of their own ‘‘exotic’’ spoils mirrored, through historical pastiche another spectacle of trade, their commercial interest in ‘‘occidental’’ goods did not match the European mercantile thirst for Chinese wares.37 The lack of interest in European goods was to continue through the nineteenth century, and its effects were to profoundly shape the contours of East India Company trade.The opium and tea trade, in one famous triangle of exchange, would pave the way for both the unraveling of dynastic rule in China and the planting of tea in its Indian colony. Small consignments of tea entered European markets through the sixteenth century, a supply facilitated by the Dutch East Indian Company’s growing maritime activities in Java and Sumatra and on the Japanese coast near the island of Hirado. The earliest known requests for the purchase of tea from a European maritime company came from the Dutch Lords Seventeen to their director general in Batavia. From 1610, Dutch ships would take consignments from China to Java, from where the tea was shipped on to Europe. Initially, these merchants purchased tea through barter with sage.38 British merchants were getting a taste for tea from these Southeast Asian ports.39 Till 1689, when the first direct import nexus was established by the newly constituted East India Company, British merchants purchased tea 32

from their other European rivals. Two small gifts were made to the English king in 1664, and the first large batch (143.5 pounds) was shipped from Bantan, Java, in 1669. Tea’s arrival on English shores is indexed within aristocratic folktales. It was the earl of Ossay, traveling from the Netherlands, who brought with him ‘‘a quantityof tea which the ladies proceeded to serve after the newest and most aristocratic vogue of the continent.’’ 40 Tea’s association with the aristocracy was forged tighter with the arrival of the new royal bride of Charles II, the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza, who brought tea into her courtly rituals.The Company’s tribute of Chinese tea to the English king sweetened his patronage for their cartel. It was already being royally feminized through its connection with his wife. The king obliged by banning tea imports from Holland, creating finally, for the English East India Company a monopoly of tea sales in Britain and its colonies. For the Dutch and the English, commercial warfare abroad became the primary means to accumulate bullion for royal patrons.Yet to win these farflung struggles for commercial supremacy, European merchants had to cut against the historical grain of global commerce.41 Open access by sea to the treasures of the East created an Orient that was viewed as a potential mother lode of European wealth, not an abyss. Chinese emperors dismissed European incursions on the flanks of its vast territories, and their own assessment of European goods offered for trade was an almost cosmic indifference. Theaters of display such as those in the Summer Palace offered the signs of cosmological centrality in which the occidental wares were simply another act of commercial and symbolic obeisance to the Son of Heaven.42 From the sixteenth century, however,Chinese rulers were aware, and wary, of the growing European presence to the south. The Chi’ing emperor (1644) tightened control over foreign trade and by the late 1600s had cleared the coast of foreign presence entirely.The creation of a buffer zone between the busy ports and the great interior of China was one objective of Chinese imperial policy.43 Between 1685 and 1760, however, the British were permitted to anchor their ships at the Whampoa anchorage in Canton. Between 1717 and 1726, 700,000 pounds of tea were consumed in Britain. By 1742, England was purchasing one-fifth of all tea being imported into Europe. Between 1719 and 1833, tea comprised 70–90 percent of all cargoes outbound from Canton and 70 percent of Dutch East Indian Company purchases during that period.44 In 1785, the English East India Company had sold 6 million pounds of tea, and in two years the sales had reached a staggering 15 million pounds.45 By 1833 it was the most powerful trade cartel in the world and owed 25 percent of its net profit to the Chinese tea trade. Tea Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 33

ranked fourth in value of the seven commodities exchanged on an empirewide scale.46 Canton, as a result, emerged as one of the most important maritime ports in Asia. The East India Company’s monopoly of the tea trade, bound by royal charter, fed the coffers of the state in significant ways. Tea duties, to offset high shipping costs, included ad valorem taxes of 96–100 percent and yielded about 7 percent of the gross public revenue of eighteenth-century Britain.47 Between 1711 and 1810, £77 million of duty tax was collected, and through the early nineteenth century tea remained an expensive upper-class luxury. However, a large black market economy ensured that smuggled tea was reaching the ‘‘palates of the plebaean order.’’ 48 In 1777, smuggled tea fetched 53 pence per pound (compared to the retail cost of 4 shillings) and farmers’ servants ‘‘demanded tea for their breakfast.’’ 49 Smuggling of tea was so widespread that the 1765 tombstone of an ill-fated smuggler offers a divine appeal: ‘‘A little tea one leaf I did not steal / For guiltless blood shed, I to God appeal. / Put tea in one scale, human blood in t’other / And think what ’tis to slay thy harmless brother.’’ 50

Nation Making and a Tea Party It was, however, a tax on tea that caused the British to clash with their colony in North America. Tea had entered New Amsterdam’s colonial homes as early as 1664. Through the next century, tea and its accoutrements were filling the finest parlors of colonial Boston and New York.51 Economic dependence on British goods marked the preindustrial economy of the colony and was coupled with the ‘‘colonization of taste’’ itself.52 The anglicization of the colonial market and transatlantic trade suggests a cultural economy in which an emulation of Englishness was manifested through rituals of consumption. Not surprisingly, tea featured prominently in the new parlors: ‘‘Polite ladies, perhaps as a device to lure gentlemen away from tavern society, organized elaborate household rituals around tea service.’’ 53 In the last decades of the eighteenth century, these polite parlors would be seized with revolutionary fervor, and the symbolic and mimetic rites of consumptions would enact a dramatic volte-face. Tea would come to symbolize the tyranny of the British crown. In 1767, the British government, urged by its powerful East India Company lobby, proposed a levy on four commodities imported to the colony: paper, glass, lead, and tea. This Townshend Act followed the controversial Stamp Act of 1765, through which the colony had to bear a portion of the

34

military cost of the Seven Years War. Because of considerable protest this levy was repealed, except for a one-penny duty per pound of tea. But the colony did not want its tea to subsidize colonial rumbles, and this fateful fiscal strategy would boomerang with revolutionary force less than a decade later. Because of the tax, enterprising smugglers brought tea cargoes to the eastern seaboard of North America, and the East India Company found itself saddled with large supplies of surplus tea. Given its balanceof-payments crises with China, it was determined to recover some costs from the American colony. After extensive lobbying through parliament, the British made a fateful decision. The Tea Act of 1773 permitted the East India Company to restore the full amount of the 100 percent duty when tea was shipped from England, thus imposing a three-penny tax.54 This was the final catalyst for revolution, and tea bore the stigmata of injustice.When a group of men dressed as ‘‘Indians’’ threw Chinese tea boxes into Boston Harbor, it was the final dramatic act of a party that had been brewing since the late 1760s. In an illustrated poem of the time, this costumed appropriation of an internal ‘‘otherness’’—and the disorder that it signified—was explicated: ‘‘With artful disguise, / And grotesque decoration, / Like sons of the forest, / A poor imitation, / A score or more men on a night in December, / Went forth to a deed the world would remember.’’ 55 Illustrating the Boston Tea Party through the signifiers of radical otherness (still negative and ‘‘grotesque’’), the tea chest–throwers appropriated the costumes of their own ‘‘sons of the forest’’ (both native and black), creating an alterity that challenged British rule. Still a ‘‘poor imitation,’’ it is an appropriation that throws dominant constructions of a distinctly North American body politic and its radical difference—native ‘‘savagery,’’ African ‘‘bondage’’—into the cauldron of revolutionary fervor. Boycotts of British manufactures riddled transatlantic consumer trade from this time onward and became a tangible and symbolic language of resistance.56 Significantly, it was a women’s organization, the Daughters of Liberty, who boycotted tea drinking and brewed in its place ‘‘Labrador tea,’’ an infusion made from indigenous herbs.57 During the early decades of that momentous century, tea drinking was a positive symbolic act in the creative ‘‘reimagining’’ of English manners; at the end of the century, it was a powerful marker of exactly the opposite. Tea was now marked as an alien product (from China), and its destruction would signal a dramatic statement to the colony’s distant rulers.Yet it was precisely because of its quotidian presence in colonial life that its destruction in the harbor could grow from a symbolic act into political revolution.

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 35

5a and 5b ‘‘Like Sons of the Forest.’’ Illustration by H.W. M. Vickar, from The Boston Tea Party, 1882.

6. ‘‘The Colonies as a Captive Maiden Forced to Drink Tea.’’ Cartoon by Paul Revere. Reproduced in All the Tea in China, by Kit Chow and Ione Kramer, 1990.

‘‘No value on objects strange or ingenious’’ The remarkable demand for tea in England precipitated a silver crisis, which plagued the Company through the mid-nineteenth century.Chinese tea was paid for with silver, and one-fifth of all silver produced in Mexico 58 was used to purchase tea during this period.The East India Company borrowed money from local Indian banks, used capital raised from sales of Indian cotton in Canton. A system of credit developed whereby the Company sold bills (redeemed in London) and used this silver to buy Chinese tea. The East India Company faced an astronomical deficit, and China remained the abyss: a silver-lined ‘‘black hole’’ of European commercial desire. In 1785, Emperor Qian Long’s [Ch’ien-Lung] (r. 1735–1795) edict to the British king through his envoy Lord McArtney scripted the imperial logic underlying this abyss. Imagine, again, the summer palace of splendor. The emperor asserts: Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfill the duties of the State: strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar. Our dynasty’s

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 37

majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.This then is my answer to your request to appoint a representative at my Court, a request contrary to ourdynastic usage, which would result in inconvenience to yourself. I have expounded my wishes in detail and have commanded your tribute Envoys to leave in peace on their homeward journey.59

Within one century of this remarkable missive to George III, however, the British exacted a great price from China.With a certain ruthless commercial genius, they wrested the trade of Indian opium to the Indonesia archipelago from the Dutch East Indian Company and directed its sales to China. Profits from opium cultivation in Bihar (that antedated the tea plantations of their new Raj) were ploughed back to pay for the cost of Chinese tea.60 In 1773, the British East India Company declared a monopoly of the opium business in India. By the end of the nineteenth century, this commerce in addiction— and the successful planting of Indian tea—had finally broken the Chinese ‘‘hold’’ over its most precious product, its green gold.

Rituals of Consumption: Gender, Class, and Imperial Teas

Domestic Leisures Consider this portrait of a poet, John Gay, and his sisters. All three avoid your direct gaze. The woman in the foreground carefully holds a cup between thumb and forefinger. Her gown folds richly behind her; her lap, on which the other hand rests, hints at rounded flesh. She offers the cup to you, throwing it into bold relief. The other sister also holds a cup with precision. She sips. The man is framed within this feminine bounty. His table is rich in its wares.The teapot, silver perhaps, shimmers.The effect is tranquil, leisured. John Gay and his sisters, women of means, thus take refreshment at their eighteenth-century tea table. They enact, for posterity, a ritual of genteel and feminized civility. The idealized spaces of domesticity are thus signified. Consider, for a moment, the illustration that is juxtaposed to this contained image of plentiful domesticity. Painted by the satirist William Hogarth in the mid-eighteenth century, Taste in High Life suggests an almost frenetic activity, cluttered with symbols of wealth and disorder. The 38

7. ‘‘Taking Tea in England.’’ John Gray and his sisters, circa 1740. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Reproduced in Anthony Burgess et al., The Book of Tea (Flammarion: France, 2000).

8. The High Life, or Taste à la Mode. Engraving by William Hogarth, 1742. Reproduced in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, vol. 1 (1971), 467.

woman who holds the cup, carefully, smirks; her body is clothed in a gown that resembles a diaphanous tent. There is no hint of fertile, rounded flesh. Her interlocuter appears to be a dandy, sharp-nosed, almost a caricature. Curiously, a monkey reads a script at her feet.61 In the corner, a richly gowned younger woman holds the face of a young boy who looks brown, or black, and who wears a turban with feathers. This is an interior space that is rich, certainly, but conveys a certain unease: the exterior world, nonhuman and other-human has intruded within. The old woman, at the center, is not quite controlled in her body, dress, or posture. Her smirk suggests excess. It contradicts, even mocks, the tightly lipped and self-conscious poise of the foregrounded woman of the first image. In both, the teacup signals order and alterity. Thus, the English aristocracy and its thirsty upper classes created iconic and enduring images of leisure—and femininity—around tea drinking. Perhaps observations of the Chinese ‘‘high’’ culture around tea seeped into the diaries of Europeans living on coastal ports. Perhaps, dazzled by accoutrements of porcelain and delicate bamboo whisks, they wrote home of a beverage worthy of an emerging imperial nobility. European maritime journeys brought home the tangible signs and possibilities of wealth ready for commerce and conquest. Tea, like other precious wares in the ships’ holds, increased this thirst for other worlds. Images of plentiful domesticity suggest that this was a commerce both material and symbolic: a traffic of goods that would chart global imperial expansion through daily practices of consumption. Sexual politics, class distinctions, and the creation of lush, exotic backdrops created cultural spaces, which presented the dominant ideals of an emerging imperial body politic. The tea table and the delicately held cup gesture toward travel and return, suggestions of strange places and home places, imperial expansion and new national order. Through the intricate and dialectical oscillations of British imperialism within and without, the tea parlor symbolized a safe tranquility, a cocooned interior nurtured by women. Women’s tea tables and parlors suggested not only a feminized fetishism of the commodity, it was a feminization intimately connected to ideologies of leisure. The parlor and the tea table are positioned in stillness and plenitude. The women are ever present in this tranquil picture because they are not compelled to leave their interiors. They do not need to enter the public hurly-burly, the work of the exterior (outside the frame) is irrelevant. Their actions of leisure—holding a cup, playing cards, writing—signal the

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privilege of not-having-to-labor and the class power that builds upon that idealized, and patriarchal, vision of women’s nonwork. From its first years in England, tea indexed its aristocratic qualities: ‘‘Due to its scarceness and dearness, [it] hath been used only as a regalia in high treatments, and presents made thereof to princes and grandees.’’ 62 Consider the English East India Company’s gift to Catherine of Braganza in 1663, commemorated in Edmund Waller’s effusive verse: ‘‘Venus her myrtle, Phoebus has his bays; / Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise / The best of Queens, and best of herbs, we owe / To that bold nation, which the way did show / To the fair region where the sun doth rise / Whose productions we so justly prize.’’ 63 This verse not only links ‘‘this best of herbs’’ to a new queen, it simultaneously lauds the boldness of British mercantile expansion and the richness of the sun-washed places where tea originated. By the mid-eighteenth century, the tea table and the ideal domesticity it invoked had placed tea and its accoutrements firmly in the laps of upperclass women. Anna, the seventh duchess of Bedford, is credited with establishing the afternoon teatime. She ordered tea and cakes to be served in the afternoon, to offset the ‘‘sinking feeling’’ past midday and her ritual became the vogue.64 An entire aesthetics of ‘‘femininity’’ built around women and tea consumption became increasingly visible. A woman’s graceful but controlled body (like the poet’s foregrounded sister) would provide the frame for these rituals of taste. Romance, and an incipient sexuality, was suggested on this canvas: ‘‘Her two red lips affected Zephyr’s Bow, / To cool the Bohea and inflame the Beau; / While one white finger and thumb conspire / To lift the cup, and make the world admire.’’ 65 A description of a well-known literary figure, Mrs. Montagu, noted that when ‘‘not dispensing tea with distinguished grace, she was hard at work at her desk, with one eye on her correspondence and the other on posterity.’’ 66 While dispensing tea, Mrs. Montagu domesticates her intellect; her writing is steeped with grace and civility. Like Catherine of Braganza or Mrs. Montagu, women become aristocrats of the interior, their spaces clearly demarcated by private parlors, their tempos essentially leisured. The parlors thus create the ideal ‘‘private’’ space for appropriate feminine comportment, its attendant leisures, a powerful counterfoil for the masculine imperatives of ‘‘public’’ work. Women’s nonwork signaled the class and status position of their families. There was no need to labor. Decorative and graceful, they would create a space of ‘‘return’’ for that masculine necessity.

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act 2, scene 4 Spotlight moves toward the Narrator. It pauses on her. She gestures toward stage left; the light obeys what seems to be a command. She watches the area of the stage light up. Another table, chair. A young English gentleman, BertieWooster, in the attire of an Edwardian dandy, face well powdered in white, sits on the chair. A man in dark suit, Jeeves, stands, holding a brolly and a hat. wooster: (laconically). ‘‘Abandon the idea, Jeeves. I fear you have not studied the sex as I have. Missing her lunch means little or nothing for the female of the species.The feminine attitude towards lunch is notoriously airy and casual.Where you have made your bloomer is in confusing lunch with tea. Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can’t get it. At such times, the most amiable of the sex become mere bombs that a spark may ignite. But lunch, Jeeves, no. I should have thought you would have known that—a bird of your established intelligence.’’ jeeves: ‘‘No doubt, you are right.’’ 67 Light fades out. Women’s rituals of consumption were not limited to the parlors: with the decline of coffee houses (where tea was first introduced), another ‘‘public’’ space became the vogue—the suburban garden.68 In contrast to the masculine conviviality of coffee houses, suburban gardens like Vauxhall emerged as quintessential spaces for women; they were ‘‘frequented by ladies and necessarily lack[ed] the keen hardy atmosphere naturally created by the close knit companionship of townsmen.’’ 69 A language of cultivated romance and leisure permeated descriptions of these groomed gardens, kindred to the ideal enclosure of parlors. One contemporary observer enthusiastically noted: ‘‘What a pleasure to walk the gravel paths, to admire the twinkling fairy lights, to listen to the band, to eat bread and butter, to drink tea in a dusky arbor of evergreens.’’ 70 The controlled landscape of the garden and its arboretums signified again the idealized and necessary leisures of the aristocratic and bourgeois women who walked its gravel paths. In the garden’s grottoes, women with their tea bread offered another hegemonic image of feminine sociality and leisure. It was a portrayal that gestured to its alterities, to the labor on the garden’s periphery that made its theater of romance a possibility. In the nineteenth century, these images of cultivated time and groomed landscapes were powerfully deployed in the new colonies. The garden be42

came a living metaphor, used less than a century after Vauxhall, to depict the civilized ‘‘settling’’ of India’s jungles. Less than two decades after the first colonial tea ‘‘gardens’’ were carved out of this ‘‘wild’’ frontier, the Assam Stall in the 1851 World Exposition in London would offer a striking diorama. In it, East India Company subalterns wander in painted hills, ‘‘with a dozen or more servants looking after them, their baggage, their meals, their camping arrangements. Some of them wandered around the tea gardens. How gentlemanly and easy it looked!’’ 71 Global expansion, imperial conquest, and the social ordering within them were enabled by thework of others settling their sweating bodies into assembly lines, on the edges of still parlors.Whether in the factories of the industrial revolution or in distant colonial fields, this was a theater of action that could not disturb the idealized vision of a cultivated and interior landscape. Thus, banished from the canvas, we see only women of privilege in their bountiful parlors sipping tea. The construction of ‘‘femininity’’ through these aesthetics of taste and domesticity lies at the heart of an emerging and global empire. This enshrined image of femininity and civilization soon became dependent on the commodity’s production in the Indian colony, through the labor of ‘‘native’’ women, outside the frame of the picture.The woman’s body disciplined into stories of ideal interiority and delicate, nimble work becomes a bridge across the imperial/colonial/postcolonial pastiche.The narrative of ‘‘woman-as-tea’’ is a feminized historical matrix of postcolonial labor and imperial leisure. The traffic between them is uneven; the bridge is made of rope. It is frayed; it threatens collapse. But consider the rituals, for a moment, of all these bodies: bent backs, calloused fingers bunching the leaf, carefully corseted waists, soft fingers holding a china cup to the lips.

Imperial Health, Moral Labor By the early nineteenth century, however, rituals of tea consumption had spilled well beyond aristocratic parlors and suburban gardens. Though tea was expensive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, smuggling ensured its circulation in middle-class retail shops and even working-class homes. Furious debates about tea’s effects on physical and ‘‘moral’’ health raged through the eighteenth century, as it became clear that a trickle-down into other classes had occurred. Advocates stressed its positive medicinal properties, asserting its qualities as a ‘‘rejuvenator of mental and muscular effort, as a remover of drowsiness and fatigue and restorer of comfort and cheerfulness.’’ 72 But tea also had its detractors. By 1745, opponents of the Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 43

tidal wave of consumption denounced it as the ‘‘bane of housewifery.’’ 73 With strident anxiety, one contemporary observer noted: ‘‘The women who sip tea from morning till night are also remarkable for bad teeth. . . . They also look pallid and many are troubled with feminine disorders arising from a relaxed habit.’’ 74 Tea settles into a paradox.We see in this bodied description a masculine concern with an unruly body created through the relaxed spaces of teatime. An unhealthy and disordered femininity is juxtaposed to that early iconic image of refined control. Tea was Janus-faced in other ways. As ‘‘an enfeebler of the frame and engenderer of effeminacy and laziness,’’ it was, in the last analysis, a great danger to the health of industry and the nation. ‘‘Tea,’’ according to another account, ‘‘obstructed Industry and impoverished the Nation.’’ 75 For English social reformers who were theoretical and pragmatic architects of a new social order emerging out of the industrial revolution, and the colonization that enabled it, this discourse of moral health and disciplined labor was essential for the task of imperial nation making. Indeed, Victorian metaphors of society as a body, always in danger of being diseased, were primal and iconic ones.76 Most significantly, the health of this body politic could retain its productive bloom only through disciplined work. Labor in service to Industry and Nation was a task of both corporeal and moral discipline. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, tea was a potent and quotidian feature of national life and had entered the discourse of labor and national health in significant ways. Incarnated in iconic images of leisure, tea had only gestured toward alterity-in-absence, that is, toward labor. It now reappeared at the core of commentaries about class order and discipline. John Wesley, among the most strident critics of teatimes, argued with shrill eloquence: ‘‘To what height of folly must a nation be arrived that the common people are not satisfied with wholesome food at home, but must go to the remotest region to please a vicious palate! There is a certain lane near Richmond where beggars are often seen in the summer season drinking their tea; it is even drunk in cindercarts; and what is no less absurd sold out of cups to haymakers. He who should be able to drive three Frenchmen before him, or she who might be a breeder of such a race of men are to be seen sipping their tea! 77 Tea, he exhorts elsewhere, adds to the suffering of the poor because their ‘‘nerves [are] all unstrung, [their] bodily strength quite decayed.’’ 78 Wesley’s commentary about tea consumption among the ‘‘lower classes’’ suggests his own anxiety about an ever expanding market place and its commodities of possible class disorder. Bodilyenfeeblement and national degeneracy were considerable burdens of responsibility to heap on a mere commodity. Anxiety about class dis44

orders (where even beggars sipped tea) was echoed in another comment: ‘‘It is the curse of this nation that the laborer and mechanic will ape the Lord, and therefore I can discover no way of abolishing the use of tea unless it is done by example.’’ 79 Tea’s trickle-down created a specter of an unruly body politic and undermined the purpose of nationhood. Indisciplinewould seep into the assembly lines because teatimes were ‘‘merely an excuse for interrupting business or diversifying idleness,’’ 80 where ‘‘laborers lose their time to come and go to the tea-table.’’ 81 As such, teatime was an interruption of work, an insidious rupture within the rituals of factory disciplines. A feminine ritual par excellence, teatime threatened a vital, indeed a masculine ethic of work, so necessary for the assembly lines of industry and its progress. If the ‘‘effeminacy’’ suggested by a quiet sip emasculated national virility, how indeed could an Englishman nowdrive ‘‘three Frenchmen before him’’? How could the ideal mother, enfeebled by too much leisure, breed such necessary men? Tea had, through its iconic association with women, thus suggested femininity’s negative and emasculating face: a siphoning away of an ordered and masculine center that supposedly lay at the core of the nation.82 However, this specter of emasculated and disordered labor was countered by tea’s advocates, who saw in the worker’s pause a rejuvenation of his/her energy. It promoted, for instance, ‘‘the sober and moderate cheerfulness which the Dutch rightly valued, and the stubborn courage which had won for them the apprehensive respect of Europe.’’ 83 Ironically, it was John Wesley’s call for temperance, and the temperance crusade it enabled, that pushed tea into the camp of high morality. Seen as the alternative to that great corrupter of work disciplines, alcohol, tea was placed in another narrative of moral discipline and national progress.Thus redeemed, teatime on the factory floor now offered an illusory moment of leisure for the Victorian working classes.

A Commodity of Desire These travels of tea trace the contours of a leaf and beverage that has intimately connected the imperial fortunes of Europe and Asia. In its journey from the mountains of southern China to the parlors of Georgian and Victorian England it became one of the most important commodities to circulate in the expanding trade on ocean frontiers. Through the economies of barter emerged, finally, one of the most lucrative ventures of the East India Company. Immortalized on the stone entrance of the East India Office in Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 45

London, stand two Chinese figures, flanking the company crest, carrying bushels of tea. The exponential growth in the demand for tea in Britain had much to do with its birthplace, China, whose emperors exhibited such disdain for the ‘‘outer barbarians’’ and their mediocre goods. When the Chinese ‘‘Orient’’ closed its curtains early to European incursions, tales of its strange splendors trickled into the enthralled imagination of Europeans thirsty to taste otherness and revel in its spectacle. Thus, one layer of value imputed to tea was due to this direct association with the faraway ‘‘celestial empire.’’ Its worth lay in the very idea that its precious leaves were steeped in the Orient itself, ‘‘breathing the aroma of lands more distant and romantic than where coffee lives.’’ 84 An ‘‘exotic’’ value thus permeated British rituals of consumption, creating in its wake an entire culture of ‘‘inside’’ delicacy and refinement. Chinese tea production and consumption encompassed a millennial cultural economy. It combined, within one cosmological universe, notions of bodily order, delicacy, and harmony. Tea’s ancient pharmacological properties had imbued it with valuable associations of health moderation, and aristocratic teahouses exemplified the pinnacle of etiquette and refinement. If Chinese tea performed as a key actor in this unveiled spectacle of cultural refinement on mercantile frontiers, it could only be fit for a queen. Social rituals of tea consumption in China, Japan, and England staged a theater of ‘‘high’’ culture. These were symbolic stagings that created gendered and classed spaces in powerful ways. Certainly idealized through visual and written texts, these were symbolic plays that offer a tightly woven tapestry of class status, imperial power, and gender. The image of parlor and garden also presents indelible associations between women and tea. These ‘‘significations of the feminine’’ appear in narratives on labor practices in Chinese imperial plantations, and more visibly in European rites of consumption.Within plantations, the discourse around women’s labor suggests inscriptions of purity and cleanliness that are decidedly sexualized. So powerful were these fetishisms of sexual purity that they defined the finest grades of tea and measures of value with which the commodity circulated in the vast regional markets of Asia. The focus on women’s hands—now holding the cup—will be uncannily deployed in the imperial plantations of yet another ‘‘Orient,’’ India. It is a dismemberment and a fetishism that are commodified with two-dimensional certainty as the fixed image of women plucking tea, colorfully displayed on tea boxes circulating in the twentieth-century global marketplace. While no causal path can be drawn between the feminized and fetishized 46

labor of Chinese plantation women and the tea parlors of English women, this construction of femininity (inflected by class and status) is striking. Sipping tea in suburban gardens suggested a kind of leisure that was necessarily gendered. Domesticity signified by such ‘‘women’s entertainment’’ sat at the core of Victorian patriarchies.The archetype of femininity qua womanhood, created around the interior of tea sipping or the romantic interludes of a garden, was an iconic image of control. The disciplined feminine was crucial for the construction of an interiority around which an imperial patriarchy would create its terms of civilization and order. Indeed, the iconic connections between the British and tea endure into the present. It is a link that weaves the strands of both nostalgia and leisure, of empires past but continuously imagined in a quiet and peaceful sip in the middle of a hurried day. Within the portraits of graceful pouring and romantic garden walks, tea becomes imbued by the idealized significations of privileged femininity. It was as if the careful delicacy suggested through immaculate plucking in imperial Chinese plantations had marked the beginning of a journey in which leaf and powder, product and commodity, would create an unbreakable connection between women and tea in a new global empire: of fingers carefully holding the cup, of the packaged image of women’s labor as the picturesque, of tea-as-woman staging itself finally as the quintessential beverage of femininity and empire.

‘‘Savage’’ Parlors Consider the signs of otherness within two engravings in which tea is featured: in the first, a young black boy-servant offers sugar; a tropical bird perches on a woman’s hand; the chained and grinning monkey coyly lifts the woman’s gown. There is playfulness in this scene of interiority and its othering.The domestic economy and the rituals of tea, which it circles, have not been entirely elided from the narratives of a distant, and traversed, ‘‘exterior’’ world.The women contemplate the signs of this exteriority—its significations of wild otherness—with smiling fascination. The engraving in figure 9 thus suggests an explicit domestication of these signs of difference: to be seen, absorbed, consumed.85 In the engraving in figure 10, a scene from William Hogarth’s series A Harlot’s Progress, wildness is fully enacted. The woman (the Harlot) kicks the table, her breast is exposed, the teapot and cups fall to the floor, the black/brown boy-servant carries a tea-kettle. He might have been about to Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 47

9. ‘‘A comfortable dish of tea in the high life.’’ From an engraving published in 1782. Reproduced in Michael Smith, The Afternoon Tea Book, 1986.

10. ‘‘A Harlot’s Progress.’’ Engraving by William Hogarth, reproduced in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, vol. 1 (1971), 241.

serve.The monkey turns back with fear, poised to run. Domesticity, in this instance, is unmasked. Indeed, there is a white theater mask on a curtained dresser. Quiet, feminine plenitude is transformed into naked disorder. The woman’s body, now openly sexualized and agentive (consider the kick), is also connected to signs of excess. The accoutrements of high life shatter to the floor. I have traced the overlapping cultural and historical economies of a commodity that has through the quirks of millennial fates and fortune conquered the imagination and desire of regional and global empires. Through these historical flows emerge themes of ritual and power that have marked the rhythms of gender, class, status, and imperial otherness. A feminized and feminine figure indexes labor practice and rites of consumption in iconic and hegemonic ways.Yet it is the pragmatic and metaphorical translation of these theaters of rule—parlors, gardens, and civilization—into the Indian colony which is my central concern. Indeed, what these intriguing engravings offer us is not only the signs of a privileged feminine interior.They also present us with the bodied symbols of otherness, of a wild within. The other—plumed, chattering, and black/brown—belongs to a distant landscape, redolent of tropical wildness that is both dangerous and desirable.What strange but succulent fruit to place on the tea table? That tea, valued for its consumption of refinement and otherness, emerged as a central player within this particular theater of civilization, is no simple historical accident. Its absorption into the quotidian cultural life of Britain and its near mythic status as a marker of British gentility—indeed British civilization—depended upon imperial expansion. Fueled by the desire to taste otherness, this was an expansion that promised a bountiful conquest.Teatime in the parlor and garden became the living metaphors of empire and the nation making it enabled.These were theaters that carved out new boundaries of a gendered and classed social order, and material tropes of leisure and labor delineated the contours of those borders.Though mostly invisible, the exteriority of labor constituted the ‘‘other’’ within this creation of a protected and leisured space. However, another layer of otherness underwrote the romantic tales of garden teas. The interior gestured to an ever expanding exterior: a domain breathtakingly vast and full of promise. It was a tangible promise.The ‘‘savage parlor’’ epitomized the process of cultivation and its aesthetics of taste. Like the ordered landscape of another garden, it suggested a primal cultivation: of domesticating wildness, pruning the tangled branches into a civilized harvest. Imperial leisure and its in/visible ‘‘other,’’ colonial labor, Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 49

would thus constitute the fulcrum upon which anothercultivation occurred, in the jungles and the so-called savage frontiers of India.

act 2, scene 5 The spotlight moves from stage right in an arc, stopping briefly at vignettes: the gentleman and his butler (Bertie Wooster and Jeeves); the two monks (Trappist Monk and Lu Yü) sitting in silence; Alice at her Mad Tea Party. It stops at the Narrator’s table and brightens. There is a hint of movement behind the curtains, center stage, but only a hint. The Narrator looks at her one hand with long, painted fingernails. She flexes them, looking at them admiringly, making circular movements that look like the mudras of a bharata natyam dancer. Suddenly, she looks up from her preening and realizes you are watching. Somewhat embarrassed, caught in her vanity, she picks up her wicker stool and the lantern, and walks to Alice at her table. Alice looks at her curiously. She and her companions are still; they seem bored. The Mad Hatter fiddles with his tea pot. The Narrator speaks to Alice. she: What stories of oceans and emperors, ladies at tea. What revolutions in a teacup, monks and feathers. Eh, Alice, Alice what do you say? This is surely a tempest worthy of your Trip. Eh, Alice, help me untangle some snarls, some riddles. alice: (turning in a sudden flurry of temper) I wish you would Stop! Stop! Stop! First, I find myself in this strange place, shrinking and expanding. You appear and disappear like a stupid sorceress and don’t let me speak. I am sitting with a crazy animal and a creature with a huge hat and you want me to help you with your riddles . . . the cheek of it. . . . Well, let me tell you a riddle-tiddle about my story. . . . Here it is: ‘‘Alice! A childish story take, / And, with a gentle hand, / Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined / In Memory’s mystic band / Like pilgrim’s wither’d flowers / Pluck’d in a far-off land.’’ 86 Can you figure that out? And then, I might help you with yours. mad hatter and march hare: (in a chant) ‘‘Pluck’d in a far-off land, / Pluck’d in a far-off land.’’ she: (turning to you) ‘‘Pluck’d in a far-off land / Pluck’d in a far-off land.’’ Narrator looks both pensive and amused. Light fades out.

50

chapter 3 Cultivating the Garden

Wildness and a Possible Eden

act 3, scene 1 The stage is empty of the props and scenery of earlier scenes except for the Narrator’s table and Alice’s Mad Tea Party, where the Mad Hatter, the Narrator and Alice still sit together. The Narrator’s lantern is on the ground. One half of the backdrop behind center stage has a scene painted on it: a bungalow built on stilts, a bright green lawn with bushes in the background. The other half, stretched as a backdrop stage left, is still plain gauze. In front, on the stage, a thin layer of brown soil. In front of the painted backdrop, a few colonialstyle rattan chairs, a low coffee table. This area is dimly lit. The light comes on Alice’s table. Alice mutters softly and then is silent when the Narrator begins to speak. she: Poor Alice.What a trauma. First, seduced by what she believes beckons her at the end of the tunnel, she unlocks the door with a golden key. Suddenly, she is hijacked into this strange tale, into its unpromised Wonderland. Poor Alice. This was beyond her reckoning. mad hatter: (interrupting in loud song) ‘‘Up above the world you fly / Like a tea-tray in the sky. / Twinkle, twinkle. . . .’’ 1 alice: Be quiet both of you. (turning to the Narrator) Yes, I did see this lovely garden, but the door was too small and I was too big, and I wished ‘‘I could shut up like a telescope’’ 2 so I could get in. And then, then I drank something strange . . . and I could. All so peculiar. But I still have not found the garden, only this maddest of tea parties. Have a tart, have some tea. And then let me make a move on, I still have that golden key. The lights dim. Dancers behind the gauze curtain begin to move.They cast odd, elongated shadows on the stage, upon you.

And then the jungle, the indescribable jungle! To the town dweller, it would be a sinister home. Great snarled lianas stretch from tree to tree, and to his eye they look like pythons lying in wait for him.3

The young englishman alighting at the Calcutta docks from his long sea journey does not, perhaps, have enough time to drink in the hurly-burly of the port, commercial and administrative nerve center of his emerging empire. His billet, from a company in London, requires that he be speedily on his way, to make productive the inhospitable lands that constitute the expanding frontiers of that empire. Perhaps with some illusion of the future wealth that awaits his enterprise, he boards the steamership that will take him, eventually, up the Brahmaputra into the interior of Assam. The forests flanking his winding river path suggest a ‘‘dread mystery’’ so dense that you can seldom see more than fifteen yards in any direction.4 On the slow journey, perhaps with some finality, he realizes that the rivercleaves into the unknown vast jungles of a strange land, hovering unparalleled on the very frontiers of his awed imagination. These dangerously snarled forests are ambivalent spaces, however, and not only inscribed by dread and serpentine terror. ‘‘Primeval’’ and ‘‘virgin’’ 5 landscapes, they promise an escape from ‘‘the turbulence and distress of the civilized world,’’ a veritable ‘‘Garden of Eden!’’ 6 Invoking a paradise to be gained, one planter places the Darjeeling Himalaya as a space ‘‘chosen by the sovran Planter when He framed all things to Man’s delightful use.’’ 7 Metaphors of redemption lace planter journals and travelogues as they describe, even with nostalgic hindsight, what was surely an exquisite landscape. This was ‘‘Nature’’ with all Her unbound and fertile bounty, a sexualized (‘‘virginal’’) and primitive forest ready to be cultivated for ‘‘Man’s delightful use.’’ A redemptive vision wrote a complex script for the gaze of conquest. However, it is a script that constructs the frame of a moral theater to be acted within a tabula rasa: an unpeopled, newly ‘‘discovered’’ empty space of emerald green.8 If this was a blankness that was also dangerously ‘‘wild,’’ then its cultivation and ‘‘settlement’’ was to be an act of ‘‘civilization’’ in the most primal sense. Invoking their own mythologies of origin, reaching back into that ‘‘first time’’ of Eden, English planters would create for themselves a divine raison d’être.9 Who was, after all, the sovran Planter but God himself? The ‘‘garden’’ as planting metaphor is, thus, no simple literary allusion. It is a material and moral trope culled from the most powerful and primeval myths of Judaeo-Christian traditions. Original innocence, the fall from Grace, loss and the constant search for redemption are the potent and re52

curring themes of a paradise lost. In the ‘‘Orient’’ that was India, there was now a paradise to be gained. Plantations could be imagined as a necessary Garden of Eden, bringing to fruition, through their spectacle of cultivated order, a moral vision of imperial light.Colonization and conquest could thus be written into an enlightened tale of hope and redemption. The cultivation of this wild and possible Eden was, however, a herculean task. It was also an eminently practical task, because the apparently empty stage of the moral theater was paradoxically and actually peopled.The ‘‘garden,’’ a living metaphor, was to be worked ‘‘through’’ the realpolitik of material histories. Indeed, ‘‘cultivation’’ was a project dependent on human action. The act of ‘‘planting’’ through which the wilderness would become a ‘‘tea garden’’ was predicated on this action. Labor—corporeal and imagined—lay at the heart of the cultivating enterprise. The settling of forests was only possible if people could be harnessed for the task. The suggestion of edenic emptiness was an elaborate illusion, because the pragmatics of labor procurement and disciplining drew the political and indeed moral compass of the plantation venture on its new imperial frontier. That this pragmatics became premised upon a racialized economy that connected and characterized ‘‘native’’ essences to their customary work is no accident. Inscriptions of ‘‘primitiveness’’—of a primal and topographical essence—upon the various communities brought into work offered an analogue to the more abstract metaphoric suggestions of ‘‘cultivating’’ wildness. Settling the landscape through cultivation was dependent upon the civilizing of native labor. Indeed, colonial discipline, rationality, and reason would harness that primitive body and the ‘‘primal’’ landscape into the ambit of civilization.10 It was a civilizing process that would be the necessary foil for the imperial leisures of the Planter Raj. Colonial selfhood would be refashioned again and again within the iconic encirclement of the bungalow’s garden, the rounds of polo at the club, the punkah (fan) pulled gently by an attentive native servant. The planter’s nonwork, his capacity to display this leisure, was the sign of his civilized superiority: his empty time, made morally possible by the necessary labor of others.

act 3, scene 2 The Narrator picks up her lantern and stool. She moves toward rattan chairs in front of the painted backdrop. A man and woman sit in the chairs. Drink decanters are placed on the low table next to them. She sits between them. In the background, an attendant fans them slowly with a large hand-held punkah. Cultivating the Garden 53

This is the British planter Burra Sahib and the British Memsahib in leisured repose. Their faces are masks of powdered white. His white topee is on the low table; a riding switch rests on his knees. She wears a thin cotton dress of the late Victorian period. The lights are dim, but you can see the props and their impassive white-powdered faces. Behind them, the painted backdrop is barely discernible in the lantern light. Next to it, stage left, gauze fabric hanging in folds forms a translucent background. It ripples slightly, as if touched by a breeze. Sounds of the night in the background: crickets and the dham dham dham of drums. The gauze curtains move, and the three Women begin to bend in dance behind them. she: Banished to the fringes of an oriental garden, beyond the languid and somehow wary gaze of the memsahib sitting on the verandah, a sweating body stoops: hoeing and cleaning the earth, bending to put in the seeds, plucking finally the lilliputian forest of tea bushes. See how she bends in this dwarfed forest. See how she plucks the fruit of this strange Garden of Eden. To whom shall she offer her fruit? The Women bend and twist behind the backdrop and appear from behind the curtains.They wear short saris and blouses, and one carries a basket on her back; the others have a cloth pouch slung low behind their backs. The two ends are knotted bandana-style at their foreheads.They bend forward and then arch their bodies back. The knot on the forehead should appear like fulcrum, holding the body in balance. Then, they shuffle in step, one arm free to mimic the picking of leaf. Their hands make elaborate movements against the shadows thrown on the gauze backdrop by the lantern light. They turn briefly to the British Sahib and Memsahib and the Narrator as they dance. Then, arms still entwined, they shuffle out.

Tea Fortunes

And Other Myths of Origin Between 1780 and 1835, considerable discussion took place in the East India Company about the potential of tea cultivation in India. Joseph Banks, imperial botanist par excellence, wrote a memorandum on cultivation in Sichuan and even accompanied Lord McArtney’s famous embassy to the Chinese imperial court in 1793. He also sent tea seeds to the new botanical gardens in Calcutta. Indeed, it was Joseph Banks who asserted to the directors of East India Company that serious efforts be made to cultivate 54

tea in India as ‘‘an alternative supply of tea, as China was monopolizing the valuable consumer item.’’ 11 Stories of autochthonous ‘‘Indian’’ tea were being heard: a ten-foot tea tree was seen in a Kathmandu garden,12 whispers about Assamese wild tea floated to Calcutta. Official debates about the commercial wisdom of tea production, fed by those intriguing stories of indigenous wild Indian tea, were joined by other narratives of exploration and ‘‘discovery.’’ We find another botanical entrepreneur, Robert Fortune, making his swashbuckling way into the tea territories of southern China. Fortune’s famous account offered detailed descriptions of Chinese cultivation and manufacture. It also provided a rough blueprint of tea production for the first British planters in India. A professional botanist from Edinburgh, Fortune collected some of the finest specimens of Chinese tea seeds, parceled them up, and shipped them to the botanical garden in Calcutta. From tea nurseries in Calcutta, these Chinese seedlings were sent to experimental plantations in the Kangra Valley of contemporary Himachal Pradesh. Not only did 12,000 saplings lay the foundation of new plantations, but ‘‘skillful Chinese workmen’’ 13 accompanied them as well.14 Early planters made concerted efforts to ‘‘import’’ more Chinese labor, knowing their expertise and skill would be invaluable.15 Robert Fortune was an emissary of a mercantile strategy that shifted inexorably toward the direct colonization of India. In 1833 Lord Bentinck’sTea Committee proclaimed the crown’s concurrence with its mercantile lobby in London. It also concluded that tea was ‘‘beyond all doubt indigenous to upper Assam, a discovery by far the most important and valuable that has ever been made on matters connected with the agricultural or commercial resources of this empire.16 The founding of the first tea companies was threaded by another story of adventure from Assam. In these early chronicles of Assamese planting, an entrepreneur by the name of Major Robert Bruce was first introduced to indigenous wild tea by a Singhpo chief, Beesgaum. His brother, Charles Bruce, the first superintendent of tea cultivation, noted in 1838: ‘‘The Singhpos have known and drank the Tea for many years, but they make it in a very different way from what the Chinese do.They pluck the young and tender leaves and dry them in the sun. . . . These Singhpos pretend to be great judges of Tea. All their country abounds with the plant but they are very jealous and will give no information where it is to be found, like the Muttuck people. All the Singhpo territories are overrun with wood jungle, and if only the underwood was cleared, they would make a fine Tea Country.’’ 17 The early enterprise to make this ‘‘fine Tea Country’’ was dependent on hyCultivating the Garden 55

brid knowledges. Local Singhpo knowledges, Bruce’s own survey of the ‘‘tea tracts,’’ and experimental nurseries planted with the assistance of Chinese growers, blended well with the mercantile imperatives of London and Calcutta. Chinese black tea makers were interviewed in great ethnographic detail. Questions and answers about every phase of tea manufacture (sorting, drying, rolling, and withering) were duly noted in Bruce’s miniature encyclopedia about the future of Assamese tea growing and manufacture.18 Within a decade of Bentinck’s Tea Committee, and a few years after the Bruce brothers’ journeys into the interior of Assam, the Assam Company was founded in 1839 with an initial capital investment of £500,000. By 1841, 54,000 kilograms of Indian tea had been exported to London. Bruce’s account of indigenous tea plants in Assam catalyzed a lengthy botanical debate about tea’s origin as an Indian plant. Despite the evidence of thousands of years of Chinese production and trade, English entrepreneurs were determined to prove that India was the original birthplace of tea. English planters argued that stories of Chinese tea were ‘‘cloudy legends and mythological narratives of the Chinese imagination.’’ 19 It was another myth of origin whose telling dismissed the avowedly Chinese practice of tea cultivation, a history of which British botanists and travelers were more than well aware. Such a characterization of a Chinese hyper-imagination suggests a blithe, but uneasy, orientalist gaze. The competitive mytho-history of planting was, however, very much predicated on the promise of new entrepreneurial adventures. This need to assert an Indian origin was an important thread in the imperial narrative. It would lay an essential claim from which the positively unmythical and tangible commercial possibilities of tea planting could be realized in their new colony.The Japanese folktale of the Indian Buddhist monk, Dharuma, tearing off his eyelids of tea would convince skeptics that English pioneering was actually bringing back ‘‘home’’—in a spirit of re/discovery—what had always been indigenous flora, an Indian plant. Tales of ten-foot trees and tea drinking by ‘‘wild’’ Assamese tribes were drummed to full beat. These were historical fragments that, stitched together, would create an overarching imperial story: a commercial myth of origin to be enacted through an edenic vision of conquest.

Frontier Battles These ‘‘myths of origin’’ could not elide the coercive theaterof territorial annexation in Assam and North Bengal. In response to the challenges offered by many communities in the region, colonial administrators argued for a 56

stringent and absolute strategy of pacification: ‘‘The principle tribes are . . . rude, barbarous and ignorant, strong, treacherous, revengeful and poor.We cannot enter into any treaties with them because we have no solid guarantee that they will observe their engagements. The only course open to us is the adoption of a system of rewards and punishments. Thus, we pay them subsistence money, or blackmail as it is called, supplementing their funds by grants in aid, and we can employ as many of those who will take service with us as well as live in the plains.’’ 20 From the outset, then, colonial policies of settlement viewed indigenous communities (classified as ‘‘tribes’’) as a considerable threat to plantation settlements.21 Political struggles with powerful local rulers informed territorial annexation. As in numerous stories of colonial frontier conquests, the region became the site of military battles between company troops, local rulers, and various indigenous communities. So protracted were these struggles that, as late as 1880, British planters in Assam were ‘‘troubled’’ by Naga raids on plantation lands. One regional overlord, the Bhutanese king, who controlled large swaths of the Dooars region in North Bengal, was not going to kowtow to Company incursions. In a humorous and coincidental mimesis of the Chinese emperor’s demand of obeisance from Lord McArtney, a Bhutanese minister, Tongso-Perlon, threw a bowl of barley paste at the East India Company emissary, Mr. Eden, who had traveled to the Bhutanese court in 1863. Mr. Eden was then, allegedly, forced to sign two documents making ‘‘Assam and the Bengal Dooars over to the Bhutiyas.’’ 22 In response to this contretemps in political-cum-culinary etiquette, the English resolved to carry out the permanent annexation of the Bengal Dooars.23 Frontier battles with intransigent local kings (not impressed by the ‘‘peaceful’’ example of European army settlements in their territories) are replete with colonial narratives of individual heroism in the face of ‘‘native outrages,’’ microevents that colorfully embellish the Company’s determination to consolidate its administration of Bengal. Yet the Company’s resolve to tackle this Bhutanese ‘‘outrage’’ came after a century of political machinations in the region. These included military alliances with weak local kings to battle their powerful rivals, a process that ensured English political ascendency. Colonial officials characterized the armycantonment of Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills just west of Bhutanese territory, as ‘‘an example of a peaceablyconducted and well-governed station’’ for the ‘‘turbulent neighbours in that quarter.’’ 24 Because of their proximity to Nepal and Tibet, the location of the new army cantonment and the neighboring Dooars helped to shape larger imperial strategies toward Cultivating the Garden 57

China and Tibet. Indeed, the creation of a well-armed ‘‘frontier’’ would send a cautionary message to other powerful actors on the interregional, Asian, political stage.

Precolonial Contests and the Company’s Arrival Like a large genie emerging from a round, long-necked lamp, North Bengal squeezes out from its South Bengal base, pushing into the eastern Himalayan foothills. On its eastern border lie Assam and Bangladesh, and to the west beyond Darjeeling sits the kingdom of Nepal. Centuries prior to eighteenth-century company expeditions, and before Mughal imperial expansion in the sixteenth century, a vast kingdom centered in the Kamrup Valley of Assam controlled a large swath of northeastern India, including Mymensingh and Sylhet in contemporary Bangladesh. Kamrup kings claimed lineal descent from a chief of the Koche, an autochthonous people of the area, whose descendants, the Rajbansi, dominate the rural landscape of contemporary North Bengal. Internecine struggles within the sixteenth-century Kamrup court paved the road for Mughal and Afghan incursions.One royal strand of the Kamrup lineage emerged as an important ruling dynasty of the region lying south of the Bhutan hills, Cooch Behar. The kings of Cooch Behar managed to retain a relative autonomy within the ambit of Mughal governance in Bengal.25 The decline of centralized Mughal rule in the eighteenth century weakened the Cooch Behar king, who faced a serious challenge from his northern neighbor, the kingdom of Bhutan. The Bhutanese king controlled the rectangular tableland of the Himalayan foothills lying just north of Cooch Behar territory: the Dooars. One colonial administrator noted that the Bhutanese king collected from them ‘‘a small annual tribute consisting of a cow’s tail, ponies, gold dust and blankets.’’ 26 At the end of the eighteenth century, the Bhutanese king allied with a powerful zamindar (landowner) of an area lying west of the Dooars, Baikanthupur, and forced the Cooch Behar king to pay tribute to his court. On the eve of British colonial incursions, the Bhutan court had established its overlordship over a sizeable portion of North Bengal. After receiving the Grant of Dewani in 1765 from Shah Alam, the English launched their strategy of annexation by forging an alliance with the Cooch Behar royal family, now effectively vassals of the Bhutanese king. By offering its ‘‘protection’’ to the Cooch Behar family, the East India Company became the new overlord of Cooch Behar and began assessing its land revenue.27 58

Undeterred, the Bhutan court continued to collect rent from its old vassalage, and the East India Company did not have the power to halt this revenue collection. Symbolically, the battle lines were drawn.Only four decades later on the eve of battle, the Company declared Bhutanese ‘‘usurpation’’ of the Dooars.28 In 1826, the uneasy tolerance flared into open military conflict. Not coincidentally, the battle occurred less than a decade before the Bentinck Tea Committee’s declaration of the potential of tea colonization in India. Successful experimental plantations in North India now proved that lucrative possibilities could be harvested in the agreeable climate and soil of the eastern Himalayas. Military strategies of conquest also encompassed a cultural politics of ‘‘divide and rule.’’ Colonial administrators began to construct an essential divide between the cultures of the hills and those of the plains through an ecopolitical equation that characterized the Bhutanese as foreigners to the kingdoms of the plains now rapidly being brought under British overlordship. Early colonial administrators defined an important pilgrimage site, an ancient temple at Jalpesh (in the Dooars) as ‘‘a pagoda of the Hindu workers with which the Bhutiyas can have nothing to do.’’ Yet this construction of cultural impermeability was belied by centuries of contact through trade and revenue collection. This was no more evident than in the presence of the Dobhasiyas,29 a local community of Rajbansi peasants who, knowing the languages of area, worked as intermediaries for traders and revenue collectors.30 By creating an essential cultural divide, however, the Company legitimized its annexation and declared its intent to occupy tracts ‘‘of country which are peopled by a race who have no affinity with the Bhutiyas but who are closely allied with the people of Bengal and were expected to cooperate cordially with British authorities.’’ 31 In 1863, the British emissary’s encounter with Bhutanese barley paste catalyzed the final military confrontation that resulted in the defeat of the Bhutanese king on November 11, 1865.The ensuing Peace at Sinchula facilitated the annexation of 2,053 square miles of North Bengal territory.32 Within ten years of British annexation, British tea companies began mapping their ‘‘gardens’’ in the Dooars foothills. The annexation of the Dooars occurred with other military operations in the Himalayan foothills most famous for their tea: Darjeeling. The East India Company’s claim to this area, lying just west of the Dooars, enacted a strategic balancing act between the kingdoms of Nepal and Sikkim. Between 1780 and 1813, the Nepali court controlled a region that had previously been under Sikkimese rule, and the British initiated an alliance with the weaker kingdom of Sikkim. The colonial objective of this alliance had Cultivating the Garden 59

a geostrategic imperative: to secure the borders close to Tibet, China, and Nepal.Thus, an old pattern of alliances with weak rulers (who could still lay ancestral claim to land) allowed the British to begin moving into the region. In 1835, Sikkim ceded the region to the Company, and a cantonment town, Darjeeling, was founded in 1839.33 The Nepali court retaliated by kidnapping Dr. Campbell, the first British superintendent of the small hill station at Darjeeling.The British, hinting at ‘‘eastern despotism’’ charged that the hapless superintendent was abducted ‘‘for the purpose of the slave trade.’’ 34 This momentary drama of bodily disappearance compelled the military annexation of a region far larger than what was accomplished through the Sikkimese Deed of 1835. Dr. Campbell was returned, unharmed. But by 1850, the entire region of Darjeeling, with the adjacent hill area of the Tarai, was under British rule. State-level machinations between the company and important regional rulers present one visible register of the turbulent history that underwrote the Planter Raj. But another layerof political struggle, microscopic and subterranean, indexed the early nineteenth-centurychronicles of North Bengal. In the Baikanthapur forests, just west of the Dooars, increased commercial logging had undermined the livelihood of local communities who practiced swidden cultivation in forests now protected as a reserve. In 1787, increasingly pauperized, some of these communities occupied the Baikunthapur forest, alarming colonial administrators, who commented that the region was ‘‘infested with dacoits,’’ the dreaded banditti.35 Determined to suppress the disorder within their administrative ambit, colonial officers deployed the local troops to successfully quell ‘‘bandit’’ resistance.36 The banditti of Baikunthapur are but one instance of a small rupture charted in the margins of colonial master-texts. Though the annals of military struggles between company and kings eclipse the events in which local communities vainly defended their customary rights to labor and land, they still remain a backbeat, through which we can register the louder rhythms of imperial settlement and conquest. Thus, the theater of treaties and battles in this so-called frontier also encompassed skirmishes and microstruggles: with banditti as well as with unfriendly ministers and royal courts. Indeed, colonial perceptions of corporeal and symbolic assaults on European bodies—through flung barley paste and kidnapping—figured this as a ‘‘despotic’’ terrain in need for firm and stringent political control.Together, these military and symbolic struggles, strategic battles and corporeal contests, paved the way for plantation settlement: the conquest and administration of a region that would bring gold, and glory, into the treasure chests of empire. 60

act 3, scene 3 The Narrator, British Sahib and Memsahib sit in the dark. The only light on their side of the stage is the low glow from the Narrator’s lantern. The plain gau backdrop on your right (stage left) trembles as if a quick wind has blown through. Suddenly from stage left, a figure bursts onstage, the Son of the Forest:37 half of the Dancer’s hair is cut into a mohawk, the other springs with twigs. His face is painted black and white, his body is vermillion red. He wears only a loin cloth. He brandishes a bamboo torch of fire, the mashal. His leaping on the stage is done in total silence. The only sounds are the slap of feet, the thud of body on the stage.The spotlight moves on him, around him.The sense should be that the light chases him but cannot pin down his swift and erratic movements. Suddenly he stops his frenzied movement, and flings himself into a tight foetal crouch. At the precise moment of this cessation of movement, the drumming begins, like a surprised and fast heartbeat.There is that same unsettling wail, like a dirge, and harsh harsh sobs. Lights go out completely.

Mapping People, Mapping Land The staggered process of annexation also encompassed the shock troops of colonial conquest: the new bureaucrats and lawmakers of civil administration who investigated and classified customary practices of the rural economy in ethnographic detail. After the Grant of Diwani in 1765, Bengal was carved into sixteen districts, though administrative mapping was a continuous process ‘‘of jurisdictional changes necessitated by dacoits, violent disturbances of public peace, conditions of the police and pressures of work.’’ 38 In North Bengal, the Jalpaiguri District inclusive of the Dooars foothills was created in 1869 on the heels of the Peace at Sinchula. Jalpaiguri, a small village, became a site for another British cantonment. The area lying to the west of Tista River (including the Rangpur District and the Baikunthapur forest) was defined as a Regulation Tract to be administered under the tenancy laws valid for the rest of Bengal.39 In contrast to this legislative mapping, colonial administrators noted that the system of landholding was ‘‘imperfectly understood’’ in the Dooars and it was thus questionable ‘‘whether the existing Bengal Tenancy Act was suitable for this part of Bengal.’’ 40 As a result, the Bhutan Dooars was deemed as part of a ‘‘nonregulation district.’’ No act of the Calcutta legislature was automatically applicable to the region. Cultivating the Garden 61

The political implications of this special provision were considerable. It gave autonomous power to the district commissioner and his judicial apparatus, which could regulate essentially on its own terms, ‘‘any activity prejudicial to the British Raj.’’ 41 Significantly, the autonomy of regional political administrators was not a coincidental strategy on the part of the colonial state, which continued to mark the success of early plantations in Assam and the Darjeeling hills.They recognized that a well-policed and protected enclave would compell the speedy establishment of tea plantations in the Bhutan Dooars. As they wrote regional policy, colonial administrators had two pressing concerns: first, the construction of an administrative system through which customary land revenue practices could be understood and incorporated with colonial spheres of control; and second, the creation of plantations, facilitated by ‘‘wasteland’’ policies and legislation. Enactments of these revenue and settlement objectives entailed an investigation of rural land conditions, as well as an ethnologyof customary land relations between villagers and rural elites. Colonial officials, thus, devised two parallel settlements in North Bengal. In the first, existing land tenurial relations were fundamentally altered by the judicial buttress of ‘‘absolute’’ proprietory rights. In the second, the legal designation of ‘‘wastelands’’ and the creation of liberal lease policies offered vast acreages for plantation establishment. Furthermore, colonial settlement policy was underpinned by a classificatory logic that defined the parameters of ‘‘healthy’’ and ‘‘productive’’ land. These cartographic measures of land value became inextricably connected to the kinds of cultivating labor performed. From these connections between land and labor emerged a typology through which various immigrant and local communities were measured. Significantly, a social evolutionary continuum contrasting ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘settled’’ classes of labor began to define the procurement and disciplining of plantation workers.

‘‘Interests in the Soil’’ How did the district collector categorize the ‘‘imperfectly understood’’ system of landholding in the Bhutan Dooars and the Jalpaiguri District? The Bhutanese king, ‘‘foreign to the people,’’ had ‘‘no interest in the soil’’ and deputed a subah, his lieutenant governor, to collect revenue.42 The subah was assisted by a katham, a man of ‘‘respectable birth,’’ who attained his position upon a bid payable to the subah. At the level of the ‘‘village community,’’ pradhans (headmen) assisted the katham on his rounds. The katham, 62

redefined as tahsildar, became the ‘‘native’’ collector, the lynchpin of British revenue collection.43 Village lands were divided into large plots of land called jotes, sometimes ‘‘leased’’ from the Bhutanese king.The jotedar’s tenants had occupancy rights for a year or more, rayat-adhiar (peasant sharecropper) paying rent with half of the land’s harvest after the jotedar supplied cattle, ploughing implements, and seed. A vast majority of the peasant population were adhiar-prajas 44 the actual cultivators of the soil, and they worked for largely absentee jotedars.45 In order to simplify and systematize a bewildering range of customary practices and rights to land, British settlement officers conferred ‘‘absolute’’ property rights on the jotedari landed elite. Consequently, as jotedars consolidated their now legally demarcated private properties, peasant sharecroppers were dispossessed from ancestral and customary rights to land. This ossification of customary tenurial rights and increasing evictions made it possible for the local jotedars to sell the land to Marwari traders, a business community of moneylenders and shopkeepers who had migrated from Rajasthan, and other immigrants from East Bengal.46

Mapping ‘‘Wastelands,’’ Planting Forests Plantations settlements on land legally designated waste resulted in the largest and most invasive transformations of land use in northeastern India. Large forests in the Dooars were classified as waste if ‘‘no right of proprietorship or of exclusive occupancy are known to exist.’’ 47 The logic of parceling out these seemingly empty lands was, not surprisingly, part of the overarching colonial settlement policies that had already been enacted with great success in Assam.48 The Wasteland Rules of 1838 mapped out blocks of a maximum of one thousand acres for companies eager to buy land for their tea plantations.Two decades after the first Wasteland Rules, new legislative enactments permitted the purchase of land grants of a minimum of five hundred acres with ninety-nine-year leases.49 In the early decades of settlement, newly formed tea companies discovered that legislation did not translate easily into practice and that claiming their land grants was a contentious business. Early Assam Company planters staked their claim to land by putting up ring fences and squatting on land to ensure their hold against that of commercial rivals and local communities.50 The actual status of that legally designated ‘‘uncultivated’’ land is revealed in a district commissioner’s insistence on the accurate mapping of tea grants. Because many blocks of ordinary cultivation were interspersed among forest reserves and the new plantations,51 and because land grabbing Cultivating the Garden 63

encroached on those areas of local cultivation, disputes had to be adjudicated in local courts. Planters were thus advised by the local district commissioner to survey the boundaries of their property, since tea grant maps were made ‘‘piecemeal, and often in a rather hurried manner.’’ 52 Tea plantation boundaries adjoined villages, and frequently adjoining jotes (of the same class of land) were amalgamated and sold to the expanding plantations, a process exacerbated by increased land taxes. The district administration’s assistance in systematizing legislation such as the Wasteland Rules benefited the British tea companies who began to settle their new property. Colonial administrators also created government forest reserves, blocking off territories where they saw a potentially lucrative business in commercial logging. A newly appointed forest conservator systematized timber logging revenues by controlling the business of local forest contractors and a mercantile commerce already in place. Forest reserves were created to ensure a steady supplyof timber for public infrastructural consumption: timber for railcars, a rationed supply of firewood for plantations, and controlled private logging.53 Customary use of jungle clearings as pasture land was not permitted and was characterized as ‘‘indiscriminate grazing.’’ 54 Pasture lands were to be rented out by the forest department for additional revenue. Nepali and Mech trade in jungle products was considered ‘‘merely a subsidiary occupation to that of agriculture.’’ 55 Forests not set aside as reserves were considered eminently suitable for tea plantations because of the intrinsic value of jungle soil. One planter noted that ‘‘virgin jungle affords the best type of soil for tea cultivation, as the initial fertility, tilth and texture of this soil is at a high level.’’ 56 Here was a scientific recognition of the abundance that created the tangled forest, a sense that the jungle’s innate fertility was the necessary base for any plantation cultivation.

People and the Soil: Colonial Ethnologies of Cultivation These ‘‘wastelands’’ indexed a strange absence within administrative documents. British administrators were well aware of human presence in these forests and the variety of local communities that cultivated in the forests and traded in jungle produce. Local communities like the Mech, Lepcha, Dhimal, and Toto had practiced swidden cultivation for centuries prior to British annexation. The Meches were described as ‘‘a wild and inoffensive people, industrious for Orientals,’’ who were swidden cultivators living in the Tarai jungles.57 The land-extensive nature of swidden cultivation was 64

characterized as a ‘‘nomadic’’ working of the soil that ‘‘exhausted’’ the ‘‘productive powers’’ of the land. Not permitted to stay in forest reserves, these communities became increasingly pauperized.58 Colonial land-settlement policies began to create important reservoirs of workers for plantation settlement, road building, and army recruitment. An immigration settlement policy 59 that targeted Nepali men for the British Indian army 60 had the important effect of also supplying labor to tea plantations. Other colonial settlement policies were encouraged through missionary work. In 1890, the Church Missionary Society was given a lease of seventy square miles of ‘‘wasteland’’ for a mission among the Santhal community.The Santhal Colony, as it was known, was successful for about two decades, and attracted its colonists with the promise of free land and firewood rations. In its heyday, ‘‘every acre was under cultivation by 1500 Christian and 500 non-Christian Santhals, the latter who sign a pledge to abstain from drink and heathen sacrifices.’’ 61 A cultural taxonomy that connected particular communities to the cultivating work they performed emerged out a variety of directed settlements. These land/labor/communityconnections became essential inscriptions of ‘‘value’’ that were indexed through an evolutionary continuum of development. At the positive end of this telos of cultivating development were Nepali agricultural castes such as the Newars and Murmus, ‘‘capital agriculturalists.’’ 62 Their ‘‘advanced’’ forms of tillage were viewed as a necessary example for those who inhabited the negative end of the cultivating continuum, the ‘‘nomadic’’ swidden cultivators: ‘‘The Nepali system of agriculture is decidedly in advance of the primitive jhum method followed by the Meches and other aboriginal people. It appears probable that as available jungle land for this nomadic method of tillage becomes more and more scarce, the aboriginal tribes will gradually learn the use of the plough from the Nepalis, and will adopt the higher system of cultivation practiced by that class of community.’’ 63 Nepali peasant labor, thus, contrasted favorably to its other, ‘‘primitive’’ swidden cultivation. It followed that the idea of ‘‘fixed employment’’ (i.e., wage labor) might come ‘‘naturally’’ to them. Because Nepalis were a ‘‘settled’’ peasantry, they could also become ideal workers, ‘‘naturally’’ productive for the wage work of the imperial army and plantation. In contrast, the Lepcha or Mech ‘‘nomads,’’ by virtue of their moving cultivation were defined as indolent, ‘‘a besetting sin because they detest fixed employment.’’ 64 The Bodo and Dhimal, whowere similarlyconsidered ‘‘fickle and lazy,’’ 65 were situated on the continuum between the Mech and Nepali.66 Marked by their ‘‘wandering’’ work, these communities would be Cultivating the Garden 65

11a. Portrait of Sir Thomas Lipton visiting his Ceylon gardens, on his verandah, and at a London auction. Triptych. (below) 11b. Garden scene. From an advertisement for Lipton’s tea. Both reproduced in Anthony Burgess et al., The Book of Tea (Flammarion: Paris, 2000).

11c. Sacks of tea on a Ceylon plantation. Photograph, late nineteenth century. From Anthony Burgess et al., The Book of Tea (Flammarion: Paris, 2000).

defined by essentialized characteristics of laziness and instability whenever they encountered the coercive edge of colonial administration.67 The dyadic contrast between ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘settled’’ work was situated, simultaneously, on what may be called an evolutionary ‘‘laboring chain of being.’’ An implicit register of essentialized characteristics, measured by the kinds of work done by each community, plotted a telos of work. As such, ‘‘traditional’’ labor came to define a culturally bound essence, and plotting, within a chain of progress.Thus, ‘‘nomadic tillage,’’ the first stage of evolution, presented qualities of indolence and instability that were considered unsuitable for regular wage employment. For example, colonial administrators consistently depicted the Bodo-Kacharis of Assam, employed to clear the jungle because local peasants weren’t willing to work, as ‘‘unruly’’ and erratic, lacking settled disciplines. For colonial administrators, customs of ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘unsettled’’ labor were characterized as nonwork. Because nomadic tillage could not be mapped into the settled imperatives of agrarian revenue collection, it came to inhabit a place of invisibility and lack.This colonial epistemology of labor thus charted the human emptiness that defined the essence of a savage and unknown land. Unworthy to be called ‘‘real’’ work, customary cultivation located its actors into a ‘‘human’’ absence. Cultivating the Garden 67

Thus the impetus for settling immigrants and intransigent ‘‘nomads’’ was ultimately the business of civilizing, of making ‘‘human,’’ the wild practices of a savage landscape. Its divine mission was explicitly enacted through the Santhal mission colony. The evolutionary logic underpinning the telos of cultivating labor suggests, in one sense, the imperative of transforming ‘‘primitive labor’’ and making the ‘‘primitive’’ into a civilized laboring being, worthy finally of humanizing that original landscape. Consider, for a moment, the gaze of empire.There is Lipton Sahib, the tea baron commemorated in a triptych of his travels to the colony (figure 11a). There, from his own railcar, a turbaned native servant in the background, he gazes onto the landscape of his plantation. A woman worker, head covered in white, bearing a basket, plucks leaf. Now he has reached the verandah of his bungalow. He sits on the wicker chair and gazes benevolently at you. The white-turbaned servant stands to attention; an elephant and bullock cart signal an exotic and bucolic landscape. Finally, there is Lipton Sahib again, in top hat attending a tea auction back in London, his colonial travels come full circle. In the second illustration (figure 11b), a nineteenth-century advertisement for Lipton tea proudly proclaims its ‘‘largest tea sale’’ and emphasizes its victory in the ‘‘British Section World’s Fair, Chicago.’’ The text runs around the borders of the central image of the plantation itself: the dark silhouettes of women weighing their baskets of leaf and overseers in the field. Production and commodity circulation are thus carefully, and brilliantly, conjoined. But consider the final image (figure 11c), a photograph. Here, the text inscribes the label on the gunny-sacks hanging on a line. There is a scatter of tea bushes in the foreground. For a moment, look closely at the men holding the line upon which the sacks hang. One man, cheeks sharply outlined, gazes straight at the camera. The sack almost completely covers his body. In the corner of the photo, another man, lightly turbaned, also looks into the camera. His gaze is enigmatic.

The Pragmatics of Gardening The governmental legislation that created the Wasteland Rules addressed one of the two essential requirements for plantation settlement: land. An adequate and consistent supply of workers—to clear jungles, build bungalows, and plant tea nurseries—remained a critical issue. Despite large land grants and generous lease terms, tea planting was plagued by acute labor 68

shortages exacerbated by the Wasteland Rules, which ‘‘tempted the planters to take possession of more than they could manage.’’ 68 In 1859, only 10,000 workers were available for employment, against a requirement of 20,000.69 As early as 1859, planters were convinced that the ‘‘importation of foreign labor was essential,’’ and the first tea planters’ association was expressly formed for this purpose, ‘‘to organize a system of coolie emigration from lower Bengal to Assam.’’ By the 1860s, an organized system of labor recruitment ensured that two-thirds of total plantation labor arrived from the Chotanagpur Plateau, comprising contemporary Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa. Labor ‘‘importation’’ was necessary because local communities in both Assam and Bengal refused to work in the new plantations. Puzzled, one planter remarked that though the ‘‘plucking of tea leaves is light and easy work,’’ they could not fathom why the ‘‘Bengali cultivator had not, even in times of distress, been attracted.’’ 70 Planters characterized neighboring villagers who did work as ‘‘erratic’’ because they preferred ‘‘to attend to their own cultivation.’’ 71 Noted one administrator: ‘‘The people are lazy and appear indifferent to employment. This creates trouble in the accounts and loss to the work is caused by the numbers that absent themselves for days together and go their houses, where most of them retain an interest in their own lands.’’ 72 The reluctance to work was also characterized as ‘‘incidental proofs of hostility and want of influence on the part of the civil authorities.’’ 73 Despite this refusal to work, surrounding villagers were pressured in other ways to join plantations. One common strategy to coerce peasants into wage labor was to increase the revenue burden. Nonetheless, despite a 100 percent increase in land taxes, local populations continued to refuse plantation work.74 The increased agrarian tax burden was compounded by the plantations’ demand for rice to feed their workforces. Peasant family labor was consequently diverted from the cultivation of other cash crops to rice. Colonial administrators and planters viewed the local refusal to work for wages as yet another enactment of the fundamentally ‘‘indolent’’ nature of local communities. The positive ascription of settled agrarian work was switched to a negative codification of essential laziness, a characteristic engendered by the ‘‘exuberant fertility of the soil,’’ in which nourishment was ‘‘procurable without much exertion.’’ 75 Local villagers were now seen as excessively settled. Their connection to the soil was rooted too deeply in a tropical essence, through which overabundance and ‘‘fertility’’ enervated the ‘‘body’’ into nonwork. Cultivating the Garden 69

The natives’ alleged fixed habits, their ‘‘natural indolence and addiction to opium,’’ were another key to understanding their recalcitrance to engage in wage labor.The economy of excess now embraced another trope. Assamese and Bengali villagers joined the powerful orientalist images of addiction: undisciplined and lazy escapes into the debaucheries of the opium den.76 Noted one colonial administrator of his travels in Assam: ‘‘The people are naturally too indolent, and yet too low down in the social scale to exert themselves beyond what is necessary to procure them the means of living and wherewithal to gratify their passion for opium.’’ Indolence was also interpreted as an almost subversive agency, an idea of ‘‘conscious’’ laziness aimed at undermining the planter’s enterprise: ‘‘The villager, on the other hand, is master of the situation and he knows it; he works nowhere, but sits down at his ease in the village and he eats his rice and smokes his opium purchased with the money of which existing circumstances enable him to fraud the planter with perfect impunity. . . . He lies down to sleep, to eat and smoke, and sleep again.’’ 77

act 3, scene 4 Lights come back on the bungalow living-room scene and more dimly on Alice sitting at her place stage right (to your left).The Narrator turns her lantern light low. The low table is set as usual. There is a small bell. british memsahib: (ringing the bell sharply, exasperated) It is just so bloody hot and the khansama [cook] has not finished preparing dinner. And we have guests too! ‘‘I tell you, these natives are lazy. And we must not spoil them. They are born liars. And they steal. I caught a coolie woman plucking roses from our garden the other day, and I shooed her off. And they let their cows and buffaloes into the vegetable patch that Charles has planted at the back of the bungalow.We must not spoil them.’’ 78 british sahib: ( grunting) Darling, you know how it is. ‘‘All that wonderful sitting posture is natural to the race, huddled up to the cooking fires, toasting their bodies, and smoking that universal panacea, the hubblebubble—regardless of their masters, of their wants.’’ 79 If you go to the kitchen, you will see that is what the cook is doing as we speak. (Takes another sip of the drink in his hand.) she: (looking at you, perplexed ) Hubble-bubble. Hubble-bubble. Something reminds me of Wonderland. (yelling across to Alice) Hey, Alice, help me out. Do you have a lazy native in Wonderland?

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alice: There she blows! I did meet the Caterpillar, remember, perched on his mushroom. He was smoking a large hookah and asked me who I was. Who are you? he asked me. And then we had the strangest conversation. she: Right, I remember it now. That little serpent of the cottage garden. Perhaps oriental passions have wandered west to Wonderland. Perhaps, Alice is on an occidental trip. Certainly, the caterpillar is! Who is to know? Tropical indolence. Hubble-bubble. Hubble-bubble-toil-andtrouble . . . . british memsahib: Oh, dear me. I do think the gin has gone to her head. (Ringing the bell and screaming shrilly.) Khansaaammma! Khana lagao! [Put the food on] Light fades out. Racialized inscriptions obscure some concrete reasons for people’s unwillingness to work. Demographic depletion because of civil wars led to a paucity in numbers of people available for labor.80 More important, however, was the fact that plantation wages were considerably lower than wages for migrant and casual labor. In 1883, the subdivisional officer of Karamganj noted that Emigration Act labor wages had been less than three rupees per month during the previous season, while Bengali cultivators in adjoining villages earned seven rupees per month.81 Early planters were dependent on local communities, and if peasant cultivators were unwilling to work, then communities from the hills, already facing the erosion of customary rights to land and forests, were brought in for jungle clearing. In an early description of Singhpos in Assam one planter notes: ‘‘Arrangements had been made for a batch of 250 Naga hill tribesmen and swarms of Singhpo. I soon had 750 of them, both men and women hard at work.The men were given axes with which to fell the trees.They fairly ate into the jungle and with amazing agility and ran skimming over the tangle of felled jungle and bamboos with bare feet.’’ 82 His rendition of the Singhpo’s labor to clear the jungle is suffused with its suggestion of an almost animal-like ease. Yet again, an organic essence indexes the English planter’s positive inscription of physical ‘‘ease,’’ the ‘‘amazing agility’’ with which the work was done.The Singhpo’s ‘‘primitivism’’ switches into a positive register because his/her integral connection to the landscape creates the superior capacities to labor on that very landscape. The essential coupling of a ‘‘native body’’ to the landscape, wild bodies to wildness, offers the underlying philosophies of work that underwrote the daily disciplines of plantation labor. Such tropologies of bodies construct

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the logics of settlement and the labor practices upon which they ultimately depended. Yet beyond metaphor, analytic rubrics, and the tools of explanation, such narratives defy their own totalizing claims.The body rests against the trunk of a tree for a moment. It sweats against its own inscriptions and asks for water, cupping its hands and drinking deeply.The sun is high. It moves again and bends low with the sickle.

Targeting ‘‘Tribal’’ Homelands English planters mapped the ‘‘tribal’’ belt of the Chotanagpur plateau as an ideal ‘‘labor catchment’’ area. This large region (spanning parts of contemporary Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal), for millennia the homelands of Jharkhandi 83 communities such as the Oraon, Munda, Santhal, and Gond, was throughout the nineteenth century profoundly affected by incursions of outsiders called dikus. These dikus, merchants and landowners, both Hindu zamindars and Muslim jagirdars, supported by colonial land revenue policies, inexorably dispossessed adivasi (indigenous) communities of both land and livelihood. Among the Munda, customary forms of land tenure known as khuntkatti stipulated that land belonged communally to the village, and customary rights of cultivation, branched from corporate ownership. Because of Mughal incursions, non-Jharkhandis began to dominate the agrarian landscape, and the finely wrought system of customary sharing of labor, produce and occupancy began to crumble.84 The process of dispossession and land alienation, in motion since the mid-eighteenth century, was given impetus by British policies that established both zamindari and ryotwari systems of land revenue administration. Colonial efforts toward efficient revenue collection hinged on determining legally who had proprietal rights to the land.85 By making invalid any customary claims to soil by subordinate tenants, the British legal apparatus gave considerable power and incentive to jagirdars and zamindars to continue their dispossession and rack-renting of small sharecroppers.86 However, dispossession of Jharkhandi peasant communities was not met with passivity and acquiescence, for a series of revolts sparked in the region, from the Kol and Bhumij rebellion of 1833 to the millenarian struggles of Birsa Munda at the turn of the century. One argument about colonial recruitment schemes suggests that the British intensified recruitment around Ranchi in the 1890s in order to siphon away the core constituency of the

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millenarian prophet, Birsa Munda, and the various Jharkhandi communities who supported his struggles against the British.87 Another argument suggests a conscious colonial policy linkage between land dispossession and recruitment for plantations in the Chotanagpur.88 British emigration policies created catchment areas by studying local demographic factors such as high population density, land sales, and evictions.89 The Inland Emigration Acts of 1882 noted that the attention of the ‘‘government of India was directed to large overpopulated districts and saw much reason . . . to flush out poor people from famine-stricken parts into plantation areas.’’ 90 Land alienation, compounded by famines in the last decades of the nineteenth century, created a reservoir of desperate, dispossessed villagers, who readily migrated to the plantation belt in search for work.91 Once in the plantation, new workers were provided with a small plot of land to grow subsistence crops.92 Because tea plantations cultivated approximately one-third of their total holdings, no additional capital outlay was required, and the workers’ small-scale paddy cultivation was beneficial to the management on several counts. For one, they would partially relieve the planter of supplying food to the workers, and there was an ‘‘understanding that family members would work for the garden.’’ 93 The planter also charged rent on this cultivation to prevent ‘‘conversion to rights.’’ 94 Furthermore, the settlement by ‘‘time-expired’’ workers on these rented lands (after the contract period was finished) ensured a steady supply of faltu, or casual, labor during periods of peak harvest.95 The attraction of promised land rights, albeit within the ambit of a new sahib-landlord, drew many of the dispossessed into the regimes of wage labor, though it also served as ‘‘a valuable extra-legal, extra-political’’ 96 constraint on a worker’s ability to break him/herself from plantation indentureship.97

Traveling Labor: Colonial Ethnologies of Recruitment Imagine again the young nineteenth-century planter’s journey in an old steamership, its slow, wheezing way up the Brahmaputra. Imagine the ship as edifice, with its three stories, the lower levels inhabited by cargo, coal, sheep and local people, areas ‘‘seldom visited by the dwellers above on account of [their] dirt and disorder.’’ 98 It does not occur to the planter, perhaps, that in the disorderly shiphold are the future workers of his plantation realm, the subjects of his fiefdom. Those other travelers in the ship’s hold, in the train bogies (wagons) to

Cultivating the Garden 73

the coolie depot, remain shrouded in the spaces of unwritten histories: they can only be stitched together in the imagination, heard in the flickering moments of a woman’s song.’’ Aiee, Aiee, between Ranchi and Calcutta / The railcar overturned. / Many many people lost their lives. / Someone’s father, someone’s mother, / Someone’s small child. / Mother weeps shaking, father in the bazaar, / Sister wails, beating her breasts, / Sister wails, beating her breasts.’’ 99 A system combining both private contracting and the government-run sirdari system constituted the modus operandi of recruitment schemes.The contract system involved private, often unlicensed, contractors working for particularagency houses or planters. Subcontractors, known as arkutti, were allgedly responsible for the fraudulent methods and downright coercion that characterized the first phase of recruitment.100 During an investigation of these alleged fraudulent activities, some Santhals were called to offer evidence.We meet Jugal, a ‘‘pargnait of Gopi Kandoo’’ and his men from Damin-i-koh from the ‘‘south end of the hills,’’ 101 who says: We now think people will go, because they can come and go. They did not know before whether it was a good or bad country. Before people went and did not return, so others were afraid. They have gone, leaving their wives behind.We thought the country good, and the earth good, and drank well water. The work was not excessive, and women and children could earn something. Rice was dearer and sometimes our friends told us they had to pay Rs.3–4 a maund. As a rule, people were satisfied, but on some gardens they were not. In some, they were fined for petty offences. Some said they were oppressed by petty officers, i.e. sardars, jamadars.Very many of our people also go to Chittagong. People who come from the depots, complained of being phuslaoed [tricked].102

In contrast to private contracting, the sirdari system of recruitment consisted of such incidents as an individual plantation’s sending back a worker who had ‘‘been but a few months on the garden and has expressed the desire to recruit his relatives.’’ Because of the notorious repuation of private contractors, statements of village origin and intent to return with recruits, however, was to be checked.103 Most significantly, these sirdars were created as ‘‘headmen’’ who would wield considerable power over their recruits. In the process, they constituted the most important layer of ‘‘indirect rule’’ within the plantation: ‘‘The best way of working with the nature of the coolie class is to deal with them through headmen who understand their likes and dislikes in a way which no European can do.’’ 104 The sirdar becomes a ‘‘works 74

organizer’’: ‘‘A sirdar,’’ noted one planter, ‘‘has nothing to do with actual work. A headman under his name works his relatives and friends. He is responsible for their advances to his sahib, he often gives his coolies small weekly advances upon their pay, and he generally looks after their interests; a sirdar may be what we call a duffadar or in charge of a section of the people at work upon the garden.’’ 105 Women were not sent as sirdars, though there was an implicit policy shift in the late colonial period, when women were an integral part of the workforce. ‘‘To remove doubts,’’ stated one document, ‘‘it is expressly stated that a ‘garden sirdar’ may be either ‘male’ or ‘female’. The employment of female sirdar recruiters, who are generally the wives of garden sirdars, is very desirable. The magistrate can always refuse to countersign the certification of any objectionable female.’’ 106 Within the written record, there are very few indications that this became common practice, though the Royal Commission of Labour did interview a Catholic woman called Christine, who actively recruited for one plantation.107 While the sirdari system became the dominant mode of recruitment from the early 1900s, the contractors or arkutti continued to be important brokers within labor recruitment. Because of administrative discontent with haphazard and uncontrolled forms of recruitment, an increasing number of contractors had to carry official licenses, which were cleared through the offices of a superintendent of emigration. In 1878, a central recruiting body, theTea Districts Labour Association (tdla), was created to systematize and coordinate recruiting efforts of colonial administrators, middlemen, and tea managers.108

act 3, scene 5 The light comes on stage left. The bungalow scene is almost completely dark. On the forward right of the stage stands the Son of the Forest. The sound is of a train: rhythmic clackity-clack-clackity-clack-whistle-clackity-clack. son of the forest: ‘‘I was phuslaoed away to Assam. A nephew of mine was missing, and I went to look for him. A case took place about me. The three men who induced me to go were neighbors. One of them had a depot at Karmahar. They took money from me, I did not get any.’’ 109 she: (against the sound of a telegraph code being sent out . . . Rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat) Urgent telegraph from recruitment office to the plantation office. T-E-R-M-A-G-E-N-T : ‘‘Sirdar Refuses to Return to Garden.’’ 110 Cultivating the Garden 75

son of the forest: ‘‘The sahib would send sirdar to come and ‘break my jungle’. You would be given one piece of cloth, two pots. You might become a sirdar and get a baksheesh [bonus].You were paid on Sundays, and the sirdar who bought you would pay, so money would come from the sirdar.They would sell the challan [the batch of workers] to the manager. Rs. 15 per head I think it was.The sirdar would get a commission according to how many people he had. All the calculations of the money owed him was between the sahib and the sirdar.’’ 111 she: (singing to the tune of ‘‘Tradition! Tradition!’’ ) Commission! Coommiiisshhun. ‘‘The full rate of 12 Rs is charged on minors who do not suffer from any physical defect which would be likely to render them unfit when they attain the age of 16’’ . . . Twelve rupees.Twelve rupees.Twelve rupees.112 british sahib: (speaking from his dark corner) Number 53, dated Camp Calcutta, February 21, 1919. From the deputy sanitation commissioner, Rajsahi Circle, to the sanitary commissioner, Bengal. ‘‘A Special cooly train runs daily from Naihati to Santahar for the last two months with coolies from Chotanagpur, Orissa, etc. Coolies for the Dooars and Assam are bought in wagons which are overcrowded and have no sanitary arrangements. The coolies for the Dooars make their own arrangements for food—and are accompanied by the chaprassis of the garden to which they are going.’’ 113 she: (against the sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . . tat tat tat, telegraphic codes) Urgent telegraph from recruitment office to plantation office. T-R-A-G-E-D-I-A-N: Volunteer laborers want to go to your garden. Good physique. Shall I sent up? Wire reply.’’ 114 Wire reply. Wire reply. Wire reply. Light fades out.

Working Races: ‘‘Jungli’’ Labor, Vigorous Labor In one case, I met a contractor at the ghat [docks] who was very indignant because a batch of Azimgarh coolies had been returned on his hands as not being junglis. I objected that were not, as a matterof fact, junglis—towhich he coolly replied that there were as good junglis as a man could expect to get at Rs. 45 a head.115

As the British mapped prime labor catchment areas, they simultaneously evaluated which adivasi communities would prove to be the ‘‘best castes’’ of labor for their tea estates. Plantations described as ‘‘unhealthy’’ were ad76

vised by commissions of enquiry to ‘‘employ good castes, whatever they have to pay for them.’’ 116 Criteria of excellence depended on notions of appropriate physicality, the capacity to do manual work, and the willingness to remain on plantations. In that light, the Uriyas (from Orissa) were lauded for their physical adaptability and their apparent reluctance to leave the plantations. Noted one planter: ‘‘I have seen these batches since their arrival in January, and have no hesitation in stating that they have gained a stone all round since their arrival in January. They do not abscond, and seem to have come to a climate similar to their own.’’ 117 In contrast, Nepalis were characterized as unable to acclimatize to the tropical labors of jungle clearing in an ‘‘unhealthy district.’’ 118 The most suitable workers for arduous tropical labor were classified as junglis, that is, emigrants from the Chotanagpur Plateau and the Santhal Pargannas.119 In this most powerful inscription, the landscape of the jangal (jungle) (itself to be cleared for the civilizing enterprise of the planter sahib) mapped directly onto the bodies of the people who would make that enterprise a possibility. In the discourses of recruitment, jungli signified that necessary and much vaunted laboring. At the same time, it imputed to the various adivasi communities of the Chotanagpur plateau the characteristics associated by the colonizing planter-self with a primitive, uncivilized, and laboring Other. The calculus for the new worker’s capacity for hard work entailed the combination of physique, stamina, and good health. Enquiries were made by the Tea Districts Labor Association ‘‘as to the possibility of recruiting a more vigorous type from the United Provinces, a class of labourer which will acclimatize readily with any district in Assam. We prefer paying the higher price for Chotanagpuris and keeping out North Westerners who are weakly, dirty and discontented. Though they still seem of weaker stamina than the junglis, they are comparatively free from sickness.’’ 120 One inspector of a coolie depot remarked that ‘‘inmates of depots are of generally poor physique with the exception of some Santhals, Kols and Gonds.’’ 121 The physique of Kols and Gonds, both ‘‘capital workers,’’ made the Central Provinces a most attractive field of recruitment.Conversely, calculations of monetary loss were directlyequated to a recruit’s poor physique: ‘‘Another gentleman of many years experience writes that the cost of 330 adult coolies sent up to him was Rs.111–8, and that out of this number more than half were of poor physique and of the wrong caste. He experienced numbers of deaths and desertions.’’ 122 The market for able workers was, at bottom, a set of busy commerCultivating the Garden 77

cial transactions among contractors, sirdars, and sahibs. It was, however, a commerce of bodies that was very much dependent on the caste/‘‘tribal’’/ regional markings of the prospective emigrant. In 1896, the prices offered

table 1. Company Prices for Workers For Pure Aborigines or Junglies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For Good, Hardy Coolies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For Coolies Suitable for Healthy Gardens in the Brahmaputra Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For North Western Province Coolies Suitable for Healthy Gardens in the Surma Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rs.  Rs.  Rs.  Rs. 

Source: Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, 1896 (Calcutta: lec, 1906).

for workers bya local contracting agency, Begs, Dunlop and Company, were the following: Planters also complained of the rising cost of the ‘‘best types of workers: In 1893, the cost was 90 rupees per month. ‘‘Now the best coolies cost the planter quite Rs. 150, and even Kols and Gonds from the Central Provinces cannot be obtained for less than Rs. 125. Inferior labor is cheap this year.’’ 123 The gradation in cost was directly linked to type of recruit, with junglis being the most expensive to hire, followed by Bengalis and ‘‘northwesterners.’’ Thus, the labor cost of importing workers was factored within an equation of ‘‘inferior’’ and ‘‘superior’’ types of labor. ‘‘Inferior coolies’’ were calculated as a direct monetary loss for the garden: ‘‘Second-rate coolies landed on their gardens in Assam cost 130 rupees, or in other words, . . . a garden making two annas profit per pound of tea has to make thirteen maunds of tea before it has repaid itself for the expense for bringing up a single coolie.’’ 124 In this equation, profit was reckoned using a calculus of racialized labor value; the differential pricing of ‘‘pure aboriginal junglis’’ and northwesterners, ‘‘superior’’ versus ‘‘inferior’’ types of labor. In the Darjeeling District, colonial administrators were dismayed to learn that Maharaja Chandra Jung Bahadur Rana, the king of Nepal, was also deploying parallel ‘‘caste’’ terms for prohibiting the recruitment of Nepalis for military and tea company work from within Nepali territory. Planters were told to ‘‘abstain from recruiting subjects other than members of the Damai, Sarki, Kami and Gaini castes.’’ 125 Despite planter objections that these Nepali strictures would result in a paucity of ‘‘able bodied labor’’ 126 within the plantations, it was these same subordinate caste groups, 78

12.Women pluckers on the plantation waiting for their leaf to be weighed. Photograph, late nineteenth century. From Anthony Burgess et. al., The Book of Tea (Flammarion: Paris, 2000).

like the blacksmith Kamis, who continued to be recruited and began to dominate the Nepali communities of contemporary North Bengal plantations. Thus, colonial taxonomies of ‘‘advanced’’ and ‘‘primitive’’ labor were ascribed to particular communities moving into plantation enclaves. The homogenizing appellation jungli, with its significations of a primitive wildness, characterized the various Chotanagpuri communities who, desperate for work, moved into North Bengal and Assam. It is an inscription that can also be located within the larger classificatory compass of colonial settlement and its ethnologies of cultivation. Inserted into the laboring chain of being, constructed upon the customary work of various autochthonous communities, colonial administrators thus catalogued new immigrant workers. Weaving this calculus of essence into customary cultivating work, colonial planters located new workers within the hard manual work of clearing and cultivation. Indexed through their tropical bodies, jungli physicality signified a naturalized capacity to clear the jungles, to work the obdurate earth. And so it was that the immigrant ‘‘primitive’s’’ now-harnessed methods of cultivation began to create from the vast jungle landscape a veritable garden of civilization: the new Planter Raj. Cultivating the Garden 79

A Family of Workers: Sexual Economies of Settlement Standing higher than the four women, the clerk reads the weight of their baskets in this rare late-nineteenth-century photograph of women plantation workers. On the narrow verandah of what might be a factory shed, another man in black jacket and hat, looks into the camera. He might be the chowkidar (watchman). But consider these young women more closely. The two in front look down. One wears jewelry. Have they been posed for this picture? Is it a ‘‘spontaneous’’ image? They clasp their hands in front of them. Only the woman to the right appears to stare into the camera. Her face is shiny, lit by an odd play of sunlight and shadow. One can fancy that her gaze is keen, but this might be only that play of sunlight and shadow on her skin. Her one exposed foot is bare. Planters and colonial administrators systematized labor recruitment schemes and strategized various settlement policies in order to ensure a continuous flow of new recruits. Significantly, they encouraged a policy of family recruitment in the belief that the presence of women and children would stabilize the men, and prevent them from ‘‘absconding’’ back to their Chontanagpur homelands.127 Family recruitment policies constituted a powerful rubric under which adivasi women and children moved into northeastern India. As early as 1863, the chief commissionerof Assam remarked with some concern that the ‘‘proportion of men is increasing in the case of each class of immigrants . . . but the proportion of women was out of all proportion to the supply of men, the rate being 5–15% of women’’ out of the total number of immigrants.128 From the very beginning, then, planters and colonial officials were concerned with having a balance of women and men recruits, and they encoded this into their first labor immigration legislation,Transport of Native Labor, Act III of 1863 (1865). The superintendent of emigration could refuse embarkation passes if the batch contained less than one female to every four male laborers to ‘‘facilitate stabilization of the labor force, and the promotion of community life on the estates.’’ 129 However, planters found that in some cases encouraging women’s migration (to constitute the ideal of settled plantation families) was not having its desired effect, because numbers of ‘‘solitary’’ or single women were arriving in the plantations. Not only was a solitary woman suspected of being ‘‘enticed away from her husband, parents, or guardian’’ when she came through the depots, she might also have been ‘‘turned out by [her] husband, or had left [him] because of ill treatment or some other cause.’’ 130 The offi80

cial, speculating on the presence of single women in the immigrant batches, then makes an interesting gesture to women’s agency when he concludes, ‘‘emigration is largely resorted to by women to rid themselves of their family ties. There is no question about the willingness of the female emigrants to go to the tea gardens, and it is impossible to detain them when such willingness is expressed and is otherwise evident.’’ 131 As a consequence of this administrative unease, an explicit policy around women’s immigration began to emerge. The Tea District Labor Association (tdla) was instructed to enquire whenever a ‘‘young or unmarried woman’’ came for registration ‘‘unaccompanied by any relations, when . . . there seems to be reason for supposing that the immigrant may have been enticed away from husband, parents or guardian.’’ 132 By the early 1920s, the policy of family migration and a paternalistic control of women were formalized through the tdla’s bureaucracy. At the coolie depots, only married women were to be registered, and no woman was to ‘‘bind herself by a labor contract if her husband or guardian would object.’’ 133 In 1930, the tdla reported to the Royal Commission on Labour that ‘‘a number of married girls were coming up who were running away from their husbands. Now, no married women are allowed to come up without their husbands, and no unmarried women without the permission of their fathers and mothers.This is an entirely voluntary restriction.’’ 134 It was considered a serious offense if a recruiter hid the fact that a married woman was emigrating to Assam without the consent of her husband. Family parties were encouraged by the tdla, as we learn from various telegraphic messages from coolie depots that informed planters that ‘‘family batches’’ were on their way. It was also considered an offense if a family group was split during emigration. In addition, sirdari recruitment (where kin groups accompanied the sirdar) was preferred because it ‘‘ensures a certain degree of continuous family life among the new immigrants.’’ 135 Within the plantations, planters viewed unmarried men as potentially unstable labor. In one instance, single men from Bastar (Madhya Pradesh) pressured their managers to return them to their homelands so they could bring back their families. The situation was precarious enough for one planter to note a potential ‘‘exodus’’ from a few gardens in Assam.136 Furthermore, colonial district officials recognized that some single men who were recruited were actually married and leaving ‘‘derelict wives and children in the tract who [were] indebted.’’ 137 The pivotal role of women within the ideology of family settlement was not limited to their supposed stabilizing effect upon recalcitrant and absconding male workers. Women, and their children, were critical for the Cultivating the Garden 81

reproduction of an increasingly expensive labor force. However, till the 1920s, the harsh conditions of indentureship resulted in mortality far outstripping the birthrate.138 Reasons given ranged from ‘‘abortions,’’ 139 malnutrition that made it difficult for women to ‘‘retain their normal fecundity,’’ and their ‘‘inability do their daily work and at the same time look after their children . . . and it was not until 1922 that the birthrate began to exceed deathrate.’’ 140 Not coincidentally, pronatal policies and some attention to labor legislation were announced.141 For example, the 1919 Annual Report of the Working of the Jalpaiguri Labor Act noted that certain gardens were offering pregnant women full pay even in the month they couldn’t work, on a bonus of one rupee per month, for a year after the birth of the child.142 Women’s labor, and their customary proclivities to agrarian work, defined their growing importance in field cultivation. By the turn of the century, women had emerged as dominant agents in the outer margins of plantation labor, conducting the most intensive jobs of cultivation, ‘‘where in certain processes such as plucking, women are handier than men.’’ 143 A photograph in a planter text detailing the history of the Assam Company shows a hand carefully holding ‘‘two leaves and a bud.’’ The image cuts the hand just above the wrist, and the wrist is braceleted. The fingers are long and tapered. The picture invokes the other imperial feminization of labor and its delicate production. Here, visually dismembered, the hand holds itself with a certain tension. Perhaps, it is aware of its own seductions and the violence of the fetish.

act 3, scene 6 Four women, their heads covered by cloth (faces not veiled, only shadowed), walk onto stage left. The backdrop moves. The bungalow scene just center stage is dark except for the low light of the lantern. They wear the saris of women workers: cheap cotton, no blouses. The bones of their shoulder blades are starkly planed. Each carries a bundle slung on her back. You cannot tell whether it is cloth or a child. They carefully set themselves down to a squat. One has a brass pot; another a plate. They place these on the floor. One woman pulls out twigs and a matchbox from her bundle. She lights a small fire. woman 1: (in a monotonous tone) ‘‘The local officer, also, has objected to married men emigrating unless accompanied by their wives, or unless the latter given their consent, as there are a number of derelict wives and children in the tract who are indebted . . . due in part to the fact that hus-

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bands were originally illegally recruited and could not be sent down to take up their families.’’ 144 woman 2: (against the sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat telegraphic codes) Urgent telegraph from recruitment office to plantation office. ‘‘T-O-A-S-T-E-R: Sirdar brought in x single males, no relatives. Shall I send?’’ 145 woman 1: Shall I send? woman 3: Shall I send? Pause. The sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat she: ‘‘Have you got a child?’’ woman 4: ‘‘Yes, when a child is born, we get Rs. 5 bakshish for each child.’’ she: ‘‘Were you paid when you were off work?’’ woman 4: ‘‘We only get Rs. 5 bakshish.’’ she: ‘‘Are you given special light work?’’ woman 4: ‘‘No, we do the same work.’’ 146 woman 3: (against the sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat telegraphic codes) T-E-N-U-O-U-S. ‘‘Sirdar has brought in female labor N who claims her husband is M on the garden. Shall I send?’’ 147 women: (together) Shall I send? Shall I send? Shall I send? Lights fade out.

Cultivating the Garden 83

chapter 4 The Raj Baroque

act 4, scene 1 The lights focus brightly on center stage and the gau backdrop, part of which is a mural depicting the exterior of a bungalow and a green compound.The Narrator surreptitiously moves her wicker stool to the side. On stage are the British Sahib and Memsahib. They are joined by an Indian Sahib and Memsahib. The men are similarly attired in lounge suits.The Indian Memsahib wears an elegant silk sari, a strand of pearls around her neck. The British Memsahib is equally elegant in a light cotton dress of floral pink. She too wears a string of pearls. Several rattan chairs and coffee tables are grouped casually next to them. Servers in frayed white uniforms and red turbans offer trays with drinks and snacks. In the background light Western classical music can be heard, a tinkle of feminine laughter, the quiet clink of glasses.The Narrator moves more to your left, facing you. Her cowl is thrown back, her face is elaborately made up. Around her neck, a glint of pearls. she: ‘‘It was indeed a consolation, the club, housed in a grand bungalow in the mixed style of EmperorWu’s palace in Peking, and Versailles, with tall rooms, saloons opening up on one another. Situated in the pit of the valley, its wide verandah overlooked a vast polo ground, tennis courts, croquet courts and garden, all duly protected against the intrusion of black men, wild animals, hungry goats and cows, by thick hedges and shady trees.’’ 1 So here we are at the Planter’s Club in Darjeeling.The occasion: the Darjeeling International Tea Festival, 1991. A fantastic spectacle, a presidential party, hot air balloon rides, an auction on the mall of the finest tea from the most famous estates. indian sahib (Balwant a.k.a. Bobby): (turning to the British Sahib, in perfect Queen’s English) Charlie, do you want to make a bet on Castleton bringing in the best price? Remember when it sold for 6,010 rupees per kilo, more expensive than gold? 2 And the Japanese, I am sure, will outbid you European brokers.

she: (in a quick but loud whisper) And the Japanese marketed that tea smartly, in bone china containers made by the Ginori familyof Italy.What pastiche —Ming jars of the seventeenth century now Italian china of the twentieth. Circumnavigating the globe within the imperial collage, Indian tea now weaves its own commodified magic. Green gold! Green gold! british memsahib: (responding to Bobby after giving Narrator an irritated glance) Charlie, we hear the dances are about to begin. You know those lovely Nepali and Lepcha dances that the workers would do for us at the bungalow? They are going to do some on the mall. Pinki (turning to the Indian Memsahib), Bobby, let’s go. (They move to your right.) On stage left, a Woman dances. She is colorfully dressed; she smiles as she energetically stamps her feet. To the far left is an old and wizened Woman on a high chair. She is mostly covered by a shawl. Above her a placard proclaims her as ‘‘the oldest living tea plantation worker.’’ 3 This strange figure and the sahib/memsahib party frame the dancer’s movement. she: (moving with the party of four but slightly stage right) Enjoy the picturesque.The hills, oh the hills with their majesty, their color, their shangrilas. (As she speaks, the light dims and a dull spotlight remains on the figure in the chair.) Who is this? Who is this? She is a display, friends: a diorama of history, the oldest living tea plantation worker. She sits so still, her eyes are barely visible. Her gaze is enigmatic.Where does she look? What does she see? The lights fade.

october 1991 Darjeeling International Tea Festival The festival was a spectacle of the Raj remembered and reinvented into a postcolonial and national mythology.The presence of the president of India and the governor of West Bengal signaled the economic importance of this spectacle within the national economy. Japanese and European tea brokers at the tea auction situated the panorama squarely within the global marketplace. This was, after all, Darjeeling tea. Aristocracies of an old world, imbued with the nostalgia of colonial leisures, define it as the finest quality of tea.4 As the theater of the festival suggests, Darjeeling tea continues to invoke the leisured gentility of an era gone: a memory of colonial life and its powerful images of aristocratic splendor and endless entitled time. It is taste exemplified through the commodity and its symbolic play: a fetishism The Raj Baroque 85

acted through remembered historical narratives. Tea becomes, yet again, a central actor in the iconic rituals of empire relived in splendor. The commodity and its circulations of taste traffic through a global marketplace in which the postcolonial nation is located in economic dependency. Since tea fills the foreign exchange coffers of a depleted national treasury in significant ways, the selling of Raj nostalgia is a small price to pay. The irony of a festival celebrating a new Raj taking place within a communist-run state,West Bengal, is palpable. This is an aesthetics of contradiction and pastiche, a post- and neocolonial commerce that must be predicated on the picturesqueness, and the invisibility, of human toil. It is Nature’s strange largesse, which offers the Castleton estate’s sublime brew, whose ‘‘leaves remain wrapped in mystery. Even nature appears to have cast a shroud on its secret. From a spur atop Eagle’s Craig, 5,500 feet above sea-level, the slopes of Castleton are hidden behind a lace curtain of mist.’’ 5 The mountains have offered a gift of magic: fetishism is a sleight of hand that waves away labor into mist. As in the old Chinese tales of virgin fingers plucking leaf in other imperial plantations, the commodity is birthed into purity.The commodity, leaf and brew, sells not only histories of nostalgia and leisure but also Nature made immaculate and eternal as the hills themselves. Yet leisure and its times to ‘‘taste’’ the finest tea are a narrative and symbolic act that push into shadows the bodied, sweaty, and dirty history that continues to make the grand rituals of the postcolonial club a possibility.Work is either absent, or made vividly present as the feminized picturesque: a shangri-la of women at work, ethereal mists weaving ‘‘two leaves and a bud’’ into those iconic nimbly poised fingers.

Investing in the Planter Raj Mercantile and English state policy, beginning with Lord Bentinck’s Tea Committee, was eager to assist capital investment by tea companies in their new plantation ventures. English demand for this expensive and ‘‘exotic’’ brew was growing exponentially, and the Chinese restrictions on company trade from the Whampoa anchorage in Canton had to be bypassed. Early experimental plantations in the Kangra and Doon Valleys were small proprietary concerns owned by English ex-soldiers, who were encouraged to settle in the pleasant mountain valleys of this region.6 By the 1830s, however, joint public stock concerns with capital assets in London and known

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as ‘‘sterling companies’’ soon constituted the capital infrastructure for large plantations in North Bengal and Assam.The small experimental proprietary concerns further north were soon displaced. In February 1839, East India Company merchants raised £500,000 and floated the Assam Company with ten thousand shares. One-fifth of Assam Company stocks were sold in Calcutta.7 English merchants of Calcutta on the Assam Company board were joined by a Chinese physician, Mr. Lumgua; Maniram Datta Barua, a minister of the Assamese king; and Dwarkanath Tagore, the enterprising forbear of the poet who was to become one of Bengal’s most famous sons: Rabindranath Tagore.The origins of frontier capital investment were, not surprisingly, a rather hybrid business. The financial accounts of sterling joint stock companies were managed by Calcutta agency houses through a two-tier system run in Calcutta and London. London investors were suspicious of the more ‘‘native’’ merchants, the nabobs, who managed their investments in a style too alien and distant from their own mercantile manners.8 When high profits and soaring stock prices caused a speculation frenzy in the 1860s and the first major ‘‘bust’’ in the tea trade, London tightened its control on Calcutta’s purse strings.9 Though London capital, in sterling pounds, constituted the infrastructural base for these new companies, actual cash flow for creating new plantations was raised in Calcutta and currency circulated in the region.The bulk of the capital was raised in India from earnings owned and managed by the English in Calcutta, though, in the final analysis, all fiscal policies were accountable to London. The Assam Company was dependent on the initial investment from London, which was never replenished, and continuing investments in the company came through ‘‘a process of ploughing back profits and mobilization of locally available savings.’’ 10 The company’s first two decades of expansion, which encompassed fifty-one plantations, involved investments of boatloads of coins brought from Calcutta on infrequent steamership services.11 This was a tangible traffic into the Northeast, vulnerable within its isolated river paths, yet one that ‘‘lubricated the mechanism of transition from a predominantly native to a cash economy during this period.’’ 12 Furthermore, the ‘‘mobilization of locally available savings’’ involved Indian traders, primarily Marwaris (a trading community originally from Rajasthan), who loaned money to managers through a system known as the hundi. The Indian subsidization of English colonial industry, within tea planting specifically, is a significant but relatively unknown narrative in the annals of colonial and Indian business history. Marwari brokers and busi-

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nessmen in Calcutta and other burgeoning towns in the Northeast were important early investors in tea and suppliers in the auxiliary small industries and trade that grew up around the plantation enclave.13 Colonial planters created an enclave economy 14 with an outflow of capital and profit from the region, but they also remained dependent on the social and economic brokerage of local suppliers for goods, labor, and starting capital.The plantation economies were fief enclaves, certainly, but they also created the terms of an isolated ‘‘shadow economy’’ within which the British planter administrators were not the only, nor indeed the absolute, lords. From the 1870s, a triangle system of management was set into place. As its apex, the financial board in London controlled all investments and distribution of dividends. In Calcutta, agency houses received tea consignments from the plantations and coordinated tea sales in Khidderpore’s auction houses. They also sent visiting agents, usually experienced planters, to audit distant plantations. On the outer edge of this triangle, in considerable isolation from centers of Calcutta business, were the plantation managers who were responsible for labor management, tea production, manufacture, and accurate shipments of manufactured tea. Planters often resented the control and complaints of Calcutta accountants and agency house bureaucrats. They disdained the lack of practical knowledge among these desk-bound workers and saw their control as interfering in the hardy tasks of tea cultivation and management.When criticized for not pruning tea bushes during one winter season, a Darjeeling planter noted with exasperation: ‘‘I should like to point out that my policy in wanting to postpone this heavy pruning was not with a view to giving a small increase in the profits but rather to keep the crop up to reasonable figures by not cutting down a healthy block which was pruned two years ago. My sole ambition and interests are for the improvement of Mim T.E. in every respect but I feel at times that my hands are being tied.’’ 15 Commenting on these lines of communication and control, one late-colonial planter noted: ‘‘As far as our tea companies were concerned, policy came from London. Action was in Assam. Initiative (from our office in Calcutta) was impossible. It was like being the curator of an obelisk—so communications were very slow and inefficient, not just between London and Calcutta, but between the tea gardens and the outside world.’’ 16 By the end of the nineteenth century, the agency house system, owned by sterling companies, dominated Northeast Indian tea production and trade. So concentrated and immense was their fiscal reach that by Indian independence in 1947, just thirteen leading agency houses controlled over 75

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percent of tea production in the region. It was an oligarchy of sorts and much like the tea merchant guilds of Canton whom they sought to displace, British merchants had managed to create a conglomerate of truly imperial proportions. The annals of the Andrew Yule and Company offers us an archetypal story of the vast wealth to be had on an imperial frontier. It is not just a dramatic instance of the immense wealth to be amassed but also an illustration of how ordinary Britons could reinvent themselves in the image of aristocratic lordship in the colony. It was, as we shall see, a pragmatic and symbolic mimesis. The Yules were originally Scottish yeoman farmers in the service of the earls of Buchan. Andrew Yule, described as a ‘‘warehouse man from Manchester,’’ 17 arrived in Calcutta and in 1855 built a spinning unit near the city. He quickly, and shrewdly, invested in tea, and by 1892 his family-run business had become a small conglomerate owning three tea companies, two jute factories, and several cotton mills. In 1912, his son David Yule was knighted. Because David Yule left no heirs, the company was sold to another group of companies whose principal shareholders included the U.S. banking house, J. P. Morgan. In the twilight days of the British Raj, executive aristocrats like Lord Cato who in 1944 was elected as governor of the Bank of England, sat on the board of Andrew Yule and Company. The company begun bya ‘‘warehouseman from Manchester’’ in a bustling colonial capital had returned to roost in its fading imperial center. Yule and his successors had created themselves into the landed aristocrats they had served a century earlier.The Yule crest of arms, of a single ear of wheat and corn with the motto ‘‘By strength and courage’’ is borrowed directly from the family crest of the Cromyn family, the earls of Buchan.18 The colony had enabled one enterprising Scottish serf to become an imperial lord. Indeed, the symbolic appropriation of a British agrarian motif was no insignificant gesture to the fields upon which Yule’s Indian serfs would continue to toil for over a century. The settling of an imperial frontier by tea planting was to place one of the brightest jewels in the British crown. Indeed, these vast jungles of India’s eastern frontier commanded the imperial imagination: jungles to be ‘‘discovered,’’ explored, and finally ‘‘settled’’ by the planter pioneer. The seeds of civilization lay hidden there in the ‘‘virgin’’ forests whose bodily fruits, through pruning and rational cultivation, could be brought into the embrace of Reason, the hidden wild product transformed through the cultivated currencies of European enterprise.

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‘‘And others equally well born and bred.’’ If Andrew Yule and his successors recreated themselves as the new imperial masters of London and Calcutta, a similar process was taking place in the plantation’s bungalows and grounds.19 The story of nineteenth-century British planters resembles the narratives surrounding the ‘‘discovery’’ of tea in Assam, replete with a folklore of its own: mythic tales of struggle against inhospitable terrain and equally hostile hill ‘‘tribes.’’ Indeed, these founding moments of British Indian tea plantations are still commemorated in postcolonial Indian planters’ association meetings, which begin with homages to the ‘‘galaxy of legendary planting pioneers’’ 20 who converted ‘‘inhospitable tracts of land with daring enterprise.’’ 21 Standing in contrast to the idealized image of the British ‘‘gentleman’’ planter 22 which emerged in the late colonial period, early Irish, Scottish, and English entrants into the new tea fields were also from working-class backgrounds. Take the legendary Darjeeling planter, Charlie Ansell, formerly a ship’s mechanic, who was put ashore in Calcutta because of burns he had sustained while fixing the ship’s boiler. Ansell scrounged a billet from a fledgling tea company and prospered, with the usual large retinue of servants and Darjeeling’s first tea factory boiler. Known as Kulwallah Charlie,23 because of his adeptness with machines, Ansell rose from his position as factory assistant to senior planter. In his heyday, he was both burra sahib and colonel of the planter militia, the North Bengal Mounted Rifles. A planter remembering Kulwallah Charlie noted that he had a ‘‘sailor’s free and easy-going ways in his attitude to his fellowmen of all classes and races, perhaps attributable to his ‘cockney’ birth.’’ 24 Scotsmen entering as overseers and assistants were known as ‘‘ship whites.’’ 25 Status distinctions, accented byclass and national origin, indexed the internal differences within what was distinctly a British planting elite. Many of these early planters were a motley crew of ‘‘soldiers, sailors and clerks, who had not the foggiest idea of how to grow any vegetables and produce.’’ 26 Lured by the prospect of wealth, adventure, and suggestions of lordly lifestyles, they embarked hopefully on the long road to their new imperial estates. By the turn of the century, the archetype of a ‘‘gentleman’’ planter was beginning to emerge.Wayward sons of the gentry in the home country were being initiated into a profession that promised colonial gentility and appropriate ‘‘manly’’ work. Noted one manager: ‘‘Skillful men have charge of the garden now. Instead of tea being the refuge and last resource for the comparative destitute as it was not many years since, it is now looked upon as

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a profession of a high order, and into which men of the highest social rank are entering.’’ 27 The planter began to fashion himself explicitly as a genteel lord of a colonial manor. ‘‘In the immediate pre-Independence period,’’ said one of the last remaining postcolonial English planters, ‘‘We English all wanted to be gentlemen, we were addressed as esquires and basically were landed gentry.’’ 28 In the last years of the British Raj, the status of a planter was clearly marked by a public school education and ‘‘correct’’ family connections.29 Another planter observed: ‘‘Old Scottish firms liked their people to be classy and recruited several Etonians: You have to be good office material and have attended a good public school, then you might be put in charge of a tea garden with 3,000 people when you were about twenty-five. Most of us were attracted to the job by the chances of fishing, shooting and riding.’’ 30 The planter would map his ‘‘estate’’ through metaphors of an edenic fiefdom: a civilized garden circling the center of a colonial manor-bungalow. This was a tropical garden, however, and one that could never be an English garden. ‘‘Laying out the garden was a joy in itself,’’ noted one planter, ‘‘but for all its flamboyancy . . . blaze of bright colors and luxurious tropical fruits, no garden in the East can be compared with the kindly garden of old England, and even the rose-scented muzzefepore lichee is not quite so delicious as a nectarine grown out of a south wall facing the sea below Sussex Downs.’’ 31 The planter’s new garden (he remembers with the ache of nostalgia) would always be an alien one: a flamboyant oriental version of the more subdued hues of a truly civilized English landscape. Always threatened by a serpentine jungle on its borders, this oriental garden’s lordship combined a virile and iconically masculine pioneering ethos, with equally powerful images of imperial leisure.The pioneer planter was a hunter beating back the dreaded wildness with a formidable masculine tread. A planter lord who commanded a manorial estate, now vaster than anything in England, described going out on a hunt: ‘‘I thought I would try the jungle for hunting, which was only a piece of about a thousand acres belonging to the companies and kept as firewood reserve for the coolies. [While] shooting the leopard, everyone of the three hundred coolies watched me in dead silence from the undercover of the banana leaves.’’ 32 The awed ‘‘native gaze’’ suggests most palpably the planter’s own selfmythology and the necessity of impressing upon that large group of subordinates (the ‘‘coolies’’) his supreme authority, his monopoly of might. The coolies’ ‘‘dead silence’’ remains opaque, an unreadable and powerfully enigmatic script.

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Ascriptions of ‘‘primitive’’ work that began to demarcate the enigmatic peripheries of labor were contrasted to the planter’s own self-construction as a civilized, and civilizing, center.The planter’s display of leisure was also a profound comment about the necessary manual laboring of his workforce. At its core, carving a garden from the wilderness was crucially dependent on his ability to harness workers to labor on the land. Some of this capacity lay in fashioning himself into a grandiloquent image of both vitality and leisure, to display the superfluity of his own physical laboring. In that light, a theater of the planter squire in the hunt was no mere frivolity. It remained an earnest and powerful commentary about physical labor and appropriate working, as well as entitled leisure. The planter would thus become, certainly to himself, a larger-than-life myth: the archetypal shikari (hunter) of Kipling’s Raj, mounted on an elephant and entertaining a visitor from the home country. Pioneer, hunter, and gentleman of leisure, sipping Scotch under the punkah (fan) of his verandah, the burra sahib was a technicolor, indeed even florid, embodiment of imperial strength and benevolence.33

act 4, scene 2 The stage is empty except for Alice sitting quietly, listening. The Narrator has taken her stool and lantern and sits between Alice’s chair and the now empty bungalow scene. The plain curtain moves slightly. There is a slight clatter of hooeats, the only sound. she: So here is Reggie, the randy chota sahib in Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud, coming up to the workers in the field, astride his mare, Tipoo. ‘‘Reggie dug his heels into her sides and pulled the reins hard till the mare reared aloft. She had got into the habit of doing that. . . . Reggie liked to imagine that he looked like Napoleon Bonaparte, as the Emperor had led his armies across the Swiss mountains, or at least as the renowned hero figured in the picture reproduced in the school history book. The analogy invariably seemed to gather force as Tipoo fell into a trot and Reggie saw the coolies clearing the undergrowth before him. He would swing his whip in the air, and startle the horse into galloping again as if he were going to storm a fortress. And he felt he would love to come up to the coolies in the posture in which Napoleon would have come up to his men, towering like a giant over the pygmies, and infuse them with awe and respect for him. This childish fantasy had recurred again and again when he first came here, until now he could summon from his sub92

13. ‘‘From the Tea Gardens to the Tea Pot.’’ Publicity material for Lipton’s tea. From Anthony Burgess et al. The Book of Tea, (Flammarion: Paris, 2000).

conscious and act it whenever he liked. And he often did that, because emotionally and intellectually, at twenty-two, he was still very much a school boy from Tonbridge even though he held a commission in the army and was now an assistant planter on one of the biggest tea estates in Assam.’’ 34 Lights fade out.

Exhibiting Tea and Other Consuming Stories The exhibitions of planter conquest, through images of entitled and virile lordship, offer one side of the imperial coin, so to speak. The other side had to translate such displays of assured rule into tangible commerce. Profit was dependent not only on a system of indentureship based on low wages, which assured a steady dividend. By the end of the nineteenth century, Indian tea had to strategize market expansion against competition from other major tea producers: China,Ceylon, the Dutch East Indies, and Kenya. British Indian tea companies believed that focused ‘‘propaganda’’ that sold the merits of ‘‘Indian tea’’ would give them the necessary edge in an arena of increasing global competition. The Raj Baroque 93

From the 1880s onward, the Indian Tea Association and its competitors in Ceylon, began to build tea dioramas at world exhibitions and trade fairs that were then in vogue. At the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the East India pavilion served tea within a spectacular display of oriental splendor: ‘‘It is entered through a lofty gate surmounted by four minarets . . . profoundly ornamented in an elaborate arabesque design. . . . Khidmatgars [servants] dressed in red and gold uniforms completed the effect of an oriental magnificence.’’ 35 Lipton won the ‘‘highest honours’’ at the same exhibition and proclaimed its supremacy through a baroque set of oriental images: elephants, striding horses, turbaned natives, all heralding the ‘‘Lipton Tea Factory’’ in the background and the suggestion of active laboring bodies. A Darjeeling blend called the Light of Asia was sold at five cents a cup. In 1901, subscriptions were raised for an Indian Tea Cess Committee to coordinate such marketing strategies both within the country and abroad. The success of such a spectacle of marketing at the Chicago exhibition laid the foundation for subsequent tea propaganda in the United States, which, due to the events in Boston a hundred years previously, had proved a significant commercial loss to British tea merchants. A separate American Fund Committee, subsidized by the Indian Tea Association, proceeded to advertise through newspapers, leaflets, postcards, and sample demonstrations. ‘‘Specialty men,’’ employed by tea distributors, accompanied salesmen on other door-to-door demonstrations.This method of stacked advertising (promoting tea with other commodities) continued into the 1940s.36 Major tea producers, all handicapped by the slump in the world market due to World Wars I and II, launched a joint effort to focus on the U.S. market.They concluded from surveys that advertising strategies were essential because ‘‘more than anywhere in the world, consumers in the USA are susceptible to changes in their habits through propaganda.’’ 37 No concerted effort around tea marketing, they noted, had ever been made. Significantly, the notion that tea was a woman’s drink, ‘‘unfit for and unworthy of a man unless he is a ‘sissy,’ ’’ 38 was considered a serious obstacle to its potential as a popular drink. ‘‘Our advertising,’’ noted the survey report, ‘‘must endeavor to break down this deep-seated prejudice by stressing tea as a man’s drink and by enlisting to its support the testimony of men of occupations and character the very reverse of effeminate.’’ 39 The feminization of the commodity, so integral to English consumption and demand, was a serious obstacle to the lost, but still vast, market potential of the United States. In the United Kingdom and continental Europe, tea propaganda kept up

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a steady pace. The world wars compelled marketing strategies that focused on the British and colonial armies, ‘‘carrying special topical features dealing with thewarand the part tea is playing in its conduct.’’ 40 Thus, tea became an ‘‘indispensable wartime beverage’’ 41 through advertising in cinemas, traveling vans, and window displays. ‘‘Tea Revives You’’ was a major theme of advertising and a logo of ‘‘Mr.T. Pott,’’ and verses called ‘‘Tea Cuplets’’ were used in leaflets.42 Special efforts were made to introduce tea as part of food rations to miners in South Africa, ‘‘overcoming the disinclination of mine managers to alter rations.’’ 43 While international tea committees focused on the large, lucrative, but elusive U.S. market, British Indian producers, compelled by the world wars and the economic depression, also looked within at the potential of a domestic market in the colony.Under the auspices of the Indian Tea Cess Committee, the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board was constituted to plumb the possibilities of this vast internal market. ‘‘Pice [paisa] packets’’ (individual cheap packets) were suggested as a way to get to the ‘‘poorer classes.’’ Factories were already important sites of consumption, and demonstration stalls were set up in these areas. Through the 1920s, samples and tea-making demonstrations were taken to local markets and up the riverways of East Bengal to the most remote villages. Tea demonstrators were permitted to enter conservative Muslim households in Lahore, Lucknow, and Kanpur, and the women ‘‘watched from behind a screen. Very young men who could be regarded by middleaged ladies as more less children had easieraccess to these than older men. . . . Educated lady demonstrators were employed, though in certain areas . . . neither male nor female demonstrators could gain entry.’’ 44 If Mr. T. Pott was extolling that any time was T-Time, thereby making tea a staple in the trenches and assembly lines of Europe, a parallel economy of images was creating tea as a drink for ordinary Indians. By the mid1930s, advertisements in Indian-owned newspapers such as The Hindu were extolling the virtues of tea for workers, youth, and villagers. In the first advertisement from the March 23, 1936, edition of The Hindu, consumption is aimed at an idealized image of a working-class consumer.The standing man, holding a mug aloft, points energetically toward the smokestacks of a factory while his companions sit on the ground eating with their fingers.While the more middle-class suggestion of saucer-cup-and-spoon foregrounds the picture, tea is nativized into the frames of working-class masculinity. Clearly, the text-image speaks more directly to the worker’s manager.Who will, indeed, read the English of this text? Tea will offer stamina, and re-

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14. and 15. ‘‘The refreshment that maintains stamina.’’ Advertisement by the Indian Tea Association, The Hindu, March 23, 1936. ‘‘The vital drink for the Indian worker.’’ Advertisement by the Indian Tea Association, The Hindu, November 25, 1935.

laxation, for the hard-working man. It can be offered, perhaps, as a ration. Its qualities—‘‘grown and manufactured in India’’—brand it as a national commodity. In another advertisement, an elderly man in a dhoti turns to look at a young man on a cycle, a postman or messenger perhaps.45 On the ground a potter turns his wheel: the villager, the postman, the potter are connected by the teacup, plate and spoon. Through these images, tea becomes constituted as a quintessential ‘‘Indian’’ drink. Gestures to its long history of consumption and the gentilities of imperial ritual move outside the frames of these images.The ideal Indian consumers are presented as ‘‘sons of the soil,’’ and tea within that association becomes idigenized in a singularly populist—masculine—sense. It is constituted as the product of a unitary soil, a commodity of great mass appeal.

Shadow Plantocracies If tea was being constructed into a ‘‘national’’ commodity, it was also being linked to another story of indigenous enterprise. The emergence of a colonial plantocracy is the most significant and determining aspect of mercantile capital entrenchment and outflow, from the northeastern frontier that was connected by Calcutta to the center of imperial trade in London. This circulation of capital and labor did not however follow a smooth road, or river journey, once Calcutta was left behind. The isolation of the Planter Raj, the presence of hostile local elites and kings, and an uncertain cash flow meant that English planters were dependent on middlemen such as the Marwaris for the fiscal and political navigation of an unknown, and often hostile, landscape. Financial assistance in the form of cash loans suggests that the local indigenous elite of Bengalis, Assamese, and Marwaris were significant players in the economic history of plantation settlements and the tea trade.46 Whether creating a ‘‘shadow economy’’ through hundi loans or buying up small landholdings for themselves in the late nineteenth century, local elites are striking examples of indigenous entrepreneurship.47 Take the story of Maniram Datta Barua, a minister of the last Raja of Assam, who introduced Robert Bruce to the Singhpos.The dewan (minister) as he was known, was one of nine Indian shareholders of the Assam Company; he held 7 percent of its stock and drew a higher salary than the majority of the company’s European staff.48 Yet the contradictions of being a key player in the project of indirect rule as well as a protonationalist proved to be his undoing. ManiThe Raj Baroque 97

ram Dewan managed two plantations yet was hanged by the British in 1858 for taking part in the freedom struggle (or Mutiny) of 1857. Both ‘‘outsiders’’ (as colonized and ‘‘native’’ subjects) and ‘‘insiders’’ (as planters), the elites belonged to a ‘‘shadow plantocracy’’: one that offered an intriguing challenge to the overarching hegemony of the British plantocracy through the colonial period.These fledgling ‘‘native’’ planters shrewdly expanded their small plantation holdings and created styles of management and rule that were close to the feudal norms of pre/colonial Bengali and Assamese zamindari (landowning) cultures. Ties of kin and family formed the basis of a decidedly Indian business ethos, a corporate lineage that informs post- and neocolonial management in significant ways. Indeed, it is the colonized ‘‘native’’ manager and the supporting clerical and supervisory staff of the old British plantations who have stepped into the shoes of departing colonial planters. This was, for the most part, a smooth transition, because Indians were deeply involved with plantation enterprise, not only as its labor, but also as its architects, suppliers, and investors. The history of Bengali entrepreneurship in tea begins almost as soon as the English began their plantation ventures in the Dooars.49 In 1877, an officer clerk by the name of Khan Bahadur Munshi Rahim Baksh, working in the Jalpaiguri District Commissioner’s office, persuaded his employer to favor him with a ‘‘wasteland’’ grant of 728 acres.The commissioner’s office was responsible for parceling out and legislating Wasteland Rules. The patronage of the district commissioner permitted Khan Bahadur to acquire some land.50 Like many local ‘‘native’’ officers of the Raj, he worked within its system of patronage while creating the possibilities of its subversion. Certainly, the terms of this ‘‘favor’’ was another layer in the bedrock of ‘‘indirect rule.’’ Its ‘‘grant’’ suggests the contradictory practices of a grafted and hybrid feudal patronage system at the grassroots of local administration. Jalpaiguri District, created in 1864, was, as the range of investors’ backgrounds suggests, a settlers’ district. The immigration of merchant communities and lawyers from East Bengal was to shape local agrarian politics in the most significant ways. Before the infusion of tea and allied capital in the area, the agrarian economy was run primarily by Muslim jotedars and Rajbansi sharecroppers. The latter cultivated land with their own capital and gave, according to customary law, a part of this produce to the jotedar.Often jotedars employed an administrative middleman to supervise rent collection.51 As the process of settlement accelerated and land became available at very nominal prices to outsiders, jotes (landplots) were acquired by absen98

tee jotedars in the town.The initial purchase of jotes increased the capacity of new jotedars to save, invest, and take some economic risk. An increased alienation from land and the tendency of big jotedars toward dissociation from the process of production was noticeable.52 Middle-class and uppercaste Bengalis were not customarily inclined to engage directly in commerce or cultivation, though they did begin to get involved as lawyers in loan companies and small banks that were managing the fiscal affairs of the landowning class.53 Through these economic alliances with the local landlord class, Bengali upper-caste lawyers and well-to-do Muslims immigrants began to search for investment outlets for their own tidy savings.54 Investment in tea promised to be highly lucrative, and some of the start-up companies floated by Indians were proving to be profitable ventures. In 1879, the first Indian joint stock company was founded by leading lawyers in Jalpaiguri who raised 50,000 rupees. The rules for buying land were relatively flexible.55 The district commissioner assessed the applicants’ capital investment, and ability to pay the land survey cost of one rupee per acre. A favorable assessment would mean a preliminary lease of five years.56 Another early Indian company, the Gurjanjhora Tea Company Ltd., was formed in 1882, and its board of promoters included wealthy Muslims, Brahmin Hindus, and a mysterious J. A. Paul, a Jalpaiguri merchant who is registered as being Jewish. From an initial land grant of 800 acres, the Gurjanjhora plantations sold their first tea in 1885. In yet another fragment within the bricolage of imperial tea commerce, this small Indian company sent a consignment of its best tea for an exhibit at the 1902 World Exposition in Mexico City and won a medal of certification.57 In the same year that Gurjanjhora began its tea venture, two Muslim women—Bibi Meherunessa and Bibi Gulabjan—bought a grant of 777 acres.58 Nothing more is known of the Indian women’s enterprise, except that the company folded. The presence of ‘‘native women’’ in the new aristocratic commerce of tea suggests an infinitesimal ruptural moment: a slight counterhegemonic gesture to the othered tale of a ‘‘native,’’ but still masculine, plantocracy.

act 4, scene 3 Spotlight on center stage, on the bungalow scene.The British Memsahib is seated on a rattan chair. The Narrator picks up her wicker stool and moves to your left. From the right, aWoman in a dark blue silk burkha emerges and pulls up another chair. On the low table is a teapot with three cups, saucers, and silver spoons.The British Memsahib checks the tea and begins to pour. The Raj Baroque 99

she: (speaking to the audience and her companions) Has anyone heard the story of the memsahib of Mim, that garden in Darjeeling? There are several versions to the story that I have heard.The plantation was started in 1841 and the investment was made from the estate of the planter sahib’s wife, and because of this the plantation became known as mem kaman, the mem’s property.59 It was shortened to ‘‘Mim.’’ Another more romantic version says the sahib was blinded and his wife took over the plantation. british memsahib: A pointed tale, certainly. I guess tea was not just the boys playing polo and drinking Scotch.The mysterious memsahib is like Karen Blixen and her coffee plantation in Kenya. How was she received at the old planter’s club up in the mall? Most of us were not so intrepid. We did not have many choices.We flew in, we got married.We had two options.We ‘‘sat around all day doing nothing and hating India or getting involved. . . . Sometimes it seemed as though we were to sit in the clubs and speak only when spoken to, rather like a coming-out ball.’’ 60 (Turning to the veiled Woman who unclips her mouthcover as she is addressed.) But you . . . you were the most enigmatic. woman: (taking a sip of tea, smiling) We sat behind the lattice of screens, if we had the leisure to sit. But we saw you pass with your shimmering parasols, pass our windows, looking straight ahead.We watched you and then looked away; we met each other outside your gaze. Looking nowhere but straight. To you, our mystery was an essential commerce.We traced the coins lightly with our fingertips.To us, it was so much simpler. We only turned the coins over and over in our hands.Yes, there are ghosts here behind the screens too, storytellers of what appears invisible. Light your lantern, woman (turning to the Narrator) and scratch the quill. You will see the possibilities are endless, endless. she: Gendered commerce has such countercurrencies. Women’s capital constitutes, necessarily, a bank of shadows.We sit behind lattice screens; we count our coins of constraint and possibility; we emerge veiled and unveiled; we make actual other fields of connection. Light fades. Take, for a moment, the family history of the planting clan I encountered briefly in Calcutta and Jalpaiguri at the end of 1991. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Mr. Banerjee’s grandfather immigrated from Bikrampur (British Indian East Bengal) to Jalpaiguri’s bustling township. He established a successful legal practice, and his family joined the comfortable ranks of a Bengali-settler middle class. They entered the plan100

tation business while working for the Bhutanese royal family, who had been the overlords and rulers of the Dooars. Annexation meant that land upon which a Bhutanese aristocracy had ruled was now subject to the legislation of European masters. Who but a successful Bengali lawyer from local Jalpaiguri, the district headquarters, to facilitate these connections? Not surprisingly, the Bhutanese royal family had joined in the plantation venture and had hired Mr. Banerjee’s father to help them manage the fiscal affairs of their property. Polashbari Tea Estate was bought in 1913 when the family decided to buy out the Bhutanese by floating a joint stock company of which they were to become majority shareholders. Polashbari Tea Estate still remains the family business. This brief family history illustrates how Indian entrepreneurship was a business of bricolage set against the backdrop of English settlement and colonial rule. On the ground, a motley crew of displaced regional elites (the Bhutanese), new emerging elites (absentee Bengali landlords), and financial brokers (Marwaris) enacted their own lordship by manipulating, bypassing, and entering the ruling projects of the Planter Raj. Between 1879 and 1933, Bengalis dominated indigenous investment in tea.61 From 1879 to 1910, Jalpaiguri-based entrepreneurs floated eleven companies with a total investment of 11.25 crores. During these few decades, land acquisition was relatively easy and open to Indian investment. This ‘‘open’’ market for indigenous capital investment was compelled by a crises in the world market in tea which made overseas investors highly wary of investing in the Indian tea venture.62 As a result, between 1910 and 1930, 37 percent of capital investment was Indian-owned and -controlled.63 These Indian companies would display their tea literally on a ‘‘new’’ world scale alongside commodities manufactured by their colonial rulers. Soon after Indian independence in 1947, the Chairman of the Indian Tea Planters Association (itpa) noted with proud exuberance: ‘‘How the efforts of pioneers of two companies in Jalpaiguri and Northern Bengal attained a tremendous measure of success in the industry will be evident if I refer to the World Chicago Exhibition which awarded the medals to these companies for the production of quality tea in 1892.’’ 64 Indian tea in its more nativistic guise did suggest that indigenous entrepreneurship, a colonized entrepreneurship if you will, could market itself with some canny audacity and good fortune, within the pathways of imperial commerce. The actual and situated task of carrying forward ‘‘native’’ entrepreneurship within the terms of imperial rule was, however, a daunting one. The postcolonial rendition of a glorious history is, certainly, a necessary strand of the incipient politics of nationalism that undergirded these ventures.Yet, The Raj Baroque 101

like most histories of local elites on imperial frontiers, contradictions and counterstances are sewn into a colonial landscape seeking to first enforce and then legitimate its own political and administrative projects. It is a realpolitik against which the entrenchment of an indigenous plantocracy is an anomalous but remarkable achievement in the annals of elite colonial history. The colonial project was dependent on the alliances of ‘‘indirect rule,’’ as well as policies that would try to effectively oppose any real challenge to European economic dominance within the plantation enclave. Indian investors and planters thus faced considerable structural obstacles as their interest, and success, in the tea business grew.65 Till 1910, colonial legislation around land acquisition was relatively open (for settlers to buy up jotes) but as the world market stabilized and overseas interest in tea investment increased, European planters lobbied theirdistrict officials to halt the purchase and ‘‘clubbing’’ of jote plots.66 The Dooars Planters Association (dpa), the planters’ political organization and lobbying conduit, pressured the district commissioner to prohibit this ‘‘clubbing’’ of separate plots of land to create new plantations. In response, Indian owners constituted themselves into the Indian Tea Planters Association and lobbied against the ban, which was finally lifted in 1924.67 In addition, financing was an internal, often family affair, because institutional financing was not available and not open to Indians.68 Not only did Indians start their own banks, they often financed their annual manufacturing operations with money borrowed on ‘‘hypothecation’’ (a mortgage against sale) of crops.69 In the manufacturing phase of plantation work, which was the most expensive infrastructural aspect of tea production, Indian plantations utilized old factory machines that were discarded by British plantations. Because the itpa knew that it was ultimately dependent on colonial administration and law (even its factory hand-me-downs), it was careful not to enter into open conflict with the Dooars Planters Association. The nexus between the colonial administration and the planters around the issue of land acquisition was tightly formed. Bureaucratic coordination of information flow (through prompt and detailed circulars) and administrative decision making was consistent and effective. The district commissioner’s office sent all applications submitted by Indians to the European planters association for commentary and veto. For example, in 1919, a land grant request of 2,700 acres, sent bya newcompany with six Indians and two Englishmen on its board, was turned down because the planters ‘‘strongly opposed [the application] as it would interfere with food supplies in the district.’’ 70 102

Food supplies and the settlement of ‘‘time-expired’’ workers were among the major reasons for which conversion was denied. Sometimes selfaggrandizing rhetoric about European pioneering was mobilized. ‘‘It was the British pioneer,’’ noted one European circular, ‘‘who first invaded and opened up the Duars, converting it from a jungli and extremely malarious tract of country into the present valuable government estate. At the outset, but few Indians risked their capital.’’ 71 Indians, who were permitted to have one representative in the dpa, tried to counter these denials with letters and petitions. In 1924, the chairman of the itpa sent a letter to the dpa chairman urging him to reconsider a denied petition. ‘‘The proposed site,’’ he states, ‘‘would not in anyway interfere with the labor force of the other gardens. I hope you find your way to help the petitioner.There has been no new opening in the Duars by Indian companies during the past six years.’’ 72 Rhetorical contests between Indian and British planting interests within colonial planter journals do, however, suggest that the British, while determined to stop Indian expansion, were also careful to mute their opposition to the expansion of Indian ownership. A tone of conciliation was apparent when in 1926, a circular from the Indian Tea Association (ita) in Calcutta to regional planters asserted the following: ‘‘British tea firms and planters were particularly anxious to avoid anything in the nature of inter-racial argument or verbal strife with Indians interested in the industry.’’ 73 Another noted ‘‘that this Association does not desire to oppose the expansion of Indian interests in the tea industry with the proviso that only a limited area should be granted conversion yearly.’’ 74 What could explain this careful rhetorical fencing match? Why was any masking of seemingly unchecked magisterial power necessary in such isolated colonial fiefdoms? British administrators were well aware that the wider political landscape of the 1920s was rife with grassroots nationalist activity and the onset of the noncooperation movement. In a 1923 chairman’s address, the Indian Tea Association included a copy of a leaflet found in ‘‘recruiting districts’’ with the following heading: ‘‘Coolie catchers have spread the net. Well wishers of the Congress, Save the Poor. An Appeal to all the District, Tehsil and Local Congress Committees.’’ 75 The leaflet went on to warn local residents of the ‘‘propaganda work of the ‘White Men’ of Assam Tea Plantations. . . . Ignorant people should not come in their fraud and may not fall prey to these ‘Capitalists.’’ 76 The fact that this leaflet occupies a portion of the chairman’s address is indicative of the degree to which planters were registering political resistance at the most local levels.

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act 4, scene 4 Spotlights focus on the bungalow scene. British Sahib and Memsahib sit together. He has a drink in hand and looks pensive.The Memsahib is embroidering something. In the background, a Servant pulls the fan. The background sounds are of the night: crickets, a lone dog barking, a faint sound of drums: dham dham dham. The Narrator sits at her table on your left, dipping a quill into the bottle of india ink and writing. The light from her lantern is low. british sahib: These damned Swarajists will peck peck peck at nothing. They will bring down all that we have done. Reminds me of what that wit wrote at the club: ‘‘Babu Chunder Chatterjee / Bowbazar Swaraj M.P. / Got up in the Viceroy’s Council, / Spoke of the planters everyday; / Said ‘‘they most emphatically bully, / Weakly native, wretched cooly, / Starved them, flogged them morn and even, / Robbed them of their pay./’’ 77 (Takes a sharp swig of his drink) british memsahib: (clucking sympathetically) Charlie, it won’t help to get het up about this. Things will change. Why don’t you go and see the district magistrate tomorrow and see if we really are in any danger? she: (looking up momentarily to face the audience, as light fades on bungalow scene) Poor Charlie. Noncooperation raises its head even in distant Assam. The natives are restive. Poor Charlie, he truly believed that he had played cricket. ‘‘All that he was concerned about was that everyone should do his job properly. He upheld the simple law that any coolie who worked hard was to be rewarded and any coolie who was lazy or made mischief was to be punished. . . . Efficiency above all else. Latterly, the agitation of the Congress wallahs was finding echoes up in the plantation. And, in his soul, he felt a certain panic whenever he heard of a terrorist outrage in Calcutta. Not that he was conscious of the feeling of being isolated as one of the white men among the coolies, but all the same he was disturbed a little.’’ 78 Lights fade out. The threat of a well-organized labor movement (connected to this ‘‘sedition’’) ranged against them was an ever present one,79 and the planter militia, the North Bengal Rifles, were on a constant state of alert. When ‘‘sedition’’ began to involve well-educated and influential ‘‘natives,’’ British planters knew that Indian planters and businessmen were also involved in the burgeoning nationalist movement.80 They were, in important ways, a greater threat to the Planter Raj, for 104

they marshaled considerable symbolic and material resources against colonial rule. As part of an emerging regional elite class, Indian planters could invoke social allegiances with plantation and village communities by appealing to customary norms of feudal patronage. Though British planters mobilized a hybridly feudal administrative system, their location as gora sahibs (‘‘white’’ sahibs) meant that considerable social distance was maintained from the older indigenous idioms of rule. Recall, for a moment, Maniram Datta Barua, one of the last ministers of the Assamese king who sat on the board of the Assam Company and who managed two plantations. Suspected of being involved with political organizing of the so-called Mutiny of 1857 within Assam, he was hanged by the British. After his death, the two plantations under his management were sold out of the company, though the new buyers, George Williamson Inc., were beset with labor unrest. In protest, older workers, staff, and even Chinese tea makers left the plantations.81 The story of the ill-fated minister and the workers’ exodus is a telling example of the contradictions inherent within regional administration and the fissures in the bedrock of colonial rule. Barua was a powerful figure within aristocratic circles in Assam, and like many other royal officers in the subcontinent, he shrewdly joined the new ruling projects of the Planter Raj. Through his lineage, relative autonomy, and formal involvement with the Assam Company, he acted as a beneficent and powerful broker for the new sahibs.Yet his allegiances and alliances were layered and subterranean and, in the end, more faithful to the political and cultural web of his ‘‘native’’ Assamese elite class and the communities through which this class conducted its terms of rule. ‘‘Native’’ loyalty and momentary nationalist alliances across class lines were clearly manifested in the staff and workers’ exodus from the two plantations. While the case of the assassinated minister presents a striking example of political subversion within the emerging Assamese Planter Raj, Bengali lawyer-entrepreneurs and entrenched regional aristocrats began to build upon their economic and political power within North Bengal’s plantation enclaves. It was a process that involved collusion, granting of favors, and a dependence on the British for most infrastructural needs. Negotiations with local administrators and land consolidation strategies that involved ‘‘clubbing’’ individual jotes (plots) permeated the economic subversion of a system that explicitly privileged European commercial interests in planting. Within institutionally political frameworks, this shadow plantocracy emerged from the community base that later became the lynchpin of the Planter Raj.These were the classes of clerks, lawyers, and brokers that lubriThe Raj Baroque 105

cated the local engines of colonial administration. Experts at manipulating and negotiating their roles in the daily work of colonial rule, it is no surprise that they would garner economic and political benefits for themselves. Given customary taboos among upper-caste Bengali Hindu families against working in commerce, what could explain their growing enthusiasm for tea entrepreneurship? Middle-class, upper-caste Bengali lawyers could have certainly remained comfortably off as absentee landlords (jotedars) in the growing town of Jalpaiguri. Perhaps a ‘‘special charm’’ 82 in its direct association with the new British administrators and planters sowed the seeds of an incipient ‘‘nationalism.’’ 83 It was a ‘‘charm’’ of connection compelled, first, by affronted pride at the structural constraints within which local elites (often educated-caste Bengalis) in the management hierarchy were treated as racially inferior and colonized subjects. Every British plantation had Europeans as managers, and no ‘‘native’’ could rise above the cadre of clerical office staff. Most Bengalis worked in this staff cadre, and the cultural and political divide between planter and staff was strictly maintained. For new local elites entering plantation investment, this lack of upward mobility was considered an affront. Indeed, when new Bengali proprietors of rupiyah companies 84 sought managerial expertise, Indians from this staff cadrewere hired as managers. Indian entrepreneurship fed the upwardly mobile aspirations of a colonized elite and suggested a subversion of colonial ideologies of innate superiority. These ‘‘native servants’’ would enact a complex politics of mimesis and challenge. ‘‘Enterprise’’ was, indeed, going native. While it would be difficult to assert a coherent nationalist ideology as an impetus for indigenous planting during its first decades, by the end of British rule, Indian tea planters had created a forceful nationalist rhetoric around the history of Indian planting.The Indian Tea Planters Association’s contact with important nationalist figures began in the first decades of the century. Meetings were first held at the home of the Nawab of Jalpaiguri. The Indian tea planters’ connection to nationalist elites—their commitment to blending their ‘‘Indian heritage, nationalistic ethos with Indianisation of trade’’ 85—remained constant throughout late colonial rule. Note the anticolonial pride in a commentary made in the immediate postindependence period. ‘‘We were kept,’’ remarks the chairman of the itpa in 1952, ‘‘as hewers of wood and drawers of water; we were not allowed to develop our industries and we were exploited by our foreign masters for the benefit of their nationals. . . . Of the dark clouds of England’s exploitation, the brightest silver lining has been the tea industry, which is India’s fortunate legacy from foreign rule.’’ 86 106

The tea business is, thus, given an anticolonial and nationalist flavor. The commodity becomes a truly national product, blended together with avowedly Indian expertise. The ‘‘silver lining’’ of its enterprise creates the glittering backdrop fora truly national brew. During the aftermath of Indian independence, another planter asserts: ‘‘It is important to note in this connection that the capital employed by these Indian planters have been cent percent Indian and the participants in the profits have been nothing but Indian.The industry is primarily a national enterprise, and a national asset, and this fact should be taken seriously into consideration by the government in any scheme or future policy.’’ 87 Indigenous entrepreneurship ran parallel to European ‘‘pioneering’’ and opened up the wilderness to industrial progress. This progress was to be coded into the urgent economic projects of a newly independent nation state, and a ‘‘free’’ Indian plantocracy would, ideally, participate in such a shared endeavor.

‘‘Blatant Belligerency’’ Whether these postcolonial rhetorics suggest a coherent nationalist alliance during the middle and late colonial period in North Bengal and Assam would be a new arena of investigation. Certainly, these were rhetorics of alliance that were determined by the class interests of the plantocracy. Its nationalisms were, not surprisingly, contained within the frameworks of class protectionism.Working-class movements in the tea belt, which challenged the plantocratic base of both Indian and British companies, were, in light of new legislation permitting union organizing, viewed as deeply threatening. In 1948, for example, the itpa spoke against the ‘‘blatant belligerency’’ of ‘‘zealous social reformers’’ and the importance of knocking ‘‘the bother out of their unreasoning charge of maldistribution of wealth.’’ 88 Trade unions, like the intuc (Indian National Trade Union Congress) were accused of ‘‘openlyadvocat(ing) class hatred and revolt against the democratic method of collaboration.’’ 89 Labor movements were, in short, antinational, and ‘‘the experience of propaganda and political ferment are inseparable from labor movements and have imposed increased responsibilities on the district authority for the maintenance of law and order.’’ 90 In 1953 when newly legalized trade unions like the West Bengal Cha Shramik Union organized a mass satyagraha,91 the itpa remarked: ‘‘The satyagraha might take the shape of demonstrations, squatting, fasting before the offices of the itpa and dbita [Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association] and the offices of estates. . . . Other undesirable activities may be launched.’’ 92 ‘‘Undesirable activities’’ thus compelled the political parlance of colonial rule: ‘‘law and order’’ had The Raj Baroque 107

to be maintained as the postcolonial plantocracy forged ahead to meet the goals of a new nation of enterprise. While suggestions of planting nationalisms gesture toward counterhegemonic moments within the dominant arc of the British plantocracy, there are also important ways in which the aristocratic lifestyles created through tea planting would suit the landed aspirations and class consolidations of middle-class and upper-caste Jalpaiguri lawyers. This indigenous plantocracy subverted European planter dominance of the colonial industry from behind a mask of deference and collusion. Yet it was a mask that also wore the face of mastery. In that, it was Janus-faced. Its elite nationalist subversions eroded the seamless narratives of the colonial Planter Raj while simultaneously sowing the seeds of its own ascendence as the new ruling class of a postcolonial Planter Raj.

The New Maliks Within postcolonial West Bengal and Assam, one dominant ethnic group— the Marwari business community—has emerged as the dominant ownercapitalist class in the region. As local brokers and speculators in raw jute, tea, and coal during the colonial period, Marwaris have emerged as among the wealthiest business communities in the country. Names such as Birla, Khaitan, Kanoria, and Bajoria are engraved on brass plates in the old mansions of Alipore, once owned by old Calcutta Bengali aristocrats and their English overlords. Marwari corporate houses control the major industries in West Bengal: jute, coal, mining, and tea. A ‘‘settler-mercantile’’ community originally from Rajasthan, this community created financial alliances with colonial and indigenous elites through banking and trade. Famous for financial speculation, Marwari corporate houses virtually own the industrial infrastructure of West Bengal, which is governed by an elected cpi(m) government (Communist Party of India–Marxist). The contradictory alliances (and their attendant contests) between Bengali communist leaders and Marwari family-business capitalism shape the political and economic landscape of contemporary Bengal. Postcolonial capital ownership within tea is a variegated business. Small individual family-owned plantations, large Indian-owned corporations, family business houses, and multinational corporations encompass the postcolonial tea industry. In the first phase of postcolonial economic consolidation (1947–65), British sterling companies with small holdings in Assam and Bengal sold their stock to Marwari brokers. The English disinvestment

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had begun in World War II, particularly among small companies in eastern Assam which were facing the imminent invasion of Japanese forces through Burma.93 The inevitability of Indian independence accelerated the process of disinvestment. Departing English planters were replaced by a new cadre of Indian management. The new sahibs came from good ‘‘public school,’’ army, and aristocratic backgrounds. Anglicized manners and comportment ensured their postings in agency houses that were still controlled from London.These sterling companies kept their distance from the new Indian corporations. Despite the presence of Indian management, the old status distinctions between sterling and rupiyah companies were maintained. A second phase of disinvestment began in the mid 1960s when the national economic policy emanating from Delhi shifted to explicit nationalization of major Indian industries. The Indo-Chinese border conflict in 1962—where armed skirmishes took place near Tejpur, Assam—also provoked the departure of English planters. However, central government legislation such as fera (Foreign Exchange Regulation Act), which dictated that majority shareholdings of international corporations must be Indianowned, led to the departure of many remaining sterling companies.94 Until 1967, for example, 80 percent of AndrewYule’s stock was European-owned; 51 percent of shares were sold to Indians, though 49 percent remained in British banks. In 1973, British shareholders decided to sell their remaining stock to a Marwari family corporation, a move blocked by the Indian government. The company was finally sold to the ‘‘President of India’’ and is now a Government-of-India-owned company, with 30 percent of its stock in public shares. Other large agency houses, like Goodricke, sold its Indian subsidiaries to Marwari companies. The Goenka family, for example, owns 90 percent of Duncans, the parent company that managed Goodricke, one of the largest companies in Assam. However, international capital investment continues to play a major role in some of the larger corporations. Even if the majority of shares are not foreign-owned, European stockholders have sizeable holdings in tea. The Lawrie Group of the United Kingdom, billed as one of the largest producers of tea in the world, has considerable investments in Goodricke. In the early 1980s, Inchcape, the multinational company that owned sixteen plantations in Assam, sold its Indian subsidiary—the Assam Company—for $30.4 million to an nri (nonresident Indian) company that has interests in Canada, East Africa, and India. Transnational capital, thus, continues to map the fortunes of the largest corporations in Assam. When Brooke Bond and Lipton, tea blenders and

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brokers who buy half of the tea produced in Assam, refused to participate in the Guwahati tea auctions because of serious political unrest in Assam, it was a major blow to an industry that depends on foreign exports. As subsidiaries of Unilever, the British Dutch corporation, Brooke Bond and Lipton earn $400 million from their Indian tea exports: 60 percent of that tea is grown in Assam. These broad fiscal patterns suggest that a detailed economic history of the Indian tea industry within global trade would reveal its dependence on foreign-based capital investment. Given the export-oriented objectives of the industry, and its economic survival in an increasingly volatile environment, hybrid fiscal alliances with international investors are a necessity. For smaller companies, or successful corporate houses like Tata Tea, capital ownership remains entirely Indian. Many of these smaller companies, particularly in the Dooars—whose tea sales cannot compete with the export value of Darjeeling or the finest Assamese leaf—depend on domestic consumption. Indeed, the internal market for tea is now larger than the highly competitive international market and companies target the national market for its sales.

Domestic Economies If one set of nationalist images locates tea consumption within the ambit of a rural and working-class masculinity, a feminized foregrounding creates a parallel economy of signs.When one advertisement from a March 16, 1936, edition of The Hindu exhorts the consumer to ‘‘keep your family strong and healthy with Indian tea,’’ the nation has turned toward gendered kinship, gesturing to its maternal body. It is not surprising, then, to see the woman foregrounded against a bucolic landscape, her hand casually embracing her young son. Indeed, modernity is presaged in the text itself when it notes: ‘‘The young rising generation is likely to find its place in a more modern social order than the one in which we at present live. . . . Indian tea is thus contributing to a stronger and healthier Indian community.’’ Rural modernity, and its community, signified by tea consumption is still predicated on the nation, the family, and its maternal center. If the rural woman-mother is not so directly placed within the text, the next image frames the ‘‘understanding women [who] never forget to see that their men-folk receive the cup of ‘kindness.’ ’’ Now, that woman’s home contains its more middle-class inscriptions: a table, a woman pouring tea from a teapot. The sketch of a woman’s face, with jewelry, marks a classed

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16. ‘‘Keep your family strong and healthy with Indian tea.’’ Advertisement by the Indian Tea Association, The Hindu, March 16, 1936. (below) 17. ‘‘It’s your privilege and pride.’’ Advertisement by the Indian Tea Association, The Hindu, November 22, 1936.

18a. ‘‘When only a certain flavour will reflect your unique taste.’’ Advertisement for Green Label Tea. Telegraph magazine, Calcutta, circa 1995. 18b. ‘‘Contemporary Tea Hand Book.’’ Front cover. Calcutta, 1990. 18c. ‘‘The Lore of Tea.’’ Advertisement for British Paints. Advertising supplement, The Statesman, Calcutta, circa 1998.

femininity. Tea is now the ‘‘only family beverage,’’ and the woman engages a familiar trope within the symbolic economy of tea consumption and its circulations.The woman-mother stands at the center and the foreground of this idealized framing of the family. A certain middle-class ideal of a unitary Indian motherhood is idealized and linked to the commodity. Through the ritual of the image-ideal, tea enshrines domesticity around the centerpoint of the feminine, and feminized, figure of a now nationalized ideal within the Indian colony: the mother-wife of the home. If late-colonial advertisements in newspapers offer a familiarly gendered economy of signs, the postcolonial imagery continues to enforce what are now ubiquitous images of the ideal genteel, middle-class family life.95 A woman in a pastel sari stands next to (presumably) her seated husband.They look at each other lovingly. Behind them is an ornate side table; the table cover is crocheted. Potted plants and flower arrangements are carefully arrayed. The message is clear: ‘‘A certain elegance, a certain ease of living, a certain flavour.’’ Postcolonial Indian women represent the symbolic meeting point of this ideal of urban class mobility—and arrival. Advertisements of wives and mothers serving tea to their husband and children in urban middle-class settings offer an archetype of national domesticity. The feminization of tea has come in a spiraling journey back to its ‘‘home’’ in the colony, to be reproduced again and again within the postcolonial domesticities of an independent nation. Postcolonial Indian women create their own parlors. Sandwiches and samosas may be served. Immaculate and demurely beautiful, she will enter the commercial screen of her neat living room with a cup of Lipton tea. Her husband puts down the newspaper and smiles benevolently. Lipton chai, aaram chai (Lipton tea, relaxing tea). Yet, if the first image of postcolonial feminine gentility produces a certain idea of the nation, then other advertisements also mark another ambit of production: the site of labor itself, almost as common an image as the pretty woman serving tea. In one, a woman’s profile, body and face, is outlined. She wears a ring, her breasts are contoured. Even as a sketch, she is sexualized, attractive—an unsettlingly similar image to the middle-class housewife of the late colonial newspaper. In the other, a sepia-tinted photo shows a smiling woman-worker, lifting some leaves of tea. Her hands are blurred. She advertises ‘‘the lore of tea’’ for British Paints—a ‘‘member of the worldwide Berger group.’’ Both women—one a sketch, the other a photograph— suggest the Janus-faced nature of the commodity and its bodied histories of connection and disjuncture. This, indeed, is the price of the fetish.

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act 4, scene 5 Light focuses on the Narrator. She puts down her pen and smiles. She takes the porcelain cup and traces her fingers around its rim as she speaks. she: So, these are postcolonial teatimes. Come, let us join Alice for tea and snacks. The Narrator picks up her wicker stool and joins the Mad Tea Party. Alice pours liquid from Mr.T. Pott.The Narrator helps herself to some tarts.The Mad Hatter and the March Hare go backstage with the Doormouse and bring out a large kettle of tea and small paper cups.They start distributing it to the audience.The lights come up entirely. In the background is the commercial’s trill: ‘‘Lipton chai, aaram chai.’’ As the tea service continues, on the audience’s right, the curtain quivers and moves. A Woman steps out. She wears a cheap cotton sari, her shoulders are bare. She carries a metal tumbler. She walks over to the stage and joins Alice and the Narrator.They look at her curiously but motion for her to join. Alice pours the tea into her tumbler. She sits on the ground next to the Narrator. There is no sound except for small sips.When everyone has been served, the light fades out.

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chapter 5 Estates of a New Raj

act 5, scene 1 Stage lights come on dimly. The stage, its props, and scenery remain the same. Alice sits at her Mad Tea Party. The Narrator has moved back to her table to stage right. Her lantern is on the table along with the other small objects. As the spotlight focuses on her, she picks up each object to remind the audience of the motley collection of which it is a part: the quill and bottle of india ink, a silver sickle, nailpolish and clutter of false nails, the cup, teapot, some tea bags. The oval mirror, with its ornate Victorian frame, flickers in the lantern’s light. The Narrator’s cowl is pushed back, her face is entirely exposed. Except for the bloodred mouth and kohl-rimmed eyes, her face is pale. Powdered. Her fingers move across the objects restlessly. she: (muttering loudly to herself ) Lazy natives and memsahibs, white and brown; soirées of tea, and gin. Sip, smile, sip, smile. Look down, look up, don’t look straight. Be silent. Be demure. Don’t smudge the lippy-stick, smoothen your hair. Don’t catch the ayah’s eyes in the mirror. Sip, smile, sip, smile. Sippity-sip, smile. (Pause) My apologies for indulging in these vanities, on Your Time, but this too is the price of tea. I start wearing porcelain skin. In the mirror, my face is pale green.Translucent. I am lost in its chameleon surfaces. Tick-tock, Tick-tock. (Clapping sharply) We must move on from such seductions. Our theater will shift slightly. The rhythms will move more to your right. ( gesticulating stage left) There is the bungalow, and there is the field with its backscape of gauze. But now the field will stretch out more to your right. Imagine clusters of huts, villages. Some characters will reappear, some will be etched more definitively: the Son of the Forest will return in new guise; and the Chorus of Women Pluckers may dance. I will, as usual, move in and out of scenes, marking Time. Sometimes, I will sit low, in a squat, on my small wooden pirhi [wooden seat]. Perhaps I/we will all become level to your gaze.

Alice walks over with a small scrolled piece of paper and places it on the table. she: What is this? What is this? Another strange message from an oriental Alice. No—a fragment of poetry to start us off. A clue for our Wonderland, our Garden of Dreams: ‘‘So I have come / back to you, / not seeing how / you beckoned before. / It was in an / early green light, / this journey of / my return, / a light as transparent / as sun through / a blade of grass: / my fingers / even they were/dappled green / and insubstantial. / A fleeting peacock / in a flash of blue / changed the color / of startled leaves and / I paused on / the path to breathe in / the brilliant blue air, / the flickers of green. / What more to / expect from you, / my Beloved, / but this gasping / green silence?’’ This gasping green silence. Light fades as the Narrator picks up her quill and dips it in the bottle of india ink.

october 1991 Jalpaiguri,West Bengal I leave Calcutta for Jalpaiguri in October, on an overnight train winding upward through the paddy fields of South Bengal.The night air, blowing in through the train’s barred windows, is refreshing, the memory of a heavy summer heat fades.The ancestral home of my hosts is modest, in a middleclass neighborhood, and there is no resonance of the anglicized style I have come to expect of tea planters. It appears quite different from the baroque and ornate architectural style that accents the palatial homes of South Bengali elites. One of my hosts, a tea plantation owner greets me wearing a silk kimono-like robe. He carries a hookah and the image of nineteenthcentury bhadralog [gentleman] culture and its leisured smokes comes alive. We take to each other immediately. He has an ironic gaze and is aware, I am almost certain, of my assessment and its imaginative inscriptions. There is a performed languidness in his self-presentation, and his awareness creates a humorous backbeat to our brief encounter. In the evening, sitting in a dining area separate from the main house, we eat out of large brass plates and he begins to tell me about his family’s history as among the first Bengali entrepreneurs in tea. I ask him about the large World Wildlife Fund posters announcing a major tiger conservation project that I have seen lining the road. He tells me that wildlife conservation around issues such as habitat loss for elephants, leopards, and tigers has become a more visible business. Then, taking a sip of water, he leans over and pats me on the hand: ‘‘Well, 116

well, memsahib from America, I will tell you this. If you wanted to find tiger skin, it would be very difficult now. But if you want human skin, then . . . .’’ Disconcerted, I am aware of a certain exaggeration and a certain truth. The ellipses chart the range of another moral compass. The road cleaves straight toward the Dooars foothills from Jalpaiguri. The ground is flat, broken by a short incline sloping toward the Sevak Bridge, which straddles the Tista River. At the bridge, a bus directly ahead of us disgorges some passengers who pay obeisance to the goddess Kali residing in a nearby temple. On the other side of the bridge, the road winds down into Dooars proper. In the thick forests bordering the road, I suddenly glimpse a peacock with an indigo neck. Startled, he unfurls his fan of color, swivels his head, and rushes into the green cover of trees. My companions tell me that this is a rare and auspicious sighting. I have taken to reading portents, good and bad, in everything.The roots of rural East Bengal across the river and close to my ancestral homes are digging into the recesses of a memory I have not lived. The unfurled peacock speaks to this from his emerald place. On the right, suddenly rising from a field of tea bushes, is a Palladianstyle bungalow whose Grecian columns and high patio verandah manages to eclipse the neighboring low-lying whitewashed factory buildings. This imposing abode, the director’s bungalow, seldom visited by the plantation’s owners, is my home for my first foray into tea country. It could not, despite its grand emptiness, more concretely symbolize the absolute center of the planter’s world. From my verandah eyrie on the second floor, I see the factory and the staff cottages lying in front and to the left, respectively. On the right, the tea bushes begin. The factory siren sounds loudly in the late afternoon, and I see groups of women hunched forward, carrying large cloth pouches of tea leaf, pass through the factory gates.The view is kindred to the framing lens of a camera’s eye.Within one frozen Archimidean moment, thewomen become mere objects: colorful, still, a two-dimensional movement against a field of green. Within a day of my arrival, I begin to experience the verandah eyrie and its encirclement of apartness as a palatial prison. The burra sahib (senior planter) appears nervous because I am a guest of the owner, but I am more aware of gendered unease. Purposefully cleaving through such proprieties of gendered status, I ask him about the possibility of visiting a sister plantation. He responds, ‘‘He hobe, hobe. Yes, yes, it will happen, it will happen. I will take you on a tour of the plantation in the next couple of days, but it is best you stay here. If you have any needs, just tell the houseboy to give me a message.’’ Estates of a New Raj 117

The paternalistic tone of the burra sahib is familiar, and I rankle at the ‘‘inside’’ boundaries being drawn. Is this the neocolonial plantation zenana? 1 The server, a young man, keeps his eyes downcast when I address him.The direction of his gaze begins to chart the feudal terrain of this sojourn. As he serves us tea, the burra sahib suddenly moves to the verandah wall and yells at a couple of women walking through the field of bushes falling immediately to the right of the bungalow: ‘‘Don’t damage the bushes now. Your work is finished for the day. Leave, leave.’’ One woman shakes her umbrella up at him and angry words are exchanged. Pulling out a handkerchief from a pocket, and wiping his forehead, he says, ‘‘Oh, I can’t tell you how things have changed.The coolies are more and more undisciplined. See how those women screamed at me? It is all this union rongbaji [trouble making].’’ He soon takes his leave, and I am left to my elevated solitude. I imagine a nineteenth-century ancestress sitting behind a latticed marble screen watching the world go by. If she is to descend into the dusty streets, her veil must be long. She will be carried in a curtained carriage so the world may not see her. Her feet must not touch the earth. In this solitary and strange splendor, I am aware of a certain late-twentieth-century kinship to her watching but hidden gaze. The contradictions between the ideals of my research objectives and their repositioning within such feudal and paternal spaces are palpable. The next morning, I walk into the plantation office and ask for a jeep to take me to a sister plantation, whose manager, Nikhil Sinha, seems more comfortable dealing with a woman outside. When I tell him that I can’t remain at the first plantation, even at the risk of offending my hosts, he offers me a place in his far more modest guest cottage. I ask him whether my perceptions of gendered unease are correct. He smiles as he responds, ‘‘I understood what you were up to, this research on women, but he has probably never met someone like you before. You have to remember that most older planters have been here for so long, they don’t realize how things have changed.They are like in another country. I can imagine if you walked through the fields,’’ he laughs, ‘‘he would send along a platoon of chowkidars [watchmen] beating drums to keep people away. I can’t imagine him permitting you to walk through the field!’’ I also laugh, aware of his commentary’s uncanny connection to my own imaginative journeys into the possible life of a nineteenth-century ancestress.What heresy, to walk through a public field! What ontologies of honor to enact through the feminized body of privilege. Three months after that first glance down on a picture of women, I finally reach what will be my home for the next year: Sarah’s HopeTea Estate.Close 118

to the Bhutan border, ‘‘Sarah’s Hope T.E.’’ is one of the largest plantations in the central Dooars. Running about 850 acres, inclusive of bungalows, factory, and workers’ residences, the plantation has a decidedly prosperous air. On the main artery of the ‘‘high road,’’ a large sign introduces Kolpara Tea Estate, Sarah’s Hope’s nearest neighbor, with whom it shares not only territorial boundaries but also histories, rituals, and sacred geographies. The visible and prominent buildings—managers’ bungalows, a hospital, factory, and staff cottages—run parallel to the main road. The hospital is large, with familiar, tall Grecian columns, and is set in a manicured, though sparse, quadrangle of lawn. Its immediate neighbors are two small assistant manager’s bungalows. A slightly more imposing manager’s bungalow flanks the factory and office compound to one side, while the burra sahib’s (senior manager’s) bungalow sits on the other. Unlike the startling edifice of my first ‘‘big’’ bungalow, this is a handsome two-story structure set well back from the main road. Its perfectly manicured green lawn and unused swimming pool are only visible if one peers in from the front gate. On any given day, no staff person or worker is found near the front gates of the bungalows. In contrast to the factory’s perpetual buzz of activity, the adjacent bungalows appear silent, immaculate in their stillness. Arcing away from the burra sahib’s bungalow is a large open field, around which, in an almost horseshoe shape, lie the small whitewashed cottages of the plantation’s clerical staff. A staff club and large open building used for festivals, constitutes the uppermost boundary of the plantation elite’s residences. It is a tightly knit perimeter of power. Only if you look carefully from the distance of the road, will you notice rows of small, white-cement, two-roomed structures. These houses herald the ‘‘labor lines,’’ where workers’ families live. A brick wall behind the staff cottages separates the labor lines from road and staff cottages. A wire fence behind the bungalows similarly separates lawn from lines. Only those workers who serve in the bungalow—watchmen, maids, gardeners and cooks—are permitted entry across this border of wire. At night, the only areas lit are the perimeters of the bungalows and cottages: the labor lines, hardly visible even in daylight, lie silent and in almost total darkness. The stable bungalow, whose name suggests a horsy history, is an assistant manager’s bungalow and lies within the fenced perimeter. The sprawling two-bedroomed house, with an unused outhouse kitchen, is my abode for the year I remain in Dooars plantation country. The bungalow system of servitude ensures that even if the building is uninhabited, gardeners, watchmen, and maids keep it outwardly groomed. Soon after my arrival, the Estates of a New Raj 119

perimeter of hedges grows wild and the goats graze on the lawn. My neighbor, an assistant manager, takes me to task: ‘‘It is important that your garden is well kept. People from the road will see its untidiness and it will give the garden a bad name. Make sure the gardeners work. Are they working?’’ Thus it is, within and beyond the small arc of soon-to-be-untidy lawn, that I finally begin to visit communities living on the other side of the fence. Anjali Mirdha and Sannicharwa Lohra, both assigned to work at the otherwise abandoned bungalow, live five minutes from its borders, and it is primarily with Anjali and through her introductions to family and friends that I enter Sarah’s Hope’s villages. Though I am no longer in the splendid isolation of a palladian second-floor verandah, and left mercifully to my own devices, there could be no mistaking my indelible marking as a memsahib. Yet, despite (and because of ) the contradictions of that location of power, it is with a palpable sense of relief—of escaping the cocoon of feminine privilege signified by the shuttered windows of the bungalow parlor—that Anjali and I unhook its unwieldy back gate.

Managing Distance

Patronage and the Mai-Baap The unit in India is the family, not the nation, as it is with us.Why, one of the rules of their religion is that the family must see one another through thick and thin. After all, what does a coolie call any of us when he wants help: mai-baap, meaning father and mother.2

Colonial planter rule created itself around an authoritative center, beginning with the person of the planter himself, who was known as the maibaap.The mai-baap was more than the personhood of the planter, however, and came to signify the very texture of plantation patronage and power. Combining symbolic displays of aristocratic leisure, paternal adjudication, and coercive disciplining, the mai-baap served to cohere different facets of planter power into one organizing metaphor: the family. The ‘‘family’’ became the rubric under which the ideologies of rule could frame the terms of consent and the appearance of legitimation. The planter was distilled into a curiously transgendered ideal. He became a symbolic father standing at the center of the plantation family in which workers were, most definitively, his children.The planter came to jus-

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tify his rule by deploying existing folk understandings of feudal lordship. Displaced working communities and their new lords invoked the mai-baap as a mutually understood, but highly unequal, codification through which power and kinship would be harnessed.The construction of the family, with its paternal and patriarchal center, presents the edifice of a cultural system through which symbolic and bodily acts gesture to the paradoxical and intricate realities of its social worlds. The deployment of the mai-baap was the planter’s attempt to create a legitimating aura around his governance, an aura that contained the threads of both consent and coercion, acts of paternal benevolence and absolute power. His brief presence at a yearly festival is one ritual enactment of the mai-baap. At the festival, he displays his patronage with a shower of coins thrown to the dancers. In return, a prominent man in the village presents a basket of fruit or liquor.The public ritual of unequal exchange catalyzed by the sahib’s displayof lordly benevolence gestures toward a mediated consent and the theater of legitimation that scripts his rule. Symbolic displays of paternal largesse were underscored by more explicitly coercive acts.The father-judge who could enter his ‘‘family’’ of workers and arbitrate marriage disputes was, within the colonial legal system, also given full magisterial powers. All matters of what the colonial administration demarcated as ‘‘law and order,’’ from surveillance of the labor lines, to meting out corporal punishment against escaped workers were judged by the planter. Memories of such rituals of absolute power are crystallized in an old woman’s memory of a British burra sahib’s shout: ‘‘Like the roar of a tiger, memsahib, and then eight-foot tall and on his horse he would come, whip in hand, to the garden.’’ At Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate and in Calcutta, the idea of the mai-baap’s absolute authority is shared by many sahibs. In one succinct description of its enduring mythology, one young planter owner, gesturing expansively with an outflung circle of arm, states: ‘‘You have to understand. We are kings, after all. I am everything, the mai-baap, when I visit the garden. It is my Raj.’’ This striking encompassment of kingly authority within this latetwentieth-century planter’s understanding of his mai-baap moves us into the very sinews of power that constitute the body of his paternal rule in the plantation. Let me offer one of the first stories of patronage I hear from a man who worked briefly at the stable bungalow. Though the narrator never called his commentary anything, I have titled it ‘‘The Story of the Worker Hunting Birds.’’

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Well, in the sahib’s time, one day, a worker took his bow and arrow and was going through the garden. And the sahib saw him, and the sahib asked him, ‘‘Where are you going with that bow and arrow?’’ The worker replied (fool that he was), ‘‘To get a bird.’’ Then the sahib took the bow and arrow and told the man to sit down. (The arrow did not have the real tip you know, where it would stick to the body.) And the sahib shot him. The man went, ‘‘Ow! Ow!’’ (He mimics him, contorting his back and laughing). See, memsahib, the sahibs could do what they wished. On their hunting expeditions, they killed what they wanted.We, ha, if we had bows and arrow, we could be thrown into jail. Yeh bat he. This is the story.

This postcolonial parable, even through its laughing mimicry, is significant in the tale it tells about mai-baap power, its coercive edge. Yet it is paternal benevolence that draws out the parameters of my time at Sarah’s Hope. For three months before my settled sojourn at Sarah’s Hope, I have been moving nomadically through plantation bungalows and occasionally meeting workers involved in a United Nations–funded familyplanning project. Myoscillation between various planter hosts, and the deep suspicion of the few women and men workers I manage to speak with, takes its toll. I am aware that if I don’t settle into one plantation, I will not be able to conduct any research, let alone have the chance to build some bonds of trust. Given the political gulf between bungalow and labor lines, this autonomous territorial placement is crucial. Efforts at renting a small place in the town are fruitless. An unknown single woman/tenant is an uneasy proposition for most townspeople. My father in Calcutta, a veteran manager of jute factories, hearing about plantation politics, suggests that he should accompany me for a short visit. He and I recognize that a certain sexual politics underwrites this unease with my wanderings. I am a firanghi (foreigner) with my connections to the United States, yet I appear to come from a bhadraghar (civilized home). My father understands, before I do, that his presence as a bhadralog (gentleman) would vouch for my ‘‘character.’’ His paternal umbrella might shelter me from disdain long enough for me to secure a place to stay. I am fortunate that a senior planter and his wife who have sheltered me on many other occasions agree, and within the ambit of their combined kindness, this is how I come to be assigned to the stable bungalow at Sarah’s Hope. My father meets Anjali and tells her that he has given her the responsibility for my welfare. ‘‘My daughter,’’ he says affectionately, ‘‘is a pagli [mad girl]. Who knows where she will go and what she will do? Tell her 122

what is right, and what is safe. I know she will not have much to do with the managers, so if anything happens, only you will know.’’ Anjali takes the paternal order seriously and senses my sadness at his departure. ‘‘Come on, didi, come to my home,’’ she says. ‘‘I will introduce you to my father who has worked here for fifty years. Heworked in the bungalow. We can have some biscuits and chai.’’ Her elderly father greets us at her small two-roomed home, but seems scared. He does not look at me directly and says a soft ‘‘Namaste memsahib.’’ He jumps quickly to one side as I walk by him to enter the house. I am disconcerted, and again palpably aware of the embodied costs of power. In the dark, sitting on the verandah floor by one oil lantern, Anjali and I sip hot mugs of liquor tea.

Cultivating a Center Imagine the old planter’s song about playing polo in Assam. Imagine him sing a stanza in a wavering reedy voice as he sucks on a pipe: ‘‘Sitting astride my pony, / Riding my old brown mare, / Chasing the white ball up and ll with excitement, / down, / Hitting it here and there, / Riding like Doing my utmost and best, / Give me my chukker of polo, / And I’ll leave you to take all the rest.’’ 3 If polo is not played so frequently in the old planters’ clubs in the Dooars, its overtones of aristocratic leisure continue to permeate the games of postcolonial planters and their families. These families live in considerable distance from one another, and as with their colonial predecessors, the club is the only social space in which they meet and mix informally. Bingo nights organized bya memsahibs’ committee and lavish buffet dinners are frequent. Women focus on the numbers being called out on the microphone while their children race around the large room. For younger children, ayahs are brought along and they chat with the drivers outside while keeping an eye on their fleet-footed wards.The burra and chota sahibs (senior and assistant managers) retire to the bar with cigarettes and Scotch. No women enter this masculine space, and if drinks are required, a chivalrous planter will offer to fetch a glass of what is required. Polo matches have been replaced by football (soccer), and intergarden tournaments are held every year. Sitting on old rattan chairs and fanning themselves, the memsahibs look bored. Teenagers sporting Levis jeans and Nikes cheer as a goal is scored. Most of them study in boarding schools in Darjeeling, Delhi, or further north in Nainital and Ajmer, and their public school manners offer the styles of a hybrid aristocracy. These are young Estates of a New Raj 123

aristocrats of new and old empires. They wear the jeans of the new and accent their talk with the old. Their schools (Doon, Sanawar, Mayo College, St. Paul’s) are prestigious British Indian models of Eton.They embody the Raj’s pedagogies with a postcolonial twist. Nikes signal other imperial aspirations. Months after this first encounter with rattan chairs, Levis, and postcolonial soccer matches, I meet an assistant manager and his wife who host me for a couple of days in a plantation where a rare social welfare project around maternal and infant health is under way.One afternoon I am taken to another club, more modest than any I have been in. My hosts want to play a round of golf. The three of us are alone on the weedy golf course, which is bordered by the Himalayan foothills. Rather than sit alone on the club’s dilapidated patio, I follow my hosts around the course. They are bedecked in madras plaid shorts and Lacoste T-shirts. I shut my eyes and imagine them in a New England country club. When I open my eyes, I am only too aware of this Kaaesque landscape and its strange display of neoimperial gentilities. The cultivated mask of the golf course is a thin one, the untamed hills crouch too close for sustaining such an illusion. At the edge of the golf course, a goat herder chews slowly on a stick. He sits on a boulder on the edge of a ditch, and his face appears at some distance, impassive. Masculinity and Lordship Picture for a moment, again, an image of the nineteenth-century planter creating the cultivated landscape through his reasoned enterprise. Among the many threads of planter self-representation, the image of hardy pioneering gives shape to a persona that is remembered and reinvented by postcolonial planters.The image of the pioneering frontiersman, indulging in the leisures of hunting, produces the symbolic effects of an active gentleman, a squire of the outdoors. As huntsman lording over a vast colonial estate, this image renders its own colorful story about the cultural styles of a new imperial gentry. The first planters’ clubs of the nineteenth century brought together the small community of planters and their wives for drinks, billiards and polo matches.The enactment of English manners, a reinvention and mimesis of metropolitan refinement, is recreated in the postcolonial styles of the bungalow. In these elegant parlors, the combination of pioneering masculinity and elegant comportment remains an enduring legacy of the British Raj. The genteel manners of the contemporary planter’s household enhance the aura of leisure that permeates the ‘‘big’’ bungalow at Sarah’s Hope. It is a style redolent of the Raj. Nostalgia peppers the talk of veteran sahibs who reminisce about the first airfield in the Dooars and their ‘‘billets’’ under

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British planters. Numerous attendants serve tea and cucumber sandwiches with a silent and unhurried pace. However, these images of unhurried and leisured teatimes are coupled with explicit invocations of the iconic planter-as-huntsman image.There are anecdotes of a sahib awakened at midnight to attend to a herd of wandering elephants, which situate him in front of a band of special elephant watchmen, wielding mashals (flame torches) and firecrackers. A sense of danger, not only from the animal landscape, compels some planters to carry guns. The idea of courage implied through these symbols of flame and gun is important for the depiction of planter vitality and power.Take, for instance, an assistant manager’s encounter with a trapped leopard crouched in the tea bushes. Showing courage in a confrontation where workers are also present, is a matter of considerable prestige and where ‘‘losing face’’ would be intolerable. The chota sahib notes: ‘‘They are watching me and what I do with the leopard. If I show I am scared, I don’t have any standing among them. I will be known in the lines as a coward, and God knows what they will cook up.’’ The image of planter-as-hunter produces a certain set of effects about masculine authority and fortitude. It spills beyond the confines of club and parlor where its folklore is created and where it circulates. It is a display of personhood and power that textures the miasma of patronage and rests within its theaters of legitimation and consent. The leisure of the bungalow parlor is also a necessary display of entitlement, itself inextricablyconnected to labor.Though the planter will be quick to defend his enterprise and work, the representation of leisure and grandeur is an important facet of his own brand of aristocracy. The theater of disciplined masculinity and its superior selfhood creates the symbolic terrain of patronage. For one, it signifies the superfluity of his own body’s laboring. He works, certainly, but his work is ‘‘that of an enterprising and busy man,’’ ‘‘insufficient to call forth all his energies.’’ 4 He is both calm and energetic, having sufficient strength to spare; an outdoors man ‘‘rebelling against the indoor life, without doing any quantity of actual manual labor.’’ Furthermore, his is an agreeable occupation, ‘‘entailing no hard physical labour, but merely sufficient exercise for both body and mind, as is essential to their healthy preservation.’’ 5 His superior center is coded, however, in his relationship to corporeal laboring.While he works hard, his labor is that of a reasoned mind. Leisure and its displays are symbolic currency through which labor—and appropriate work—is made manifest through its negation. Thus, the planter’s

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non/work creates its inevitable alterity. His labor is reasoned and acorporeal; the bodied labor of others is its necessary foil.Through the lookingglass, then, that labor made invisible (orcaptured within the commodity picturesque), lies at the core of this cultivation of masculine authority and rule. Memsahibs and Another Tea Party If masculine courage is one important facet of the mai-baap image, then the balancing image of leisured nonchalance is created by the inside worlds of planters’ wives. The plantation bungalow, that architectural symbol of power and leisure, is most definitively the world of the memsahib. As in metropolitan corporate cultures, the wife entertains and governs a phalanx of servants, through whose labors she can present an immaculate décor and superb cuisine. Her kitchen, lorded over by a veteran cook, offers banquets that can challenge the finest culinary offerings of city restaurants.Tea plantation hospitality is famous forculinary largesse and exquisite service. For many burra memsahibs (senior planter wives), hosting company guests in such style is mandatory. Her refinement and elegant hospitality indexes her husband’s status and accomplishment as a burra sahib. News of her largesse (or lack thereof ) to bungalow workers reaches well into thevillages. Some burra mems manage small farms within the bungalow precincts, with cows and vegetable gardens and enough surplus produce to sell in the local town markets. Much like the wife of a local landowner, she retains considerable power over her large household. Occasional stories of an English memsahib’s presence in the lines, or walking her dogs through the paths of the plantation field, are in singular contrast to the assiduous distance maintained by her postcolonial counterparts. The postcolonial memsahib remains isolated in her bungalow. She is rarely seen by the rest of the plantation communities, glimpsed fleetingly, perhaps, in her passing chauffeur-driven car. The cocoon of the bungalow parlor and its internal politics manifests a patriarchal and caste/class-inflected language of rule. It scripts the imperatives of a protected, refined, and feminized domestic world. Its literal invisibility to the ‘‘outside’’ reflects a dominant and hybrid vision of the memsahib’s status and position. It combinesVictorian and indigenous patriarchal ideologies into one integral display of rule.6 For one, the depiction of the plantation parlor and its leisured domesticities throws the outdoor and masculine image of the planter-sahib into greater relief. The ideal of a sheltered, indoor, and eminently feminized world stands as an effective counterpoint to his outdoor, vital, and masculine one. Indeed, the construction of either remains profoundly dialectical, making possible an unequal, but powerfully coupled, vision of aristocratic rule within the plantation. 126

I spend some time with a new chota memsahib (assistant manager’s wife), Rina Basu, who wrestles with her new status and isolation from the urban hurly-burly of Calcutta. Since she is only a few years younger than I am, and new to the plantations, we share candid views about the gendered and status expectations of being a young memsahib within the plantocracy’s social webs. Codes of visitation between burra and chota memsahibs are as elaborate as the rites of ‘‘calling’’ among late nineteenth-century Victorian gentlewomen. Memsahibs also create their own ‘‘kitty’’ parties, bridge games, and organize social events at the faded planters club, even if largely invisible to wider plantation communities. She remarks, ‘‘Oh, it gets really lonely because he is gone most of the day and I can’t take any walks beyond the bungalow garden. We have our club outings, but it is rare to meet women my age and I can’t just land up at a burra bungalow for a visit. There is a definite hierarchy maintained within the company. Of course, in terms of people who work in other companies, it is a little freer. But in the club, everything is assessed and I have to be careful. My husband is an assistant, he is good at what he does, but I have to be careful about his position. Sometimes I don’t want to wear a silk sari to an evening function at the club, I have some nice salwar kameezes [tunics and pants], but he will insist that I am dressed more formally. Plus, everyone knows we were recently married and I am a new bride. . . . But I will tell you one thing. It is the other memsahibs you have to watch out for, what they will say about what I wear, my manners. Like you, I love to sit about and chat, but when I am mixing with them, I can’t do this. I tell you, I miss being myself.’’ We both know well that a woman’s physical self-presentation in public signifies not only her status; it symbolizes her husband’s position. For a young wife, sartorial transgressions would reflect negativelyon her husband and might hamper his professional advancement. A family’s status is maintained, or enhanced, by his masculine managerial progress, but codes of a domesticated femininity also chart its routes.Within the circumscribed ambit of the plantation’s corporate culture, invested in its grand displays of rule, a memsahib’s manicured elegance is an essential foil to the sahib’s lordship. Rina comes from a close-knit middle-class family in Calcutta and is slowly getting used to the astonishing isolation that marks the daily tempos of her life. Like many other memsahibs, she often visits her family in Calcutta. Within her spacious bungalow, she directs the domestic work. A young boy from the plantation villages cleans and cooks, and for larger dinners she can ask for more help. This servitude is ‘‘free’’ for the assistant manager because the boy’s wages are paid through the main office. A burra Estates of a New Raj 127

memsahib can command up to five kitchen helpers because of her status, but even Rina has ample help. I stay with her for a few days, and every morning the young boy brings to my bedroom a cup of tea laid out on a small tray, a tea cosy, silver spoon, sugar, and a perfect miniature porcelain jug of cream. I am puzzled by this formality and ask Rina whether she was used to this service in her Calcutta family. I have only encountered this kind of detailed and attentive servitude in tea country and occasionally within the upper echelons of the country’s army and navy elite. This is not, I am certain, a typical metropolitan Bengali middle-class breakfast-in-bed. She assures me that she has learned this from other memsahibs. ‘‘Anyway,’’ she notes, ‘‘what does it matter? There isn’t much that he has to do. I help with the cooking. This way I can teach him well, and he can continue working in the bungalow.’’ When I move to unlatch the front door, she asks the young boy to do it for me. It is an unnecessary and rather absurd order in my eyes. But for her, it is only within this bounded ambit of the plantation parlour that she can exercise her will. Her command is a necessary act. Rina’s socialization into memsahib-dom is thus woven into these quotidian and minute acts of power. Most of the memsahibs I meet in the first months are gracious but distant. Like their husbands, they are not quite sure how to place me. I appear to be from the same class/caste background, yet my behavior is transgressive. I cannot fit into a frame of reference and, so, vanish outside its borders.Their disavowal suggests a more abstract unease. Perhaps, I behave too much like a jungli woman. Perhaps it is best to step away and remain polite and silent.

act 5, scene 2 Alice and her companions sit at the table, while the Narrator speaks from the darkness of her corner table, lit only by the low flame of the lantern.They speak their lines as if they have already spoken them in the past.There is no reenactment of the scene, just repetition in exaggerated, high-pitched tones. she: Reflect on Alice as she joins the Mad Tea Party. Alice, Alice, with her long hair, petulant and annoyed at her strange encounters. Consider the Mad Hatter’s disdain and their collective reluctance when they see her approach. But Alice is Alice. She insists on joining them for their tea. mad hatter, march hare, doormouse: (crying out in unison) ‘‘No room! No room!’’ alice: (indignantly) ‘‘There’s plenty of room!’’ march hare: (encouragingly) ‘‘Have some wine.’’

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alice: (sounding puzzled and angry) ‘‘I don’t see any wine. . . . Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it. I didn’t know it was your table. . . . It’s laid for a great many more than three.’’ hatter: (who has been looking at Alice with great curiosity) ‘‘Your hair wants cutting.’’ alice: (with severity) ‘‘You should learn not to make personal remarks.’’ 7 Lights dim. The only light left comes from the lantern.

‘‘Internal Others’’ and En/Gendering Difference Social separations, signified through the symbols and styles of grandeur and leisure, offer one facet of the distinctions maintained between workers, staff, and planters. Racial and ethnic boundaries are drawn through a baroque set of cultural practices that are naturalized into a daily habitus and elaborated through conversations, rituals, geography, and the disciplinary regimes of the body at work. Such registers of difference are embedded within a descriptive texture from which it remains difficult to untangle the knots, to comb out the ‘‘essences’’ of the social snarls. It is more productive to reflect on these knottings as a series of discursive ‘‘effects’’ that cohere tightly enough to prevent any transparent or totalizing claims. However, social claims of exclusion and inclusion and ascriptions of inferiority and superiority tag these effects in the most material and significant ways. Consider the following discussion as one path through the thicket of these effects, as a constant and corporeal movement (rather than a search for static plottings) of power and its paradoxes. The ‘‘cultivated’’ center of postcolonial patronage cultivates the ideological terms of its rule through a feudalism that is firmly rooted in castebased hierarchies.When a majority of the plantation workers are from either lower-caste or adivasi communities, then the first line of control between them and a plantocracy comprised of upper-castes is clearly drawn. To one Bengali planter, the inclusion-exclusion dynamic is a transparently simple one: ‘‘When we were invaded thousands of years ago by the Aryans, there was a division.This is the difference between them and us.They are the ones who fled the Aryans and went into the jungles. We accepted the Aryans. They are out of touch with development.’’ In striking ways, this dichotomy echoes the broad social-evolutionary rendering of a Victorian chain of being, though it is definitively rooted within the textual past of caste Hinduism and animated by its intricate practices of ritual, commensality, and pollution. However, the commentary can-

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not be extricated from its own specific placement within a social history that is also colonial.Within such a historical framing of dominance, subordination is doubly coded. The outcaste adivasi is also the primitive jungli. The indigenous upper-caste ideology of a laboring outcaste is coded in dyadic contrasts and inscribed within feudal practices in which an adivasi is viewed as innately inferior. Tribalness and jungliness are mirrored against the similarly innate but refined behavior of upper castes. For many middleclass and upper-caste Bengalis, such ideal comportment is considered bhadra: civil, leisured, charitable. A bhadramahila is a gentlewoman, and much like her English counterpart, she epitomizes a refined interior comportment. Her working-class or village counterparts, marked by necessary labors, cannot remain so contained. For livelihood and survival, they spill over the lines of the parlor and courtyard, the hegemonic ambit of a civil, and indeed civilized, interior. The adivasi inhabits a space millennially marked. Uppercaste scripts of originary exclusion twine with Victorian dichotomies to be recrafted into a postcolonial and middle-class ideology of feudal privilege and power. Acts of separation are cultural and political acts.They wrench difference into the glassyand refractive surfaces of negation. Something extrudes from such a hard body of reflection, birthed by a violence of its own making. Drunk Others The road rushes past in that third dusk I have spent in North Bengal. I am being driven toward the Bhutan hills, into the heart of plantation country, in speed and silence, befitting my station as memsahib. A figure lurches onto the road, barely stumbling aside, as the car swerves, narrowly missing him. Turning back, I see that it is a man. He falls, though I am certain we have not hit him. I ask my driver, Phirku Tamang, what is wrong with the man, and he says, ‘‘Eh, memsahib, that is a matal [drunkard] from the garden. It is market day and he has had too much, you know ‘water.’ ’’ When I ask if there are many fatalities on the road because of this, Phirku laughs and says with cynical clarity. ‘‘Listen, memsahib, one thing you will learn quickly. Hum log to chagri aur kute he, we people are goats and dogs. If a car hits one of us, well, so what? One less goat to bother with. If I hit something, I go on.’’ His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror.They are mocking. I am conscious of the chilling and ironic bite of his glance. I had heard the term matal—drunkard, alcoholic, good-for-nothing— in Calcutta, and I knew it was a powerful and dominant inscription of laboring otherness. A young scion of a Marwari planting family in Assam asserts, ‘‘The problem is that these tribal people are backward and don’t want to 130

work. They are like herds of sheep and must be treated sternly. The worst thing you will find is that the men are drunkards, matal, who will use every excuse to miss work. So the manager who is mai-baap has to be alert to these tendencies . . . and problems. The women are not such a problem though. They are good disciplined workers but the men are real badmashes [ruffians].’’ This alleged proclivity to alcohol consumption ascribes a racialized and masculine otherness onto the bodies of the plantation’s working men. It is a characteristic invoked repeatedly by the managerial elite to suggest an almost innate lack of control and indiscipline. It justifies not only the need for stern disciplining within labor regimes but offers a foil to the planter’s own upright sense of sober, masculine, and ‘‘classy’’ personhood. Indeed, the postcolonial planter sense of sober civility—the careful distancing from the drinking habits of male workers—is strikingly like the British planter’s own construction of genteel Victorian-colonial masculinity, whose own foil was the dirty and ‘‘naturally’’ undisciplined habits of ‘‘native’’ labor.8 The essentialist construction of the matal, which becomes an iconic marker of postcolonial jungliness, is embedded within its own historical economy of control. Not only was the colonial government invested in revenue taxes of an increasingly lucrative commerce in alcohol, but planters used it to justify the extraction of labor power. These currencies of control went well beyond descriptive metaphor. They offer a narrative of management that constructs its other as both pathetic and dangerous, a body always in complicity with its own inherent caprice. Reasoned and rational disciplining was necessary for such irrational complicities to be brought to order. One colonial planter commenting on ‘‘customs and traditions’’ of his ‘‘native’’ workers commented that their ‘‘worst nature’’ involved a ‘‘certain amount of debauchery on every native holiday . . . of nautch [dance], carousing and drink.’’ He elaborates further: ‘‘They unquestionably lean towards a too ardent admiration for strong waters and will do any amount of extra work if there is a bottle of rum at the other end of it. For an additional few annas, the value of the rum, they would not undertake an hour’s labor beyond the regulation quantity. At times of heavy flush or a backward state of cultivation, when something must be done to increase the labor powerof the garden, brandy or rum—the more fiery the better—is the only inducement that can be held out where money fails to succeed.’’ 9 The use of alcohol as a strategy of extracting labor became a custom. Bablu Gond tells me how his grandfather had come to the garden, a three days’ walk from Chotanagpur. ‘‘All this area, memsahib,’’ he remarks, ‘‘was heavy jungle. Huts were built close together because people were so scared. Estates of a New Raj 131

The mosquitos were so big [gesturing with his hands] and the children were dying. So they did think about staying in this sasan [punishment]? But then the sahibs told him they would give them good dawai [medicine] and half a bottle of daru [liquor] would be given to each man for the day. After drinking, all they could do was work and then fall asleep. This is how all this drinking became so bad.’’ Against these lurching narratives of bodily destruction, assertions of honor and personhood are powerfully made. Mongra Oraon, a watchman, walks back with me one night from someone’s home in the village. Pointing out a pothole on the path with his flashlight, he renders a tale of humiliation. I know he is inebriated, and this is perhaps what gives him the courage to talk. He had gone to the office that afternoon and had already drunk some handia (rice beer). In the office, while picking up his wages, a senior member of the office staff mocked his drunkenness in public. Turning to me, he shouts: ‘‘Memsahib, what did he think—that I don’t have izzat [honor]? I was with my granddaughter, and he asks me this in front of her and in the office. I wash his plates and touch the remains of his food which are polluted. . . . I even massage his feet. . . . Yes, this is what I did for the chota sahib and if this babu [staff ] gave me that order, I would have to do it as well. . . . What, memsahib, am I not a person? I will never wash his dishes again. Nothing like this has been said to me in twenty-five years.’’ Mongra’s slurred outrage gestures toward the frames of consent and legitimation through which the terms of patronage, and personhood, are ordinarily understood. Izzat, or honor, is a ubiquitous and powerful building block within the edifice of patronage. When Mongra remarks that it is the public nature of the babu’s mockery that has insulted that sense of honor, he knows that his charge will be located within the mutually recognized vocabularies of patronage. It is a charge that demands that though he is prepared to render feudal service (massaging the feet of a member of the managerial elite), its agency demands a reciprocity that minimally recognizes honor and personhood. Patronage, and its feudal norms, deploys a common lexicon. When a chota sahib asserts that ‘‘maintaining face’’ while confronting a leopard is an important act of disciplined courage in front of his watching workers, then he too invokes the same syntax of honor and personhood as Mongra. Even if the grammar of honor/personhood/patronage is a performance (of obeisance or courage), it cannot be consistently fractured. A layering of such workers’ ‘‘losses of face’’ affects the managerial elite’s reputation. If its sedimentation becomes too thick, too collective, it can threaten his administration and burst into open rupture. The narratives of the matal are not, 132

then, hegemonic icons of masculine otherness. They are historicized chartings of an alterity that indicates the many faces of patronage. Marked on the body-to-be-controlled, these are stories that gesture to the shared and unequal codifications of patronage, its colonial-feudal distinctions.

act 5, scene 3 The Narrator turns up the light of her lantern. She picks up her quill pen to dip into the bottle of india ink.The light comes on dimly center stage where the figure of the two burra Sahibs can be seen. They have a decanter on the table, some pegs, glasses in hand. Suddenly from stage left, the Son of the Forest bursts onto the stage. He carries a brown paper bag. He wears frayed cotton shorts and vest, rubber flip-flops. He weaves his way around the stage to where the Narrator sits. She has turned in surprise, interrupted in her writing, as he lurches across the stage toward her. He sits down on the ground next to her, taking swigs from a bottle in his brown bag. son of the forest: (in a slurred voice, drawing out his words) Meemshhahib . . . what are you doing, meemshhahib? Put the kalam [pen] down and listen to me . . . hic. . . . Today I came back and poured kerosene on my wife’s kilo of rice that she bought from the market . . . hic. . . . She is weeping and threatening to tell the sahib. My children are hungry, I am hungry too (suddenly starting to sob) . . . but what am I to do? Meemshhahib, the daru is too much in my blood . . . and when the nights are cold, oh it warms me, it warms me. (Turning to the silent figure of the watching Sahibs with a gesture of disgust) Tomorrow the sahib will yell at me after she has gone to him, maybe he will take my wages. The Son of the Forest does not wait for a response. He picks himself up and wends his way across the stage. He pauses in front of the Sahibs sitting silently center stage and takes an exaggerated sip from the bottle in his paper bag. They shake their heads as he lurches on. One pours a drink for the other. He reaches stage left and collapses into a huddle. Four Women appear from behind the gauze curtains. They sit in a circle and, clapping softly, begin to sing what sounds like a lament. It is a song about the ravages of alcohol. They sing in one language of the garden, Sadri.The translation for the song is provided in your program. As they sing, they glance at his huddled figure with expressions of pity, anger, and sadness. The lights dim. Gendering the Racialized Boundaries Plantation women drink, and they also make and sell the customarydrink, handia (rice beer), a crucial source of Estates of a New Raj 133

income for their households. However, what is significant is the manner in which a dominant ideology inscribes a gendered essentialism of bodily indiscipline upon male adivasi workers. It is one example of the ways in which gender fissures and defines the perceptions and enactments of difference, power, and status. Consider, again, the bungalow memsahib resplendent in her cultivated interior. Her placement ‘‘inside’’ is critical, for it shapes the public face of the planter sahib’s status and power. Her relative invisibility to the working community throws into relief the definitive public characteristics of the planter’s masculine vitality. It is a vitality whose authority is underscored because of this gendering of entitlement. Within the small world of the plantocracy, her location of privileged and refined marginality narrates the dialectical effects of a rule that is eminently and splendidly paternal. Village women, and men, will comment frankly about these terms of distance. For many, a memsahib or a maiji (wife of a staff member) should recognize these lines of status and constraint. It is the middle of the plucking season, the height of premonsoon summer, and I wander through the village toward the ‘‘division’’ section of the plantation where new tea nurseries are being planted. A young Nepali man who is helping the supervision smiles as I approach. ‘‘Eh, memsahib, why don’t you have an umbrella? It will get very hot soon,’’ he says. Since it is good practical advice, I tell him that I am not staying long and would be more worried about a deluge of rain. He interrupts: ‘‘But you should be careful, you will become darker. Already, I see the difference.’’ Reminded immediately of an earlier comment made by a planter associate, I quickly ask him why this was important. What did it matter that I was to become ‘‘darker’’? ‘‘Hoh, hoh,’’ he responds reprovingly, ‘‘you must remember that you are a memsahib.The maijis and memsahibs all have umbrellas so they do not become kala [black].You also should be careful.’’ When I tell him that women fieldworkers also carry their large sturdy umbrellas as common-sense protection against a high sun and they don’t appear to be concerned about their complexion, he responds with some irritation: ‘‘Memsahib, what I am trying to say is that you are not one of them. If you become dark, it is not a good thing.Why are the other memsahibs carrying theirs?’’ Firmly put in my place, I am made aware of the gendered and racialized perception of my status: its necessary fixity, its honor. The perception of skin ‘‘color’’ couples with gender and status in inextricable ways. The umbrella becomes a symbol of protection in multiple ways, an insignia of izzat 134

and location indeed. Consider how quickly a worker will snap his umbrella shut if the sahib is walking by. Consider its significations of royalty and power. Though not markedly ‘‘darker’’ or ‘‘lighter’’ than before, my movement across the terrain of power was being traced upon my appearance (‘‘Already, I see the difference’’). Women from various working communities will comment on the ‘‘fair’’ or ‘‘dark’’ complexions of maijis. Isolated in the clustered arc of staff cottages, these women are rarely seen. Their children play soccer in a large field separating the main road from their homes, and they will occasionally be glimpsed taking walks with friends within the small perimeter of their children’s play. Some women who live in the villages near the cottages will comment on the beauty (almost always defined by complexion) and fashionable styles of younger wives and daughters. One evening, Julena Lohra, whose house is close to this area, tells me with satirical flair: ‘‘They come out only in the evening wearing their saris and ornaments as if they are in Calcutta.They parade up and down and look past us if we are walking by.There are some maijis who are very nice and treat their basha (cottage) servants well. One is very beautiful, she has skin as white as milk.’’ These commentaries followed one scathing observation about how these same maijis quickly shut their windows in order to evade the gaze of workers returning home from the end of a day’s work: ‘‘It is as if our nazar [look/ attention] will turn them black.’’ For many women workers, the maijis’ shuttered windows suggest a symbolic shielding against the defiling blackness of their very being (transmittable by even a gaze). Their commentaries underscore with a dramatic clarity connections made among status, gender, and race.The feminine, interior world symbolized by the closed windows present an image of peaceful domesticity. It also appears to those watching from an exterior and laboring perspective that the maijis shutter themselves against the threat of an ontological blackness, a bodily defilement of their very status. The gendered veiling of social distance is presented dramatically during the most important Bengali ritual of the year, the Durga Puja. In the large open building adjacent to the arc of cottages the maijis make their only collective public appearance of the year during this panplantation celebration (administered by the staff ).They sit to the left of the goddess Durga, hidden behind a screen, in contrast to their visible husbands, brothers, and sons, who supervise the festivities. Veiled behind the screen, the maijis become symbolic shadows of their menfolk. Like their superior sisters, the bungalow memsahibs, they too become (momentarily) receptacles of honor, vessels of status for their families and communities. Estates of a New Raj 135

act 5, scene 4 FourWomen emerge from behind the gauze backdrop stage left.Theyare the same dancers from prior scenes. All four carry parasols. The sounds in the background are repetitive, mechanical, and strange. After a few minutes, the audience recognizes that they are the sounds of doors and windows shut, bolts being drawn.Then the sounds of the madol (drum) begin: dham dham dham.Colored spotlights are placed behind the dancers and their shadows against the gauze are elongated and colorful. They leap around their section of the stage with great athleticism. Two pose as a planter and his wife. Their faces are painted in white and black. The dance is an energetic parody of obeisance and mockery. They open, they twirl, they close their parasols.10 As they dance, from stage left, a figure emerges. She is a goddess. She wears the costume of a bharata natyam dancer, but with one difference: she wears a mouth veil. Her eyes are characteristically elongated and huge. In her left hand, she carries a sickle. It is held at waist height. She holds her right finger out in a famous mythological gesture of Krishna’s: the sudarsan chakra. A spotlight plays on her motionless and watchful figure. Only her eyes move. The dancers complete their choreography of leaps. The lights dim. The dancers exit, shadows aswirl, behind the gauze backdrop.

Relations of Pollution In the tea industry, it is entirely Indian and drawn from the so-called bhadralok class, except for posts of sardar. Bhadralok means respectable parentage. It corresponds to what in the U.K. is known as the ‘‘black coat’’ class.11 The many government offices in Calcutta are more cheaply conducted by babus under English management.They are a very different class of peoples to have dealings with and surround themselves in a mysterious atmosphere of importance, pleasing enough to their own dignity and detestable to the public.12

The plantation’s clerical staff, known as babus, assist the managers with duties primarily in the factory and the office. Three staff members, known as garden babus, supervise field production, taking orders directly from the manager to the head overseers. Unlike the planters who routinely shuttle among plantations as they attain seniority, staff members inherit jobs from their fathers and remain in the plantation over generations. Hired during the colonial period, in a practice common to colonial business establishments in Calcutta, most of the office staff are Bengali.Usually men from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, the British recruited them in the nineteenth 136

century to do office work. Many contemporary staff members come from similar upper-caste backgrounds of Indian maliks (owners). A tightly knit community, some of these multigenerational families are also quite prosperous. They own petrol pumps, movie theaters, and equipment stores in nearby townships. As the epigraphs suggest, the apellation babu is embedded in the cultural taxonomies of British colonialism. For British administrators whowere dependent on this emerging middle-class to lubricate the cogs of daily business, the babu soon inhabited a space of caricatured essentialisms; innate intelligence, a bookish ‘‘effeminacy,’’ and laziness emerged as enduring ascriptions of these ‘‘native gentlemen.’’ Immortalized by Rudyard Kipling, the ‘‘Bengali Babu’’ became the archetype of an emasculated colonial subject.13 Contrasted to the virile masculinity of Pathans of the northwest frontier, Bengali ‘‘effeminacy’’ also came to define the typologies of ‘‘martial’’ and ‘‘nonmartial’’ races in the subcontinent. Within the plantation, the inscription provided a sharp contrast to the bodily and manual laboring of the lower caste and adivasi workers.14 An elderly, retired staff member in the plantation recalls his training under an English planter, Mr. Mortimer, who always carried a large whip. His memory of this striding planter is uncannily resonant of the old woman worker’s memory of another colonial planter’s roar. Mr. Mortimer, mounted on a horse, he notes, ‘‘looked like a giant, and we never spoke unless spoken to. He gave me my first job.’’ Apart from working in the office, the social distance between colonial sahib and babu, indexed within the transparent codes of colonial racism, was assiduously maintained. Yet, according to one Bengali senior planter whose father had entered managerial ranks in the 1930s, the distinctions are ‘‘artificial.’’ He argues that in the contemporary period, the plantation has two central strata: those of the sahib/babu and the ‘‘working class.’’ His analytic implicitly privileges an ethnic connection between the contemporary planter and his staff. Interestingly, this particular sahib discursively attempts to erase the status and class distinctions that continue to exist between the two strata of the plantation elite. His remarks index the permeability of the boundary between the strata, as the young planting code charts a new genealogy from its roots within the staff cadre.15 The social distance between sahib and staff is still maintained at Sarah’s Hope, though the texture of this distance is marked differently in the postindependence context. As in the colonial period, informal socializing between sahib and babu is rare, despite the fact that two senior planters at Sarah’s Hope are from a long staff lineage. In Calcutta, one senior planter Estates of a New Raj 137

whose managerial lineage stretches back six decades remarks, ‘‘In the British period, the babus were a different social strata which was racially distinct. Today the gap between the babu and manager is still maintained. What is still maintained is the colonial culture of management.’’ Because of the planter’s dependence on the staff for daily administration, the separation is not as palpable within the office. However, babus have their own staff club and organize some of the important Bengali religious festivities, such as the Durga Puja. In some cases, assistant managers will participate in these occasions. Nonetheless, these schisms of status and power between the two strata of the plantation elite index the manner in which ‘‘colonial cultures of management’’ continue to have enduring salience in the plantation. Though the staff cadre continues to be dominated by Bengalis, a few literate members of the adivasi and Nepali communities have climbed into the much-coveted clerical positions. At Sarah’s Hope, unusual for Dooars plantations, three staff positions are occupied by members from the Catholic Oraon and Santhal communities.Yet only one of these families resides in the staff compound.The Santhal staff member lives in the factory line, after his cottage in the division section of the plantation was stoned repeatedly. Apart from office work, these new babus do not socialize frequently with the Bengali staff cadre and their families. What were the terms of distinction created and maintained on the other boundary of the staff elite? How is the construction of a superior babu identity perceived and constructed both by the communities of workers who border the staff compound and by members of these families? According to one prominent union leader, staff-worker relationships continue to index historical distinctions. He notes, ‘‘During the era of the English companies, the staff would not mix with us at all. Like the sahibs, they had fear and distaste of us. But in the more desi bagans [‘‘of-thecountry’’ gardens],16 the babus would mix with us more. This garden’s customs are more angrezi [English], so the same distance remains. Here, these old things are alive.’’ However, a few staff sons, some of whom are unemployed, remain involved in union politics both within the plantation and in the nearby township, serving as an important link between local-level union leaders and the wider political activities in Siliguri and the rest of North Bengal. Most staff families adhere to upper-caste traditions, particularly such members of the older generation who follow strict codes of pollution and commensality. Adivasi and lower-caste workers, who work in the staff cottages as cooks, will comment on how they are not permitted to touch certain 138

cooking utensils and vessels and, in some instances, not approach the small altars in the house. Ritual feudalisms are augmented by servitude on the land. Staff families who settled on the plantation were given large plots of land for khetibari (cultivation). In an arrangement kindred to surrounding peasant subinfeudation, babus hired workers to till the land as adhiars (sharecroppers).While these extra holdings technically belonged to the landowner (the tea company), customary labor-on-land resulted in land ‘‘inheritance’’ from one generation of staff to the next.17 However, with plantation extensions, land used for private cultivation has now returned to the company, and these practices of labor extraction are no longer common. Because of the nature of plantation clerical work (organizing leaf weighment, accounting, and garden administration), most staff members are in consistent and dailycontact with workers, more so than the planter.Theirencounters are confined, however, to administrative operations and distance is assiduously maintained. Nonetheless, a daily interface perhaps helps to explain the focused racialized discourse that delineates the terms of social distancing. Touching Bodies and Ghinna It is through this quotidian interface that one demarcating category of pollution emerges within various commentaries about these discourses of negative difference.The term, ghinna, connotes both repulsion and disdain. It is recognized through bodily acts.When I meet Mina Mahato for the first time in her house, soon after I have ‘‘settled’’ in she asks me my ‘‘title’’ or surname.When I tell her, she exclaims, ‘‘So you are Bangali [Bengali] and bahman [Brahmin].’’ She offers me lal cha in a steel tumbler. Lal cha (red tea), as it is known in the villages, is made from the remains of processed tea in the factories, which is given to the workers as a portion of their ration allotments. When I ask her how she understands this, she is blunt. ‘‘Look, memsahib, don’t mind me. You don’t seem to have any shame about mixing here, so I will just tell you. You Bengalis don’t even want to come near us.’’ Some of the women from the village who have come to assuage their curiosity, sip their tea and nod in agreement. I am puzzled, intuitively aware that for her, ‘‘social distance’’ is created literally through bodily proximity and space. ‘‘I will tell you what I mean,’’ she continues. ‘‘Sometimes a couple of babus will come to our houses.This is if they are close to my son or husband. If any of us stands too close, they will tell us to move away. I remember once we were returning from the town after going to the market and as usual the bus was very crowded. So I was carrying my son in one arm and my things in the other when his foot touched the knee of a babu who was sitting down. It was a mistake. I don’t know why he got so angry but he started giving me Estates of a New Raj 139

gali [insults]. He started saying all sorts of bad things. I was with a friend and we were tired and we got really mad. We started screaming and told him that if he did not shut up we would take off our slippers and slap him. He became quiet quickly. But I never forgot that. My son is only a child.We were not taking his seat. He had ghinna [repulsion] because we were mazdoor [workers] and adivasi. You people are a big caste, this is why.’’ Bodies thus script the quotidian languages of separation and status. Daily memories of seemingly insignificant and fleeting encounters build up perceptions of power and its deferrals. Connections that bridge these separations are gendered ones. As Mina notes in her commentary, some members of staff families (generically known as babus, even if they are not directly employed by the plantation) do have friendships with men from the plantation’s villages. These are crossclass and masculine kinships that can create political alliances for union mobilization. Links between union politics in regional centers like Jalpaiguri and Siliguri are brokered through these alliances. I am not privy to any open discussion about these alliances and stay away. Stories about union politics are filtered through women’s observations, and some discussions with union leaders prove fruitful. I want, simply, to avoid the familiar paternal condescension and disapproval of men from ‘‘my’’ own community. When I meet some individually, or very rarely when I am invited to someone’s home, there is both warmth and curiosity.Yet an unease with my connections to sahibs and transgressions on the other side of the fence remain a constant subtext.One day, I am caught in Bhagirathi’s kitchen while she cooks dinner. It is an encounter that embarrasses the man (a member of the staff ) who walks around the corner to buy some Bhutan rum from Bhagirathi’s store. I am sitting on a gunny sack, playing with a goat’s ears. We mumble pleasantries. He looks aghast. About six months after Mina’s commentary about ghinna and my encounter in Bhagirathi’s kitchen, I accompany Munnu and Anjali to Jalpaiguri.This is a rare outing for both, and theyare dressed in their finest clothes, Munnu is splendid in bright pink. They instruct me not to wear my usual uniform of baggy skirt and shirt.They will be embarrassed, they say, of my naked legs (‘‘We feel shame for you’’). I am appropriately dressed in a salwar kameez. As we wait for the bus, Munnu, who works in the neighboring plantation, Kolpara, asks whether I have noticed that the staff at this plantation were laughing at me when I had visited her natal home. I have not been aware of this mockery, the ‘‘filtering out’’ process has already begun, and her question rankles. ‘‘It is because of what you look like, didi, I think that 140

is why they are laughing.’’ Again, I am made aware of a body politics. I wince and don’t probe further. I tell her that she must make sure that we don’t walk in front of Kolpara’s staff cottages again because I will retaliate and say something. ‘‘Oh, didi, don’t mind,’’ she says consolingly, ‘‘it is probably because they have shame that you are mixing with us kala aadmi [black people], we jungli and garib log [wild and poor people].’’ In one instant, I am forced to shift from my own self-centered analysis and its feminized unease. There is a body politics here beyond any individual zone of pride. Munnu’s comment is satirical and self-deprecating. It is also brilliant because it captures, in one fell swoop, the multiple codes of hierarchy and distance upon which the plantation builds its edifice of power.Combining in one unravelable weave are significations of race (black people) and colonially inflected notions of primitiveness (jungli) with class markers (poor people). The bus arrives before I can respond, and we clamber on board for the almost two-hour journey into town. Munnu nudges me as people stare. I pinch her elbow and we burst out laughing. The cultural politics of babu-dom do not mirror the planter’s core of power, though theyenact the second tierof its administrative rule. Relations with contemporary planters, though ethnically contiguous, remain divided by social schisms created through the colonial period. Class and status distinctions, though not as clearly coded on colonial racial terms, are enacted rigidly. Social distance with adivasi workers is maintained through customary upper-caste understandings of pollution. These are practices grafted through a racialized discourse that defines a bodilyontologyof higher status. The term ghinna offered one manifestation of these acts of distance. Jungli otherness, constructed through the staff’s cultural politics, suggests one refraction of the planter’s own terms of cultivated selfhood. Ghinna is a trope that can trace the longest span between the cultivated center of cottage and bungalow. It is a marking that settles the jungli into the black margins of a social periphery.

act 5, scene 5 The Narrator turns up her lantern’s light where she sits, stage right. She has been writing, and she puts down her quill to look at the audience with an expression of regret, puzzlement, and anger. The figure of the Goddess, in her dancing costume, sickle in one hand, emerges from your right. She holds a pirhi, which she places on the ground and sits on. She moves her mouth veil to one side. A light Estates of a New Raj 141

focuses on her. She and the Narrator sit on either end of the horseshoe stage. Alice is present but silent, only a dark shadow in the background. she: I have another riddle for you, Alice. Or for you, Goddess, with your sickle and veil. It comes in my worst dreams, those that edge into terror. It is like this.On a mahogany table is a box made of lacquer and enamel. It is as large as a coffin. I reach over and untie the strings that hold this box. I find in it . . . a dark corpse. In its belly, I find another box, another body inside. Boxes all the way down, each beautifully inlaid, each holding its treasure of dead flesh. In the end I am left with a midget whose belly contains a box the size of a pin. Even my long false nails cannot open its lid. . . . I try and try. I use their edges, but my cuticles bleed. I think I will find a jewel, a ruby, after all this searching through the clammy entrails of death. But there is only silence around me, and my bleeding desperate hands.What is in that last box? Why is there such silence? goddess: (reciting as if she is reading a poem) ‘‘Those who see won’t say anything. . . . He who opens his mouth will die. This has happened before. Will happen again. Once in a while, it is necessary to rend the sky with leaping flames and screams of the dying, just to remind the harijans and untouchables that government laws, appointment of officers and constitutional decrees are nothing. Rajputs remain Rajputs, Brahmins remain Brahmins and Dushad-Chamar-Ganju-Dhobi remain lower than Brahmin-Kayasth-Rajput-Bhumihar-Kurmi. The Rajput or Brahmin or Kayasth or Bhumihar or Yadav or Kurmi is, in places, as poor as or even poorer, than the harijan. But theyare not tossed into the flames because of their caste.The fire god, having tasted the flesh of forest-dwelling blackskinned outcasts during the burning of the Khandav forest, is fond of the taste of the untouchable poor.’’ 18 The Narrator gazes intensely at the figure of the sitting Goddess. She looks even more puzzled. The Goddess’s words do not seem to satisfy her. She clutches her head for a moment, picks up the quill, and starts to write as the spotlight on her fades. The Goddess looks over, shrugs, picks up her pirhi and moves offstage.

Men at Work, Indirect Rule The postcolonial plantocracyconstitutes a tinyelite of managers who are assisted by a small cadre of staff. As a small and tightly knit core, they enact an ideology of ‘‘cultivation’’ that is not only about literal labor on the landscape but also about the more ineffable and symbolic constructions of difference and power.19 From the very beginning, however, the politics of patronage 142

through which these differences were charted had to rely on the ‘‘consent’’ of a small stratum of men from the communities of new im/migrants.This new class of workers were the sirdars, created to serve as the first link between foreign planters and their new workforce. They were sent back to home villages to recruit and to organize the new batches of workers. Because they ‘‘had the ear of the sahib,’’ they had enough ‘‘power to make it decidedly uncomfortable for any individual who sets their authority at defiance.’’ 20 In the most significant way, these newly created headmen 21 constituted the political fulcrum of the plantation’s own version of indirect rule. In some plantations, recruitment sirdars became field and factory overseers. In others, an entirely newclass of garden sirdars were created. As sirdars established themselves with their recruits’ batches, they also began to occupy supervisory positions in the factory and the fields of labor. They begin to constitute the overseer strata of the plantation field and factory. Planters paid commissions to recruitment sirdars who were also responsible for wage payments.22 The political economies of indirect rule and consents to the regimes of wage-labor constituted the coin of the realm. For the theaters of patronage and the control of large, displaced and often recalcitrant workforce, it was a small price to pay. If the plantation’s new headmen agreed to bow to the planter-lord in exchange for money and authority in the emerging villages and labor lines, the planter-lord also relied on another class of workers to act as a network of surveillance. Chowkidars (watchmen) were hired ‘‘to observe and report the movements of all bad characters within his locality and the arrival of suspicious characters in the neighborhood. . . . Any incidents of Murder, Rape, Dacoity, Robbery, Theft, Riot and Administering Steepifying Drugs’’ 23 were to be noted. Though the sirdari system of recruitment and commission payments is no longer in place, its effects are palpable. In significant ways, the sirdar’s status and authority has transformed into other positions of power within the work hierarchy. The netas or union leaders are situated in the first tier of this postcolonial labor elite. They have inherited the mantle of the colonial sirdar’s status and embody the upper layer of the overseer cadre. Significantly, the more prominent trade union leaders create a buffer zone of patronage between planters and workers. Trade union activism in the plantation region has been the single most important political transformation of the postindependence period.24 Through its umbilical links with state and national party politics, it has shaped the political landscape of North Bengal. However, there is no visibly Estates of a New Raj 143

radical or vibrant union politics connecting these large political claims to the local level within the plantation. Since the radical ruptures of the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s, union activity has been formalized through a communist-run state structure. All major political parties, dominated by the West Bengal’s ruling party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Congress, sponsor and support local-level unions. It is beyond the scope of mydiscussion to map the complex relationship between local level unions and state-level party politics. Suffice it to say that the political and cultural distance between state-level policy making (dominated by Bengalis) and local-level union organizing is great. Each plantation has its own union culture, and histories and degrees of activism and ‘‘agitation’’ (in local parlance) vary considerably. I state this at the outset in order to underscore the complex histories of the larger political universe within which this particular plantation’s political culture is embedded. In addition, though I argue that union leaders create a political culture of subpatronage, my assertion is based on the micropolitics of specificity. It is a description and argument that stems from numerous cynical commentaries by ordinary women and men workers, who themselves assert the political alliances between certain union leaders and planters. In response to general questions about union activity, men and women workers repeat a folk saying in the plantation’s villages: ‘‘Ghora ka lagam muh me he; aur log ka lagam, poket me he’’ (The reigns of a horse are in his mouth, and the reigns of people are in their pockets). I meet Peter Minj, a charismatic and prominent member of a trade union. He tells me that the burra sahib had already told him that I was coming and that he should take care of me. The mai-baap has a long reach and wears many faces. I apprehend that Peter’s paternalism is situated in a larger network of surveillance. He takes me for numerous excursions but gets exasperated when Anjali or some of my other women associates accompany us. When I assert that my research is about ‘‘women,’’ he sounds encouraging. However, as I become increasingly uneasy with surveillance, and move more completely into the worlds of women workers, Peter is nonplussed. When we encounter him in the villages, he mocks the women who accompany me as ‘‘memsahib’s reeesurch ashishtants.’’ They shake their fists at him with knowing humor and I laugh. The subtext of our laughing thrustand-parry is clear. Soon, Peter’s flamboyant dramas of welcome are a thing of the past. Mantles of Inheritance Genealogies of union leaders can be traced from the colonial past. Notably, the personal histories of some of the more powerful leaders follow lines of direct descent. These ‘‘mantles of inheritance’’ 144

are historically transformed, but they are living residues of that same past. For example, the colonial sirdar’s name may be commemorated in the memory spaces of the plantation’s villages and fields. I am told, for example, in one of my first walks through some of the villages that one stretch of labor lines is called the Japiyasirdar Line. Within the field itself, tea blocks are occasionally named after a sirdar. Descendents of these lineages can inherit the old mantles of authority through histories of legitimation, from above and below. Because the social distance between planters and the mass of workers is still stringently maintained, a sirdari family’s customary access to the planter’s attention and ‘‘favor’’ is significant, since it charts the routes of familiarity. At Sarah’s Hope, two of the four most powerful leaders in the cpi(m) and Congress-sponsored unions are direct descendents of well-known sirdars. In one case, a leader spoke of his great grandfather, Ganesh Sirdar,25 a founding fatherof the Factory Line: ‘‘He came from Nepal, memsahib, when there were very few people in the bagan. In the 1890s, it must have been. Other sirdars were angryat the power he had. It is said hewould snatch other sirdar’s workers on horseback. His son, Siva Sirdar, even visited Calcutta in 1923.’’ During the colonial period, the customary payment of commission to sirdars for their challans (worker batches) and his disbursement of wages, constituted the economic terms of subpatronage.There was ‘‘no uniformity about giving commissions to garden sirdars. . . . A garden sirdar usually has 40–50 laborers under him.’’ 26 According to Ganesh Sirdar’s descendent, these commissions were paid by Sarah’s Hope’s planters as late as 1960. Most importantly, he also asserted that sirdari ‘‘commissions’’ have been translated into payoffs for union leaders. Another union leader remembers his father’s position as a community leader who held a khawai (feast) every year in which he gave workers their Puja season bonus.27 The feast was funded by the planter who might have made a brief appearance. Because of demographic changes and unemployment, the union leader is a postcolonial rendition of the colonial sirdar. He, too, is a broker of employment. Men and women, desperate for a permanent job have to appeal to him first. Jobs are acquired and a lucrative black-market economy thrives in the villages, and union leaders can earn a sizeable commission from buyer and seller. The political economy of legitimation is thus constructed through a cash economy. Bonuses in kind and under-the-table payoffs lubricate the wheels of postcolonial patronage. Somra, another union leader characterized his ancestor as a ‘‘head of department,’’ an apt description (in English) of his own position as a plantaEstates of a New Raj 145

tion neta. Somra’s direct access to the planter has led to extra privileges, and visible signs of higher status for his family. His position as community leader is visible in the layout of his house: a large courtyard, kitchen garden, and electric power lines. Since other houses do not have electricity, this is an open signal of the planter’s favor. A gravel path, painted blue, winds through an open gateway into an annex with verandah and cane chairs. For Somra, his imposing residence and its apartness, gesture toward a special dispensation. His sense of pride in his residential distinction is clear: ‘‘If you walk around anywhere in the labor lines, you won’t find a home like this. I am a union leader. I believe you have to do work yourself. I do my work myself. I have earned this.The manager tells everyone, ‘Look at how Somra keeps his house. Learn from him.’ ’’ His own self-representation also suggests a striking reinvention of personhood. He makes himself in the cultivated image of the planter. ‘‘Look, memsahib, I changed. We did not know what curtains were before. I saw that the burra bungalow had tobs [plant pots]. So I wanted tobs. I bought them and painted them and put plants in them. I liked chairs, so I got cane chairs.The problem is now that people don’t care that everything is chowpat [upside down]. There is no sense of competition. If he [any worker] looks at my house and thinks, ‘Well, why can’t I be like that,’ and then works to do that, this would be good. But now, people are too lazy. They drink, they don’t save. Nothing.’’ In this symbolic mimesis of mai-baap style, Somra links his own sense of status and legitimacy to his own ability to advance himself in a strikingly individualistic and entrepreneurial manner. Signs of imitation are also then signals of individual will and power. While this leader’s sense of superiority is mimetically coded, his power encompasses the wider universe of political institutions. This wider political legitimation of various unions through a state government, itself run by the cpi(m), leads to a manager’s dependence on the loyalty and acumen of a handful of union leaders. If he cannot ensure a threshold of compliance, union leaders will appeal to wider regional and state-level mobilization against management. In that light, this new ‘‘big man’’ is different from his sirdar ancestor in one critical way. He can, through the state’s political machinery, challenge the planter’s enactment of absolute power. As a result, managerial strategies involve a careful balancing act. The planter placates leaders by granting them behind-the-scenes favors but also flexes his muscles when necessary. In some cases, such a political balancing act is thrown awry by union leaders who do not compromise. Such leaders, who have braved police guns or shouted down a sahib, are remembered with some awe by ordinary workers and villagers. 146

Yet such legendary challenges are a thing of the past, and ordinary workers remain considerably dependent on union leaders for permanent and casual employment, conflict arbitration, and wage negotiations at the district level. In this web of obligation and favor, leaders create a powerful level of subpatronage. Such a sense of authority is explicitly stated by one: ‘‘I am like the manager here. People will come to me first and I will do phesla [adjudication]. Like if someone is having problem getting a labor quarter, or casual work.The sahib has given me that responsibility. Only if it is a really difficult case will I take it to the manager’s office. Everyone comes through me. In this way, I run the garden.’’ Ethnic Cleavages Selection and maintenance of power within the broadest nexus of ‘‘indirect rule’’ cuts across caste cleavages, though some basic patterns of preference can be gleaned. Field overseers, the daffadars, are from various adivasi and Nepali communities and some are bhagats (faith healers/doctors) and thus socially prominent in the villages. Many of the watchmen, often the sahib’s informants, are Nepali. Managers will characterize Nepalis as ‘‘braver’’ than their adivasi counterparts. It is a positive and essentialist ascription that has resulted in this community’s employment in factory and other substaff positions. Assorted factory jobs include carpentry, machine repair, and clerical jobs. While carpenters and electricians come from a variety of communities, the head mechanic and his team, whose task is to maintain and repair factory machinery, are all Nepali Kami. The Kami are a dominant blacksmith caste within the wider Nepali community of workers, who repair tools and hammer out sickles and knives in the villages. This customary tool work has translated into some assignments in the upkeep of the factory’s machines. In addition, managers generally view Nepalis as a disciplined and hardworking community. These are generalizations that also include an ascription of a ‘‘fierce’’ courage. Perhaps this essentialist ascription of valor explains why they are employed as factory chowkidars. As the surveillance team of the mai-baap, watchmen have been one of the most important arms of plantation law and order.Though they are dispersed throughout the plantation, it is the office and factory watchmen who guard against thefts of tea from the factory by organized gangs. In one dramatic incident of such a theft, factory chowkidars turned on the siren, and proceeded with khukris (traditional Nepali knives) aloft to chase the alleged thieves across the factory roof. In so doing, the Nepali chowkidar who related this story to me creates for himself a heroic image of courage. It buttresses the dominant and favorable inscription of an essential bravery. Not surprisingly, these inscriptions of discipline with their sugEstates of a New Raj 147

gestion of fierce energy are historically configured. Colonial ascriptions of Nepali fortitude and valor creates the foil for the postcolonial planter’s own construction of that most iconic of internal others: the adivasi worker whose location on the lowest link of the laboring chain comes as no surprise. Similarly,Christian communities in the plantation have garnered some of the better jobs in the factory because of their greater access to mission-run schools. Literacy is rare among most communities, and higher secondaryschool education even rarer. The missionya (person of the mission) has historically had access to local schools run by Catholic priests and nuns, but all the Christian denominations have encouraged grassroots literacy training within the villages. This basic education has helped missionya men garner overseer jobs such as that of the boidar (time keeper/attendance taker) or factory sirdar. In two cases, schooling and college education have facilitated the entry of two missionya men into the staff cadre. Just as the Nepali man enjoys the positive ascription of vigorous courage, the missionya incur positive comments from the planter.There is a common perception, for instance, about missionya ‘‘cleanliness,’’ their overall discipline, and infrequent drinking. One assistant manager focuses specifically on their ‘‘clean and educated appearance.’’ He remarks: ‘‘These Christians are not drunkards like the rest. They are cleaner and more respectful, and make more disciplined, good workers.’’ The sahib’s perceptions of an almost intrinsic missionya cleanliness is laced again with practices from the colonial period. A parish priest’s recommendations helped place one worker in an overseer position. Though patronage of this sort is no longer explicit at Sarah’s Hope, the prominence of the missionya in numerous labor elite positions is striking. Of eight factory overseers, six are either Roman Catholic or German Lutheran. Nepalis and missionya are located within an intricate ideological web of internal othering, one that constructs degrees of distance between the communities of men who become eliteworkers and the constituency upon whom they will exercise the mai-baap’s command. It is a continuing and subtle ideological game of divide and rule, and although it is not entirely accepted by any of the communities in question, it nonetheless underwrites their rise within the social organization of labor. Though a sahib’s policy of ethnic divide and rule between Christians and non-Christians and between Nepalis and adivasis has been used in the past, it is difficult to make panplantation generalizations on how this has influenced daily labor disciplines. A sense of cultural superiority vis à vis adivasi communities is shared by upper-caste planters, Nepalis, and the ‘‘general-caste’’ communities that view themselves as more ‘‘Hindu’’ than others.While this sensibility is pal148

pable in rituals, marriage rules, and within issues of commensality, a common working experience obscures much of the ethnic and caste differences in the field. If missionya men dominate as factory sirdars, their wives and daughters are field pluckers. If a Nepali chowkidar is also a union leader, many members of his community are daily-rated field and factory workers.

In the ‘‘Big House’’ There is, however, a small coterie of daily-rated workers (named in field musters) who have a different, indeed intimate, access to the sahibs. These are the maids, watchmen, gardeners, and cooks who serve in the bungalows, bashas, and hospitals.The burra bungalow has a domestic staff of three malis (gardeners), two ayahs, one baburji (cook), two assistant cooks, and two chowkidars. This staff retinue is augmented when large-scale entertaining occurs. Similarly, each staff cottage has a gardener and cook paid by the company. While kothi-ka-kam (work of the bungalow) is not an elite position in terms of supervisory status or wages, it is still a position that gives workers the most intimate and immediate access to the planter and his family. Depending on the proclivities of either, bonds of loyalty do develop, and favors are bestowed. Many bachelor assistant managers are served by personal servants rather like butlers. One assistant manager arranged to have the man whom he called ‘‘my Jeeves’’ transferred with him when he was posted to other plantations. However, some bungalow workers consider these bungalow tasks an inferior servitude. A gendered hierarchyof status is apparent. Bungalowchefs, who plan menus and supervise cooking, particularly in the big bungalow, sit at the apex of the status pyramid.Valets and kitchen helpers, young boys or men, perch on its second tier.Women do the more ‘‘menial’’ jobs, cleaning, sweeping, washing (dishes), and babysitting. Because this gendered hierarchy of servitude within the plantation-bungalow household is marked, women who consider themselves a bara jat (big/superior community) will simply refuse to work inside. Meena Mahato, who is a Kumhar and from a general caste, remarked explicitly: ‘‘I would rather work in the garden with my own strength and skill. In the bungalow, I might have to wash their underclothes. This is izzat ki bat [a matter of honor]. I would not do it even if it is easier than work in the field.’’ 28 Women who are summoned to the bungalow for domestic work have already gathered information about the memsahib.There are no secrets from the village. Is she tough? Is she stingy? Will she give you food if minding Estates of a New Raj 149

the child stretches through the night? Does she make you shine a copper bowl twenty times? If a woman is frail and in ill health, the bungalow job is desired. Anjali, who has had a serious gastrointestinal condition and is still recuperating, has had to leave fieldwork due to her poor health. Because she has a permanent job, inherited from her father, who worked in the burra bungalow for years, the manager’s decision to permit her to continue in her father’s line suggests the benevolence of access. She squats on the back steps of the kitchen and sifts through grains of rice. She remarks, ‘‘I was a very good plucker. I had a good reputation with the overseers. But when I got ill, I could not go on. They could have put me in the lata kam [light work], with the old women and children, but my father spoke to the manager directly. That is how I got this job. It has more rest, but I am very alone here. This bungalow has just remained empty for so long. So I come, dust the place, and then leave. Or I sit for hours and my eyes go back in my head. Look at my eyes. I worry so much. Anita and Rajiv [her young children], what will they do?’’ She rubs her eyes wearily.They have the sad transparencies of endurance. We sit quietly. Her fingers whisper over the small grains of rice.

Overseeing the Field Though the location of the factory’s labor elites within the immediate radius of planter power informs their own sense of prestige and status, it is the labor elite within field operations upon whom the planter remains most dependent.This is for two reasons. In the first instance, distance from the factory and office, plus the dispersion of a large workforce in a variety of different tasks, means that planters and administrative staff must rely upon overseers at the grass roots of field operations to carry out their commands. Secondly, even though the garden staff and assistant managers circulate through the plantation on their motorcycles for spot inspections, it is impossible for a small managerial elite to be aware of every detail of daily labor deployment and practice.Consequently, a chain of command beginning with the garden babu and ending with the daffadar is critical for daily field work. The munshi is the most senior overseer and has ‘‘some degree of literacy as well as character, influence and experience in the control of labor.’’ 29 On the supervisory chain of command, he sits directly below the two administrative staff-in-charge, the garden babus of the main plantation. Planning and deployment of various field tasks are relayed directly to him from the staff. Experience as a worker from the lowest level of the labor chain, skills 150

in all field tasks, and basic literacy are the explicit criteria for holding this office. Time-tested loyalty to the planter’s order is also a prerequisite. An assistant manager remembered one munshi: ‘‘That man was great. He was my man. He told me everything. I know everyone called him my chamcha [informant], but he was a good man. He reported everything to me.’’ This possessive ascription—‘‘my man’’—was corroborated by a leader who, in a union meeting, asserted a multiple possessive: the ‘‘munshi, boidar [time keeper], and daffadars are the company’s men.’’ This union leader was also a senior boidar. In a vivid metaphor invoking an almost princely representation of labor rule, one assistant manager described the munshi’s position within the overall chain of command: ‘‘He is the driverof mychariot. . . . It is a twenty-horse chariot where he holds the reigns. And I hold him.’’ Situated directly below the munshi are two boidars, who bicycle in at the beginning of each shift to mark the muster (labor roll), and corroborate their figures with those of the munshi. The boidar, in crisp shorts and shirt, with a large conspicuous watch on his wrist, is a visible figure of authority. The watch and small notebook combine in a symbolic coupling of one aspect of plantation disciplines: the management of time. One of the boidars, a union leader, checks muster around the bungalows on his scooter; a vehicular connection to his assistant managers, who wheel through the field on scooters and motorcycles. Four chaprasis supervise the last and largest cadre of overseers, the daffadars. In the colonial period, sirdars employed daffadars directly to organize their work batches, and planters noted that as a ‘‘consequence nine-tenths were useless for work.’’ 30 As ‘‘foremen of gangs,’’ they were controlled by chaprasis who controlled ‘‘several gangs or section of work.’’ Significantly, in the commerce of reserve forests, a class of subcontractors called daffadars supplied wood to timber merchants.31 More directly, colonial administrators described the daffadar as the unscrupulous contractor of the emigration system. ‘‘The daffadar,’’ one noted, ‘‘is an excrescence of the ‘free’ emigration system who has lately come into prominence and only exists on account of the unlimited profit in the passage of coolies from one middleman to another.’’ 32 The historical use of the term suggests a folk recognition of an extractive ‘‘middleman’’ class already working within other feudal structures of labor organization. In the postcolonial plantation, seniority and the good nazar (attention) of the sahibs inform daffadar and chaprasi status. Significantly, their gender distinguishes them immediately from the bulk of ordinary workers. Approximately thirty daffadars supervise the separate groups of women, children, men, and convalescing older workers.Though no specific caste pattern Estates of a New Raj 151

can be discerned among this group of overseers, membership in union coteries and respected positions within plantation villages index some common trends. Take for instance, the fact that every bhagat (faith healer) I met in the plantation from a variety of different communities was either a daffadar or chaprasi. Birsa Bhagat, one such Oraon faith-healer, understands his status as an overseer within the customary syntax of faith healing within his community: ‘‘I am like the guru of cultivation. The garden is ours. As daffadar, I remain a daktar [doctor]; but I am also like the manager. I want to keep peace in the plantation, make sure people have jobs.’’ While these suggestions of customary prominence remain significant in the constitution of an overseer class, measures of good work in the eyes of munshi, chaprasi, and sahib are equally important. Note the manager’s written commentary on criteria of selection: ‘‘Explicitly, management has no categorical norms in allocating certain occupations to certain groups in written or unwritten forms. It is decided according to individual garden level performance—that is, by assessing one’s individual skill, efficiency, or by observing one’s knack or performance tendency towards a job entrusted to him. This does not mean that certain groups will get certain jobs.’’ The manager’s emphasis on ‘‘individual’’ skill is paradoxical, because it obscures the structural locations of subpatronage and the gendered privilege that permit entry into the elite strata of overseers.These include not only the sahib’s favor, but also the union leaders’, for it is upon their recommendations that the planter increasingly depends. The pool of candidates for the entire overseer cadre is culled from the largerconstituencyof male fieldworkers. Indeed, though mobility to higherstatus jobs is limited for male fieldworkers, as suggested by the selective politics of patronage, it is possible for some to rise into the highest ranks of garden operations or enter into factory and office occupations. However, for the bulk of the field labor—women—this is an impossibility. To the majority of the plantation’s working communities, the layered hegemony of the supervisory strata is well understood under a rubric of legitimation. Acceptance of feudal norms is a given. It defines the ‘‘company’s men’’ as bara aadmi (big people). Anjali, sifting her rice in the sun, comments: ‘‘These people [union leaders] are alada manush [separate people], mukhiya [community leaders] . . . like the chaprasi, boidar, munshi, and neta, they are the ones that make us work.There are only certain kinds of people who can make us work.They make more money than we do. If you, memsahib, ask me to clean the bungalow, I do it. But if someone else asks me, I will not. They are mén aadmi 152

[main people].We are the mazdoor [workers] who are at the bottom.What are we, memsahib, we are nothing.’’

act 5, scene 6 The Narrator picks up her wicker stool and lantern and moves from stage right to the empty side of stage left. She places the stool in this extreme end, stage left, and sits. From behind the gauze, center stage, come four Women, in old cotton saris, with sickles and twigs in hand. They squat on the floor next to the Narrator. One Woman chews on a twig. Another pulls out some tobacco to roll in the palm of her hand. Their faces are weatherbeaten. They look relaxed. she: ( pulling out a piece of paper from her pocket) Let me read you something from a novel by Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud. A conversation between two workers in Assam: the ill-fated Gangu, whose daughter will soon be the object of the planter’s desire, and his neighbor, Narain. Gangu, who has been beaten, whose wife has died, whose dreams about the new life promised have shattered. He asks Narain about the sardar’s position, and Narain answers: ‘‘The sardars are favoured people. What they say goes. The sardars have land to cultivate, but I have none. The manager pays the sardar, the sardar pays me what he likes. I want some land. But can I get it forcibly? The managers gives it to the sardars, and we cannot get it from them.The sardars, the babu, the chaprasi, the warders, have all got land. . . . That Neogy Gurkha who is the sardar over my wife’s work in the garden, has got another five acres. Do you know why?’’ Gangu responds by saying no. Narain goes on, ‘‘Because . . . . the Ashahstant Planter Sahib likes his wife.’’ 33 woman 1: (chewing and spitting out her tobacco) Does this sound strange to you, oh memsahib with the quill and long nails? This is only a flicker of what can be told.Who are we? We are mere blurs in the green distance. Then you come close and find that when we bend, our movements may gesture desire.When we move and bend. Oh, when we move and bend. woman 2: We are watched.We are watched. woman 3: The land was never ours. The land can never be ours. woman 4: But we also watch.Our eyes are not lowered absolutely.Our eyes are not so still. woman 1: Our field occupies the memories of silence. Oh, when we move and bend. The Narrator holds out her hand for some tobacco, which she rolls in her hand. They sit quietly as the light fades. Estates of a New Raj 153

Patronage and Patriarchies: Toward the Moral Economies of Rule For living years among kindly, simple people from Chotanagpur or elsewhere, the normal British manager or assistant becomes very fond of them. The sahib lives many years upon one estate, so do many of his laborers. He watches a new generation grow up from childhood to manhood and womanhood. He helps them with their marriages and their family affairs. Naturally there is affection between the coolie and the sahib.34 Is it not ridiculous to suppose that owners would wilfully maltreat their servants, knowing that everything depends upon them being in a good state of health? 35

Planter Powers Rita Chhetri meditates on the mai-baap We meet toward the end of my time in plantation country. Rita is from another plantation, active in its union, and we meet one day to go to her village. As we walk to her house, she tells me that a particular field hukum (command) was ruining the bushes.With some exasperation, she notes, ‘‘They are making us double-prune the bushes, and it is because of this V. A. Sahib [an external manager], wherever he sits in Delhi, Calcutta. Does he have any idea about a tea garden? The poor burra sahib, he has his hands tied.Why, he was telling us that he was just a jharuwallah (broom-wallah/sweeper), so I told him that if he was a jharuwallah then I guess we really are only patiwallahs (leaf-wallahs/people). The way I look at it is this. I respect the sahib because he is like my mai-baap, but when I know something is wrong, then I won’t know my own father. We are all human beings aren’t we? He may sit on the sofa and I on the pirhi . . . but how did he get to sit on the sofa. Where is that sofa from? This is why I have no longer ghinna, sharam aur dar (repulsion, shame and fear). . . . I had all this at one time but now I have let go of all of them.’’ The mai-baap is the symbolic, metaphoric, corporeal, and cultural core around which the geographies of cultural power are mapped.The mai-baap has been deployed to suggest both the personhood of the planter and the political culture through which the architecture of patronage and power is constructed.The planter must wear the cloak of the mai-baap, but it reaches beyond his own individual personhood. It wraps itself around a much larger social body.Within its mantle, the sahib attempts to create an aura of legitimate rule through garnering the consent of an overseer cadre. The recognition of a cultivated core of power is, however, crucial. It is created by 154

spatial mappings and manifested as cultural action through the terms of social distance, inclusion, and exclusion. The quickly shuttered windows, the umbrellas snapped shut, and the wire fences between villages and bungalow spin common threads of power. Sometimes they tangle and knot, as a result of coercive and consensual dispersions, constituting a fragile but mutually understood vocabulary of patronage and power. A useful theoretical heuristic with which to attend to the question of the ‘‘acceptance’’ of patronage, and the threads of domination that embroider the pattern of its daily enactments, is the Gramscian notion of hegemony as an arch,36 supported by the two pillars of consent and coercion.Take, for instance, the issue of consent (or acceptance) within the system of patronage on tea estates.The widespread usage of the term mai-baap suggests that planters, sahib, and workers together define their social world with a stock of symbols and images culled from parallel, though disparate, understandings of feudal rule.The combination of British ideas of gentried lordship and indigenous ideas of zamindari (landowning) entitlement generates a tightly knit and hybrid lexicon. Yet even a thoroughly grafted understanding of paternal ‘‘rights’’ to rule can only partially explain how a tiny plantocracy continues to exercise its power over a large and immensely varied workforce. Consent is a layered and fragile business, taken from a small strata of the plantation’s labor elite. The difference to note is that plantation patronage, with its mediated consents and shared understandings of rule, is embedded in the structural inequalities of a wage-labor regime, which is embedded in the global market and state power. That is to say, the planter’s decision in a dispute case is enacted within the terms of highly unequal exchange. The parties’ consent (to his decision) is balanced by the other supporting pillar of the conceptual arch of hegemony: coercion. Antonio Gramsci provides another useful analytic metaphor with which to recognize the paradoxes of the plantation system, in his notion of a coercive armor. Patronagewears the mask of hegemony; acts of legitimation are its feathers. But the mask is made of steel; coercion constitutes the remainder of patronage’s armor. As such, acts of legitimate authority are constituted within the coercive parameters of a work regime and its ultimate objective: the extraction of labor power for the profits of tea. Artifacts of postcolonial patronage include old whipping posts in the distant fields of Assam. The histories of patronage are remembered by an old watchman who speaks of hafta bahar (expulsion), when a troublemaker and his family would be deported, body and possessions, to the outer borders of the plantation. Estates of a New Raj 155

Yet the terms of domination that constitute the warp and woof of plantation patronage suggest that an emphasis on the coercion aspects of plantation history and political culture can take away—from those who remain subordinated within it—certain forms of agency. This includes both the subtle (and not so subtle) ways in which people articulate their opposition to coercion, and the ways in which they simultaneously ‘‘agree’’ to its unspoken compulsions. There is, in fact, a frequently used term for command that encompasses the thick, contradictory texture of patronage.This word, hukum, asserts the planter’s directive. It gestures toward threat (if the hukum is not followed) and the mai-baap’s capacity to coerce workers into compliance. Simultaneously, the planter’s desire and wish that the hukum be followed is suggested when he states after a given order, ‘‘Yeh mera hukum he’’—‘‘This is my desire/command.’’ Workers’ perceptions of that desire, and thus the importance of following its direction, is also succinctly expressed when asked about why a certain task was being carried out: ‘‘Because this is the sahib’s wish. It is his hukum.’’ In this way, the semantic fullness of hukum conveys the simultaneity of coercive and consensual forces within the enactments of daily patronage.

Paternal Benevolence and Cultivating Consent Consider the paternal miasma in the following illustration offered by the narrator of the story about the planter and the worker apprehended when he was out hunting birds. Memsahib, this is what I saw with my own eyes. One day, a woman and her marad [man] were walking from Chamurchi. She had on her head a bundle of things and in front of her, she was carrying a child, wrapped. Behind, wearing a dhoti and punjabi [shirt] and carrying a stick came the man, looking like a laat sahib.37 They were walking to Moraghat T.E. [a nearby plantation]. I was a schoolboy then. The sahib saw this from the verandah and came in front of the bungalow gate. He said: ‘‘Hey, man, where are you going?’’ ‘‘To Moraghat.’’ ‘‘And is this your wife?’’ ‘‘Yes, sahib.’’ Then the sahib took the stick from the man and hit him on his back and said: ‘‘How long after was this baby born?’’ ‘‘Nine months, sahib.’’

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And the sahib said: ‘‘Don’t you think she has carried it long enough? Now it is your turn.’’ He laughed as he related the story to me, and I asked him whether he had laughed while witnessing the incident. He responded: ‘‘Oh, how could we laugh in front the sahib? He would say, ‘Eh, why are you laughing!’ and then beat us. I agree with the sahib and what he did! Why not! But you see in those days, there weren’t all these unions and party politics and the sahibs could do anything. I remember in front of my eyes, on the factory verandah, men being beaten. Now things like that can’t happen.’’

While the planter’s ability to do ‘‘anything’’ at Sarah’s Hope is diminished, the narrator of the small tale is clear that his intervention was an appropriate one. His affirmation of the sahib’s blow to the husband’s back suggests an acceptance of the planter’s act of intrusion between husband and wife. The narrator’s apparent legitimation of this act emerged from his perception that the situation was unjust, while it implied a criticism of the husband who was ‘‘looking like a laat sahib.’’ His perception is itself situated in a broader understanding of the planter’s right to act within the paternal web of the mai-baap. The mai-baap, in its most literal translation, is the mother-father, and as its embodiment the planter sahib could treat his workers within that extension of fictive kinship. Thus, the planter as father-patriarch could, with a firm and paternal benevolence, intrude upon a family’s walk to the weekly market. Consider, also, that the story is being told to a memsahib. Consider its latent and even biting irony. The planter’s intervention and surveillance of community matters was often a matter of stringent coercion. Yet conflicts that do not have a direct connection to planter concerns with ‘‘law and order’’ within the labor regime, such as marriage and family disputes, do come to the sahib’s attention. In the words of one burra sahib: ‘‘A manager is a planter, accountant, administrator, doctor, and judge. He is a jack-of-all-trades. If a husband and wife have a problem, they will come to the manager and say, ‘‘Bichar kar do [arbitrate this].’’ The word bichar, in contrast to hukum, has a more processual and consensual sensibility. It connotes the following: ‘‘Do justice in this case and arrive at a decision for us.’’ The sahib’s decision (which then transforms into hukum) is accepted because it is expected that as mai-baap he will be fair and arbitrate wisely in each case. Not surprisingly, a veteran planter’s knowledge of marriage customs and disputes are considerable. Nikhil, a senior

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planter, comments: ‘‘There are many cases which would come to me before, but now this has changed. Often it would go like this: ‘‘If Budhua (the man) has kept Mongri (the woman) for a while—they may even have children— then the elders of the community will insist on some ceremony in which the couple’s families feed their clan. If the couple’s families refuse to do this, they will come to me for arbitration.’’ However, the sahib’s arbitration is a last resort, arrived at as the end of a process of adjudication between village councils and the families involved. In short, if all efforts toward consensus within the villages have failed, the matter is taken to the office. This involvement of the planter in the most intimate altercations also occasions his presence at marriage ceremonies of prominent workers. The invitation might come from an old sirdar who arrives with betel nut and fruit. At the actual ceremony, the manager is presented with his favorite brand of cigarettes and whisky. The planter’s presence in the home of a prominent sirdar will signal the latter’s authority and status. Since these occurrences are considerably rarer in the postcolonial plantation, they will gesture to the special attention of the mai-baap. At Sarah’s Hope, the senior planter stands aloof from most events, deputing junior members of the managerial staff to attend these or conduct arbitration. A labor welfare officer is now structurally located to oversee ‘‘labor issues’’ on the plantation. This junior manager presents his role as one of stewardship, in which he, ‘‘with the help of important workers solves every problem amicably.’’ His involvement with marriages now involves settling monetary advances so families can afford the increasingly costly ceremonies. As an institutional innovation through which managerial attention is focused on labor issues, the labor welfare officer’s job (ideally) encompasses a continuous, daily interface with the plantation’s communities. However, for most workers, the labor welfare officer holds a managerial post, and many still prefer to take disputes straight to the burra sahib, the nodal figure of patronage. At Marybank Tea Estate, a neighboring plantation, the burra sahib has initiated a ‘‘labor day’’ once a week, when, sitting behind a grilled window, he listens to specific complaints and attends to disputes. Even here, matters of sexual politics will come to the mai-baap’s attention, which he adjudicates orally and informally. In one case, the family of a pregnant fifteen-year-old woman came to the senior manager for arbitration: the purported father, to escape future responsibilities, had left the plantation.Though the village council had decided in the woman’s favor, it was necessary for the sahib to ensure the alleged father’s return. Using his access to a wider intelligence

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network, the burra sahib located the man in a neighboring plantation, and through its managers, ensured his return to Marybank. According to this particular burra sahib, the need to be involved in labor matters remains critically important: ‘‘It is not right for some burra sahibs to allow or expect their assistants to take care of all arbitration. It is a shirking of responsibility. After all, the mai-baap is still important, even though the old hukum is gone. The manager still has authority. It is a one-man show, and the involvement with personal matters is very important. Otherwise, the manager can be cut off from the roots.’’ To some workers, past managers are remembered for both the personal attention they paid to individual and community issues and the kind of arbitration they exercised. Personal attention from the planter is viewed as a special dispensation.To have come under the planter’s good attention is remembered for years as a measure of his benevolence. Thus, one old watchman recalls proudly how, when he had cut his foot, the sahib had tied his own handkerchief around the wound and taken him to the hospital. To the old man, this personalized and focused benevolence will sediment the maibaap’s reputation in positive ways. Conversely, a manager’s distancing from all aspects of workers’ lives is perceived as ghamandi (pride). The perception of ghamandi informs the worker’s own measure of the mai-baap. On one occasion recounted to me, a senior planter had come to inspect a damaged house. He was invited for tea, but refused.The woman of the house told me: ‘‘Memsahib, I had a lot of dukh [sadness] because of this.What could it have done to him? This sahib is not a good sahib.’’ In the most important ways, workers’ recognition, and ‘‘acceptance’’ of mai-baap benevolence are informed by their own evaluations of appropriate behavior. The planter’s willingness to arbitrate and engage in some of the more important rituals, are not only viewed positively, they are seen as honorable acts. The ideology of honor encompasses a sense of collective community as well as individual personhood. It involves, at the very least, a performance of basic respect and the saving of face within public settings. This maintenance of honor is indexed and measured through the language of address between sahib and worker. While workers, whether women or men, will rarely address the sahib directly, if they do, they will begin with the term that is the high-status marked appellation for ‘‘you’’ in both Hindi and Sadri: aap.38 Managers, in most cases, will address workers with the familiar tum, which is acceptable to both parties. However, in some cases, managers will use the appellation tu, which signifies the lowest relational status. Tu is often

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used, for example, within a family by a senior family member to address a much younger sibling. If the planter addresses an elderly worker as tu, this is judged by other workers as a sign of disrespect. This register of (dis)honor is stated explicitly: ‘‘What does the sahib think? That just because the old man is an adivasi and a coolie, he does not have izzat? Would the sahib call his own father like that? We also have izzat, memsahib, like any bara aadmi [big person].’’ Similarly, when a man is publicly berated by the sahib for being a matal (drunkard), that humiliation remains etched in the worker’s mind. The collected, and collective, memories of public humiliation, the small losses of face, texture the ‘‘consent,’’ or resistance, to patronage. In significant ways, a perceived insensitivity to the ideology of mutual, though unequal, honor cracks the mask of the mai-baap. Conversely, if the planter delivered a kara kanun (tough/corrosive ruling) but was perceived as ‘‘fair’’ and occasionally beneficent to the workforce, he would still be considered a good sahib. Take, for example, one senior planter who is remembered for sudden acts of largesse during the day. If he saw a storm coming, he would ride out in his jeep and shout to the fieldworkers to return to their homes early. The planter’s appearance of beneficence and involvement in community matters also involved calculations of extraction and control. The same senior planter remembered for sending people home early was also responsible for giving extra jungle land for workers’ cultivation. Two years after families had cleared this stretch of jungle land and cultivated rice on it, he announced that the area was to be used for plantation extensions. Noted one man: ‘‘Ah, yes, that sahib was a good sahib when it came to our problems, but he was also very clever. He made us clear the land. For free. He lied because he knew we could not keep it, like before. What could we do? We are too straight. Our hearts are big. That is why we are buddhus [fools].’’

Patriarchal Entitlements and Matters of Coercion Recall for a moment, the story of the worker hunting birds. To that planter, a man with a bow and arrow (indigenous weapons of hunt and battle) suggested a symbolic transgression of power. Thus the drama of seizing the bow and arrow and shooting at the worker, after making him cower, was a graphic signal of his superior power. In effect, the scene was a small theater for the benefit of those watching, of his capacity to garner abject bodily submission. It was a display that enhanced the self-representation of hardy pioneering and rule in the colonial hinterlands. 160

Material and symbolic histories of coercion resonate in the memory talk of many villagers. These fragments of the past persist into the present and chart the postcolonial pathways of planter power. Colonial labor legislation regarding plantation recruitment stipulated trenchant mechanisms of control around physical mobility and daily work. Extralegal methods of punishment were not uncommon. The North Bengal Rifles, for example, a planter-organized paramilitary regiment, augmented the colonial police force and conducted border surveillance in the area.39 For most members of the plantation communities not privileged by selective paternalism, a planter’s benevolence was eclipsed not only by his actual capacity to exercise force but also by folk recognitions of the threat and reputation of that force. It was a reputation enhanced by social distance and fed by rumor. There are old stories that still circulate in the plantation of how planters would ride on horseback, inspecting the village at dead of night. Hooeats are still heard, some say, in one corner of the factory. Another story places him, again at night, on the verandah of his bungalow lassooing the unwary or trespassing worker. These fragmentary memories, unanchored even to the margins of recorded history/histories, thus continue to spin a cloak of fear and awe around the person of the planter and the ideologies of his rule. Such memory talk registers the infinitesimal symbolics of power and status, inscribed on the body, clothing, and gestures in a way so subtle it is almost ineffable. An elderly driver remembers his work in the fields during the time of the English sahibs: ‘‘We could not wear pants in those days.We could be beaten and the sahibs or babu would say: What do you think you are—a sahib? The British if they smelled oil in your hair would call you a kamchor [work-thief ] and you would have to wash your hair.’’ These pasts in the present continue to be indexed in the quotidian and symbolic power plays of the postcolonial field and factory. Only the most prominent workers, union netas or munshis, might gesture to planter power through sartorial mimesis. Wearing a crisp shirt, shorts, and good sturdy shoes, these overseers partiallyappropriate and ‘‘wear’’ the manager’s status. If the manager alights from the jeep for a closer surveillance of field tasks, the overseers will stand to attention, eyes averted from his gaze. Anyone cycling past the manager and his standing jeep, immediately alights and pushes his bicycle past him, off the path. The umbrella, that most practical device of tropical protection, is immediately folded in his presence. Perhaps the customary significations of royalty embedded in the open umbrella mark this action as the ultimate sign of respect for the mai-baap. Certainly, in past years, a worker’s unfurled umbrella would signal enough disrespect Estates of a New Raj 161

to elicit if not a beating, certainly boxed ears. These examples of bagan ka niyam [customs of the garden] gesture to honorable obeisance and respect. Behind such customs of fealty, however, rests the shadow of threat. These acts of mimesis and fealty signal other histories of fear and coercion. The sudden jerking movement away and the quick folding of an umbrella, scripts a habitus beyond the realms of oral and written history. The body shifts into its own unconscious volitions, marking the time of the subterranean. It choreographs memories beyond the grasp of language itself: the lash of a whip, lonely hooeats, the echo of a shout.

act 5, scene 7 The lights come on slowly. The Narrator still sits to stage left, on her mora. The fourWomen squat next to her in a half arc.One rolls the tobacco, another scratches the earth on the stage with a twig. She stirs up some dust, a barely discernible cloud of brown air. she: So here there we have it. Mai-Baap.The mother-father, how odd, what gender-bending in this claiming of the Mother. But there we have it. And the body of hoof beats, some whispers of kidnapping, a few tales of plunder. woman 1: (lifting the twig from the stage and shaking it at the Narrator, mocking) Shhh. Shhh, memsahib, don’t give up the ghost of the story so easily. Don’t even think about entering such labyrinths of flesh and stone. You may unleash a monster with three heads. woman 2: (shoving Woman 1 playfully) Titch. Titch. Why are you scaring her so? She is doomed to tell these stories. Memsahib, enter the labyrinth. Go on. Be brave. There are corpses hidden in its catacombs, but, who knows, they might be friendly. The dead like to tell a tale or two when they have a chance. There are not many who will listen to them, no? woman 3: What would Gangadhar say, I wonder, if he sat up on his bed of ashes. That poor coolie, that poor father. Consider his impotence when the sahib comes for his daughter, Hira. woman 4: Hira, the jewel of the sahib’s desire. ‘‘The sahib accompanied by a chowkidar of the bungalow came to Gangadhar’s hut and renewed his proposals, which were refused. About nightfall of the 25th of May, the sahib’s bearer, Nasim Ali, asked Hira to accompany him to his master’s bed. The demand was refused.’’ woman 3: ‘‘Enraged at the refusal, late at 10 p.m., the sahib arrived at the scene armed with a revolver and called out ‘Hira, Hira.’ ’’ 40 Hira’s

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younger brother started shouting, and Gangadhar came rushing from a neighbor’s hut. ‘‘The sahib fired three shots at him.The first missed him, the second shot hit him in the arm without causing any more injury than an abrasion, and the third hit him on the right side of the chest, broke a rib and passed on at the back. . . . The sahib was tried but acquitted by an all-European jury.’’ 41 woman 4: (taking the twig and poking it into the Narrator’s hips) Eh, Eh, what do you make of that? Maybe you will meet Hira in the labyrinth. Maybe her ghost will speak with her father.Consider this possibility, memsahib. Consider it well. The lights fade. Erotic Economies The history of the plantation is the history of desire. The history of tea is that of consuming desire. Imagine again the cup lifted to feminine lips. Consider the woman’s body poised and posed, holding up the porcelain cup against the light. If you gaze closely against such painted light, the liquid is only an interior shadow. The body is not neutered but nubile, beckoning to the gaze of rule, its fleshy possibilities. The history of power is also the history of a woman’s body bending to labor, captured by the scrutinyof desire that can claim her if it pleases. Imagine Reginald Charles William Hunt, chota sahib of fiction and fact,42 who ‘‘regards with impunity the balanced form of the woman bending gracefully over the bushes as her hands stripped the white waxy camellia, the young leaves and flushes.’’ 43 Consider the stirrings of his desire. Sexual liaisons between planters and women workers, in the colonial period, thread the folklore of the postcolonial bungalow. In the villages, women nod their heads in agreement and say, ‘‘Ah, yes, memsahib, there are still some gora [white] children in the lines, we will show you one day. Children with blue eyes.’’ In the early decades of plantations in Assam, these alliances were institutionalized through chokri khanas (girls’ houses), which were small cottages built on the furthest edges of the plantation that housed the sahib’s ‘‘favorite’’ women. In the early twentieth century, it was not an uncommon practice for English sahibs to keep local women. In some Assamese plantations, young women were ‘‘offered’’ by men from their communities to the sahibs. Strikingly similar to the racial and sexual politics of Caribbean slave plantations,44 this was done to incur special favors from the manager.45 That coercion underwrote these profoundly unequal sexual alliances is corroborated by postcolonial sahibs who agreed that the colonial sahib’s ‘‘absolute’’ authority made these possible. One burra sahib noted:

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‘‘Yes, if he wanted a woman, he had the power to have her summoned. He would tell a trusted chowkidar, ‘Bring phulna [that] woman.’ ’’ In an incident that occurred merely twenty years ago, inverse traces of the colonial summons remain. A senior postcolonial planter recollects an event from his first Assamese posting: ‘‘I was working late in the office one day and only the chowkidar was there, when I noticed a young woman on the steps of the verandah. She was no more than fifteen and had a platter of fruit in her hands. I noticed immediately that she had a large flower in her hair, which in many adivasi communities means courtship, availability, something like that. It was all very subtle, you see. She was a sirdar’s daughter, and he could have been sending me some fruit. But I knew, as she knew, that this was another kind of a gift. I was not married then and I knew everyone knew that. I was scared because I just did not want any hanky-panky and because this is all very dangerous now. I somehow got the chowkidar (who I remember was laughing) to send her away.’’ The woman’s flowery ‘‘offering’’ gestures toward a sexual politics occurring behind the scenes. The planter’s recognition of ‘‘danger’’ suggests the ambivalent ways in which sexuality could be used to ‘‘test’’ a new young sahib.The agency of intention is obscured.The effects are open to their own reading of compliance and subversion. In a strikingly similar story, an English colonial planter commented that ‘‘the workers have been known to stage a plot against a planter if he was violently disliked. In one instance, I recollect, they brought up a girl from a large tribe on the garden and placed her at night in a young assistant’s bungalow.They then followed up with a crowd and accused the assistant of intrigue. This assistant was quite innocent of anything of an erotic nature but was thevictim of a cabal. It was deemed politic to transfer him to another district, where he did extremely well.’’ 46 The ‘‘erotic’’ becomes both the language and the site of corporeal subversion. A woman’s body brokers the terms of resistance. But her agency remains obscured in the static of the text, swallowed into the empty margins of the page. At Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate today, whispers about a manager’s gaze on women workers will circulate. However, the political climate of the postindependence period, with its union activity, militates against any overt liaisons between planters and women workers.Yet rumors abound, and women who spoke of these sexual transgressions invoked the terms of izzat as explanation: for the young sahib who did not know his station, but mostly for the young woman who carried a mark and was dishonored in the eyes of the wider community. 164

I learn about one particular postcolonial liaison and its rupture from Prem Kami, a Nepali chowkidar. Apart from a few union netas, he is one of the few men in the villages who will speak to me on a consistent basis. Most significantly, I have met him alone in the kothi (bungalow) when he makes his rounds of the bungalow perimeter. Because many of our conversations about Nepali histories and cultural politics occur within the ‘‘hidden’’ radius of the bungalow’s parlor, rumor and innuendo about our meetings do not circulate in the villages. Or so I think. Later, he takes me to his home in the outer perimeter of the Factory Line to meet his wife. We sit on the living-room floor, sharing the ubiquitous biscuits and mug of tea. He tells me of encounters with elephants on the edge of thevillage and forest, some of the history of the community from the desh (country/Nepal) and then (to my surprise) the story of a transgressive sahib (manager). He knows, already, that I am interested in narratives of, by, and about women. ‘‘This whole thing happened many years ago, and it involved a woman from my community. She is not from the garden. The assistant manager, who lived in this bungalow was known for his nazar [attention/eye] on women. He was a Punjabi, not a bad manager. I was the watchman and I knew women visited him. All right, so this happens—I didn’t recognize anyone from the garden, and some women were memsahibs like you. Then one night, I heard this man, not a Nepali, telling the sahib he would be back with a woman. So I was curious and waited around. A few hours later, this man came back with a woman from my jat [community].What was strange is that they met in the garage, and the sahib had some food and drink. When I saw this Nepali woman, I became very angry and I immediately went to the line and told my union leader, who raised a commotion, and we caught the three of them in the garage. This is the thing, memsahib, that woman was behaving like a randi [prostitute]. Even if she had no izzat for herself, she was dishonoring her family. It had to be brought out, that is why I reported it. And the sahib: he got into trouble because the leaders took it to the senior manager. He got suspended for a few days and then transferred to another garden. I don’t know what happened to her. Her family must have done something, sent her away—but people will always remember her name. She was stupid. Nothing ever can really happen to the sahib, but everyone in her community will remember her.’’ When I ask him about how common these cross-class alliances are, he remarks, ‘‘Of course these things happened. Particularly in the angrezi zamana (English period), and we could do nothing. But now, sahibs have to be careful. Because of unions, they will be challenged.They should be careful.’’ This incident of bhinjat (cross-community/caste), cross-class sexual Estates of a New Raj 165

transgression, initiates a series of acts that create a narrative of gendered stigmata.One man, Prem, scripts a masculine narrative of resistance against the manager’s transgression. In that, his act is a small instance of class resistance. However, it encompasses sexual and community politics in important ways. Significantly, he does not dwell on the participation of the man who served as a broker between the woman and sahib. Indeed, his emphasis on the woman’s possible sexual transgression as a threat to (Nepali) community honor is what triggers his report to the union leader. Despite his own assertion that the woman in question was not from the garden (let alone his own specific village), a wider and more abstract understanding of jat and sexual propriety was at stake. Inextricably linked to that other trope of class resistance, Prem’s ideology of honor presents a complex triple-layered script: an intimate weave of class politics, community identity, and sexual transgression. I do not find any other narrative traces of this Scarlet Woman. These are histories of taboo, and I prefer to open my ears and listen to backbeats rather than push toward some reductive clarity. Sexual transgression will spin a dizzy set of Rashomon-like effects: taboo and myth will sustain the oscillations. The ‘‘truth’’ of the encounter in the garage is staged through a singular perception and collective acts. Many truths lie within one history of stigma. My ears strain to hear some rhythmical repetitions in these stories of community. I discern a two-beat tempo—women, honor, women, honor. The case of the Scarlet Woman, presented through one masculine narrative, suggests that the protection of an abstract sense of jat honor is an imperative.The woman’s stigma is a small price to pay for upholding a sense of community honor against the sexual peccadillos of a straying assistant manager. Her betrayal of honor is not only a betrayal of her community; it is also a class betrayal. The manager appears absolved in this script of condemnation. The sexualized body traffics in excess: cabal, intrigue, honor, commotion. The rituals of desire between ruler and ruled, planter and woman worker, are choreographed through a theater of taboo, impossibility, silence. They are performed through the fleshy actualities of power and desire. The gaze pins the body bent into curvature of work. This, too, is the other history of labor.

Jungli Parlors In the parlors of the old bungalow, the tea is fine. The leisured ambience is safe. Exhausted sometimes by the alterity of the gaze, I sometimes escape 166

into the cocoon of luxury, into the cradle of entitlement. One evening, I squat in Munnu’s kitchen sipping handia. Two days later, Mrs. Singh and I sit and sip tea and talk of painting landscapes. These sudden switches are disorienting and problematic.What liberal epistemological terrain of power do I enact as I leap through from bungalow to village? There can be no disentanglement of these journeys; they remain irreducible; they sustain the edge of a blade. But I have also transgressed in my shift from the parlor, the andarmahal (inner palace) of cultivation, which is apparently my birthright. I leave behind the delicate lattice that bounds such interiority to be faced with the unmasked and legitimate anger of another gaze.The paradoxes are inescapable. I realize that this search for escape tracks the perimeters and aporias of privilege.The women I come to know cannot escape the field. If they are to enter the parlor, they will enter it, eyes downcast, with a perfectly ordered tray of tea. No conflation of these paths can be asserted, even implicitly, through the moral economies of text. Yet in some moments, we walk a few paths of connection. If I disappear, they tell me they will get on a bus to come to this ‘‘big’’ bungalow and meet Mr. and Mrs. Singh. They assert this to me: ‘‘Tell the sahib we will come if anything happens to you. We won’t go to our burra sahib, we will come to him. Straight to his bungalow.’’ Their words are remarkable. It is a hukum to be listened to because it is an assertion of a kindness that connects, in one flickering instant and only for one ineffable moment, the field and the parlor. What more to learn from these pedagogies of ‘‘fieldwork’’? What more but to listen closely to my teachers of the village? We lower our eyes, we look up, we sip from our careful cup.We remain silent in a parlor of dreams.

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chapter 6 Discipline and Labor

Regimes of the Body

Fingers Hands rest on a bed. The knuckles are curled in, pressing against a scab slightly open, a hint of blood. In this rare moment of rest, the curled fingers do not evoke sentiment. Their tension, that inward turning into the palm, does not mark any other fact than this: calluses can be painted black by natural ink, the tree’s juice feathers into the palm and stains its hard whorls of flesh.The landscape of the forest has imprinted its own theater of roots and branches in this small partially covered stage of the palm, green turned to fissured black. A finger traces the delicate filigree. Such a vivisection of the body in repose, creates its own peculiar and dangerous illusion.The scalpel naturalizes the separation of flesh from flesh. The hand does not rest in still separateness. It lifts hair from the brow, it moves down with a sigh, it touches the waist, and slips back on the bed.The body and its suggestion of form, its integral connections, is gestured in this sweep from forehead to bed. Yet, dismemberment creates the fetish. See the hand now poised over a small tree, holding two leaves and the plant’s bud. Dismemberment suggests an aesthetic of the feminine. Notice the long tapered fingers, the bracelets, the careful display of leaf. Is this ritual a worship of the tree’s fruit or the lovely fingers and wrists so carefully displayed? Is it both? Or does the fetish suggest the need to indelibly connect foliage to flesh, the natural world to Nature, inextricably and essentially marked by the titillating and nurturing aesthetic of a feminine hand and the body to which it gestures? In this portrait of delicacy and dismemberment, search for movement that animates connection. See the shift from the bed to the tree as part of a flow in which the bodydemands its own integrity. Imagine the fingers reaching for the child’s face to caress, clenching into a fist, opening the blouse to suckle a baby; spreading, preparing, and kneading dough; grasping a branch

to break it for wood and its necessary fires. Consider all this in its entirety. The fingers anoint the body’s integrity in toil and in celebration of its own being. Consider the wholeness of this in the story to come, as a series of gestures in flesh, shadowed, and beyond the fall of a capturing gaze.

Genesis and Rationality The master planners of the colonial plantation enacted the practical tasks of labor procurement and discipline through narratives thickly layered with metaphors and allusions to their own myth of origin and its primal landscape, the Garden of Eden. Indeed, some British planters evoked a Miltonian paradise to be regained in the fresh and ‘‘virginal’’ wildness of this new imperial frontier.1 Colonial tales of planting combined this vision of original conquest with more contemporary images of pioneering adventure and courage. Adventure and divine providence thus provided the philosophical impetus for a colonizing project that grounded literary allusions and metaphor into a quotidian and often brutal narrative of botanic and bodily mastery. If the untamed forest called for a redemption already scripted within its own mystery, then the colonizing mission could focus on its necessary cultivation. In so doing, cultivation—as the figurative act of civilizing Nature through the practical act of sowing and reaping—became the raison d’être of the garden. Cultivation is at the heart of the garden’s creation and the maintenance of its groomed order. As a colonial and postcolonial metaphor, it invokes the old themes of civilizing and civilization. As a frame within which women

19. Two leaves and a bud. Drawing from The Tea Lover’s Treasury, by James Norwood Prett, 1982.

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and men are disciplined into work, it provides the cultural, political, and bodily meanings through which social power creates the terms of its various orders and disorders.The planter animates the ideological and practical center from which such power is deployed. Dispersed into a constellation of the plantation’s fields and villages, his command, the hukum, is absorbed, translated, and challenged. Power laces spectacle, turns into the grandiose, and spreads through mimicry and resistance. Beyond any singularity, ‘‘it’’ expands, contracts, and creates the manicured economy of the controlled forest. But it also flickers in the shadows, the thorny edges. Management, in turn, shapes the narratives of cultivation, its terms predicated upon shared understandings of what constitutes ‘‘rational’’ planning and behavior. Indeed, this managerial rationality itself rests at the core of the daily discipline that constitutes the plantation’s order. Order and discipline are the twin arms of this dominant ideology of rule: efficiency, productivity, and profit along its most important arteries. Rationality is deployed through spectacles of rule, the Euclidean landscape, through rituals of its own reason. The colonial planter’s displays of both hardy vitality and splendid leisure has been translated through postcolonial mimesis with an indigenously feudal twist. The postcolonial planter’s social distance from the workforce is enhanced by a sense of superiority that has naturalized a basic understanding of colonial rationality and its capacity to ‘‘order’’ and ‘‘civilize.’’ Within such a philosophy of rule, only a few have the innate skill to rise above the compulsions of the body and its inherent unreason. The ‘‘primitive,’’ or the jungli, signify unreason in their ‘‘wild’’ bodies. Their essences must, and can, be brought ‘‘to cultivation’’ by the disciplines of reason. Cultivation is thus an ontological act. The body of its labor is a fleshy cartography of mind-over-labor, as much as it is the anvil upon which fortune’s gold coin is hammered. Coupled with this philosophy of innate mind-over-body superiority are far more ancient caste-based ideologies of pollution, commensality and hierarchies thus engendered.2 Upper-caste, and sometimes anglicized, the postcolonial planter deploys a hybrid and complex ideology of rationality and order. The jungli—either lower-caste or adivasi—is fixed in a place of lack. She thinks, but hers is innately inferior thought, for she is trapped within the cycles of her dark body. Illusions If management, based on rationality, abstracts itself (as a philosophical imperative) from the disciplines of the body, it creates for itself a powerful illusion. Because it is indeed through the body, in the acts and gestures of bodies in landscapes of labor, that cultivation enacts the

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managerial logic, the reason of its being: profit, productivity, and efficiency. When those bodies are racialized and gendered within the intricate hierarchies and organization of labor, then the dominant ideologyof separateness, of a superior mind-which-does-not-need-to-work, collapses into its own illusion. Its own logic of corporeal inscription defines, and defies, its frames of control. When bodies themselves are fetishized in acts of labor because they are female—to pluck with delicacy and to sell the commodity—then the illusory division between rationality’s management and bodily toil is blurred. When those same bodies are conflated into the natural landscapes within which they are disciplined to work, because they are women, the very terms of separateness are challenged and reconfigured. Cultural and historical meanings of work, when read through narratives of ‘‘the body,’’ can be viewed not merely as reflexive of the disciplines within which they are constrained in certain moments. They can also be seen as idiosyncratic, individual, and alternative commentaries about the terms of those very separations.The reflecting consciousness cannot be so easily denied. Not neutral, not dismembered, not bled of its own skin, the body thinks through a history of constraint, of possibility, its own alterities.

act 6, scene 1 The light comes on slowly on the Narrator on her stool, the four Women on the stage floor. The Narrator flexes her fingers, scrutinizing them against the light. One of the Women looks up at her movement and shakes her head. woman 1: This is no natak [theater], memsahib, why do you move your fingers so? woman 2: The body makes its own swollen journeys through history, memsahib, the answers are not written in your fingers and the pen which you hold. The body has no calligraphy to decipher. woman 3: But oh, maybe it does, maybe it does. Like a faint swell in the ocean of your words, memsahib, perhaps a body speaks through secret hieroglyphics. But you look strained, memsahib, run your fingers against your other fingers.The flesh contains its crevasses, its whorls of absence. Perhaps, they tell a tale? Lights fade.

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Fields

A Landscape’s Cosmology I enter a path into a field of green, eight years after I saw it first, to walk away from the cacophonous town. The bonsai mathematics that creates such a landscape of precision does not dim the pleasure I take in this momentary escape. My walk is one of leisure and of solitude. It recreates the plantation as a garden that is silent, solitary, and splendid. Aware of the danger of such romantic thoughts in this landscape of predilection, I consider its other cosmologies. I recall my first walk into the field that autumn almost a decade ago. A helpful senior planter is taking me on a tour of the field. An old man crossing our path on a cycle jumps to attention, falling off his seat, becoming entangled in the cycle’s wheels. The sahib admonishes him, gently, though the old man’s fear is a tangible thing.We have walked to the edge of the field and into a village area.The sahib introduces me to a bhagat, ordering him to ‘‘answer the memsahib’s questions.’’ Disconcerted again by the man’s nervousness, I request that the sahib leave us. His order, however, sits with us like an old ghost, impossible to exorcise. The bhagat and I walk back into the field. He talks about his village and his work as a ritual master and elder. I am hesitant to ask any questions, constantly aware of the parameters of coercion within which we take this walk. We are on the edge of a square block of tea when the bhagat suddenly clambers over a fence and climbs a shade tree that has a broken branch. Using a large sickle that he has been carrying, he saws at the branch till it breaks away cleanly. Gasping in the heat, he says, ‘‘Memsahib, there is one thing you must know. I am like a daktar [doctor] to these trees. Each tree, each tea bush, I have supervised in planting.When I was young, I used to plant the seedlings myself. When I see one injured like this, I feel pain. This is why I am helping this tree now.’’ There are myths of power and meaning constantly grafted into this landscape. There is romance and fear, reverence and obeisance, ritual and remembrance. There are cosmologies that rest in the human claim of a torn tree branch. When I tell Bhagirathi of the pleasure of a solitary morning walk into the plantation field, she is aghast.Why would I want to walk there and alone? This desire is incomprehensible, though amusing, to her. Her place of bodied labor and sweat is my space of contemplative leisure.

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Maps The management of cultivation in the plantation is worked on multiple axes. The most noticeable rendering of its sense of order is embedded in the landscape of the field itself. The tea bush defines the field, a primal center of the nascent commodity. As a wild plant, the tea tree can grow to twenty-five feet, and its transformation into a waist-high bush is a result of four-year cycles of pruning and plucking. Initially, a nursery of plant cuttings is prepared, carefully protected from extreme weather by a tarpaulin. Careful attention is paid to each individual plant, and every cutting is placed by hand, light work that is often done by elderly and ill women and small children. After six months of careful tending, the young tea plants are transferred into a newly hoed plantation area and placed in precise rows. This spatial precision of planting is worked through a careful calculus of soil productivity and land use economy. Following the design of the older square blocks of tea, known as chopols, it is this mathematical work of planting that constructs the flat and even map of the tea fields. The grid of young tea bushes interspersed with shade trees creates the latitudinal and Euclidean perspective of the landscape. As the plant grows, careful pruning determines its height. The plant’s center stem is cut at six to eight inches after eighteen months, stopping the growth of that stem and promoting lateral branching.The plants’ tending is aimed at maintaining the foliage through alternations of plucking and pruning. A tree is thus transformed, through bonsai-like cultivation, into a tea bush. Leaf plucking begins quite early, before the central stem is cut again, in the second year. Left untouched after this second cycle of pruning, the mature tea bush is ready for a full season of plucking in its third year. It is, however, a series of pruning cycles during the bush’s winter dormancy, that is most critical to its maintenance and regeneration. The bush gets a light pruning in the first winter, leaving 50 percent untouched. In the second dormant season it is not pruned, but in the third ‘‘medium skiff’’ pruning takes approximately 22 inches off the height of the plant. In the fourth year, ‘‘light skiff’’ pruning removes just the uppermost growth. Each year, a fourth of the field is pruned, and thus in each four-year period, the entire cultivated area has undergone one cycle of pruning.The precision of these pruning cycles, and the skill required to measure the action of the various sickles and knives used for each kind of pruning, is embedded in the final result of such efforts. This combination of surface grid and vertical truncation creates the flat and linear horizon of a strikingly and mathematically rationalized landscape.

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Cycles of plucking and pruning are organized by block, each one of approximately 4.5 hectares. Individual chopols are marked chronologically in the blueprint of the field from which the managers will determine pruning and plucking cycles. Chopols are classified numerically according to their order of planting. Since four-year cycles are critical for determining these pruning and plucking rotations, measurements of time are inscribed within the spatial measurements of the field. Indeed, one history of the plantation can be read in the chopol’s numerical classifications. Not surprisingly, the expansion of cultivation moves outward from the center of a plantation: the office, factory, and bungalows. The oldest chopols are found nearest to the center of this managerial arc: a double numerical coding marks each square: number 1 is (the year) 1908; number 65 is 1972, and so forth. If a history of numbered reduction charts the map of tea cultivation, where a calendrical year punctuates a certain point of origin, there are also other histories inscribed into these squares of cultivation. There is, for example, a narrow ravine called the Umesh Kholla, which cleaves through Sarah’s Hope and its neighboring plantations. Its run through the chopols is punctuated by a small temple at what I have called elsewhere Siva’s Rock. The sacred borders the spaces of mundane and daily work. In certain plantations village rituals take place in the center of the cultivation field. If we follow the Umesh Kholla into the neighboring plantation, Kolpara, we read suggestions of ritual histories that spill into the places of popular memory. Distinct from the ritual spaces of the Umesh Kholla, but registering a certain kind of ritual history, the Ram Dhan Chopol commemorates the life of a respected union leader and village elder. In another case, the spreading branches of an old jackfruit tree offer shade to the small white-washed tomb of a Muslim elder. Significantly, the tea bushes are planted around the tree and the tomb: neither the tree nor the tomb are touched or removed. On the northern side of the road lie the bungalows and expanse of the Hospital, Mission, and Factory lines of Sarah’s Hope. The southern expansion covers the largest section of the field. The stretch of tea is punctuated once by a small forest, which is maintained as a firewood reservoir.On its far eastern border, is a plantation extension begun only fifteen years ago near the semi-isolated Tin Line. At the edge of the Mission and Purana Line, on the plantation’s northern border, lies the newest plantation extension, Sarah’s Hope II, where some workers once tilled their own small plots of land. This new plantation extension borders on both the Christian cemetery and the Umesh Kholla. A sacred tree, herald of the Bhutanese hills to the north, stands sentinel to this arena of nascent cultivation. Sarah’s Hope II,

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or the naya bagan (new garden) as it is known, is a space not yet fully captured by the precise mapping of the old plantation. Its planting will begin in earnest toward the end of the monsoons and will be managed by unemployed young men from the community who receive a contract from the manager. In its state of half-cultivation, Sarah’s Hope II remains a territory still touched by a hint of unfurled wildness. The landscape is dominated by a Euclidean logic manifest in an almost abstract precision of green. Yet there are fault lines within its hegemonic reach.Time fissures the land into a story of staggered genesis. Ritual spaces chart other logics, and human agency, though invisible in the dispersed vastness of the field, commemorates itself in popular memory through the landscape. Order and its alterities write many histories of rationality. The landscape begs an excavation of itself, beyond the steady illusion of flatness, deep into the rituals of its own mystery.

Seasons and Clocks The landscape is thus rationalized by a cultivation scheme that has created its own seasons and ultimately, the terms of its harvest. The plant’s growth and dormancy are defined, however, by the volition of the earth and its habits. Not surprisingly, these cycles determine the pace of work and the deployment of various labor tasks. The most critical aspect of management geared toward quantifiable profit is the tea bush’s first cycle of ‘‘flush,’’ when the first layer of new, bright green leaf can be discerned amid the older foliage of darker, bottle green.The first ‘‘flush’’ occurs in March, and the permanent field workers ready themselves for one morning shift of work. If the rains are late, and if irrigation is not sufficient, tea bushes can be burned in the sun.The upper leaves turn a crisp brown and eventually the entire bush shrivels and dies. Usually, the rains are adequate for the first crop, which planters know will take about a month to come to a fuller flush. From June, however, when the monsoons arrive in a steady torrent, the primary work of harvest—plucking—reaches its peak of intensity. At the end of November tea bushes enter dormancy and the second major season of cultivation begins: pruning. Besides pruning, workers are assigned to field tasks that have continued through the year. These include cleaning the aisles between the bushes with hoes and cheeling (turning the soil). The slower tempos of the winter season includes yearly workers’ vacations of two weeks, staggered through January and February. Partly because of the

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slower pace of winter tasks, and the more hospitable weather, this is a time when marriages and visits with family in other villages are commonplace. Thus, two basic seasons chart the contours of theyearlycalendarof work, marking times of labor intensity and some leisure. Agrarian cycles frame the management and flow of this first phase of plantation production. However, cultivation, one of its central facets, is but one major aspect of the plantation’s entire productive process. Manufacture, this second phase of production, takes placewithin the concentrated radius of planter power: the factory. A large white building lying adjacent to the managerial and staff offices, the factory is the end point of the plantation’s productive logic. In its concentrated locus of machinery and manpower, it sits in striking contrast to sections of the field that are being prepared for planting. If the latter suggests a space of half-wildness, then the site of manufacture—where tea leaf is transformed into a product readied for commodification—represents the place within which the deployment of rational management is most focused. Work within the factory, though finally dependent on the seasonal production of leaf, is ordered in ways more like the assembly line rhythms of an industrial workplace, where the relationship of machines and bodies are placed in a certain synchronicity. Work, as human action on the environment, is thus redefined. Machines replace the tea bush as a site of human reference, and it is a shift that constructs different modalities of labor. Historians, most notably E. P. Thompson, have argued that nineteenthcentury industrialization transformed the customary rhythms of agrarian work. ‘‘Task’’ times, upon which the seasonal harvests of farming depended, shifted into quite different temporal and spatial modalities. Both symbolically and materially, the clock and factory siren now marked the beat of daily life.3 Thus, disciplines of time, coupled with the spatial regimes of the assembly line, began to define the efficient economies of factory work that underwrote the profits of mass production and manufacture. Tea factory management follows the logic of the assembly line in its division of labor and in the ways that the machines of manufacture dominate its large internal spaces. Yet, unlike the common image of a crowded factory floor, the tea factory is spacious, well-lit, and only in one large room do its boilers emanate intense heat. Neat white signs label a particular phase of manufacture, and a large clock on the front wall signals the management of time. Synchronized with the factory siren, it is this clock that marks the day of work, not only within its immediate ambit but in the siren’s sound, which reaches into the field.

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The factory, set within the locus of managerial power, is a place that animates the planter’s ideology of order and rationality with clarity. Not only are its various work disciplines within the immediate surveillance of the senior manager, but its visual and spatial placement resonates with symbolic power. Its work tempos, though dependent on the cycles of the field season, are charted in ways strikingly different from cultivation in the field. Embraced within the administrative and masculine regime of the plantation, all the factory workers are men. Indeed, factory work narrates its own bodily tales. Manufacture is, in this folk history of work, an essentially masculine business. Indeed, essentialist assumptions about gendered incapacity to do ‘‘mind work’’ and sexual difference ensure that women are wholly absent. Rationality, once again, defines itself through a certain kind of lack. As the home of the clock, however, the factory comes to mark the temporal parameters of the day, housing as it does the omnipresent siren. The siren, which used to be a loud hand-beaten ‘‘gong,’’ sounds eight times during the day, beginning at six in the morning. Most symbolically, residues of colonial time schedules remain within workers’ perceptions of the siren’s call. During the colonial period, the siren’s clock was advanced by half an hour, creating a temporal schism: Garden Time and Indian Standard Time. Thus when it was actually 5:30 in the morning by Indian Standard Time, the siren would sound the beginning of the 6:00 factory shift. Prior to labor legislation, planters manipulated daylight hours to stretch the working span of the day.With postcolonial legal stipulations of six- and eight-hour days, Garden Time is strictly obsolete and its earlier extractive objectives cannot be met; even if the clock was to advance by half an hour, only the stipulated legal hours of work are permitted. At Sarah’s Hope, the siren sounds Indian Standard Time. Workers, nonetheless, continue to perceive this artifact of colonial scheduling as somehow present within the logics of the contemporary regimes of work. Unlike a productive process that is entirely dependent on factory manufacture, the plantation is ultimately dependent on the quantity and quality of its tea leaf. As such, even the tea factory cannot be understood as a site entirely removed from the agrarian rhythms of the field. Its system of work is linear, its times marked by the clock, but it remains connected to landscapes of labor that remain truer to earlier agrarian rhythms. The waxing and waning of seasonal production is, itself, dependent on the rains. If there are early rains, plucking will be phased in from the end of February, though in most cases, it begins in March. From the beginning, then, regimens of

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‘‘clock times’’ must contend with the seasonal flows of rain and the tea bush’s own offerings of leaf. The annual calendar of production and manufacture in its ebb and flow defines not only the tempo of work; it also determines the wage calculus. With the onset of plucking in March, work tempos are paced by a calculation of daily wage within which task and clock times cohere.The task-based component of the wage focuses on the amount of leaf plucked.The ticca dictates a minimum quantity of leaf, which is slowly increased as the tea bush offers a larger harvest. Between February and April, when the first ‘‘flush’’ is small, the ticca is about eleven kilos.The basic daily wage, called the hazira, is paid for attendance at both morning and afternoon shifts of work. However, to receive the hazira, a woman must pluck the entire ticca and attend the full shift of work, if that is required. As the season peaks into a full ‘‘flush,’’ the actual time spent in the field becomes more important. The ticca (minimum weight) is now raised to 25 kilos, and is attached to an added incentive of half a rupee per kilo plucked. This incentive, called doubly, together with the ticca, determines the actual hours spent in the field. During the times of peak harvest, when the siren sounds at 7:30 a.m., some women may already be in the field; they will work straight through the day, with less than half an hour break for lunch. The task incentive thus compels the actual workday to stretch beyond the stipulated six hours of plucking into eight. As the season wanes with the approach of winter, work again becomes only task-based, and during winter pruning, one morning shift of six hours can complete the daily ticca for a set number of bushes to be pruned. In short, wages of cultivation are based on grafting agrarian task-based logics to the temporal regimes of an industrial clock. In contrast to the task component of the field labor, factory and office work follows the regimes of the clock entirely. The task component of the wage is absent. Factory wages are calculated on a daily hazira and overtime pay is paid on an hourly basis. Nonetheles, factory work remains dependent on the amount of leaf plucked. In the height of the peak season, when factory troughs have an abundance of leaf, the two-shift day is expanded to include a third, night shift. By the end of November, factory operations close down for machine overhauling, and the small number of men who work there are redeployed to dig drains and clear roads within the plantation’s villages. The plantation encompasses a hybrid cosmology within its landscape and in the labor disciplines to which this landscape is connected. Tasks of cultivation, though close to the farming toil of adjacent villages, are regimented by the terms of wage labor: of bounded temporal shifts of work, 178

surveillance, and complex alienations from the fruits of that work. Geared toward a global marketplace, labor practice is organized into hierarchies of control and sexual divisions of labor and is embedded within the landscape itself. Though the language of command is ideally abstracted through these pyramids of control, fetishisms of work and its genderings erode the call of the siren and its more abstract breakdown of the day.4 The factory, most removed from the alterities of wild borders, is still hooked into the field. It dominates the landscape to a certain point, but becomes invisible, in the far reaches of the field. Its rationalities are simultaneously hegemonic and illusory. The field, with the factory that it also contains, offers a cosmology peculiar to itself. It is simultaneously a theater of the season and of the clock: a cosmos of system and machine, some fetishes, and the rituals of the actualized landscape.

Fieldwork

act 6, scene 2 The lights come on stage. The four Women have left. The Narrator gets up, carries her wicker stool from stage left to center stage, near the shadowed bungalow living-room scene. She sits next to the British Sahib and Memsahib. A faint drumming begins.The gauze-curtained backdrop begins to shake as shadow Dancers begin to bend and move behind them. The movements are slow, the shadows thrown are elongated. she: What a jatra [theater] to be imagined in this work of the field, which we now come to finally. Fieldwork, Fieldwork. Only a backdrop to the humming of machines. Consider all the acts. The big house, the clanking machines, the scratching ink pens on account ledgers. Each act in miniature, each scene touched by the paths of the villages. What is this constant painted backdrop, this green and dwarfed forest, the shadowy figures barely discernible? The field is flat and constant, so we imagine. The spotlights play on dark and light, there are murmurs, gestures stooped, a sudden curtain of water. But wait: this is no flat screen of wood. Our gaze has been deceived. This is a gauze curtain of green, it moves with the wind. Behind it the shadows shift: an arm, a hand, a suggestion of breasts. A body braced against some fierce onslaught of rain, hunching forward to carry the heavy cloth pouch of leaf. An outline of an umbrella against a tree. See how they bend and carry the umbrella Discipline and Labor 179

now, held against water and sun. See how they file through the light, the muslin, the play of water. Consider how they vanish and stay, vanish and stay. Lights fade out. There is a quickening of the plantation’s pulse at the end of February, heralded perhaps by a bright thin layer of green, discernible on some of the tea bushes. The rains have yet to come, but the yearly holiday and its attendant revelry of marriages and visits to relatives on other plantations are coming to a close. Anjali tells me one morning that the first aurat dols (women’s gangs) will be sent for plucking within the week. I have been at Sarah’s Hope for less than a month and am eager to finally encounter women in their fields of labor. The back gate of the bungalow has been unlocked daily, and Anjali has slowly introduced me to a small radius of the Factory Line. The men remain visibly uneasy about my daily walk through the canteen math (canteen field). Most know about the patronage that has brought me to this particular plantation. The important union leaders skirt me cautiously, and thus from the very beginning, it is women who begin to draw me into the worlds of their families and communities. My arrival during the last weeks of winter is fortuitous, because Anjali, and the women I meet through her, have time to speak with me. Though consistently generous with their time, which even in winter is packed with household tasks, I recognize that my research, and its demands for conversation, is itself dependent on leisure, its free and floating determinations. While conversation, a dialogical act, is certainly one place where a deeply human encounter can occur, it cannot be excised from the conditions of its making. As we become acquainted, that winter just before the call of harvest, I am aware of constant motion: bending over to stack the firewood carried miles from the forest; hitching the baby higher on her back; quickly making tea. Knowledge production is, I learn with some immediacy, also a process of extraction, and the body, in both listening stillness and in necessary movement, is implicated. When I return, seven years to the month of my first winter conversations with them, I remember this and the relationship of their work to my research, and its terms of leisured extraction. When I mention the issue of their ‘‘giving time,’’ Munnu smiles. ‘‘It was not that much trouble to talk, we did what we needed to do. But you see, with you there, I have an excuse not to work as well. Things won’t be said, if you know what I mean.’’ 180

Plucking In early March, the manager gives the command for the first round of plucking to begin.The evening before the first day of plucking, the information is yelled in the villages by watchmen, who also announce the precise location by tea block numbers where the women must assemble in the morning.Two hours before the first call of the siren at six, the women are already on the move. Bhagirathi’s three sons, the oldest of whom is eleven years, have to be fed, and she cooks enough rice, vegetables, and lentils for her family of six. With barely enough time to eat herself, she rolls up a chapati (flour tortilla) and dips it into a hot glass of tea. Her own food is an afterthought. First, the small house ritual must be conducted, followed by cooking. Munnu, whose house is around the corner, begins her walk to neighboring Kolpara Tea Estate. It is going to be a long walk, with her two-year-old, Bina, hitched on her back.Though she has married into Sarah’s Hope, she has never given up her inherited job in Kolpara. Though pressured by her father to give the job to her brother, she has refused. Though this means a long, tiring walk back and forth between the two plantations, she explains that the job is her strength. In 1999, eight years after the ethnographic present of this field text, Bhagirathi’s three boys are older, they tend to family business, and help their mother with cooking. Munnu has exchanged her job with a woman from Sarah’s Hope who married into Munnu’s natal plantation, Kolpara. She does not miss the long walk. The morning shift in the early peak season technically begins at 8:00 a.m., though in practice, the chopol is reached (particularly if it is distant) at around 8:30 a.m. The munshi (senior overseer) in the garden, who takes his orders directly from the garden staff and the sahibs, has cycled into the field to begin checking the attendance lists with the boidar (time keeper) and the gang overseers, who have already reached the area.The senior manager and his management staff have met in the preceding days to organize their strategy of plucking rotations and give their hukum (order) to the garden staff and supervisors earlier in the morning. By 7:45, the cluster of field overseers milling around the factory compound have headed out to their designated chopols. Most women do not walk alone into the field but meet their friends on the main road.This informal grouping of friends reflects the kinship ties of their respective villages. Up to fifteen women will walk in dols (groups/gangs) to their assigned area of the field. Almost all will use the paths that circle around the factory area. From April onward, in the height of the peak seaDiscipline and Labor 181

son, garden staff and managers park on side roads to discipline tardy women, either by sending them home or by sharply admonishing them. These reprimands are resented by some of the women, who will remark that they are dependent on the timings of the public water taps and that they don’t wear watches. Bhagirathi’s dol of sisters-in-law, sisters, aunts, and friends is tightly knit because most of them are from the same jat, the Kumhar, and they live close to each other in the Factory Line, the village cluster lying immediately behind the factory. As a community who view themselves as a bara jat (‘‘big’’ community), which distinguishes itself as sadan (general caste) and not adivasi, it is a prominent community within the diversity of the plantation’s villages.This sense of superiority is enhanced by its relative economic success. Bhagirathi and her family run a small but successful store, and many of the menfolk have garnered some of the elite jobs in bungalow and factory. Most significantly, Bhagirathi, her sisters and aunts, have never left the village through marriage. Rather, their husbands have married ‘‘in’’ from Bihar: theyare ghar jamais (house son-in-laws).Their sense of claim, to their village and to their labor, is empowered by this historical and semimatrilocal continuity.Two generations of women have remained within.That sense of ‘‘place’’ and history is palpable as we walk to the field. The overseers announce the ticca of eleven kilos as the women assemble. Gesturing with his stick, the daffadar points to the aisles between each bush. Around Bhagirathi’s dol, three hundred women move into two chopols. About twenty overseers, themselves managed by an aurat chaprasi (women’s senior overseer) gesticulate with their switches and shout.5 About half of the total number situate themselves on one end of the large block, to move in one direction toward the other end of the rectangle. This strategy of deployment is to ensure that if there is a stray leopard crouching in the center of the chopol, it can escape. Bhagirathi explains that incidents of mauling are not infrequent and she will show me a one-eyed woman in the village. The spatial ordering of women follows the mathematics of tea bush layout. Its linear aisles define the women’s positioning and reformulates the cluster of women’s dols.The women’s spacing indexes not only the linearity of organization; it suggests also a highly individualized movement through the field.Yet, the organic roundness of the bushes and the women’s conversations create a mesh of camaraderie across the verticality of the rows. In contrast to a factory’s enclosed space, where such a criss-cross of chatter is mediated by the noise of machines and monitored by floor supervisors, the plantation’s landscape of horizontal dispersion—and its silences—makes such camaraderie possible. 182

The women fix heavy protective sheeting, a tirpal, around their waists to protect their torsos from the small but tough branches of the bush. The rumal is a cloth pouch that hangs from her forehead to low on her back. It is here, with a quick backward motion of the hands, that the leaf is thrown. The sun is not high yet, the days are relatively cool, but most women carry large black umbrellas, which they prop among the bushes. One woman shouts laughingly: ‘‘Hey, put the tirpal around the memsahib and ask her to join us. I will take her leaf.’’ Bhagirathi yells back: ‘‘Be quiet. That is a matter of honor. How can the memsahib wear the tirpal?’’ Turning to me, she laughs: ‘‘Sit down, didi, in the shade. We will talk as we work.’’ Status is marked in this brief, humorous, and satirical exchange: didi (elder sister) is still the memsahib. Izzat, or honor, writes an explicit syntax of Bhagirathi’s refusal to fix the tirpal around my waist. Honor maps Bhagirathi’s sense of order, which in this instance, is underwritten by a widely shared perception of class and caste difference that charts the gulf between memsahib and mazdoor (worker). Though I have no intention of plucking, because of ethical questions about enacting a superficial mimesis of their labor,6 my own sense of ‘‘choice’’ (and its contemplations) becomes irrelevant. I follow Bhagirathi’s command and sit in the shade. At 9:00 a.m., the ‘‘muster’’ (attendance) is compiled by the boidar and the munshi (the senior overseer), who will enter the shift attendance in the office ledgers. His small ‘‘pocket hazree’’ book, the field daily attendance register, is divided into lists headed with the name of specific sirdars or overseers. This listing of groups of women is a living artifact of the colonial period, where sirdars were primarily responsible fororganizing their new recruits into working batches.7 Women recruited from same, or nearby, home villages in the Chotanagpur were grouped under their kinsman, whose authority and ‘‘big man’’ status, was legitimated by the planter. Paternal power is codified through transference, from husband/father to sirdar, into the most basic terms of labor control. Though the colonial sirdari system has formally dissolved, the postcolonial organization of the hazree book suggests that its skeleton still frames the literate indexing of women’s work.The women’s names, grouped under an overseer’s name, suggest that postcolonial women’s dols have inherited these structures of laboring kinship from their foremothers of the colonial plantation. While they are not exact reproductions of colonial groupings, these orderings of women do suggest that patterns of territorial and community solidarity are historically ‘‘naturalized.’’ Because the boidar’s small book creates the base of the office ledgers of Discipline and Labor 183

20. Attendance log, from an overseer’s Pocket Hazree book. ‘‘Sarah’s Hope’’ Tea Estate, May 1990.

weighment and wage, this sirdari artifact underscores the indelible and significant ways in which paternalism charts the terms of managerial power. Men from the community of workers were, historically, ‘‘given’’ the women to manage ‘‘for’’ the planter. The postcolonial planter, still distant from daily management, has continued the same traditions of masculine control. Though these feminized lists appear insignificant in the wider plantation system, they build the foundation of a cultural politics of labor within which women’s marginality is assumed and naturalized. Indeed, customary norms of village patriarchies are, through such legitimations, further strengthened. Soon after the muster is taken, a panniwallah (water carrier) with two heavy cans of water, cycles on a path alongside a large group of women. After balancing the cans on a bamboo pole, he enters one corner of the tea block, pouring water into the women’s cupped hands from a small mug. Nursing mothers who have left babies in makeshift hammocks, take time to breast-feed their infants. Small daughters, or other young kinswomen, will accompany new mothers into the field, to help mind a particularly young infant. The sun is blazing, but the rhythms of work keep pacewith the easycamaraderie between the women, who banter with their overseer: ‘‘Hey, brother, what is your news?’’ Conversation halts momentarily when the garden staff and assistant manager arrive on their respective motorcycles.They yell loudly: ‘‘Hath chalao, 184

hath chalao [Move your hands, move your hands].’’ Their combined bellow is met with a smatter of derision. Bhagirathi shouts: ‘‘Hey, sahib, we have reached our ticca, so what are you shouting about?’’ Yet some women enact, with some humor, their own subversions of these ordered inscriptions. In the daily log, only first names of women are given. I am told that women create their own names for these registers of control. Sometimes, their names are anonymous, indicating only the day that they began work: Budhni for a woman who started work on Wednesday (budhuwar), Somri for Monday (somwar). Apparantly, these too are colonial traditions. When an exasperated babu would be faced with a silent recruit who refused to give her name, a day-name was given. Silence was, then, refusal. Perhaps done out of fear and subconscious recalcitrance, it coded a certain noncompliance. Multiple ‘‘Wednesdays’’ could only be distinguished by their sirdar groupings. But women subvert this calendrical anonymity even further. They name themselves for reigning film heroines: Sandhya may become Madhuri; an older woman, Mita, is Meena Kumari, and Munni becomes Rekha.8 This name play suggests a counterclaim of the alienating conditions of work, where anonymous lists are tricked into a certain playful individuality but where the totalizing claims of the plantation system are symbolically thwarted. The village is a place, then, where one’s identity is not so wrenched into an exhausting alienation. In these ‘‘home’’ places, then, the birth names can remain true.9 The siren sounds the end of the first shift at 11:00 a.m., and after packing the leaves down with their feet, the women haul the bundle of leaf onto their backs. Since the weighment shed behind the factory is about two miles away, it takes the women thirty minutes to reach it. I walk back with Bhagirathi and her kinswomen.We move down the path in a safe cluster. Shifting the leaf ’s weight more evenly in the heavy cloth bundle on her back, Bhagirathi wipes her brow: ‘‘You will see how hard this gets in a few months. This leaf is nothing. There is not much pressure now. But if you want a story of tea, tell whomever you tell that this is our life: in sun, in rain, we do this. If you don’t even see our sweat, how can you write?’’

Weight In September, months before this particular walk to the factory weighment shed, I had watched from afar women, in lines, wending their way from the field to the factory gates. Then, in full harvest, the bundle of leaf overwhelmed the small and bent-over bodies. Heads bowed, eyes focused on the ground, the feet shuffling along.The large sacks on their backs, inverted and Discipline and Labor 185

strange heavy pregnancies, are disproportionate to the size of their bodies. How far do they walk? How far? A back gate to the weighment area leads into a shed where some of the office staff man four desks, beside which are hanging scales, ready for leaf weighment. At each table, women line up in their sirdari batches. Staff assistants steady the scales and shout out the weight, which is noted quickly in the ledger. Mira Chhetri remembers an incident in weighment: ‘‘One day I carried 52 kilos on my back with my lame foot, for five kilometers, and this babu tells me to sit further away from him. He was writing in the weighments. I was perhaps in his way, I don’t remember, or maybe it was his own ghinna [repulsion].To have to go all the way around . . . anyway, I was just so tired and he was bothering me, the harami [expletive]. So I got up, turned and dumped the whole bundle of leaf on his shirt. I told him I had tripped but to this day, the factory staff look at me badly. Now that I am a health assistant, they say ‘Namaste, didi ’ [Hello, sister]. When you are a plucker, you are basically nothing.’’ An assistant manager yells at the women to move their bundles quickly to the drying trough. Bhagirathi’s dol, a group of women not to be trifled with, shout back: ‘‘We are going! Are we stopping work? We have brought you your tea.’’ As we head out of the back gate of the factory, Somri Lohra mutters, ‘‘That sahib has a lot of gham [pride]. See his sour face, even his memsahib looks like that. All sour.’’ By 11:45 a.m., weighment is complete, and the women head home for a quick lunch. At 12:30 p.m., the siren sounds the second shift, though they have begun assembling from 12:20 p.m. By 12:40 p.m., work has resumed. News of the latest scandal in the village, as well as ribald jokes about a particular garden babu are shared. It is in these early months of work that the women’s solidarity is most palpable. Anjali, who is not in this plucking muster, guides me back into the field, and sits with Bhagirathi’s dol, which she will join when she resumes plucking. For now, she is assigned to my bungalow. She speaks again of the alienation brought about by isolated work in the bungalow system. ‘‘Ay, didi, I left the garden because of my health and because my father had worked in the bungalow so the sahib knew me. But I am there alone, and I sit and worry so much, my eyes go inside my head. At least here you are with your friends and time goes. The work is hard, but oh, the time goes.’’ We sit in the shade and she moves closer to her friends who are taking a small water break. She huddles and says, ‘‘Didi, don’t look.We are ‘start-

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ing.’ ’’ Other women, in earshot, start laughing.One friend, who is plucking nearby, says, ‘‘Anjali, I am surprised you are not in the Division Bungalow with you-know-who.’’ This is a thinly veiled reference to a young bachelor assistant manager in whose bungalow Anjali has worked. She responds with arch laughter, ‘‘Oh, you know, he takes me everywhere on his motorcycle.’’ Anjali’s ribaldry, with its inflection of sexual innuendo, is satirical and subversive. The suggestion of the erotic between women, which switches to joking about a young bachelor planter’s nonliaison with Anjali, offers a theater of alterity. Taboo is countered by earthy knowledges. Not so easily dismissed as unimportant innuendo, the collective jest hints at powerful sexualized connections between women within a space vertically below the surveillance of the command and distant from the onerous tasks of their village homes.The field’s discourse occurs, then, on simultaneous planes of action. Alterity can be humorous; it is played through another horizontal perspective. Within the ambit of the level gaze of the overseer and the vehicular circling of the planter, the women move their hands. Their chatter cuts across the call of the siren.Yet below the horizon of the gaze, and in the absence of men, secret solidarities are forged. The spirit remains laughing, golden-eyed, and perhaps as untamed as a crouching leopard. Afternoon work is monitored by all levels of the supervisory cadre of overseers and by surprise spot visits of garden staff and assistant managers. Because this is the beginning of the harvest, supervision is energetic. It sets the example, and the pace, of the more intense disciplining to follow when the growth of leaf is at its peak. On Monday afternoons, the 4:00 p.m. siren is sounded half an hour earlier because of the local market held near the factory. Mondays are also, not coincidentally, payment day for pluckers, who are categorized as ‘‘daily-rated’’ workers.Clerical staff, who calculate the daily wage and doubly (the amount to be paid for kilos plucked above the required weight) sit at three long tables as the women line up, ready with their sirdar batch name. Small change is given in the form of coupons that can be used in the market, another reminder of colonial customs where workers were paid with money that could not be used outside the plantation area. The women try to move as quickly as possible through the familiar rituals of weighment and payment. Mondays are particularly busy days, as all the family’s food and provisions shopping is done at this time. For a few, like Bhagirathi, whose family runs a small store, the market day is hectic. She washes her face quickly and sets up a large can of kerosene on a path leading from the market into the Mission Line. She measures kerosene into

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old glass bottles and money changes hands. Sometimes a customer does not have cash and puts his or her payment on credit. She makes quick calculations in her head, and with remarkable recall, makes sure that her eldest son will record cash income and amounts owed. On any given market day, she can make a forty-rupee profit, more than her daily wage. Almost directly behind her, Munnu begins to sell home-made handia, or rice beer. She has spent two days preparing this popular drink. Selling handia supplements a meager income, and on a particularly warm and lucky afternoon, she can earn a handsome hundred rupees.

Uterine Economies/Third Shifts On ordinary weekdays, this enterprising work is replaced with the more mundane tasks of cleaning kitchen pots, refilling them with water, and preparing evening meals. Because the management’s supply of firewood is inadequate for the harvest months, women continue to build up their winter stockpiles of wood.10 When the monsoons arrive, collecting wood and drying it will make cooking even more onerous. Munnu’s young daughters forage in the plantation for twigs and sticks, while she may walk five miles into a small forest to get more firewood. Since the wood is not damp, the cooking fire lights quite easily, and she stokes the flames in the small clay depression in the adobe floor of her kitchen. One afternoon, a small crisis erupts. Anjali and Bhagirathi’s cows are missing. Collecting firewood is out of the question, and Bhagirathi, who usually pays a young cowherder to take cows into permitted grazing areas, is angry. She tracks both animals to the plantation cattle pound, where she has to pay a fine. Straying cows are brought in by garden watchmen, who are paid a commission from the total fine.11 Bhagirathi’s search for the cows has delayed other household tasks, and though she can pay the fine, she comments that ‘‘for people who are far poorer than I am, this is a further punishment.We are lucky if we can have the animals at all—because of the milk.Where else can the cows go? Everything is out of bounds. And then, on top of it, they take money from us. This gets me so angry.’’ Chasing errant cows, walking miles for firewood, and stoking a small fire all constitute a shift of work that begins, technically, two hours before the morning siren. Significantly, men are visibly absent in the late afternoon and evening of women’s work and are to be found congregating by the workers’ canteen. The women’s third shift of work is sanctioned by the naturalized and feudal divisions of village and household labor. While sons and hus-

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bands may help in tending a store, for example, other household tasks are distinctly feminized and remain a woman’s responsibility. Kitchenwork, however, cannot be understood in the middle-class terms of a ‘‘separate’’ and contained domestic economy. Cooking is the endpoint of a labor that includes long walks for firewood, water collection around public taps, and the growing of vegetables in a small kitchen garden. It also involves a feminized collective, where daughters and other kinswomen will help in various phases of preparation. It is indeed difficult to splice this flow of work into the dichotomies of ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private,’’ of domestic and outside labors. Pregnant or nursing women who work in the field belie such divisions through the active presence of their bodies in labor, so to speak. Fieldwork is thus mediated through a uterine and sexual economy that encompasses tasks of cultivation, the maintenance of households, and the tempos of social life in the labor lines.12 Cooking, ostensibly the iconic task of interiority, is dependent on the field and forest for its possibility. It is enabled by women’s continuous travels through village, field, and forest. This is an economy of flow, and of bodily travel, mediated through women’s bodies, which cannot be contained analytically within the binary of ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private.’’ While the ‘‘body’’ cannot be reified as the only template of women’s multiple experiences of labor (and certainly their own commentaries work against such reifications), there are important ways in which their own narratives through (and not ‘‘of ’’) their bodies compell a rethinking of labor as a daily experience of both constraint and excess. Embodiment does not permit easy lines of demarcation. Certainly, women situate themselves within the command of the rational landscape and work their necessary hands into the foilage, enacting an ordered harvest.Yet within and under the palpable and stifling control of the gaze, inside its voices of command, a subtext of bodily presence erodes the landscape of lines. Subtle spirals of the erotic lace the huddle of women’s talk in moments of rest.The body burgeons into the possibility of new life as it bends, with a ponderous yet paradoxical elasticity. After some months, in the time between such bending, there will be time to suckle.

Plucking Intensity By mid-April, when the premonsoon rainfall has fallen steadily, the ticca is increased to twenty-five kilos and the monetary incentive of doubly— or half a rupee per kilo above the ticca—is in place. This shift in the wage

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calculus and the incentive transforms both the pace of work and social life in the field. Because of the incentive, many women will now reach work before eight in the morning, thereby accelerating their already hectic morning routines. Simultaneously, surveillance of attendance is intensified, and even the burra sahib will wait near the main path into the field to turn away latecomers. This tight supervision of tardiness adds a palpable tension, and the overseers’ call to move quickly seems sharper. The trickle-down of the hukum (command) is thus understood.The earlier banter between the overseer and women, and the easy camaraderie between women, is almost absent. The concentration on plucking is singular. Some conversation takes place when the siren calls out the shift’s end, and they pack their leaf into the bundle, to start the long walk back to the weighment shed. Subtle temporal coercions increase the duration and intensity of work in important ways. Because the overseer owns the only wristwatch in the field, he effectively controls information about time and shift duration. It is a ‘‘secret’’ knowledge that compells a microextraction of labor power. The monopoly of that knowledge does not, however, go unnoticed. The siren, women recognize, sounds a few minutes later than ‘‘standard time’’ and will begin to stop work a few minutes earlier. An angry overseer yells that ten minutes of the shift remain. Moniki Mosi points out the discrepancy in time with a tartness that is explicit. Moniki Mosi: Look, didi, these daffadars always lie to us. Overseer: Well, the only reason I tell you ten minutes (instead of five) is if I tell you the latter, you will begin to leave early. If the babus see this, they will yell at me. Dol (in unison): Ha, ha, we will raise money and buy one watch, and then you see.

In high sun and sweat, even this quick thrust and parry between women and overseer, is rare. Angry and loud responses are reserved for the garden staff: ‘‘Why,’’ women will yell, ‘‘are you barking like a dog? Aren’t we pulling your ticca?’’ Quietly, on the path to weighment, Moniki Mosi remarks: ‘‘This work is sasan [punishment] for us because we hear yells from every side, sahib, babu, daffadar. What to do, didi? Khato aur khao [labor/suffer and eat].’’ Not only are the tensions within cultivation greater during the peak season, the duration of work is transformed. A large green-wire mesh trailer, the weighment truck, arrives mid-morning and afternoon and punctuates both shifts of work.The quantity of leaf plucked will be too heavy a load for 190

thewomen to carry.Two assistants and one overseer quickly set up a bamboo tripod with hanging scales, and weighment proceeds briskly. Each woman receives a small slip of paper with the weight written on it, and she will present this at the factory when her second bundle of leaf will be weighed. The face of the scale is turned away from the women wearily falling into line. The overseer usually notes a kilo or two less than what is indicated on the scale. I watch what is being written and am concerned about the arbitrariness of what is being noted: sometimes a kilo, sometimes three, are deducted. Since most women cannot read, this micro-instance of extraction glides by with some ease. When I ask women about the subtraction of leaf weight, they tell me that this is a customary subtraction that is supposed to account for the weight of the cloth. Though they agree there is a certain arbitrariness in the amounts subtracted, they shrug tiredly. When the siren calls the end of the morning shift, women haul the rest of their leaf on their backs, and unfurl their umbrellas for the hot walk back to the factory.The time needed to walk to and from weighment is not explicitly factored into the duration of the shift. During peak season, a half-hour walk and fifteen minutes at weighment ensures that the 12:45 p.m. siren leaves barely an hour for lunch. Sometimes, Bhagirathi and her dol will begin the afternoon shift within half an hour, in order to pluck as much extra leaf as possible. By the end of the afternoon shift, the women who are focused on their incentive have worked almost continuously from eight in the morning. Exhaustion is universal, and a brief greeting accompanied by a small tired smile uses up a woman’s last reserves of physical energy. As she plucks, a woman must carry the weight of the leaf on her back. There is no receptacle near her where she can empty a mid-chopol burden of leaf and come back for it later. In peak season, a plucker will pull 54 kilos of leaf at an average,13 though Bhagirathi and Munnu have brought in over a hundred kilos [see appendix, table A5]. Approximately half of the entire amount will be physically carried. Older children, sons and daughters, will help their mothers with the extra leaf and occasionally, husbands will bicycle in and strap a bundle on the back seat and haul it to the shed. During the peak harvest, casual workers, known variously as bigha or faltu labor,14 are employed [see appendix, table A4]. The selection of bigha workers is dependent on the family’s employment situation, union leaders’ benevolence, and the manager’s assessment of need. For example, a large household with only one permanent wage earner will be given priority. Many women who have married into the plantation and are waiting for a chance to buy or ‘‘inherit’’ a job from their husbands are hired. Batches of approximately 150 women are rotated through three cycles of work durDiscipline and Labor 191

ing the peak season. Because labor laws require additional pension and inkind benefits after sixty days of continuous work, bigha cycles are kept to days just below that number. A subset of the bigha batch, known as ‘‘daily voucher’’ workers, are hired for ten-day cycles of work when the volume leaf is particularly high. When ‘‘daily voucher’’ workers are to be selected, a line chowkidar (labor line watchman) announces the openings. Candidates line up at the factory window, where an assistant manager will listen to each candidate’s need, and cross-check his list with the union leader’s preferences. Though selection is mediated by political benevolence and structural need, a woman’s body can determine the choice. In one instance, the chota sahib deployed a calculus of a woman’s height and its influence on the shape of the tea bush: ‘‘To be honest, selection for daily voucher can be quite arbitrary.When they come to the window, I will try and choose a taller woman, because when she is taller, it is easier for her to pluck. But more importantly for me, with longer arms she can reach out further, while if she is really short, the bush can become cabbage-shaped. We have to aim for evenness, you see.That is crucial.’’ Though most women workers are quite short (a ‘‘tall’’ woman is a striking anomaly), and the manager’s commentary perhaps an exaggeration, it is an equation of an ‘‘ideal’’ that combines labor mathematics with a fetish: the woman’s body defining the potential quality of her labor and its dependence, on the rational aesthetics of the tea bush. Bigha women enact quite different temporal and spatial rhythms from their sisters in permanent work. For one, they are separated from their permanent sisters, and their dols are deployed to areas furthest from the factory. This is a reprieve for the permanent women. The bigha work begins at 8:00 a.m., and the first weighment truck enters at 11:00 a.m. This midday weighment occurs later than the permanent women’s field weighment, because bigha women will not return to the factory for a lunch break. By 11:30 a.m., they wash themselves at the water tank and begin to eat lunch brought by their children, who have cycled in. Because the bigha shift spans the entire day, there are more babies in the makeshift hammocks hanging between the trees. Older siblings will occasionally enter the field and help mothers or sisters with plucking. After a very short lunch, eaten with their dol under an umbrella for shade in the hot sun, the women are back at work. Technically the day ends at 3:00 p.m., but because there is no siren to signal its end, their work often stretches for an extra fifteen minutes. Once again, because only overseers wear watches, most women are not precise about the clocked synchronicity 192

of the sirens. The garden staff, seen only occasionally among the larger groups of permanent workers, is present at lunch break to ensure that bigha women take the shortest possible time to eat their lunches. The intensified disciplining is explicitly noted by Mona, a bigha worker: ‘‘Look, memsahib, no one cares for bigha workers. If you don’t pull 25 kilos ticca, they will ask you if you want to work.They will never lower the ticca for us. There is hardly any time to eat; you will see a woman eating and continuing to work. But we need these jobs, so we take it. In other plantations, the manager gives six months bigha work, but here we only get two months.’’ Economic desperation thus outweighs a conscious sense of injustice at their differential treatment. It is, as it is for many in the plantation, a matter of both survival and endurance.15

Discipline and Delicacy To pluck, the nail of the thumb must be applied to the top of the forefinger, and the stalk or leaf cut through. However, in practice, it will be found that pluckers, if not properly looked after, will nip the stalk or leaf between the thumb and slightly curved forefinger, and with a sharp pinching twist take off the stalk clean through by hooking the forefinger round the stalk and with an upward motion tearing off leaves and axis. It will be obvious to the reader that if such a vile lazy practice be allowed, the loss of succeeding flush would simply be enormous.16 I can tell you the Planter’s Law of the Medes and Persians. Two Leaves and a Bud, Plucked Dead Level.17

From the aesthetics of purity in Chinese imperial plantations, where even human fingers could soil the pure value of the emperor’s tea, to the British Planter’s Law—Two Leaves and a Bud—the act of plucking has a special and significant place within the annals of labor practice. Indeed, women’s cultivation itself and its hegemonic fetishisms add a three-dimensional layer to the colorful histories of consumption through which the feminization of tea emerged. The colonized and postcolonial working woman’s body rounds out the two-dimensionality of parlor etchings. If empire was signified by the careful lift of cup to feminine lip, the shadow of another woman waited in the wings. If the carefully folded hands and downcast eyes of a postcolonial Indian woman welcomes you to the pleasures of Darjeeling tea, a similar shadow bends in the background. Discipline and Labor 193

Its suggestion of presence-in-absence fleshes out the flat allure of the iconic image. Within the field, the icon is inverted, the shadow is bodied, three-dimensional, a conscious act. Though explicit connections are not made, the feminization of the commodity and labor practice—whose meeting point is thewomen’s bodyas fetish—inflects understandings of women’s work within the ranks of workers and the managerial cadre. The planter’s hukum (order) demands quantity. When the overseer shouts, ‘‘Move your hands, move your hands,’’ he enacts this managerial imperative: the amount of leaf must be sufficient for the tea chests being readied for a Calcutta shipment. For some women, this pressure to pick quickly is a direct consequence of the company’s and the sahib’s lalchi (greed). Munnu describes this speed in wide grabbing movements over the tea bush. ‘‘What happens when we do this,’’ she notes, ‘‘is that we harm the bush. It is jungli torna [wild tearing]. We really injure the bush. We should be doing this,’’ demonstrating with a quick and neat movement of her wrist. ‘‘Do pati ek sera [two leaves and a bud] . . . but the company gets too greedy. It wants more, more, more.’’ 18 Munnu’s evaluation of jungli plucking, and its converse, suggests an internalization of the Planter’s Law. Yet, her commentary can also be seen as resting on another axes of claim to the plantation, and not to the aesthetics of profit, which determines managerial disciplines of plucking. It is the tea bush, and its life, which is threatened by company ‘‘greed.’’ Significantly, Munnu redeploys that most potent inscription of wildness (heretofore bodily inscribed)—jungli—into a critique of the company, the planter, and his managerial raison d’être. Interestingly, at neighboring Kolpara, some women do not share Munnu’s concern with tea bush life, and are known to secretly use bamboo stick prongs to assist their plucking. This is, however, rare and would incur severe disciplinary action if discovered. Indeed, accusations of haulabina-hukum (careless plucking without the order) causes increased friction between overseer and worker when the pressure to pick maximum leaf is at its height. Moniki Mosi, Bhagirathi’s aunt, fights with an assistant manager who yells at her for plucking haula-bina-hukum. She is indignant: ‘‘There I was in the middle of the assigned row and he starts screaming at me. In fact, there were some women on the side who were doing haula. Instead of yelling at them, he turns on me. Not only that, this is where the overseer put me. So I shouted back at him and he headed off on his motorcycle, glaring at me with his big eyes.’’ Prosaic and individuated disciplining of this sort constitutes the bedrock 194

of mangerial coercions. They are not, as Moniki Mosi’s countercommentary suggests, one-way streets. However, for young managers, these acts of microdisciplining are cornerstones—and indeed proofs—of proper initiation into the rites of planting. Note a careful entry made in the daily ledgers of a first-year assistant manager: ‘‘I have been making a random check from time to time of the leaves plucked by individual workers in the bigha mela to make sure that they only pluck what is necessary. On Friday, I caught two women plucking broad leaves from the side of the bush along with old leaves and twigs. They do this to increase their weighment so that they get paid more. On reporting to the manager, I had their work stopped for the time being.This had to be done as a necessary step against bad plucking.’’ 19 Consider this postcolonial commentary’s synchronicity with a colonial sahib’s observation of plucking and his argument against incentive payment: ‘‘Very often, when there is heavy flush, pice [paisa] is paid to coolies for extra leaf. This must never be done in the first two flushes and only in exceptional cases in the third flush.The coolies pull the leaf off anyhow unless watched for the whole day, duffadar pick for their wives, and neglect their work, any amount of damage is done to the garden and a lot of coarse tea is made for certainty.’’ 20 The colonial and postcolonial disciplining of the women gestures to another implicit axis upon which plucking surveillance rests. The presence of twigs with leaf is detrimental to the overall quality of tea. Following in the steps of the alert assistant manager, overseers will rifle through individual bundles of leaf to check for ‘‘bad’’ plucking.Veteran senior overseers recall how in tougher times, if the woman’s ‘‘hand slipped,’’ she would be sent to detention. Now, the loss of daily wage is the only threat against what is seen as a conscious carelessness. In most cases, the assistant manager will permit the erring woman to spread hercloth and sort out twigs in the field itself. In sum, workers’ strategies to erode the hukum—a woman padding the weight of leaf with twigs, an overseer helping his wife—suggests the small backbeat of resistance to regimes of work.The manager’s own consciousness of such strategies reinforces and creates the terms of plucking surveillance. The pragmatic and even prosaic nature of such surveillance is inflected by the planter’s own fetishisms of plucking, heightened by early observations of work and the ritual folklore of consumption. In one colonial observation, a certain ‘‘orientalization’’ of plucking techniques is explicit: ‘‘The black tea maker plucks the leaves with great rapidity, with both hands, using only the forefinger and cuts them in the hollow of his nail.’’ 21 Consider another colonial planter’s commentary on the work of Chinese tea makers: ‘‘While Discipline and Labor 195

others were heaping into the grates beneath the cooking pan logs of wood to feed the flames, which caused the leaves to hiss and crackle, the chopsticks in the nimble hands of the Chinaman rattled their accompaniment on the sides.’’ 22 Such a peculiarly detailed description of the Chinese tea maker (the focus on nails, the nimble hands) creates an aura of connection between the fetishisms of women’s plucking and this premachinery work of manufacture. One postcolonial manager defines plucking as an inherited craft. He remarks, ‘‘Women pluckers are like those weavers who make dhakai [Dacca muslin]. It is the same fine quality that is our objective.This is why weaving, like plucking, is hereditary—women can pass their skills to theirdaughters.’’ Tea plucking, in this analogy, is elevated to a craft whose skill is inherited and takes on feminized suggestions, even though weaving is a transgendered craft. The inheritance of plucking jobs is a complex business, and a lineage of women is difficult to trace. Indeed, many young brides—married in from other plantations and villages—‘‘inherit’’ jobs from their husbands. However, the idealized analogy is striking, in that weaving is inflected by an aesthetic of seduction and allure. Dhakai saris are high-end luxury items, so fine and transparent, the saying goes, the face of a bride veiled in such muslin can still be seen. As analogy and referent, the conflation of two fetishisms—and their significations of the feminine in both work and product—are telling.The value of tea, as with muslin, is intrinsic. Its worth is enhanced by feminized tradition. The labor that creates such products of value is to be protected and disciplined. Surveillance, then, is the cost of romance and its seemingly transparent seductions.

act 6, scene 3 The stage is dark. A backlight is turned on slowly, enough to show the silhouettes sitting at the Mad Tea Party table, stage right: the Sahibs and Memsahibs sitting center stage; and the figure of the Narrator, who rests on her mora just left of center stage. She leans over and turns on the black oil lantern at her feet. There is movement, extreme stage left. A woman Dancer comes out from behind the gauze backdrop. She carries a mora and sits next to the Narrator. woman: You summoned, memsahib.What for? she: I have been reading in the dark, some poems from other places, other languages. I wanted to share one with you. That’s all. Only a part of it, I promise. It is not long. woman: Go on, memsahib. I can rest my feet.Go on. Is it a song, this poem?

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As she talks, she reaches into a fold of her sari and pulls out some leaf and tobacco. She begins to roll it as the Narrator responds. she: Yes, like a song. A man writing for his lover, an ode to her hands. It is called ‘‘Girl Gardening,’’ ‘‘Oda a La Jardinera.’’ ‘‘Yes: I knew that your hands were / a blossoming clove and the silvery lily: / your notable way / with a furrow / and the flowering marl.’’ (Pause) Odd, to not know the language of his words, translating this for you in an alien tongue. woman: Go on, memsahib, I am listening. she: ‘‘The whole / of you prospered, / piercing down / into earth, / greening the light like a thunderclap / in a massing of leafage and power. / You confided / your seedlings, / my darling, / little red husbandman; / your hand / fondled / the earth / and straight away / the growing was luminous.’’ 23 woman: (After a long pause and inhaling her bidi ) In a massing of leafage and power. In a massing of leafage and power. (She repeats the phrases slowly.) The Narrator turns the lantern down completely.The stage lights fade into total darkness.The only light is the glow from the bidi glowing, an ember in the blackness. The sounds are of rustling crickets, the unquiet dark. There is a stirring. Quietly, the Dancer gets up and leaves, stage left.

Ethnographic Leisures June is bursting with leaf, and the pressure of work is constant. Some days, I walk into the field with Anjali and we visit Bhagirathi’s dol. Even though they are welcoming, their exhaustion limits our conversation, and we sit quietly in the shade. Many afternoons, I remain in the leisured isolation of my bungalow venturing out in the late evening when I assume that the women who have befriended mewill have completed their necessarychores. Yet again the awareness of the sharp divide between my leisured privilege and their constant labor is acute. To mull over that divide, in a feudal system within which structural inequity is a given, appears facile and indulgent. Yet, because of the basic tenets of ethnographic field research, I must carefully consider the historically specific terms within which my own experience and understanding of women’s laboring takes place. To do so is not to absolve myself of the inescapable conclusion that I reach about my fieldwork experience: that it is

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extractive, that my unease in ‘‘taking time’’ both within the laboring field and in the village is ontologically and politically fraught and cannot be sidelined within ethnographic translations that make certain kinds of knowledge claims. In this specific instance, labor—as bodilydiscourse that defines plantation women’s experiences—rests at the center of narrative assertions about plantation disciplines and its patriarchies. The ‘‘field’’ and ‘‘fieldwork’’ take on a theoretical double entendre that cannot be obscured. In the plantation, the ‘‘field’’ has a descriptive actuality that is created through bodily disciplines. Likewise, ‘‘fieldwork’’ is realized by hard labor, which I do not—agreeing to the terms of its feudal codes— participate in. The ethnographic ‘‘field’’—emptied of specificity into abstraction—is impossible to assert within a landscape that itself depends on a coercive illusion. My own nonlaboring body and its observational stance appear to reproduce the terms of that illusion within the text, in a language that may register the Euclidean and Cartesian logic of a disciplined landscape. I risk this splintered register in order to underscore the artifice of the ethnographic story: its production and manufacture and the kinds of bodily labor that are absent in its making. This ethnography cannot be about anything but labor. The story about fieldwork, like its tea, is a tale about the price of romance, its seductive disembodiments. The narrative artifice of fieldwork is complicated further by the oral and dialogical nature of anthropological experience. When I lie alone and at leisure in the bungalow, my notes and authorial pacings are the highly individualized products of solitary mind work.Yet when I return to the villages with these reflections grinding into the pestle of my unease, they are reworked through partial, collective, and dialogical encounters. I continue only for the human surprise that can emerge, glistening, within such a baroque dialectic. I enter the miasma of unease in a hopeful way. I reach cautiously through its vapors, not searching for space innocent of power and its paradoxes, but for a place that offers the possibility of a pedagogy through which human community and connection can also be celebrated. So let me go back to Munnu’s kitchen, back to the time when we sat together in the light of a flickering lantern. She kindles the fire to prepare the lentils. I play with her baby while her daughter Savita peels some garlic. I tell her about my unease, that my sense of purpose, in the project—to listen and tell women’s stories—is waning. I tell her that I am paralyzed by its contradictions. ‘‘Didi,’’ she says, ‘‘I don’t understand what you are doing and why. But don’t worry so. It is not your responsibility, our condition.

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Maybe it is karma that has made me a worker and you a memsahib.Who is to know?’’ Munnu’s words are generous. But I am not sure that she fully believes her own karmic rationale about the terms of power and privilege that will always separate us. In many other conversations, she is the most astute commentator of feudal power and its discontents. Perhaps she is trying, with words that are enigmatic, to coax me into thinking beyond a liberal miasma of guilt. ‘‘Responsibility’’ is, indeed, the term that begs most careful translation. I leave it, for now, within that troubled, cloudy space in which intent, perception, translation and dis/connection swirl. The contradictions are irreducible.

Learning to Labor It is here, in the small kitchen, that Munnu’s three daughters become vivid reminders of the past and future of the plantation. Children’s worlds spill into their mothers’ labors, their parents’ aspirations for their education constrained by the necessities that demand that the entire family earn some wages. Children who are too small to work, and infants not taken into the field, can be left in a small crèche next to the factory.The manager employs a few maids to look after the babies, and sometimes milk is provided.Toddlers are left at home or with relatives, and mothers are secure about their safety. The home, in their sense of things, encompasses the village with its extended ties of kinship.The household is not a discrete and autonomous unit, and children thread familial bonds across the village. A small governmentrun primary school (up to class 4) offers a morning shift of classes, but the teaching is desultory. Children’s, particularly daughters’, education takes place in the village and in their mother’s landscape of work. A young boy is not as visible in assisting his mother, and if economically fortunate, will be encouraged to attend the neighboring Hindi high school. As in other parts of the subcontinent, a family’s meager financial resources will be focused on a boy’s education. Most girls will marry out of the plantation and in their in-laws villages will take up wage work. Rita Chhetri’s story is, unfortunately, a common one: ‘‘I was a restless child, I had a fast mouth and would answer back. Yes, I had a good mind. I went to school before my father retired and completed up to class 7 in the town school. The teacher let me skip two classes because I was smart. But then my father retired, and it was decided that my brother would con-

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tinue studying and I would take my father’s job and support the family.Yes, I had pressure from the family. He was the only son, and I was told that if he passed his class 10, he would get a good job. But he did not pass, and now he is unemployed and my life was ruined. A daughter assists her mother from an early age. Savita and Sabina, who play in the village while Munnu is working, will return to help with household chores once the last siren has sounded. During the day, the two sisters will accompany other small friends into the field in search of tea flowers, which grow at the base of the bush. Cooked with cummin, coriander, and onions, the tea flower curry is slightly bitter but palatable. Munnu tells me that when money is tight, and there is barely enough to buy enough vegetables, the children will collect vegetables and forage for firewood. ‘‘It keeps them busy, and it helps me a lot. I did the same when I was small and before I started work in the plantation.’’ If work is inherited by one of the children, or bought by a parent, then an explicit pedagogy of wage labor begins. Bhagirathi began work at twelve, about fifteen years ago, when an old gardener (who had sheltered in her family home) decided to give her his job.The burra sahib ‘‘checked my teeth’’ (to approximate her age) and allowed her to join a children’s dol. Sannicharwa, a bungalow watchman, remembers beginning fieldwork when his ‘‘teeth had not filled his mouth. This was the only way that the sahib could figure out age, but it all depended on him. If you and your family really wanted to start, he would usually allow it.’’ The custom of children working in the plantation is as old as labor recruitment itself. Family ‘‘settlement’’ of new workers included children, and from the very beginning children joined their parents in cultivation. Planting and weeding were the first tasks given to minors, a task they shared with the elderly or ill women. It is a tradition that continues to this day. Children conduct other forms of informal work. This is a labor that spills over from the village into the field. Daughters who mind infant siblings in the field may pluck to help their mothers.When an elderly person or ill kinswoman works in lata buri kam (weak, old women’s work), she may be accompanied by a child who will help her plant tea seedlings in the nursery. Small children catch insects that cause the dreaded tea blight and bite women’s arms and fingers while they pluck. They put the insects in cylindrical bamboo containers, for which they receive a small amount of money from the overseer. Postcolonial labor legislation rules against child labor,24 though it does permit a highly malleable ‘‘adolescent’’ category. Despite difficulty in ascertaining the boundaries between child and adol (adolescent), teenagers 200

are placed in adol dols and during peak season, both chokra and chokri (boys and girls) and adol dols cluster together. Significantly, gendered divisions do not occur at this stage. Only when an adol girl becomes a woman, a boundary marked by the onset of puberty, does she move into the aurat dols (women’s gangs). However, both groups of youngsters will, at some point in their initiation, work alongside the experienced women workers to take explicit directions from them.Watching and doing, mimicry and commonsense action, root the early pedagogy. A senior overseer recollects his first experience of pruning: ‘‘I watched people doing the kolom [pruning] when I was maybe fourteen years old, and then I tried it once. I did not realize it but even in that first cut, I had done it well. An overseer came and asked me if I had pruned before and I told him no. He praised me and immediately put me to work. Kolom is hard and it needs skill. This is what got me the job: my skill when I was a young boy.’’

Winter’s Labor Aye gele naya kuli, de dele kalam churi, Alam jalam kalam katu dagi ke saman re. Aye gele naya kuli, de dele kalam churi, Alam jalam kalam katu dagi ke saman re. Here are the new coolies, give them the pruning knife, Cut, cut the bush exactly to measure. Here are the new coolies, give them the pruning knife, Cut, cut the bush exactly to measure. Aye gele dari phut, de dele biri phut, Alam jalam kalam katu, dagi se saman re. Ucha Neecha bheley, kamdari naga kara, Alam jalam kalam katu dagi se saman re. Here is the waist stick, here is the four finger stick, Cut, cut the bush, exactly to measure. Cut up or cut down, the overseer will take your pay, Cut, cut the bush, exactly to measure.25

December has finally arrived and though plucking and other tasks in the field such as weeding and hoeing continue, the harvest is well past. The tea bushes have entered dormancy and turn a uniform dark bottle-green. BeDiscipline and Labor 201

cause of the paucity of leaf, casual workers are no longer employed. Most of the permanent women and men will be deployed for hoeing and pruning. In the words of a colonial planter, pruning is an exacting task because the longevity of the tea bush is dependent on it. Close supervision is imperative: ‘‘After he [the manager] has pruned as he wishes the work should be done, he should teach the overseers who will be in charge of the work and make them each prune for a day or several days until he is satisfied with their work. Then a small muster of coolies should be started at work and gradually increased until the whole muster is on. The work requires a great deal of supervision and the coolies should never be left until the manager is positive that every individual coolie knows what he has to do.’’ 26 If the colonial planter himself demonstrated pruning to his new workers, contemporary workers will comment on their own monopoly of skill: the postcolonial sahib is seen as ignorant of such immediate and bodily knowledge.Consider Mita Ghatwar’s memory of a lesson in pruning: ‘‘No one here knows the work like the coolies. Look, the sahib barely gets out of his jeep! What does he know? Remember when I told you I fought with the sahib about kolom [pruning]. It is hard to do it just right, and you can destroy the tree if you are not careful. So I was trying, and the staff who was supervising screamed at me. I lost my temper and told him I would be thankful if he showed me how to do it himself. Now he could not show me, because he did not know how to do it. So he got angry because I put him down in front of the others. He told the manager, who tried to put me down. But couldn’t.’’ Bina, Munnu’s one-year-old daughter, sits in the kitchen making a slight lisping sound: ‘‘Seeerr . . . seeerr . . . seeerr.’’ Munnu grimaces. ‘‘Listen to the sound she is making, didi. I make this when I am working, and she has picked it up. Two months before I gave birth to her, I was doing pruning and because it is hard, I was swinging the sickle and making this seeerr . . . seeerr . . . sound. I did not realize that the chota sahib was standing right behind me. I was so embarrassed. He asked me why I made the sound, and I told him it was the only way I can get the work done.’’ Anjali, sitting in the kitchen with us, admonishes Munnu. ‘‘You should not prune when you are so pregnant, Munnu. It can damage the child because all your strength when you swing the knife comes out of your stomach, where the child is. That is when you swing from the waist up. That is why your breath comes out seeerr . . . seeerr . . . seeerr.’’ Munnu winks. ‘‘Perhaps Bina heard the sound when she was in my stomach. No, I think she hears me now when I take her to work.’’ The rhythms of winter work are markedly different from the speed, in202

tensity, and surveillance of plucking in peak season. For one, daily wages are entirely task-based (e.g., x number of bushes to be pruned), and no incentive is given for extra bushes. Once the specific allotment of bushes are finished, the worker receives the daily wage and is free for the remainder of the day. The only incentive is temporal, how quickly one can finish the task requirement. As a consequence, Bhagirathi and other members of her dol will try and enter the assigned area as early as possible. Since time is not stringently clocked, the dol will not arrive in one group. A day can begin as early as 3 a.m., when it is still very dark. Fear of leopards who take shelter in the fields at night is a constant, but the desire to finish the task quickly is greater than this fear. Bhagirathi, who is particularly swift, will finish her task by ten. She cooks her family’s lunch when she returns in the late morning. As such, her predawn household tasks are confined to a quick wash before dashing to the field. Because the time to complete the task depends ultimately on a woman’s individual strength and speed, arrivals and departures are a dispersed business. Dependent on a specific rotational cycle, different kinds of pruning are assigned. Women can be assigned to ‘‘lp’’ or light pruning. Swinging a twelve-inch sickle with her arms, twisting her upper torso, she will slice a few inches off the top of the tea bush. Her precise swinging arc is colloquially called ainchy (inchy) kolom. The English command, to clear an inch of leaf, is thus coded into the plantation’s own vernacular of labor. Labeled as ‘‘light’’ pruning in managerial parlance, the strength, speed, and stamina necessary for the grooming of 110 bushes, an average task, is considerable. A woman must ensure that every tea bush in her ticca is matched in tabletop evenness. Her overseer must supervise pruning into a collective and synchronic precision. Bhagirathi, pausing in between the swishes of her sickle, gasps: ‘‘It really feels as if the power comes from my stomach, rising up here’’ (pointing to her chest) ‘‘and then in through my arms. It burns. This is hard work. You have to swing through in one motion, and if you don’t, you splinter the branches.’’ Power emanates, then, from a bodily center and in a space where a baby may have rested. It flows into the arms and finally creates the physics of the sickle’s swish. The body narrates the breath and hiss of its own parabola. The tea bush’s tabletop evenness depends not onlyon the powerful swing, but also on the quality of the sickle, the jhurni. Garden sickles are often blunt, and workers will invest their own money to purchase newer tools. This internal economy of sickle making and sanding is controlled by comDiscipline and Labor 203

munities who are traditional blacksmiths, such as the Nepali Kami. In the field, a blunt blade is sharpened by a senior overseer carrying coarse sand in a small bamboo container. While managerial surveillance of time is less intense in pruning cycles, careful attention is paid to the quality of pruning. Both the colonial sahib and Mita’s postcolonial commentary attests to this. Careless pruning can destroy the tea bush, and if a woman does not have the aptitude—physical strength and speed—she will be assigned to late plucking rotations or other field tasks. Considerable practice, and an early tutoring in different kinds of pruning, is enough to ensure consistent skill. Overseers will regularly identify and select skillful women as pruners. Because most managers do not themselves know how to prune, a lack mocked by women like Mita, experienced overseers are left to organize and supervise these morning shifts of work. Though the senior planter will wheel by fora few moments, his gaze lacks a certain edge.Women are quick to take advantage of his fleeting and superficial presence. Family members will join a woman with their own sickles and help her to complete her allotment. In contrast to plucking, when only a younger kinswoman may very occasionally assist, husbands and sons will help with pruning. An inside agreement ( girmit) is sometimes made with water carriers who will, for a small commission (up to 10 rupees), prune the bushes. Strictly speaking, such assistance is not allowed, and the informal workers will drop their sickles as soon as the jeep or motorcycle of a manager is sighted. Overseers are more than aware of these customary practices of labor assistance but will simply look away. Though women are liberally deployed to do certain kinds of pruning, men are selected carefully. The gendered body is a measure, again, for this managerial judgment. A man, they remark, has greater upper body strength. For hawa kolom (literally, air pruning/light skiff ), the sickle must only skim the bush. It is entirely dependent on upper-body strength, and women apparently cannot sustain many hours of this pruning. Jhumpa kolom (medium skiff, or ‘‘chicken claw’’ pruning, to describe the knotted stem and branches) requires a large degree of physical force and strength. These pruners use a large 22 inch sickle to sever half the bush with one sweep of the arm. Men are preferred for this task, and the managers will consult with senior overseers to select the finest and most powerful pruners. Gendered differences in physical capacity and ability are shared among the managerial cadre and the workforce. That men will help kinswomen with pruning attests to this wider recognition of gendered physicality.While these differences are bodily coded, it does not prevent women from prun204

ing. Indeed, women are quick to assert their strengths in pruning, rather than their lack of physical capacity. Kamzori—or weakness—is not a common descriptor of differential pruning, because a considerable number of women continue to wield the sickle. In contrast to the feminized and fetishized task of plucking, the bodily calculus of pruning and its gendered inscriptions of physical power is muted. In the general talk of work among both planters and workers, pruning is not unilaterally or stridently defined as ‘‘masculine’’ work. Though a gendered equation of the body is made, it is not as remarkably underscored as the feminized fetishisms of plucking. Munnu, about six months pregnant with her fourth child, is weary at the very thought of pruning. She sighs. ‘‘This year I am not going to do it. I have to tell the overseer. But I know it won’t be good for me. I feel the baby too much in my stomach. He won’t be happy because I can do pruning well. Even hawa kolom’’ (she swishes her arms like large scissors). ‘‘Oh, he will let me go, but I do have some shame about telling him.’’ For one season, pregnancy obviates the sickle’s swish. Other women, judged in lack, work the earth. When pruning abates in January, gangs are put to field tasks like cheeling (turning the soil), clearing the jabra (twigs, branches) between the rows of bushes. Cleaning the undergrowth between the aisles of bushes follows the familiar and linear mathematics of plucking. Now, the women bend from the waist, cleaning and turning the soil in unison.

Divisions The arrangement that women should be plucking in one part of the garden and men hoeing in another is the best.27

The separation of women and men workers, even when they are engaged in similar tasks, translates a body politics into fields of labor. These are cultures of separation that reproduce social norms of appropriate gendered behavior in which naturalized biological differences, sexuality, and codes of shame and honor are all implicated. The fact of separation, most obviously charted in the spatial distance between women’s and men’s gangs, is located within subtle, explicit, and often contradictory discourses, in which gender difference is the sine qua non. By describing the cultural praxis through which gendered difference encodes labor organization, the stories of the field have begun to flesh out the social meanings given to daily experiences by women who enact this Discipline and Labor 205

work.Women’s commentaries are privileged to suggest a feminized agency. This is an agency that is not framed entirely as ‘‘resistance’’ but situated as daily ‘‘talk.’’ Sometimes, these are subversive moments.When located next to the fetishisms, which make them silent icons of the commodity, this talk chatters its way into possible alterities. However, this narrative privileging does not seek to elide the theoretical and pragmatic web in which such an overt and striking feminization of labor is meshed. The feminization of labor is actualized through a process of gendering in which definitions of men’s work—and masculine labor— creates a mirroring that is mutually, but unequally, constructed. The focus on the historically specific nature of feminization as practice, as one dialectic between commodity and labor, cannot displace the fact of men’s toil in fieldwork and within plucking itself. Indeed, it is precisely the invisibility of men’s plucking within the annals of tea cultivation that creates the foil against which the fetishisms of women’s labor are framed. Cultural meanings given to work, and its gendered divisions, imputes value on the very terms of action within the field. This is gendered worth that translates into inequities that can be traced within the ineffable tempos of the workday. The effects of gendered worth create some of the most powerful backbeats in the divided cultures of the field and factory. Young boys learn to pluck leaf in children’s gangs and, like girls, can be as young as ten when they begin to take their lessons from older and experienced women who are considered the most skillful teachers.Within the fluid definitions of adulthood, which chart the social sanctions of separation between women and men, overseers will shift older boys now in adol gangs into the marad (men’s) dols.When asked what factors determine this shift to adult male labor, an overseer looks perplexed. The sexual division of labor is so embedded within the cultural habitus of field and village, it has congealed into fact, naturalized into bafflement. However, the field overseer’s unease, which I interpret as bafflement, cannot be interpreted with such singularity. His seeming confusion might reflect the conditions within which the question is posed. I stand in the field of men’s work on another day of hot harvest. Some of the men have a vague sense that I am interested in women’s work and I mix with women. Now, wandering outside the clustered companionship of Bhagirathi’s dol and Anjali, I face them with a probity inflected by a gendered, class, and ethnic difference that indelibly shapes the contours of their unease. While overseers and fieldworkers are used to the supervision of sahibs, it is very rare for a memsahib to walk into the field with questions. Surprise, suspicion, 206

and nervousness constrain our dialogue. Its limits are defined by the very terms of separation that I seek to examine. In one assistant manager’s bungalow, such constraint is not palpable. Our ethnic, class, and upper-caste connections temporarily outweigh the gendered divide, which among his senior colleagues translates into heavyhanded paternalism.This particular chota sahib, however, is unusual among other Bengali planters, in his frank discussions about gendered distinctions in the field. Naturalized assumptions about heterosexual norms underwrite the terms of distinction. If women and men workers were not separated, sexual politics would ‘‘naturally’’ occur. ‘‘The fact is that men will make passes at women,’’ Sujit Mitra says, ‘‘and we won’t be able to get any work done.’’ Significantly, the responsibility of disruptive sexual politics is placed on men workers. Sexual agency, even when ascribed as a negative characteristic for labor discipline, is a masculine imperative. This characterization of men’s proclivity toward sexualized indiscipline laces ascriptions of a general masculine ‘‘unruliness.’’ In a connected commentary about sexual politics, the sahib remarks, ‘‘the men are hooligans. They are more unruly than women. I have different medicines for them. Women have a tendency to be docile, and I have a different medicine for them.’’ Within one dominant narrative arc, heterosexual politics within the field is explicitly connected to a dangerous and entirely masculine agency. Disruption is initiated by men, and women react to, or are mere receptacles of, male sexuality. Most significantly, disruptive flirting hints at a larger problem. This is an unruliness that can flare into more serious political threat. It seethes in dangerous contrast to the essential ‘‘docility’’ of women.Within this reasoning, the sexual division of labor is necessary as frame of containment, a potential ‘‘hooliganism’’ nipped in the bud. Significantly, within the sexualized narratives of separation, women workers are nonagents. Their own recognition and judgments of sexual norms and behavior are not suggested in the analysis. The ascription of docility reveals both ignorance of women’s worlds as well as paternalist assumptions about an intrinsic passivity. Yet assumptions about such passivity are also beset by contradictions. In response to a question about why women are not selected as overseers, another assistant manager remarks, ‘‘Women workers have authority in the crèche house. No woman sardars exist—because of their lack of leadership qualities, lack of command, and their dominating nature. Overall, they are lagging behind in concentration and to some extent, they are self-oriented. And many of them lack personality, though they are cunning.’’ Discipline and Labor 207

Men are dangerous with a difference; their hooliganism cannot be underestimated. Women, within this garbled but bluntly misogynistic commentary, are essentialized into another kind of threat. Women’s ‘‘cunning’’ and mental incapacity to supervise hint at an agency that not only relegates them to the lowest strata of labor but also imputes a devious and dangerous consciousness to them. The separate field suggests a feminized erotic in no simple way. There is a hint of relative autonomy in the space, and place, below the overseer’s gaze. Even if men are not present in the field, the sexual politics of the village ripples into the realms of cultivation. One woman screams shrilly at another, accusing her of having an affair with her husband. A fist fight is narrowly averted. When asked about the demarcations between women and men, Menu Mosi says, ‘‘Oh, that is how it should be.There would be problems like when we might need to relieve ourselves. It is just a matter of shame. It is better this way. We are more open as well.’’ The paradox of this ideology of the gendered division of labor is thus set into place.While paternal assumptions about men’s sexuality and women’s lack create the social terms of separation, it is that very reasoning that offers a space that is, within the duration of a shift, a forced ‘‘freedom’’ from other kinds of demands that are made once the day of labor is over.

Different Tempos Even if one assistant manager underscores men’s indiscipline as a potential political threat, the daily disciplines of marad dols do not translate into increased surveillance or pressure. Men’s gangs are assigned to areas furthest from the office, and many will cycle to and from work with umbrellas and packed lunches strapped on the back of their bicycles.Two senior overseers and four field overseers supervise the men for the entire season. Morning shifts begin later than women’s, at 8:30 a.m., and the day ends at 2:30 p.m. Lunch is eaten in the field. The fluid shifts of work are punctuated by the weighment truck. In contrast to the surveillance of women during peak harvest, the supervision of men is muted. The lunch pause at 11:00 a.m. is not broken by the overseer’s edgy call to quickly resume work. So relaxed is this break that men bathe with water from the larger water truck parked nearby. Overseers will eat their own lunches with the men. The cadences of a working day, where men supervise men, contrast the attention paid to women’s work. Men’s camaraderie cuts across the hierarchy, and a heightened surveillance only occurs when the senior manager’s 208

jeep comes into view.Though managers are explicitly wary about a masculine threat to labor disciplines, a masculine autonomy and ease is palpable in men’s plucking rotations.This autonomy contrasts women’s laboring spaces in two ways. Both the greater intensity of surveillance on women’s plucking and the legitimation of men’s supervision of, and over, women compel women to enact a camaraderie that cuts across, above, below, the authority of the overseer. Because of field assignments in areas furthest from the factory, men’s dols are diffused into the landscape.Theydo not remain within the more immediate and visual arc of planter power. Spatial dispersions not only permeate the differential supervision of men’s work; they also enable differential mobility. For instance, cycling to work is clearly a man’s prerogative, and he can ask for a loan to buy a bicycle.The speed and mobility of a bicycle fundamentally alter the length of a working day. Because they can strap leaf on their cycles, they use less physical exertion.When asked why women were not encouraged to bicycle, both managers and staff were perplexed. The social reasoning of appropriate gendered behavior was a given, its logic naturalized. When I ask Bhagirathi’s dol about men’s bicycles, they agree that cycling would conserve energy, but the thought of their cycling was a source of amusement. Once again, lajja (shame/shyness) codes socially acceptable behavior. Men work in other field tasks, such as digging ditches, cleaning drains, and fixing fences. They can work as assistants in the office. Theirs is a lateral mobility, at the base of the hierarchy, which is not open to women. Managers define these tasks as ‘‘too physically demanding’’ for women, a characterization belied by the similar work done by women in the hoeing and clearing of tea bush aisles. The ascription of bodily strength is analogous to the gendered measures of pruning.Yet, in contrast to the latter, these field tasks are not open to women. Another field task limited to men, and which poses high health risks for them, is the pesticide spraying of tea bushes. Monetary incentives for this corrosive and dangerous work is the payment of a double daily wage for two short shifts of work. Though covered shoes and masks are required by law, most men wear open-toed rubber sandals and are bare-chested. Strapping small plastic tanks on their back, they spray the bushes. Economic necessity far outweighs explicit knowledge of bodily harm. Lalchi (greed), the old overseer tells me, is destroying the land. ‘‘When I ran the plantation for the English sahibs, you could not dig too far. The soil was hard and strong. Now it is loose and weak. The dawai (fertilizers/pesticides) that are put now make the bush stronger. But it not only Discipline and Labor 209

weakens the tree, it destroys the soil.This way, the plantation will die. Men will continue to die sooner in this work. Of course. But so will the bushes, which means the plantation. And then we are finished. If the bushes do not live, how will we?’’ Anjali, sitting with us as the old man speaks, nods in agreement. Later, as we walk through the village, she tells me, ‘‘Didi, we get sores in our feet. This did not happen before. We use raw tea leaf juice as a medicine and tie bandages from old cloth. This should not happen. Our bodies are being eaten away.’’

Of Men and Machines Three Chinamen, with a gravity becoming the responsible superintending of the various groups of natives busily engaged around, were sifting and sorting and inspecting the teas, carefully watching that no outsider in the shape of a straggling bohea leaf, should desecrate the box intended solely for the glorious product of their united labor—the finely rolled, crisp, wellpicked, first class, A-1, black tea—the soo chong.28

The factory rests at both ends of the plantation’s productive logic. Its siren clocks the morning shift, its large interior spaces receive the leaf for its final journey into commodification. In the old colonial factories, known as teahouses, before the advent of machines of withering and rolling, tea leaf manufacture was a labor-intensive and more bodied task. Accounts of the careful attention of rolling and ‘‘cooking’’ leaf ‘‘in the nimble hands of the Chinaman’’ 29 were made. Indeed, in the absence of machines, different phases of tea manufacture required intensive bodied attention, and the fetishisms of the hand spilled into the teahouse. Sketches of the hand, and only the hand, underscored the attentive intensity within which the leaf was manipulated: ‘‘The left hand grasping the leaves about to be rolled, resting in the little finger; the extended right hand with the fingers close together, except the thumb, which is stretched out, ready to be placed on the leaves received from the left hand.’’ 30 This ornate and detailed description of the hand receiving the leaf, orientalized in its connection to the ‘‘Chinaman’s’’ nimble hands, underscores the sense of human craft with which tea plucking was becoming invested. Indeed, a sense of a lost art is explicit in the following nostalgic reference to the premachinery era of tea manufacture: ‘‘In these days, we do not pro-

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21. ‘‘First Apparatus Used in the Manufacture of Tea in India.’’ Figures 7 and 8 of Account of the Manufacture of Black Tea in Assam, by C. A. Bruce, 1838.

duce these wonderful hand-sorted grades with their bloom on the leaf, or those thick liquory malty teas, the result of the old tea maker’s art with a hand-fed drying mat.’’ 31 By the turn of the century, the advent of machinery had shifted this earlier romance of hand-crafted manufacture into another gear. A bodied aesthetic would be eclipsed by a new language of technical rationality that would require disembodiment.The rationalities of manufacture now spoke languages of efficiency. Technology would script a new equation between machine, labor power, capital cost. The body, operating the machine, becomes a mere sign in this new calculus of control.The relation between machine and human laboring, equated with cost and value, eclipses the earlier fetishism of the hand rolling its leaf. Gopal ‘‘Fitter,’’ as the chief mechanic is called, and his team have spent the winter overhauling the factory’s machines. The heart of the factory, the generator, has been a particular focus.When leaf begins to pour in from the ‘‘first flush,’’ everything must be oiled into action. As women empty their first bundles of leaf in the second-floor drying trough, factory workers are galvanized into action. The leaf ’s journey of transformation into fine black ‘‘powder’’ begins in these large withering troughs. Prior to the large electric fans, both women and men workers used to spread the leaf on bamboo and wire mesh racks, stacked four stories high. Even now, a few men crouched on either end of the trough manually turn the leaf. From withering, the leaf is moved on a conveyor belt through a funnel into the cut, tear, and curl (ctc) machine, located in one large corner of the building. One overseer supervises eight workers through the four phases of the ctc. In the largest interior space of the ctc room, cut leaf is spread out in neat rows by another group of men. Spreading the leaf quickens fermen-

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tation, and the small curls of cut leaf turn into small shrivelled mounds. Another overseer supervises this move from cutting to fermentation. The large room within which this critical phase of manufacturing takes place suggests light and space. Its cavernous interior contradicts the more typical image of crowded assembly lines and the din of clanking machines. Both this sense of space and the hum of machines eclipse the men’s movement on the floor. The impression of light is dispelled in the second section of the factory, where the drying, sorting, and packing of tea occurs. Large drying machines are fed their necessary heat from a furnace stoked by hand. Men, stripped to the waist, their skin burnished orange by the flame of the boilers shovel coal. Through this flickering heat of the last drying machine, the leaf is transported on a labyrinth of conveyor belts into the last stages of sorting and gradation. Six overseers regulate the temperature and weighing of the final product.Tea dust is swept to one area, while the good tea is funneled directly into tea chests handmade in the factory. It is this tea dust, mixed with the lowest grade of tea, that will be rationed to workers. ‘‘Memsahib,’’ someone says in the factory, ‘‘come to my house to have biskit and lal cha.’’ During February and March, early in the peak season, only two eighthour shifts run concurrently in the factory. The morning shift begins at 6:00 a.m. and ends at 2:00 p.m., taken over by another group till 10:00 p.m. When the harvest is full, more shifts are staggered into this double shift. The clock is ever present, but the seasons of harvest define the labor muster and the number of shifts. When leaf is abundant, the factory operates for twenty-four hours a day, with three concurrent shifts of work. Significantly, overseers organize shift durations and timings themselves. At the ctc machine, four shifts range from six to two hours in length. As a result, factory workers can stagger their eight-hour workday into multiple minishifts. This seasonal flexibility is noted in colonial ledgers: ‘‘Working hours are not bound by any hard and fast rules as the leaves cannot be sent to the factory until they are well withered which depends solely on weather conditions.’’ 32 Such flexibility, particularly in the colonial period, contained its own coercions. Alcohol, for instance, stretched the workday. One old overseer recollects, ‘‘The sahibs would give us daru [liquor] to make us quiet and drunk, so we would keep on working.We were given half a bottle each, and there were no limits to hours worked.’’ This extraction of labor power is one of the many faces of the idealized masks of efficiency demanded by the colonial factory sahib. Note his rendering of ideal and ordered work: ‘‘Three gangs of youths rapidly filled trays with withered leaf and dead on the gong beat ran with absolute military precision into the rolling room and filled 212

three rollers.’’ 33 Yet the postcolonial factory’s multiple shifts offer another face to the marching precision of the long-gone, gong-beat-regulated steps of men carrying baskets of leaf. The overseers’ freedom to create malleable schedules suggests that factory organization marks a different disciplinary register from the field. For one, it is located within the immediate radius of administrative power, next to the offices of the senior planter and his staff. The factory staff and the senior manager can stride in at any point to check machines, the quality of tea, and the work muster.Yet, in spite of this location in the very nerve center of planter power, surveillance of work is not as intensely palpable as it is in the field. Perhaps this is so because of that very proximity to power, and continuous surveillance is not deemed necessary. Problems can be fixed with some immediacy. The overseer’s relative autonomy within this ambit of powerand his men’s ability to stagger shifts also suggest that factory work does not entail the same patriarchal weight of the surveillance of women in fieldwork.

Skirting the Factory Bhagirathi’s dol and I walk in noisy chatter through the front gate of the factory compound, heading directly toward its back gate. Grabbing my hand after weighment, Bhagirathi purposefully takes me on this short but defiant and collective cleaving. My shirt slips off my shoulder, and Anjali pulls it up. My unease with this walking display turns to embarrassment as I notice that we are being watched by office staff and factory men. That this area is viewed as a masculine space has been made clear, and through emotions kindred to my own sense of embarrassment: shyness, shame, and an explicit sense that this is also the sahib’s place. At that moment, however, the other women do not appear discomfited. ‘‘Anyhow,’’ Balki says, ‘‘Did you know that someone was killed by a machine six years ago? There was blood everywhere. This is why we don’t like to go inside the factory.’’ Our anomalous walk through this masculine arena of power, and this mention of blood, hints at absences, of labor that is gendered and commentaries of fear that suggest cosmologies of loss. Alterity etches a thin red line around the edge of the machine. Despite its striking gendered demarcations, women did at one time work in the factory. Leaf, for example, was winnowed and sorted in large bamboo sieves and ‘‘it was discovered that the best people for sorting and sieving were the women.’’ 34 Elderly or ill women were assigned to factory sorting through the 1950s.While they never worked the machines, small groups of Discipline and Labor 213

women sorted leaf by hand, though the advent of sorting machines led to their displacement.The three women who do work within the factory compound are viewed with slight suspicion by fieldworkers, who emphasize that each woman has had strong and ‘‘personal’’ relationships with union men. The innuendo is only a whisper. Women’s displacement from customary rural work, compelled by technological innovations, is an important and recurring story in rural India.35 The fact of displacement, however, must be framed within the cultural and patriarchal logics that inscribe an essential lack of, or bodily ambivalence about, women’s capacities to work with machines.When asked why women are not trained in factory work, one factory staff responded with seeming transparency: ‘‘Women do not have a natural bent towards machines like men. And their presence may cause trouble in terms of other things, you know, with men.’’ The implicit suggestion of sexual politics is kindred to commentaries about the field’s gendered divisions. The explanation of the gendered incapacity of women to work with machines is echoed by a senior factory overseer: ‘‘Look, memsahib, this is work of the mind. I am a sirdar because you need some education for this work.Women don’t have this, so there is no point training them.’’ The factory thus encompasses a masculine space whose work rhythms follow the clock and remain, simultaneously, dependent on the vicissitudes of the season. Equations of efficiency—the calculus of machines, men, and time—and the numbing repetitions of an assembly line monitor the conceptual templates of its labor organization: its formulas of input, output, and capital costs. Yet within its daily pragmatics, perhaps due to the season’s caprice, the tempos of work are surprisingly flexible, and the planter’s hukum (command) is filtered through a certain devolution of power. Stories about tea plucking, and the fetishisms of women’s bodies that they underscore, offer a definition of ‘‘production’’ that is both corporeal and romantic.That is to say, suggestions of a natural craft within the tamed forest of the tea bush informs not only the folklores of consumption but permeates cultivation—and hence production—in the most definitive ways. Delicacy, nimbleness, and craft transform the product into a commodity of worth: the aura of the natural female hand’s attention creates its values of seduction. Consider the contrasting description of the manufacturing process, a ‘‘turmoil [that] seems incompatible with the peaceful product whose grateful and refreshing qualities survive the rough usage that calls them forth.’’ 36 Unlike cultivation, manufacture enacts a certain violence on the body of the 214

leaf, causing ‘‘discoloration of the leaves by rupture of the small sap vessels and cells’’ 37 . . . Such colonial planter narratives about the manufacturing process suggest that the cost of the noisy, though necessary, machine in tea production is the unmasking of its own mythos of nimble romance. It is a dissonance that jars the melodic allegories of a naturally feminine labor and its seductive commerce.

Technologies of Power Rodh rodh kamalo, pani pani kamalo. Sardar baksheesh debe ki nahi? Sardar handia debe ki nahi? Work in the sun, sun; work in the water, water. Will the sardar give us our bonus? Will the sardar give us rice beer?

Work disciplines enact the managerial command through the miasma of cultural histories in which the postcolonial tea planter is a larger-thanlife symbol of lordship. The aura of the colonial mai-baap continues to inflect the mythologies of benevolent rule in the field. That women and men will follow the hukum is a given, not only because of economic compulsion, but because the hukum is legitimated through the measured consent of working communities.The ‘‘indirect’’ rule of the colonial sirdars, recruiters, and overseers has transformed itself into political alliances between union leaders and managers.The allegiance of field overseers and ordinary watchmen to this alliance is necessary for livelihood and survival. The hukum is directed to this second-to-last tier of work organization from the apex of its pyramid. In spite of the differences of religious, caste, and ethnic locations, the postcolonial actors of ‘‘indirect rule’’ share one feature that distinguishes them from the large majority of field workers. At every level of power, however diffuse, men wield the planter’s hukum. Strategies of order are conceptualized and administered by men across class and ethnic hierarchies. The labor regime is a cultural system through which working men are given the ‘‘right’’ to rule over women in labor. The manager’s legitimation of working men’s authority over women fieldworkers is grafted onto customary norms of patriarchal authority in the villages.The patriarchal cultures of labor disciplines are triply knotted: from Discipline and Labor 215

the sahib’s office, within the relative autonomy of the field, and through rhythms of exclusion within the villages. The planter mai-baap belies the transgendered sense of that term and exercises his authority upon labor disciplines as lord and patriarch. The ‘‘family’’ of labor is, in this instance, most definitively, predicated on the disciplining of women-into-work.The manager’s exercise of poweralso displays a coercive patriarchal edge.Though he may enact a judicious balance in village arbitration, it is the coercive and punitive nature of his surveillance that is most vivid in the field.While he may be the nodal point of such power, his assistant managers share and legitimate the edge of disciplining. If the senior planter finds a woman carrying twigs for her hearth, he will shout and, depending on his mood, cut a day of her wages. For a woman suddenly thus confronted, it the sahib’s actual presence that compells both fear and shame. Munnu speaks of one unlucky instance when, carrying a dead tea bush, she encountered the burra sahib of Sarah’s Hope: ‘‘He was suddenly there, didi. I was walking home in the evening, and he gave me huge scolding. Shouting at the top of his voice, he told me, ‘‘You should be ashamed of yourself. After all, isn’t this bush your bhagwan (god)? Don’t you have any shame?’’ I was ashamed and scared. But because I worked at Kolpara, he let me go.’’ The manager’s sudden appearance and his shouts become entangled with the plantation’s dailydisciplines.Women’s perceptions of the manager’s ultimate power—to fire a worker, to cut wages—is measured in the quick reflexive folding of an umbrella, the eyes suddenly downcast, an alert stillness when the jeep is sighted. Indeed, their knowledge of the managerial imperative to punish informs all aspects of their work, even if it involves carrying firewood home. While women and men workers are aware of transgressions that can result in more serious punishment, there is also a sense of arbitrariness about that exercise of managerial power. Shouting an admonishment at an individual woman is common, but whether that shout will be transformed to ‘‘charge-sheeting’’ (where a worker can be expelled from a permanent job) is not assured. Significantly, to be reprimanded for individual misdemeanours with shouting is an acceptable norm of punishment, but if punishment is taken to the stage of a kamjam (work stop), retaliation can occur. I am told by one group of women about a sister who was caught with firewood: ‘‘One day she was getting the small dead twigs from inside the bush, which were dry, and the chota sahib caught her. . . . She refused to put the wood away, telling him: ‘You come to my house and tell me that I don’t need this; that I don’t need to cook for my family.’ ’’ The woman involved 216

adds, ‘‘The manager got very angry at my talking back like this and told the overseers not to give me work the next day. I went as usual for work, but when I was not allowed to work I headed to my union leader. He did not do anything, so I got the gang and many other women to come to the office. We were shouting that we would cut this manager to pieces, with our jhurni [knives], we will cut him. If they do not give us enough firewood, how dare they stop a woman’s work, kick her in the stomach like this.’’ The woman, now supported by a loud collective of other women, had to be mollified by the senior manager. Her daily wage was not cut. It is relatively rare for an individual ‘‘misdemeanor’’ and its disciplining to result in wider collective protest. Managers, however, are alert to what they perceive as more collective, and conscious, acts of sabotage. Significantly, men’s acts of indiscipline are taken more seriously than women’s. Managerial perception of danger in collective acts of erosion of a hukum is heightened when men are involved. Masculine agency, fed by hegemonic assumptions of an essential unruliness, is viewed as threatening in ways that a woman’s recalcitrance is not. In fact, the few written commentaries about ‘‘illegal’’ incidents in the plantation’s ‘‘Law and Order’’ files were primarily concerned with men’s acts of sabotage. Noted one diligent assistant manager’s capture of ‘‘tree pinchers’’: ‘‘I made surprise checks through the garden and have found thirteen men cutting trees and branches. On Sunday, I went to the garden at 4 a.m. and tracked the laborers cutting trees. I took them to the office and confiscated an axe they were using.They will be charge-sheeted on Monday. I have also organized chowkidars to go with me at night through the garden . . . but we have not caught any shade-tree pinchers yet.’’ Managers suspect men of organizing and enacting acts of sabotage, from stealing sections of irrigation pipes to setting fire to the tea nursery and orchestrating an economy of local tea-selling. Perhaps because women workers do not have easy access to public markets and the black-market economies that are sustained there, men become the first suspects in cases of theft. Though surveillance of men workers and any subsequent punitive action present the coercive edge of planter power, it is within the daily cadences of work that women experience the continuous threat of coercion.The violence of a raised voice, the substance of a threat, defines a manager’s reputation for fairness and balance. Threats of violence are absorbed with trenchant humor. Take women’s response to an assistant manager who kept them waiting in the sun for two hours because they refused to leave their firewood: ‘‘Look, we all know he is a little crazy. So we laugh, and that gets him angrier. He Discipline and Labor 217

22. ‘‘Supremely yours.’’ Advertisement for Brooke Bond tea. Reproduced in The Calcutta Tea Trader’s Almanac, 1978.

told us he would shoot us, put us in a gunny sack, and drown us in a river.’’ Angered at the transparency of the violence in the manager’s commentary, I am puzzled by the women’s response, which is both amused and tolerant. When I express this unease, they shrug: ‘‘Look, we all know his craziness, so we don’t take it so seriously.We must have some maya [compassion]. He did not touch us, and he humiliated himself.’’ Tolerance of verbal insults is quite elastic, but bodily touching or shoving can flare into open confrontation.When the same ‘‘crazy’’ assistant manager shoved a driver in the factory compound and broke a chair in his rage, a crowd of both women and men demanded the senior manager’s intervention.Though reluctantly offered, the apology did come with an explanation that ‘‘not all fingers in one hand are the same.’’ The gendering of postcolonial feudalism in the plantation can be traced through the strands of its coercive webs. ‘‘Consent’’ is both fragile and measured for the cadre of workers who enact the planter’s terms of rule. A senior overseer’s authority is enhanced not only by his higher wages but also by the planter’s trust and his ability to extract the necessary labor from women. An ordinary field overseer may be more willing to undercut regimes of work, but even then, his authority over women is palpable. Plantation patriarchies, manifested through labororganization and practice, are not only multiple and layered; they are inextricably linked to the colonial and feudal politics that asserted the metaphorical and pragmatic 218

settlement of a ‘‘family’’ of workers.Within this idealized frame, a coercive and highly personalized culture of labor emerged. Its moral economy is embedded within a history of explicit coercion, fragile consent brokered by a few workers, and the bodily obeisance of a majority to the lordship of the sahib.This obeisance was itself based on a customary recognition of feudal power that demanded a kinship from the labor, bodies, and goods offered in dutiful fealty. Plantation feudalism, translated into wage contract labor, continues to be shaped by plural patriarchies of the bungalow and village. Labor’s patriarchy, enacted through the feudal call of the hukum, demanded not only the consent of women: men, marked as racially and ethnically inferior because of their lower caste and so-called tribal identities by both British and upper-caste Indian planters, became dark sons of the planter’s family.They would never enjoy the true fruits of his fief ’s golden orchard, though given a small measure of power, some offered their reluctant consent. Yet it is the historical determinations of women’s work that brings the plural nature of the plantation’s feudal and patriarchal complex into boldest relief. From ‘‘settling’’ recalcitrant male workers into the regimes of wage labor, to the fetishisms of their nimble fingers, women’s consent to planter rule was critical to the planter’s own pragmatic sense of entitled lordship. Acts of paternal benevolence and protection of women, for example, might blunt the coercive edge of labor management. Consider, for a moment, labor portrayed as seduction. Brooke Bond, again. Her basket has become the commodity: supreme, supremely yours. Her cheeks are full, her eyes beckon. They seem to have a sweet expression. Near one contour of breast, her fingers hold two leaves and a bud. Her wrists are braceleted. Consider again the commodity’s circulation and its productions of desire. During the colonial period, the planter’s entitlement encompassed another desire for obeisance, when women who caught his eye in the field were summoned to the bungalow. The postcolonial manager, however, as we have seen, must be very careful if he wants to cast a similar net. It is a striking example of the grafted nature of customary norms of patriarchy, with colonial feudalism that some working men offered their daughters to the planter women’s bodies brokered for a personal favor and the lord’s attention. Such stories are told in the postcolonial bungalow, and alluded to in the villages.There is taboo resonant in the laughing whisper, a startled silence. Desire, and power unmasked, betrays the community: sacrifice and its own agencies dissolve into the empty space of the body’s margins. Discipline and Labor 219

The field whispers, but its laughter is earthy. Its talk happens below the horizon of the gaze. It is still the manager’s attention and desire that cuts across the plane of his surveillance. I am told of a gora sahib (white sahib) who looked intensely at a beautiful woman.This I am told by a young man. His great-grandfather, recognizing the planter’s attention and unable to halt its logical progression ordered his daughter to return to their home village in Orissa, where she would be tatooed in designs known as khodna. Such patterns on the skin, read as scars by a desiring Englishman, would protect the woman. What she may have thought of this shield of indigo is lost to the wind. Some women tell me that it is a matter of izzat to not meet the gaze of senior sahibs. Fear, obeisance, and shame chart the path of a downcast gaze. Speculation surrounds the intentions of a young bachelor assistant manager. He, the dol tells me with some amusement, has the ‘‘eye.’’ The intent of his attention does shape the perception and contours of ordinary field surveillance. The perception and effects of a sahib’s attention is itself imbricated within powerful and ubiquitous folklore about the positive and negative, even psychic, powers of the ‘‘eye.’’ If it watches with ill will, you must ward it off with a talisman, a potent mantra. If your spirit opens to enlightenment or you are otherwise gifted, a third eye may open. In the close knit and multigenerational lineages of the plantation villages, the interpretation of a gaze can rupture kinship. This is a moral economy where all human relationships are calibrated, and a young assistant manager’s possible desire will be thus read.38 Yet it is women who will hold themselves, and other women, responsible for less philosophically inflected acts. Rumor and speculation feed the story of a young woman and the same assistant manager. Its veracity is not as significant as its interpretation as a possible liaison. In Munnu’s kitchen, a sheltered space for such talk of taboo, Mita Lohra ponders on the rumor making its rounds. ‘‘It is like this, didi,’’ she says, ‘‘as a woman you must know your own place and your izzat.The sahibs are big people, like you are, bara aadmi. Nothing will happen to him! We saw her with our own eyes, wearing new clothes and lippy-shtick [lipstick] and swinging her hips looking at him. We have noticed this many times, and we have told her to be careful. I have heard that one day after work, the sahib helped her put some grass on her head. Maybe nothing has happened, but we all wonder.’’ A story of mild flirtation is understood as a transgression on several fronts. Not only is the class/caste order shaken (‘‘the sahib is a bara aadmi’’), the codes of gendered honor are threatened. Significantly, the woman is held 220

responsible for actions that are frowned upon publicly. A woman’s honor knots into her sense of status and place and is linked intimately to sexual propriety. Women consistently remarked that nothing really could happen to an errant manager, but a woman’s reputation would be ruined. Social transgression is defined then as a discourse that seeps into public commentary and layers collective memory. Discourse can be understood as material, linguistic, and symbolic acts as nebulous as a gaze. Though mundane conversations in a kitchen cannot mark the facticity of one minor incident, let alone speculate on the frequency of such transgressions, these are interpretations fed by memories of a time when liaisons between planters and women workers, however fraught, were more open ‘‘secrets.’’ The labor hierarchy thus contains within its own structures of separation the conditions for a sexual politics as quotidian and (almost) indiscernible as the mundane tempos of daily work. Julekha Shaikh, who works in a nearby plantation, tells me that she had noticed one manager’s focused gaze for days and was uncomfortable. She told her gang, who verified that his attention on her was singular. A friendly field overseer casually mentioned to her that the manager had been asking about her. Now acutely uneasy, Julekha decided to act. When she saw him approach her area of work, she sat under under the level top of bush. As he casually came closer, she sprang out in front of him screaming and flailing her arms, as she puts it, ‘‘like a mad woman.’’ As I start to laugh at this image, she too shakes with angry amusement: ‘‘My friends thought I was crazy to do this, but I was angry. Very angry. If no one will protect my izzat, who will? He never bothered me again, he avoids the area I work.’’ The political economy of the field is thus a sexual economy.The laboring body is not neutral within the fall of a desiring gaze, the ambit of gendered honor and its hip-swaying transgressions. Eyelids are downcast, the distance between women and sahib enacts the vast cleavages of power and status. Yet the patriarchal command, unspoken and open to its many interpretations, winds tightly into the same bodily economy that bends and resists its will. These economies of desire and power create one layer of difference and marginalization within women’s work experiences. The gendered experience of labor is not merely ‘‘different’’: it textures and defines the bodily margins of plantation power. Organizations of space and time demarcate the subtle and explicit ways in which such marginalization is created. Cultural acts layer such subordination and affect, in the most immediate and detrimental ways, the quality of a woman’s life. Women’s daily work flows through several shifts. The time needed for Discipline and Labor 221

household chores, which extend back into the plantation and forests, adds a considerable burden on their already depleted stocks of physical energy. Because the ‘‘reproductive’’ work of pregnancy and childrearing is embedded within the daily experiences of ‘‘productive’’ labor, the ontology of women’s labor might be best understood as a ‘‘flow,’’ not in the connotations of abstract ease, but as a corporeal recognition of the integral nature of its practice.39 Within the customary patriarchal norms of the villages, cutting through a range of communities, the responsibility of ‘‘family’’ work is primarily women’s, and the measure of her labor value encompasses both her willingness to labor for wages and to shoulder the customary burden of household chores. Within wage labor itself, the consequence of the spatial and temporal differentials between women and men is a greater intensity and duration of labor. The clearest advantage for daily-rated men fieldworkers is that fact that women are not transferred laterally to the more ‘‘physically demanding’’ tasks of ditch digging or pesticide spraying. A move vertically up the chain of command, into the supervisor cadre is extremely rare.Wage calculations based on task and time components are particularly extractive when contrasted to the entirely time-based calculus of factory wages. Incentives in the factory are not task-based, and overtime is paid for extra hours that are clocked. Wages for plucking, on the other hand, are predicated on a minimum weight of leaf. If a man works a factory shift for ten hours he is paid a haziri of 36.80 rupees (88 cents) and 4.48 rupees (11 cents) per hour of overtime.40 Bhagirathi will receive her daily haziri of 34.80 rupees (83 cents) only if she plucks 25 kilos of ticca.To earn the equivalent of two hours of factory overtime, she must pluck an additional 35 kilos of leaf. Though it is difficult to calculate with any precision the time it would take to pluck 25 kilos, women workers have to work at greater physical intensity to achieve parity with factory counterparts. A 2-rupee difference is still maintained between daily-rated fieldwork and factory work. In addition, till 1975, wages of both women and men pluckers were kept unequal: a ‘‘symbolic’’ extra rupee was paid to men.41 [See appendix, tables A1–3.] Though men fieldworkers earn their wages within the same regime as women, their spatial and temporal deployment suggests some advantages: their having bicycles tempers the physical effort of manually hauling leaf to the weighment shed. The camaraderie between overseer and men workers, like the heightened tension between overseer and women workers during peak harvest, is also gendered. The lunches and rest pauses the men share with overseers allows fora masculine bonding that cuts across the labor hier222

archy. Within the factory compound, almost exclusively men’s spaces, an overseer’s relative autonomy to create his own schedules reflects a measured ‘‘freedom’’ that is both about the factory’s location in the immediate ambit of planter power, as well as the more subtle gendered ‘‘alliances’’ traversing caste and class hierarchies. Feudal and patriarchal norms wind into the spindles of plantation labor histories. The moral economies of the hukum blend colonial ideas of manorial rule to the potent and equally complex ideologies of zamindari (landholding) feudalism. If the colonial planter created his own ideal image of a hybrid Victorian and colonial lord-of-the-oriental manor, his postcolonial heir enacts a mimesis of colonial and zamindari lordship.42 His hukum broadcasts a hybridity that is as intricate as the communities of women and men who accede to it and respond to its feudal imperatives. These ideologies of rule inflect work disciplines through the agrarian arrangements of time and space, which, in turn, reconfigure the clocked and automated efficiencies of industrial manufacture. Indeed, the landscape itself, in all its strange and fathomless reach, is pregnant with these contradictions. The Euclidean mathematics of the tea bushes renders an almost exquisite rationality. In its horizontal vastness, it obscures the necessary diffusions of human labor. Its artifice is veiled by an illusion that cannot be sustained by the clanking machines of the factory, its patently unnatural rhythms. Yet it is this relative quietness of the human presence in the landscape that suggests cosmologies secret and subterranean. For a moment, then, turn your back on the noisy machines and their metallic edges of sound and walk the furthest tangent from the perimeter of power into silence and sweat. Hear the faint whistle of the faraway siren. Imagine the possibilities, imagine the possibilities.

Ritual/Labor Consider the green print of rows and squares, the containment of a stunning logic drawn into the weft of the land. Here and there, in some stray block of green, stand large branched trees with more than a hint of reaching encirclement. On the edge of another block, is a bamboo pole, a flag commemorating a village ritual. The trees and the flag gesture toward a cosmology that couples with, rests alongside, and erodes the plantation’s emerald order. They signal paradox and simultaneity.They offer subterranean tales as significant as the will that bends a body over a stunted tree. Labor disciplines also enact the rich culDiscipline and Labor 223

tural life of communities inextricably linked to a life of the soil, the rhythms of the season.The bodily ontologies of labor are embedded in a ritual history in which the actualities of material toil and cultural meaning are combined to create historical praxis. These are ritual political economies which spin other cosmologies of labor. Alienation and connection, corporeal claim and loss, fetishisms and prayer all tell tales about the cultural processes through which the field is imagined, historicized, made fertile by its own cycles of death and harvest. The sacred chants underneath the long whine of a profane siren. Alterity moves through the ineffable.

Sacred Patronage The bhagat (faith healer/doctor) ordered by the burra sahib to accompany me on my first tour of the field, saws off the torn branch of a tree with a healing claim. Clambering down and joining me at the fence, he shows me the space where he conducts a gaon puja (village ritual). He becomes more animated as he explains his role as a ritual master and organizer of the yearly event. A donation from each family (the amount is agreed upon by the village council) is collected for the feasting that takes place aftera simple ritual. Though these gaon pujas do not have set dates, they occur just before the heavy onslaught of monsoon rains in June. The burra sahib will be asked to donate some money, and if he is particularly benevolent, he may match the funds raised. He will, however, rarely attend the festivities in person.When asked why he contributes, one burra sahib, Rohan Aggarwal, replies, ‘‘It is mai-baap. They expect it and why not? It hardly costs me anything, and it makes them feel that I am being respectful. They will think: yes, this sahib is not so bad.’’ There is, within the field itself, a small ritual which the planter must attend.The bhagat explains,’’ If the manager is good then he may donate some money for the gaon puja. But he must come to the new planting, when the new tea trees are shifted from the nursery. He will break the earth and put the sapling in. I will put a coin in the hole and he will give a sweet. Then we will get some baksheesh.’’ The symbolic and material exchange is coded into a religious idiom and claim: ‘‘Though the garden is ours, the sahib is our guru.’’ In this small drama of ritual and patronage, a claim on the plantation is made alongside a benevolent definition of the planter as guru. Ascriptions of planter benevolence and workers’ claim on the land demonstrate how rituals can be perceived within the currencies of legitimation for both the 224

planter and his overseer. A minor pause in the day, perhaps, but it remains a recognition of harvest and the highly unequal but mutually understood alliance between a village elder and his sahib. At Kolpara, where Munnu works, her dol lays a similar claim on the maibaap. Plans for the ritual were made a few weeks before the first day of plucking. Fifty rupees were collected, and a box of sweets and several garlands of marigolds bought. The women asked their overseer to notify the senior manager to visit their area, and the manager duly arrived in his jeep. The dol asked the overseer and sahib to stand next to their cycles and jeep. After garlanding the tea bush, lighting incense, and arranging a small plate of sweets, the women garland the manager, his jeep, the overseer, and the overseer’s cycle. Amidst considerable, and demanding laughter, the planter presented one hundred rupees to the dol. Humor and parody are the expressive styles of this small theater of patronage. Munnu’s dol enacts a basic and customary understanding among numerous plantation communities that soil, rocks, and plants possess a life force, a diffusion of divinities.Though garlanding a jeep and cycle might be a laughing matter, garlanding the tea bush might also involve deeper cosmological meanings. Significantly, the expectation of a bonus underscores the ritual economy of the event. Summing up the ritual’s success, Munnu remarks, ‘‘We asked this sahib specifically, because he is not stingy.We knew that. For 50 rupees, we got 50 rupees back. Not much of a loss, and we got some rest.’’ At Sarah’s Hope itself, in contrast, these rituals of the field are rare. Kolpara, Munnu’s natal plantation, which was never an agency-house British garden, is owned by a Bengali planting family. Its tolerance for ritual interruptions is a result of a historical recognition of indigenous traditions. A planter who has worked in both British-style and smaller Bengali-owned plantations contrasted these traditions explicitly: ‘‘Look, the British did not humor pujas and what-not in the field, though they would have contributed to a gaon puja. But in Bengali gardens, I have noticed that there are traditions which we, incoming managers, are expected to maintain.’’ The habitus of patronage is thus distinguished by the indigenous, more ‘‘native’’ recognitions of shared cosmologies. Though village rituals among the tea bushes are absent at Sarah’s Hope, there is a wide arc of new plantation that is cleaved by the Umesh Kholla (where the rock associated with the god Siva is located) and bounded on its eastern border by the Christian cemetery. On one of these edges of the plantation field sits a peepul tree, held sacred by various communities who live close to it. An elderly Nepali overseer, supervising the new planting, Discipline and Labor 225

tells me an old folktale. ‘‘Vishnu,’’ he says, ‘‘rests within the broad leaves of the peepul tree. No-one knows where the seed of the trees come from. Perhaps brought by the wind, or on the wings of a bird. My grandfather used to say that the seed of the tree we are looking at fell first into a ring of thornbush and from within this protection, it grew and grew. And you see, memsahib, no one can uproot this tree because those roots are like a woman’s hair. It has spread far into the earth. Even we, all the way here, are standing on its roots.’’ Though theVishnu aspect of the tree’s sanctity is more familiar in a Hindu cosmology, the Oraon do share the Nepali overseer’s recognition of its ineffable power.Their gaon puja is held at its base. Asserting an almost agentive divinity through the sacred reach of its subterranean roots, the tree secretly reclaims the territory about to be cultivated by the disciplines of another cosmology of power. Though planters who are asked about these stories dismiss them as mere ‘‘superstition,’’ at least one has had to contend with its fixity: a senior manager, planning the new extension, who asserted that the tree should be removed. I am told by Munnu, whose in-laws live in the old line near the tree, that the sahib was aware of the tree’s ritual importance. He circulated a story that some spirits had come to him in a dream and instructed him to uproot it. Much to the consternation of the village, he arrived with a bulldozer and tractor. Because of the strength and reach of the tree’s roots, this effort to dislocate it was a failure. Though the two-decade-old story could not be corroborated with the planter in question, its sharp recollection and its retelling imply important symbolic contests. Like other stagings of infinitesimal rupture, the sahib’s loss of face served to strengthen the social faith of the communities who held the tree potently sacred. In so doing, the planter’s public failure spun out another small thread of history and alterity within the natural and human claims on the landscape.

Sacred Bodies The cosmologies of the peepul tree and a shared recognition of a rock’s divinity, animate a basic belief that certain spaces and entities are imbued with the extraordinary, coupling the sacred and the quotidian, expressing through the ordinary moment a daily divinity. Within such a metaphysics of encompassment, the tea bush occupies a singular space. As the focal point of disciplined labor, the planter’s command imputes layers of value that construct the tea bush into a fetish: the purity of its gift of flora and the pristine quality of leaf create the millenial romance and 226

discipline of tea plucking. Analogies of the idealized and natural craft of cultivation are made through the essential link between women’s fingers and the tea leaf.The latter is the primal site of value. Fingers actualize that value through nimble worship. The hegemonic and ritual stories of the tea bush and its leaf rest alongside other narratives of claim. Women and men who work the leaf and plant the saplings, create another—even competing— layer of cultural meaning around the bush. Bush gestation and regeneration, enabled by the cycles of seasonal labor, present the first suggestions of a primal, embodied and analogical claim. Babulal, an overseer of sapling planting notes, ‘‘The tea plant is in the nursery for nine months and then is ready for planting. If the new plant is left in the soil for more than nine months, it will not survive. Like a woman may not survive. It is difficult for a woman if the child is within her too long.This is why we give our maya [compassion] to the bushes.We must take care of them from the beginning.’’ Pancultural and common metaphors of planting leading to birth and of a pregnant earth nurturing the plant to young growth define the overseer’s own idealized philosophy of work. Affective nurturing through compassion is the idealized claim and method of his own laboring sensibility.When shade baskets are placed around the saplings to protect them from a harsh sun, the anthropomorphic claim is total: ‘‘Through this kind of protection, we care for the trees, as though they are our children.’’ The old senior overseer who criticized the use of pesticides evaluates the planter’s knowledge and wisdom regarding tea bush longevity. He laments the use of pesticide on the tea bush by drawing an analogy to the human body: ‘‘It is as if you rub a man’s body with kerosene daily. You will get bad results. When you care for your baby, you are careful to see that the water does not get into her ears. Everything now is about greed. Keep planting more and more. This garden’s sorrow is great. The urea in the soil makes our feet raw. Before, the roots were strong and spread wide.You could take cuttings to make new plants, but these bushes will not last. They are too weak.’’ For this overseer, the weakening of the bush is a direct result of greed, lalchi. Greed creates a sorrow that spreads through the entire garden. Cosmologies of affective connection that once informed the human acts of the natural world—the tending of a tea bush—are eroded by a physical corrosion that speaks to moral and bodied depletion. Indeed, this juxtaposition of nurturance with greed suggests a moral universe of work that, for the old man, is being challenged by amoral economy, which threatens the plantation’s longevity. This sense of longevity and regeneration is linked to Discipline and Labor 227

community survival. In the middle of plucking, Bhagirathi offers a historical claim: ‘‘This is our garden.When the sahib goes after six or seven years to another garden, it is we who will remain here. This is why sewa [service] to the tea bush is so important. If we don’t do this, one day, we won’t eat.’’ Tea bush sewa, a term that connotes service as duty, asserts the community’s dependence on the trees’ survival. Basic economic survival through careful labor writes the syntax of survival. Women will also comment that the company’s greed for more leaf can, and does, damage the bush. Pressure to pick fast can lead to jungli (wild) plucking. Thus, some women and men perceive in these ‘‘new’’ commands a threat to both social and botanic health. Regeneration and a bountiful and balanced harvest are necessary for social and economic survival. Yet work disciplines coded into sewa and nurturance present a construction of laboring personhood that remains inextricably connected to the community and its landscapes of regeneration. Planters also deploy metaphors of botanic corporeality through which they construct value and fetishize the tea bush. One planter explains how he orders pruning: ‘‘I tell them this. If you love a tree, it will love you. I look at the tea bush the way a mother will look at a baby. Like a baby getting hungry, so does the tree. Remember the Hindi and Bengali word for tea— cha. Think of chawa, in Bengali, which means ‘to want.’ I also tell the labor that the bush is like a baby cow, it wants milk, nurturing. . . . As from a cow you raise and feed well, you will get milk.’’ This sense of holistic demand for nurturing labor is anticipated by a colonial predecessor, albeit with a more evolutionary emphasis: ‘‘It would be well to bear in mind more frequently than is done, that the final end of the tea bush’s existence is not merely the production of leaves to be converted into black tea, but like every other living thing, the development of the individual for the cultivation of the species.’’ 43 The postcolonial planter’s use of corporeal analogies—the bush as baby to be nurtured—posits a shared script, but it also emphasizes the way in which the tea bush is constructed as the fragile centerpoint of all labor. If a worker draws an analogy to gestative vulnerability, then by invoking the infant metaphor, the sahib underscores an essential fragility. This suggestion of infant fragility serves to justify disciplining workers when they are perceived as damaging the bush. Such ‘‘fragility,’’ made corporeal, lends itself to a fetishism that cannot be unhooked from managerial disciplines. The tea bush is constituted as an embodied and larger-than-life symbol of the plantation’s raison d’être. Within this construction of fragile centrality rests the coercive edge of the hukum. The overseer who props his foot on a bush is made to genu228

flect three times; a woman collecting twigs for firewood from beneath a bush may lose a week’s wages. Coercion is articulated through metaphors of the sacred.When Munnu is admonished for carrying a dead tea bush from Kolpara, the sahib shouts, ‘‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Isn’t the bush your god?’’ Yet his disciplining can be juxtaposed to her pivotal role in organizing the ritual of planting in the field: the garlanding of bush, sahib, and jeep. This ritual of humorous subversion suggests that subversions and disciplines share a language that is Janus-faced and porous. The rituals of the bodied landscape layer various fetishisms into the daily habitus of labor.The sacred is also the productive, and patronage must enter worship and the cycles of watched nurturance. The imperatives of labor disciplines are understood within a moral economy in which affective connection presents a judgment against the hukum’s own cosmology of ordered profit.Claims of laboring connection rest alongside the alienations of work. Analogy, metaphors, and allusion are literary and discursive tools that are carefully deployed by sahibs, overseers, and ordinary women and men workers. While they do offer alternative and even competing cosmologies of labor, they cannot be conflated. A tea bush is not a human body, though laborconnects the body to it.The bodyand its labor is dependent on the fruit, which is made possible by acts and meanings of that very labor. Ontologies of connection made through the richness of symbolic language cannot collapse the distinctions of human and natural worlds in these commentaries of discipline and consent. Rather, they offer critical and compelling suggestions about the experiences of both connection and disconnection, consent and resistance.

Sacrifice Alienation, as a condition that fractures work and its fruit from the integral connections of community and selfhood, flickers most palpably in the machined spaces of the factory.Gendered divisions and women’s ambivalences chart the cultural topography of manufacture. In contrast to some cosmologies of connection within the field, the relationship between men and machines resonates with a negative ambivalence. It suggests a possible tearing of the connective tissue between personhood, community, and work. Machines claim blood. The boiler’s furnace is a fiery pit for the unwary. Machines can be possessed by capricious spirits who hiss stories of necessary sacrifice. These are colonial and gendered tales because they say that machines demand the bodies of virgins.This sexualized history of alienation is itself connected to a wider universe of belief in which human sacrifice is Discipline and Labor 229

connected to the landscape of technological innovation. Roads, railways, and bridges require not only the intangible energy of human labor, they can demand life itself. Mongra, who remembers the Angrezi zamana (English period) remarks: ‘‘What we used to hear was this, memsahib.When the rail was started, people would be sacrificed as in some Kali temples. Same with the Sevak Bridge. Inside the hills you had to give kasam, your life. If the sacrifice is not given, the bridge will break. Roads, I have heard this, memsahib, required fifty kumaris [unmarried women, virgins] who would be buried alive. Their families would be told that they had run away.’’ The folk beliefs of devouring alienation were enhanced by the largerthan-life and distant image of the British burra sahib. Colonial patronage permitted, and was dependent upon, indirect rule, but for the majority of the workforce, the burra sahib was an awesome figure. Mongra remembers that the ‘‘English were fierce, khatarnak, awesome. But when there are machines, there will be blood.’’ Interestingly, even a fierce and powerful burra sahib could capitulate to the will of the machine. Mongra continues with his story: ‘‘It would happen at night.They would come by horses and catch you by rope. Not just the sahibs but men with turbans.They believed that blood made machines works and this is why. Many people say that the sahibs beheaded one person a year.’’ Mongra’s recollections of shadowy ‘‘turbaned’’ men and planters on horseback were shared by Anjali. We sit in the darkness in her labor quarter just behind the factory. ‘‘Yes,’’ she says, ‘‘I have heard other people speak about this. This happened long ago, but that kumari blood was necessary.’’ An elderly kinswoman who joins us concurs. Her husband worked in the factory for over thirty years and had heard the story of the British sacrificing young girls during ‘‘new leaf.’’ ‘‘But, I have heard another story,’’ she says, ‘‘that when the sahibs could not get young girls from the plantation—perhaps they had maya for them—they would pierce their own fingers and mark the machines with their blood and suck the finger.They did not want to let us see that they would give their blood.’’ Sacrifice of virgin girls, in two popular versions of the story, occurred annually, either when machines were being overhauled in winter or during the first days of harvest. I talk to other women, picking up fragments of this sacrificial cosmology. Munnu tells me that her mother, who had walked from Chotanagpur to the plantation, remembers human sacrifice during the new harvest in her desh (country). As we reflect on the veracity and the suggestions of both stories, she remarks that ‘‘perhaps these are old customs, and the British sahibs borrowed them from us.’’

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Though varied in detail, stories of virgin sacrifice were common in the plantation, part of an almost commonsensical history.Veracity was beyond the point.Whether true or not, these are commentaries about a time in which migrant dislocation and harsh regimes of work created traumatized and tragic mythologies of history. That sahibs, seen within the ambits of absolute power, preyed on young women is a lasting parable about patriarchy, sexuality, and labor: the final offerings of bodily annhilation as one of the conditions of production and manufacture.44

Appeasing the Spirits The folklore of decapitation and sacrifice within the colonial period has a grisly resonance in an accident that occurred six years before my arrival. An old man, with a scarf around his neck, was sweeping early one morning when it got caught in a machine. He was instantly decapitated.Observations about the sprayed blood on the factory floor, as well as inadequate compensation to his family, were made to emphasize the capricious injustice of the work regime. The tragedy of blood in this contemporary event invokes the old understandings of alienation and mystery connected definitively in this enclosed cavernous landscape of power to the machine and its various killing fires. There is only one ritual in October, the Biswa Karma Puja, which explicitly addresses the spirits of the machine. Conducted by Nepali Kamis (blacksmiths), who work primarily in the engine and generator rooms of the factory, this is the most important yearly celebration of their patron deity, Biswa Karma. It is a celebration that costs 2,000 rupees, collected from the communityof engineworkers, with a small donation from the management. The first, formal phase of the ritual begins in a tool shed adjacent to the generator room. In a setting common to many Hindu rituals, a Nepali priest chants mantras, offering incense and food to a large statue of the deity: a burly, blue, and long-haired male figure brandishing spanners and wrenches that bristle from his clenched raised fists. The second phase of the puja is taken over by the Nepali worker who has raised the funds and conducted all the preparations for the ceremony.With a clay pot of smoking incense and a plate of vermillion powder, he moves first to the generator room, where the machines are stopped and anointed with the powder. With the same pattern of momentary pause and anointing, he marks every machine in the factory. Though the office proper itself is ignored, babus and sahibs bring their jeeps, scooters, and cycles to be

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anointed. Even the burra sahib’s son’s small cycle has been brought from the bungalow. When asked why every single machine had to be anointed, Jaman Singh is clear: ‘‘These machines have souls and spirits, and when we show them izzat in the way we are showing them, then accidents will not occur.’’ His companions all concurred, invoking the tragedy of the six-yearold decapitation as one instance where the puja was not performed. The folklore of sacrifices and the belief that machines require blood to function offer the most vivid commentary on certain kinds of labor alienation. In contrast to the cultivating field, where traditional cosmologies can recapture the plantation’s spatial regimes within terms of cultural meaning and connection, machines signify a most dangerous loss of human control: literally alien technological gods, who demand their women’s bodies and lifeblood.

Embodied Alienations If the annihilation of women’s bodies suggests historical understandings of alienation, there is also another language, which is enabled not by absence but presence, not by lack but by an immediacy of flesh, bones, and sweat that finally must escape the confines of language. The text is only a faint gesture. Anjali takes me to lata or buri kam—literally the weak or old women’s work. They are frail, they work slowly, the overseer does not shout. An old woman catches me at the edge of the field and grimaces: ‘‘the sahib makes our body turn to water.’’ The body is not only a metaphoric tool or philosophic concept upon and through which theoretical models and abstractions can traffic. The written word strips away the flesh and bones of a sighing, expostulating, grimacing, and gasping body, though the body is still scripted into language as it reaches into the eloquence of its own paradox, its own suffering. The consciousness of labor occurs through the matrix of the body. The body dissolves into water. Bodily strength, Bhagirathi tells me, is depleted through sweat, which comes back into the body, turning it into water. This biological introversion is coupled to the earlier description of sickling physics.The strength of shakti moves from her stomach, to her chest, out to the arms. She feels this strength as a substance, a tumescent force that moves through her upper body, her arms, and mouth. When blood turns to water through sweat, as the strength moves out, it becomes soft. Elemental, like water.

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Pregnancy also makes the body soft.The analogy of conditions of laboring to being pregnant implies a profound connection of labor to its bodily origin.The philosophy of introversion, blood to water, is the same. Munnu, stroking her swell of stomach, explains: ‘‘Because I have this child inside me, I have more water in my blood. It makes me soft. This is why I cannot sweat and bend so much.’’ Bodily softness weakens the body in work labor. It is not clear if pregnancy’s softness is also a condition of weakness, though the connotations of introversion as weakness are strikingly analogous. In a similar vein, breastfeeding a child is like satisfying the tea bush’s demands. ‘‘My daughter,’’ says Anjali, ‘‘drank milk for four years. This is our custom, but it is also why we are so thin. Half of my body goes to the child, and half of my body goes to the work of the garden. My milk is also my blood, and that is taken by my child. The tea bush takes the rest.’’ 45 Strength, in blood, is siphoned from the body through the simultaneity of many labors: plucking, sickling, gestating, suckling. The body demands integral narratives. Kasht (suffering) and khatni (labor) are words commonly used to describe the immediacy of alienation. ‘‘Work,’’ I am told, ‘‘is a matter of kasht. If it was not so, how could it be work?’’ Yet, even when women are explicit about their kasht, they will emphasize their pride in having a job. Munnu asserts this frequently: ‘‘I never absent myself from work, even in the last months of pregnancy I will work till I absolutely cannot. All my friends tell me that I am finishing my life this way. But what is my life without work? What will happen to me if I don’t work? Touch my arm, feel how hard it is. Like a piece of wood. I won’t break so easily.’’ The conditions of alienation are situated also in paradox: what takes also gives. Fetishism is contested. For women, wage labor is both burden and possibility. Their own consciousness of its terms—through parody, confrontation, and trenchant commentaries—creates a spindle, a top: woundup, spinning alterities. It is August 10, five days before Indian Independence Day. The women are assigned to the tukra bagan (piece garden) directly in front of the bungalow. They are relaxed because there isn’t much leaf, and some lean against the bushes chatting. Moniki Mosi keeps plucking, and her kinswoman mock her playfully. ‘‘Hey, why are you plucking? There won’t be doubly [incentive pay]. Don’t be foolish.’’ Someone chuckles, ‘‘Oh, you people don’t understand. Moniki is giving her body to the company. Her body for the company’s benefit.’’ Another shouts, ‘‘No, no. She is working for the country’s freedom.’’

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act 6, scene 3 The lights come on slowly, shadowing the stage. A spotlight focuses on the Narrator sitting off center stage. From stage left, the four Women emerge from behind the gau backdrop behind the field. They are clapping lightly. They gesture to the Narrator, as if giving her permission to speak. She smiles, lifts her shoulders wryly, and gestures back to them. They bend their torsos, they lift their hands, they keep clapping and shuffling their feet. They repeat over and over again in Sadri, the following song. women: (in chorus, singing as they dance) O Mother, you gave me birth / Digging your nails into the earth. / You brought me up by feeding me / On morsels of rice. / O my poor mother! / You lost me for one lota [pot] of water. / You had kept with care the leaves of saal. / Now you throw them away. / You have thrown away all your leaves. They repeat the chorus twice. The lights fade out into complete darkness as they shuffle out, stage left.

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chapter 7 Village Politics

Situating Moral Economies

february 1999 Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate Seven years have passed since I last sat in the darkness of her kitchen, huddled in the pauses between the grinding of spice, the stoking of fire, a fragment of speech hovering in the shadows thrown by the kerosene lamp. My memory of such pauses, the way her fingers would collect the mound of ground spices to mix with the raw to start again, is gossamer, as wispy as the smoke from the small fire. Munnu looks up at me from the grindstone. Her glance is quizzical and searching. I try to understand something she says.This is culture too: a woman’s searching glance as she grinds her spice, another’s grasping at smoke. Her daughter Sabina strokes my fingers, pushing against the cuticles of the nails, humming in delight. Munnu cups water in her hands and cleans the grindstone of its residue of spice. She stokes, again, the fire. My journey back does not allow much reflection on such slow meditations of flesh, its dusky musings. We speak now in the sleepy afternoon. Winter offers more time to talk. I do not live anymore on the perimeter of the village, and night journeys on the long and empty artery of the road are dangerous. Cars are stolen, drivers kidnapped, sometimes dead bodies are left in the forest.The border seems more violent than the earlier time, when I had walked the same road with Munnu and her kinsmen, who guarded our small journey with long bamboo poles. Now, she tells me, a walk to the Bhutan hills for firewood is risky. Border guards have allegedly raped one woman, and Munnu herself has fled from one terrifying encounter. We talk more explicitly about violence within the village and the terms of local justice. Smoky and subterranean, her narrative reinforces the villages’ moral economy of power. The plight of an anonymous woman limping to

her village from a dangerous forest constitutes the secret knowledges that are shared between women. These are the seemingly invisible histories of bodies shamed into registers of public silence. When I ask other women about redress through the formal judicial system, Balki Mahato remarks with some cynicism, ‘‘The courts are far, and who trusts the police anyway? The woman’s izzat is already torn. What has happened has happened. She copes with it.’’ Then, hesitantly, I am told about an event that occurred a few years ago, involving one of the few men who had assisted me with fieldwork. On two separate occasions, he had allegedly assaulted young girls from the village. Both incidents were publicized and reported to the senior manager. Though he was not fired from his job, the villagers took justice into their own hands: he was whipped publicly. However, this act of public shaming did not prevent him from attacking again. I recognize, with both anger and sadness, the ironies of this research process and its telling craft. The gendered specificities of ethnographic production are implicated through paradox, gouged within the moral economies of power, which it seeks to texture and nuance. The cultural matrix, within which a particular event of violence is publicly recognized as a rupture of the social skin, is constituted through an intricate codification of gender, class, and ethnic inequalities within the plantation’s villages. Acts of violence aimed at women constitute one of the more vivid strands within cultures of power and subordination. The lack of a ‘‘public’’ discourse about a lone attack in the jungle presents a striking contrast to a community’s own brand of public justice against the alleged sexual assault of two girls within the village. It is a contrast that gestures toward contradiction. Social silence is juxtaposed to a public shaming, where justice is underscored by the fact that the alleged perpetrator keeps his high-status job as a watchman and roams freely in the village. Adjudication within the formal judicial system, through the manager and then the courts, is a marginal business. Elision thus draws the coercive parameters of patronage. The political cultures of the plantation’s villages creates a layered and plural moral economy. The terms of cultural difference, inextricably connected to rituals of hierarchyand separation, invest these cultural economies with a particular feudal force. Indeed, the ideologies of patronage, enacted through the hukum (order) and the outwardly benevolent reach of the maibaap, are recrafted within the cultures of village authority and power. Adjudication of alleged assaults, arbitration of marriage conflicts, or deliberations about a job allocation are in the purview of village and union 236

leaders, who head their own councils. These councils or panchayats work their customary jurisprudence in the shadow of the wider system of planter patronage. Political power in the villages, legitimated within the terms of the mai-baap, stages itself through a theater of mimesis and customary autonomy. Patronage in the village is charted through caste and ethnic difference, and masculine authority is a given. This is a moral economy located in dialectical, creative, but concrete choreographies of power.1 Cultural practices such as marriage, ritual, and adjudication are only some manifestations of concrete acts that construct community history and politics.Women and men define and make community through a cultural praxis in which contest, negotiation, rupture, and solidarity are the grammar of collective politics. Gender, class, caste, and ethnicity are the analytic categories embedded within the actual practices of hierarchy, difference, and power. Three vectors of analysis are realized in this examination of village politics: gender positionings, caste and class separations, and the politics of ritual. Within the narrative, these vectors can be viewed as threedimensional planes, angled and meshed together through dialectical linkages. Indeed, ‘‘working-class’’ cultures cannot be reduced to static mappings of labor.The politics of difference interpellates through work into the realms of the household, the secrets of violence, the murmur of rituals.

Processing Method The winter break has passed, and with the call to harvest, the tempos of the village have shifted imperceptibly.There is no longer time for the long walk to Bhutan. Anjali and I walk through quiet villages or visit women in the field. The methodology I am developing through the process of research is dependent on the contingencies of labor and the habitus of political isolation. These are communities who are not used to strangers trying to get information about their families, households, wages, and work conditions. As a consequence, the research method follows a many-branched path. Its contours are shaped by political constraint.Office ledgers, daily registers of the workforce, and wage accounts are left for me in the office. Efforts at a more detailed survey of household composition are not successful.When Anjali and I approach a home not directly known to her, its residents disappear or don’t respond. Since I am eager to mark the boundaries of community in the diverse cluster of villages and learn about the histories of territory and space on a larger scale, these silences are frustrating for me. I recognize with clarity Village Politics 237

that they gesture eloquently toward the connections between ethnographic method and theoretical/textual production. How could I claim a plantation ethnography, as a totality, when most people were suspicious, or even scared, about my presence in their homes and communities? What were the philosophical assumptions about ethnographic ‘‘data’’ collection that I needed to examine and decenter? While building on the informal kinship between women, I created a questionnaire and asked a local union member to assist me in a sample survey. In contrast to my approach using women’s introductions to kin-based networks, our entry into this family and household survey were through formal appointments with men who presented themselves as the heads of households. Wives and daughters stayed in the background and served tea and biscuits. Though I had planned fifty in-depth interviews, only twenty-five were completed. Rabi Neogi, my unpaid survey assistant, dropped out at the end of the second week. I was told that some rumors had circulated. The economy of his problematically unpaid ‘‘volunteer’’ assistance was coupled with innuendos of sexual impropriety and information about my own connections with rival political activists. The circulation of what-cannot-be-said permeated the methods I had been using to glean ‘‘wider’’ knowledges about the plantations. In these circumstances, a conversation to clear up any misunderstanding could not take place; taboo constituted some of its impossibility. Conversations with women constituted the most enduring method of my research process. While I collected statistics, completed more formal interviews, and sketched partial maps, these statistics, interviews, maps remained the most problematic aspect of the ethnographic process. For one, I recognized the Archimedean frame on which I was constructing my knowledge bank about plantation communities. In contrasting the porous and ‘‘uncontrolled’’ approach of my conversations with women and the more impermeable bounds of that framework, I began to reassess my earlier conclusion that I had ‘‘failed’’ because of the broader silences. Now, rather than view these refusals in the terms of failure, I began to consider them as an ‘‘empty’’ fulcrum, as it were, upon which I could assert a particular kind of feminist methodology. The refusal of utterance, its void, became the territory through which another kind of conceptual and bodied exploration would take place. Silence became possibility. Beyond privileging women in the analysis and locating such an assertion within the histories of gendered relations of power, my method underscores the partial and situated modalities of ethnographic knowledge-making. To 238

assert ‘‘partial perspectives’’ or to carefully delineate the politics of one’s standpoint is not to detract from an analysis of plantation ‘‘cultures’’ in a wider sense. My contention is that reflexive analysis is integral to a narrative that is also about the broader political culture. As I have already noted, the fetishisms of women’s labor are historically constituted and fundamentally global. The quotidian acts of a ‘‘marginal’’ laboring field are also ‘‘centrally’’ staged. The ‘‘particular,’’ the positioned, and the partial provide a commentary about the ‘‘general’’ but without totalizing claims. It walks its own middle road. Indeed, as I free my own learning to enter into the mundane and smoky chatter of women’s lives, I build up a knowledge base that is well beyond anything I glean from the ‘‘data bank’’ I had been forcing.These are narrative rocks of the particular, which contain a mother lode of considerable historical and cultural significance.The privileging of women’s stories and the gender politics within which they are embedded are the ironic consequence of both explicit intention and default. Though I am generously assisted by numerous men, none of these relationships is a constant, or consistent presence, in my sojourn. As a result, gender marks the primary fissure within the research method, and its cleaving tensions mediate the text in fundamental ways. Radiating from this fissure are the equally significant cleavages of caste divides, ethnic separations, social status, and class difference.

Space, Power, Claim

act 7, scene 1 The spotlight falls on stage right, where the Narrator sits at her original seat, her chair at the table with its mirror, its bric-à-brac of quill, india ink, and porcelain. Her head is cowled; she moves the objects restlessly with her hands. Turning to look at the silent and still tableau of Alice’s Mad Tea Party, she motions Alice to come over. The spotlight moves with her beckoning gesture. Alice yawns and walks over. She sits on the wicker stool that the Narrator has carried around the arc of the stage. Her eyebrows are raised, questioning. she: Ah, Alice, now I understand your tantrums. I have been magnified, telescoped, placed inside kaleidoscopes. I think now that this walk from your mad tea party, to the sitting room, to the field, is kindred to your looking-glass journeys; those falling, shrinking, sleeping, bloating journeys of yours. (Pause) But history is a spiral, I think—strange parabolas that loop around to come back again and again to not-quite-but-yet-theVillage Politics 239

beginning.Where is the angel who dances on these arcs, these half coils? Tell me, Alice, you traveler through the looking-glass . . . tell me, what is it that I seek? alice: ( yawning) I have watched you silently. Your movement from space to space, place to place.Where is time in all this, all this time for tea? It is not endless, I know, I know. But your search for an angel on the coil, on its arc, from this spot to the next, is futile. Or maybe just elliptical. Dot. Dot. Dot. Why not jump from dot to dot? Why not take the quill and map its curves? Designs might be revealed. she: But I am tired of maps, Alice. I prefer ether. Perhaps I search too hard for some secret signs. The Narrator’s fingers move restlessly over her objects. Alice picks up the false nails and starts applying them. Her expression is sympathetic.The Narrator rubs her forehead tiredly. The lights fade. Stand on the artery of the road and consider for a moment the shadows that lie behind the imposing edifice of the bungalows and thewhitewashed perimeters of the factoryoffice. In the dusk, the two-roomed cement houses, and those made of thatch and mud, alert you to other home places. These are the Labor Lines that, through one level of nomenclature, chart the territorial spans of plantation power.The Factory Line fans out directly behind the perimeter of factory and office; the Labor Lines are further away. The label labor lines is used most commonly by planters and staff. Its classification suggests a homogeneity that is contradicted by the immense diversity of the boundaries drawn within it. Indeed, those who live here will assert that they live in a village or gaon. Because the village/line is also categorized by ethnicized and caste subgroupings, this appellation is necessarily twinned. For example, the Hospital Line includes a distinctive subvillage called the Missionya or Girja (Mission or Church) Line, which is distinctively marked by its freshly painted blue gate posts and small church.While other non-Christian families live inside the wider compass of the Hospital Line, the decorative boundaries of the Christian subvillage within it is conspicuous. The Factory Line, which extends beyond the Bungalow Line, likewise embraces numerous communities. It fans out around a prominent gathering place lying just behind the back gate of the factory: a laborcanteen (managed by a prominent union leader), a small temple, a workers’ club, and a small two-roomed primary school together create an important meeting place for a large number of communities. Once a week, the haat (plantation market)

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transforms what I have called the Canteen Field into a space of concentrated and informal economic exchange: vegetable and fruit vendors, women selling kerosene oil from large tin cans, and shopkeepers selling sweets, occupy the market’s lively three hours of buying, selling, and busy sociality.

‘‘The Price of Cauliflower’’ Two evenings after my first visit to the market, I am invited to a wedding in the Factory Line and I am told by Anjali that one of the guests wants to speak with me. He works in the factory as an assistant to the factory staff and, though young, has an aura of authority and status. Anjali has already told me that though he is not a union leader, he is a men aadmi (‘‘main person’’). I sit down gingerly on a rickety wooden chair. I am a little nervous of his regard, which is unflinchingly steady. It is also wary. ‘‘So, you have come to do research on us,’’ he says. ‘‘I saw you walking through the market the other day when I was playing cards and I am wondering why you are here. For what purpose.’’ After I give him a summary of the research objectives—that it is for a university dissertation and a possible book, that I am interested in itihas (history) and women, and it is not allied to any political party—he laughs scornfully: ‘‘And what do you think you will learn by just walking through a haat, memsahib? What were you watching, what did you see? Did you learn the price of cauliflower?’’ Then leaning over, he reaches for a clay lamp burning on the table, the flame flickering in its shallow base of oil. Placing it between us, he says with some intensity: ‘‘You see this flame, the oil, the clay cup that holds it.Who lights this? Who pours the oil? Where does the oil come from? How does the flame happen? Think about that first, memsahib, before you note the price of cauliflower.’’ Leaning back in his chair, he shakes his head and calls out to someone standing at the door, ‘‘Bring the memsahib something cold to drink, it is very hot in this room.’’ During the week, the Canteen Field becomes a place where men meet to watch films in the Labor Club or play cards in the canteen. Women, walking through the area to and from work, are seldom seen congregating in groups. This area is claimed by village men who meet regularly in canteen and club. Some women may collect for ritual activities at the temple, but on the whole, this is an area they avoid.Women’s leisure time is scarce, but the Canteen Field also rests in the immediate shadow of the senior planter’s bungalow. It is a proximity that does not prevent autonomous cultural and commercial activities, but its alignment toward, and within, the ambit of

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planter power cannot be dismissed. It is indeed no coincidence that union leaders control the daily economy of the area. Films are often shown in the evenings at the Labor Club, and though open to women, few actually attend.This is not only due to the burden of evening household chores. Women often remarked that being out in the darkness, within the implied ambit of men, was not appropriate. Anjali tells me that young unmarried girls and children will go to video nights, but a married woman might endanger her reputation and izzat.One of the most significant codifications of the village’s moral economies, izzat is also inscribed into the very geography of the plantation.The Canteen Field becomes ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘masculine’’ through the social—and honorable—absence of women.This ‘‘space’’ is created into a cultural and temporal ‘‘place,’’ folding out through the scripts of daily acts and definitions of power. Despite the quite public nature of their laboring, the naturalized and commonsensical separations of customary activities, this absence within one public space is translated into other kinds of gendered claims. Women will create alternative places to gather. Often this may occur through ritual activities within their homes, but sometimes other ‘‘open’’ sites of gathering are chosen. Anjali, Munnu, and Bhagirathi take me ceremoniously to the Umesh Kholla on the border between Kolpara and Sarah’s Hope. We take a path through the Mission Line, past the small Catholic church and grotto, with its blue statue of the Virgin Mary.We head toward a ritual area perceived as a ‘‘Hindu’’ site, where a large brown speckled rock rests in the center of a dry stream bed that winds through several plantation fields. Its proximity to the Mission Line focuses community diversity within a small locus. For the three women who take me on this first visit to the Umesh Kholla, this unusual rock is both an incarnation and sign of Siva. We clamber down a short but sharp incline. Anjali lights incense, places flowers on the rock, and anoints it with vermillion powder. For one elderly Nepali woman, believed to be possessed by the goddess Durga and blessed with attendant powers of healing, the Umesh Kholla is a particularly important site. As the incarnation of the goddess, the woman is the consort of Siva. Her visits to the rock are potently ritualized. Yet it is in the quotidian and unspoken claiming of this small area by women that another public domain is gendered. Munnu, who does not define herself as ‘‘Hindu,’’ says that she too has seen here the silhouette of a rearing cobra, the sentinel and symbol of Siva. If the gendering of space inscribes a cartography with multiple zones of contest, important historical claims of community solidarity are also made 242

here. A palpable sense of shared history, through journeys from the Chotanagpur Plateau, has created bonds of solidarity over generations. Family groups were brought from the same homevillages, and the memories of such shared territories are vivid. Chonas, a prominent member of the Mission Line, remarks: ‘‘You see, memsahib, when you first came, you settled around your sirdar (recruiter) and clan. All of us who are missionya [Christian] came from specific places.Those in Tin Line came from Berwe in Madhya Pradesh and we [in the Church Line] came with Simon Sirdar, who is Petras’s father [Petras is a union leader]. Though they are Catholic and we are Germaniya (German-Lutheran), what of it? In the old country, we shared walls. As we do now.We are one samaj [society].’’ Many sections of the lines were named after principal sirdars, and some lines continue to be remembered by those old names. One interesting example of historical shifts in residential naming is indexed in the Mission Line itself. Previously called Simon Line, it changed its name to the Mission Line at the prompting of a senior planter in the late 1960s, who suggested to the community’s elders that they should call the line after their religion. This was the same planter who, in a masterful strategy of religious ‘‘divide and rule,’’ also argued that Christian workers should not dance in the yearly dance festivals because they were ‘‘Hindu’’ rituals.The absence of the large Christian community in these customary dance festivals did lead to their decline as important performances of pancommunity solidarity. Historical claims are made through the memories of ritual. Time, inscribed within geographic space, becomes a sacred referent for the other histories of power. Birsa Bhagat, an Oraon faith-healer, recalls the stories of entire villages that moved ‘‘during the time of the angrezi sahibs [English sahibs]’’ because of the obha, a dreaded wind of misfortune: ‘‘It used to be believed in those old days, when our people were new here, that misfortune would come from any place, like the obha that carries in its path the stench of death.Then, even the sahibs could not stop us, we would do a prayer and then move our bamboo huts to another place.’’ Another fragment of history frames a territorial claim. A Santhal elder recalled a legendary ancestor whose reputation of both toughness and prophetic acumen was respected by the English planter. In one story, the ancestor was approached by the planter about a piece of land to be used as a site for staff homes: ‘‘When the land around the bashas [staff cottages] was going to be cleared for the babus [staff ], one sahib came to my grandfather to ask if land was good. It was all jungle then, as far as you could see. My grandfather agreed to conduct some prayers. He was like a bhagat, you see. He took a black chicken to the field in front of the staff home and told the Village Politics 243

sahibs that if the animals didn’t eat it overnight, the land was ritually clean. The chicken was not eaten, and the sahibs did what they had to do.’’ Through its ritual inscriptions on the otherwise sacrosanct territory of planter power, the story of the Santhal oracle (and its retelling) claims history. In so doing, it hints at subterranean fissures that underlie the cultivated maps of the emerald field.

Contesting Communities

act 7, scene 2 Spotlights focus on the Narrator, sitting stage right. Her cowl is thrown back. She opens a drawer in the table she is sitting at. She takes out a book and opens it. She looks at you directly. A faint but steady drumming can be heard in the background. She reads slowly from the book, as if reciting a poem. she: ‘‘Like the famous line from the Arabian Nights—puriya ke andar puriya, uske andar puriya—in the matter of caste and community, too, there are stories within stories. Dig for the earthworm and, unwittingly, you’ll unearth a dinosaur.’’ 2 Lights fade out. Power, traveling through space and time, carves out ritual and nuanced histories of contest and solidarity. It also creates the analytic frames within which I come to some understanding of the complex and diverse cultural politics in the Labor Lines. My own placement within the bungalow, where I inhabit the status of memsahib, shapes the arc of my village encounters.Though I visit more distant lines and cross the borders of neighboring plantations, it is that small area lying adjacent to the bungalow that becomes the focused site of these plantation pedagogies. The bungalow location draws out the first lines of the cultural cartography of power that threads the analysis. Demographically and territorially, this plantation is one of the largest in the central Dooars. Apart from the philosophical conundrum of asserting totalizing claims about plantation culture, the practical limits of highly individualized field research, when surrounded by such vast pluralities, are daunting. Consequently, the territorial placement and the absences of what lies further afield create its narrative boundaries and its deeper analytic claims. This discussion of ‘‘community’’ and the politics of difference 244

through which relatively autonomous histories are made will underscore dialectical and intricate patterns-in-action rather than fixed categories. Process, rather than taxonomy, will be emphasized. This rendering of community is more concerned with the contradictions and paradoxes of social life. It is interested in viewing community (or indeed ‘‘culture’’) as emergent within a praxis on the ground, of human agency and power that is enabling, disabling, and constantly creative. Cultural practice plots the historical contours of community. Such plottings are predicated upon ‘‘recognitions’’ of difference.These are recognitions manifested through habitus, ingrained within the histories of religion, caste, labor, and gender. Indeed, these are the analytic corridors through which the material practices of community travel.The cultural economies of patriarchy, structured within symbolic, bodily, and ritual agencies are privileged, but not excised from the other corridors of cultural power. However, an examination of such processes must immediately contend with language itself: the nomenclature, labels, and categories that conceptually and pragmatically bind our understandings of community. Accepted and now commonsensical definitions of community emphasize local and microlevel groups that constitute a subset of much larger social collectivities: cities, towns, and even the nation-state. Community can also be seen as socially homogeneous with an inherent and even impermeable sense of identity. Consequently, community can be ‘‘removed’’ from the wider historical landscape and juxtaposed to the work of states, constructions of the nation. Community may be viewed as constituting the core of such larger processes and institutions. However, an assumption of local impermeability can flatten a sense of dynamic and dialectical connections to these. I build this narrative about community on interlocking conceptual stacks that are embedded in larger historical landscapes. At one level, ‘‘community’’ is used to locate the plural social groupings within the Labor Lines. Like the line/village whose own definition is historically configured, the community is located, and constituted, within the surging of cultural practice. It does not assume impermeable or static boundaries. It is not used to connote a primordial or essential residue of some self-evident larger category, be it ‘‘Hindu,’’ ‘‘caste,’’ or ‘‘Nepali.’’ Rather, I present the concept in an agentive and immanent sense, as collective body that is made, unmade, and ruptured through the paradoxical effects of cultural action. Politics, too, is unhooked from an analogous fixity. It traverses—like the viscosity of its life blood, power 3—through language, symbol, and the body, enabling the historical process through which community is made. While the narratives remain close to the ground and detail micropolitics, Village Politics 245

they are embedded in the global histories through which they are dialectically enabled. The regional politics of West Bengal, the international borders of other nation-states, and the production of a commodity traded on a worldwide scale, splinters the analytic boundaries of the ‘‘local’’ and the ‘‘community.’’ In framing this part of the narrative within the ambit of the local and the specific, I offer a perspective that moves outward, gesturing always to the dialectics of its making.

A Categorical Politics Two anthropological categories, ‘‘tribes’’ and ‘‘castes,’’ emerged as a set of organizing labels within which colonial rulers catalogued and administered workers’ cultures. Earlier, I argued that classifications in district handbooks and censuses constructed a taxonomy through which particular communities came to be inextricably connected to customary work. A telos of labor underwrote the system of classification. Among the important reasons that ‘‘tribes’’ were placed within the ambit of ‘‘primitivism’’ was because their customary work—swidden or shifting cultivation—was viewed as ‘‘primitive.’’ ‘‘Agricultural castes’’ were favorably contrasted to this ‘‘primitive’’ movement because they were ‘‘settled.’’ Though this work-communityclassification presents one strand in the cosmology of the caste: tribe (civilizedprimitive) binary, it is salient for an examination of a cultural politics where communities were recruited, and administered, for the primary purpose of labor.4 Local and indigenous categories entered the administrative parlance of district handbooks and planter reports. Communities indexed as ‘‘tribal’’ (such as the Oraon, Munda, and Gond) were also called madesia, people from the ‘‘middle country,’’ or Chotanagpur. Madesia were contrasted to Nepali immigrants, the paharia, people from the hills. While the madesiapaharia dichotomy is not expressed frequently in the postcolonial plantation, it indexes a major ethnicized division. Nepalis will distinguish themselves from adivasis, a subcontinental indigenous category that denotes an autochthonous and often outcaste status. It is a term that has replaced the older rubric of madesia. The term adivasi is deployed by various second- and third-generation communities from the Chotanagpur to distinguish themselves from other groups, specifically, Bengali, Punjabi, and Nepali elites. For this reason, and despite its own homogenizing effects, I deploy it in the narrative. Another broad and self-referential category opens up conceptual space for understanding community within vernacular mediations. In numerous 246

discussions that I had during my fieldwork about community multiplicity, the term jat was offered as an explanatory and heuristic tool of community identity and distinction. In the simplest sense, it was used as a general referent to one’s group, whether that identity was ascribed with religious, caste, or national markers. Thus, an Oraon, Santhal, Catholic, or Nepali person would respond to my tentative question about their samaj (society), with ‘‘My jat is . . .’’.What is significant about this usage is the manner in which it both includes, and expands, the recognition of jat as a specifically ‘‘caste’’ or ‘‘subcaste’’ category predicated on customary occupational status. Not only adivasi communities (located outside the formal caste hierarchies) use this category; so do communities whose primary self-definitions are religious. The significance of this multiple stacking of ‘‘primary’’ identities is that jat is registered always through relational positionings. When a Nepali woman is asked about where she is ‘‘from,’’ she asserts a sub/national and caste identity: ‘‘I am a Nepali and Kami [blacksmith]. We are not adivasi.’’ She ends by creating the lines of distinction. Her response, and assertion of being Nepali, may also be complicated by my own interrogative location as a Bengali.Within the context of North Bengal politics, where organized assertions of pan-Nepali identity have challenged the hegemony of Bengalidominated state politics, her assertion to me of being Nepali is pointed. The elasticity of the category is most apparent when jat is used alongside samaj, or society. To delineate one’s jat, then, is to also connote in the broadest sense one’s ‘‘society.’’ The notion of one’s jat as demarcating one’s community has ripple effects, expanding a specific occupational family title in ever widening circles to include a subnational identity. It is an expansion and permeability mediated by a particular community’s positioning in relation to another. Jat could index one’s customary occupation as well as encompass religious and subnational identities. Claims to either are mediated in the first place by the relational status positioning of one community vis-à-vis another. In more specific discussions about the constitution of small/big or lower/higher jats, the category was further broken down by customary rankings of subcaste or through religious differences. The relational flux of community identity, and the permeable encompassment of the category jat, was vividly presented in one conversation: ‘‘Eh, memsahib, all this upar [above] jat and neche [below] jat . . . what does it matter? What does it matter to you bara aadmi [big people]? After all, we are all garib [poor].We are the garib jat, the coolie jat.’’ It is also important to underscore, however, that jat is not emptied of its connections to a more defined Hinduized caste hierarchy. To empty jat of this important referent is to diminish the potent and often hegemonic effects Village Politics 247

of a clearly defined ‘‘Hindu’’ ideology that now determines politics at the national level and is beginning to have important effects at the plantation grass roots. Though the narrative of jat and hierarchy will emphasize hybridity and flux, this other pedagogy about a superior, national, and unitary Hindu identity is also threaded through the story. The analysis of ‘‘difference’’ and the syncretism and hybridity of community-qua-jat politics cannot be excised from the postcolonial landscape of Hindu nationalism and its strategies of mobilization around potent definitions of an immutable and essential religious identity.

Gender, Honor, Separation Curious to meet the Santhals who live close to the Factory Line, I ask Anjali whether she will accompany me there. Tall, overgrown hedges shield their homes from the path. Unlike other houses that open onto the road, this shield of hedges is striking. Anjali, and other women I ask, tell me that this community keeps to itself. They are well-known for radical political mobilization.5 A Santhali union leader of the late 1960s is remembered for his fearlessness and his courage in shouting back at the planter. When I ask a group of Anjali’s friends whether I can be introduced, Mina Lohra shakes her head: ‘‘Memsahib, they keep to themselves, so I don’t know if they will have anything to do with you. Even the women are like that, and the men do not like it if the women mix too much. I remember during Holi [the Festival of Color], when we were throwing color at each other, a boy [non-Santhali] threw some at a Santhali girl. There was real bata bati [talk/fight] between his community and the Santhal elders. It was sorted out without any panchayat [council] sitting down. So we don’t try to mix too much. They are khatharnak [awesome/fearless]. If they want to talk to you, they will let you know.’’ These comments register the cadences of difference; respect for a history of political resistance and the stringent ‘‘protection’’ of Santhali women lace the perception of social distance.These commentaries from ‘‘without’’ provide important insights into customary rules ‘‘within’’ and the terms of gendered honor that mark the boundaries of social distinction. The dialectical interplays between rules (manifest through the transgression in which a gendered color was thrown in a markedly Hindu festival) and daily practice (compelled through necessary, hybrid labor arrangements) are enacted through a politics of difference. Out of these recognitions of transgression emerges a cultural politics that

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is animated by internal stratifications of economic difference: perceptions of ‘‘Hindu-ness,’’ understandings of caste customs, and discussions around women and ‘‘honor.’’ Indeed, women’s placement within the script of honor, and the issues of status it suggests, is critical in demarcating the boundaries and politics of community. Sexual politics, through marriage arrangements within jats and cross-jat (mis)alliances, cut across the matrix of the larger plantation society. Indeed, the gender-jat nexus constitutes an inextricably coupled matrix. It is a coupling that also shapes the local patriarchies within the plantation’s villages. I know Santhali women could provide their own analysis of the colorthrowing incident, but I don’t meet any who will speak to me. A fruitful and incisive discussion with the Santhal panchayat does occur, but no women are involved.Who, indeed, speaks for the jat?

Women Speak Distinction One evening, Munnu introduces a kinswoman dressed in widow’s white. While Munnu, an Oraon woman, draws her into kinship, she asserts that she is a Kumhar. She tells me she is ‘‘sadan (general caste) . . . the same as your friend, the shopkeeper,’’ a barbed reference to Bhagirathi, who runs a successful shop. Puzzled by Munnu’s claim of kinship, I learn that the woman’s son has married someone from Munnu’s clan, and this has made her kin. Her immediate assertion of difference, even superiority vis-à-vis Munnu, is itself telling. Bhagirathi does locate her extended family within the sadan, which she defines as a high-status caste cluster: ‘‘Didi, we are Kumhar. In Bihar, we make pots and we are not the same as adivasis. We are general caste. Our rituals, songs, and dances are different. It is like this. We, the Goala [cow herders], and Sonar [goldsmiths] fall in one group. Then, it is the Lohar [blacksmiths], Mahali, and Ghasi. Then the Oraon, Munda, and Santhal.’’ This category also indicates a placement in the wider administrative hierarchies of postcolonial censuses. The Kumhar are not classified in what are called ‘‘scheduled castes and tribes’’ and are viewed as a general, though not upper, caste. Yet, because of this placement in the census, Bhagirathi’s children are not eligible for the quotas reserved for ‘‘scheduled castes and tribes’’ in high school and college education entrance competitions. With Anjali and Munnu sitting next to her, Bhagirathi remarks indignantly, ‘‘Look at the three of us.Wework togetherand we are all poor, sowhy should we not get the same assistance?’’ The other women are eligible for

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‘‘reservation.’’ The lines of contradiction between status and class are thus drawn. The two other women, who have listened to the hierarchy mapped around them, smile and nod. There is some irony in their quiet assent. Later I ask Anjali, my constant companion, about the sadan/adivasi distinction. She appears uneasy, curiously puzzled. ‘‘All this upar-neech jat is not good. In the garden, we are from many jats and we are all poor. So I don’t understand it.’’ Perhaps the ingrained codes of subordination creates the general, and evasive, terms of her comment to me. Perhaps it is the boldness of the more advantaged who can choose to articulate the terms of power and distinction. Anjali and Bhagirathi, who claim their jat identities as Bajania and Kumhar respectively, are firm friends. Inscriptions of ‘‘superiority’’ and ‘‘inferiority’’ in these different positionings are spoken about carefully. Friendship and support—during illness, economic hardship, or a difficult childbirth— are constantly emphasized during any discussion about jat differences. The quotidian and interdependent terms of these relationships are significant. ‘‘Didi,’’ Anjali notes, ‘‘yes, there are all of these things. Which jat is better than the other, who won’t eat with who. It happens between us also. I have friends who don’t eat with me in certain places, but in the bagan (garden/field), we all have to drink the same water. If I don’t have any rice for two days and can’t feed my children, Munnu will bring me some. Or Bhagirathi will. This is how we help each other. We are poor, didi, this is our life.’’ The moral economies of the village thus contain the conscious silences through which solidarities created by a common gender/class experience of impoverishment can be maintained. Calibrations of kinship are finely gauged and fragile. The kinship of gender and labor travels across the lines of jat. It is a solidarity that cannot be betrayed, even in casual conversation. Anjali’s own family and jat history is pieced together slowly. She tells me she will have to ask her father and try to remember some stories. ‘‘People think we are a lower jat. . . . My title [equivalent to last name] is ‘‘Mirdha,’’ and we came from Dumka, and there people speak a language which is like Bhojpuri. In Balurhat we are all called Bangali [Bengali] and Turi, and our title there is ‘‘Singh.’’ We are bajania [musicians] . . . we play the dol [drum] for marriages . . . like when a higher jat like the Ghatwar [fishermen/wharf keepers] have a marriage, they will pay us to play the drum, give us food, but we will cook this food on a different stove.We are a very small society here, but we are not such an inferior jat as some people in the village think. I don’t know if it is true, but someone from here, we think it was a Santhal, spread a rumor that he had gone to the home country and seen that our jat 250

did the work of doms [cleaners of carrion]. That we were covering up who we were. This is just not true, we are bajania, not doms, but whether or not it is true, some people treat us like a small jat. . . . Arrrreee, in the end, I don’t know why all this pollution stuff is still so important.’’ Though Anjali’s community is small, her story about its history of identity presents the multiple and contested nature of jat ascriptions. In this instance, lower-caste ‘‘Bengaliness’’ is connected to a distinctly North Indian title, ‘‘Singh,’’ and the ascription of outcasteness (dom) permeates others’ perceptions of community status. Anjali’s father, for example, claims a certain Bengaliness by conducting a Kali puja (one of the most important Bengali Hindu rituals) as his household’s annual house ritual. Anjali’s presentation of this blurred history suggests a possible archetype for the negotiations of community identity and status. Jat selfhood is understood as being in flux, multiply ascribed, and always relational.The story of jat demotion (not accepted by the community but registered by others) also suggests the process by which customary and ascribed status distinctions are transformed through labor migration. Downward shifts in status, particularly if a jat is numerically small, can be hastened by something as subtle as a rumor. A jat is made and unmade through the subtle registers of time, perception, and demography.The ambivalence of process and the tracks of bodied movement constitutes the history of the out/caste. The ‘‘fact’’ that a Santhal catalyzed this interpretation of a demotion of jat status begs further scrutiny. Why a Santhal? What deeper histories of conflict might lie between these communities elsewhere in Bengal? Is this another form of internal othering? What might a Santhal woman say? The questions remain unanswered. Munnu, who is Oraon, asserts her kinship across jat, but speaks openly about issues of status. ‘‘We are a lower jat,’’ she notes, ‘‘but there are many of us here.The Purana [Old] Line is almost completely Oraon.We also have many rules about mixing with bhinjat [noncommunity]. But things have loosened up.’’ That early winter, when I meet Munnu for the first time, I learn quickly about the syncretic flux of community life. In the small and dusty courtyard of her home, she and her husband sit quietly in the center of a noisy house ritual, following the instructions of the bahman [brahmin priest]. Her husband, wearing white, lightweight cloth, is silhouetted against the smoke of the small fire made temporarily sacred. There is a full moon when I walk back to the bungalow. Munnu darts toward me, her eyes shy. Grabbing my hands, she asks me to visit again. Because I knew Munnu was Oraon, I expected a ritual closer to the old cosmologies of the Chotanagpur: a sacred grove, theworship of a tree, some Village Politics 251

offering of liquid drink, and feasting. Instead, I participated in a small ritual that had distinctly Hindu markings: an altar to Siva, a bahman priest, textual invocations. Anyessentialized assumption I had about jat practice refracting some ‘‘authentic’’ and original cosmology is well jostled. To learn this lesson early in research is fortuitous because it underscores how my journey is about a learning of ‘‘process.’’ By focusing on the ambivalences of practice, my analysis does not offer totalizing claims of any jat identity. Rather than search for some lineage connecting plantation customs to their ‘‘origin’’ points, I detail another kind of social constitution and the discursive practices through which the histories of community identity are constantly made. Instead of positing Oraon identity as a discrete entity, with a sharply delineated lineage of ‘‘original’’ customs, I understand Munnu’s own narrative and practice as a frame through which I can come to some understanding of what it means to be an Oraon/woman/plantation fieldworker at a specific historical moment. This individuation of a certain kind of Oraonness is structurally interpellated, resting within the vectors of class and gender. However, it is an interpellation that gestures toward a social meaning and historical experience that is shared, and beyond the fragmented specificity of an individual narrative. These are not disassociated fragments. Woven together like the thatch of some village homes, they construct the architecture of its patriarchies. As flexible as that thatch, specific jat stories can be seen as creating series of alignments toward various economies of power. I begin to visit Munnu more regularly. I learn that she has married into this plantation village, though she continues to work in the neighboring plantation, where she was born. Because her husband is an orphan and his kinship ties are weak, their home is not in the Purana (Old) Line, where a majority of Oraon, and some of her husband’s relatives, reside. Surrounded by communities like the Kumhar and Nepalis, who claim their Hindu identity and location within the higher status of the caste structures more explicitly, I begin to understand Munnu’s Hindu ritual as a gesture of partial incorporation.Yet Munnu’s knowledge of cosmologies that do not fit neatly into the practices of her house ritual suggests that this incorporation is not unidirectional. Munnu’s work gang in her natal plantation includes numerous Nepali women who are close friends. ‘‘They are tough,’’ she notes ‘‘and fun to work with. I like being with them. They are from my village.’’ 6 Though these friendships in labor do cut across community distinctions, a sense of separation is palpable. Anjali’s neighbors in the Factory Line are Nepali, and though sympathetic assistance is given in crises and creates its own kinship, 252

a superior distance is made explicit. ‘‘Look,’’ says a Nepali woman who lives close to my bungalow, ‘‘we are Hindus. We are a big jat. Our chal [movement/‘‘customs’’] is different from these adivasis. It is just like that.’’ Because Anjali, Bhagirathi, and Munnu are the primary triage of my connections in the village, my conversations with Nepali women are not frequent or sustained. Though I accompany Munnu to her natal village, and am invited by her Nepali friends to various cultural activities, our conversations are not consistent. Only toward the end of my first sojourn here, upon which much of these narratives are based, do I meet a Nepali woman, Rita Chhetri, with whom I can engage in an ongoing dialogue about politics. She does not live at Sarah’s Hope, and our conversations focus less on questions of Nepali ‘‘identity’’ and more on general politics, because she is active in her plantation’s union. It is perhaps not so ironic that my lack of connection with Nepali women at Sarah’s Hope is striking.Though I do meet a Nepali man who is a powerful union leader, I am aware that there are other Nepali who are prominent in high-status jobs and work in the unions, and that the distance they keep from me is assiduously maintained. I recognize that perceptions of my own ethnicity (Bengali) and class (memsahib) defines the miles between us. I do not push against the membrane of their resistance. However, I do learn about the sub-jat distinctions that undergird the wider rubric, Nepali. Customary occupational titles chart important internal hierarchies within the Nepali community.Though a majority of families are Kami [blacksmiths], Chhetris,Tamangs, and Dorji who are customarily agrarian castes in Nepal claim a higher status than the numerically dominant Kami. Not only are these few families more prosperous than their neighbors in the Factory Line, their men, like the one who spoke to me about the price of cauliflower, are powerful members of unions and village councils.

Religious Choreographies and Theaters of Twilight In striking contrast to my distance from many Nepali families, a theatrical and very public welcome to the Missionya (mission/Christian) is orchestrated by Peter Toppo, a Catholic who is prominent in the community and union. He is expansive and hospitable, but has (I realize) a sharp curiosity. With flamboyant bonhomie, he lets me know his connections to the senior planter. I have been warned about him and am cautious but appreciate his willingness to perform initial introductions to members of his community. He conducts his introduction of lay catechists and church culture with an ease that suggests a familiarity with ‘‘outsiders.’’ Peter and two prachers Village Politics 253

[lay catechists] explain that their own Roman Catholic community is the largest of three denominations in the village.The other two are the GermanLutherans and the Church of North India, who have two small churches that flank the larger Catholic grotto with its statue of the blue Madonna and her child. Christian missions were established in Ranchi and the Chotanagpur Plateau in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, a close relationship between labor-recruiting agencies and the Catholic Labor Bureau channeled new converts to the railway depots. Italian priests settled into the Dooars only in the 1930s and began to create their parishes. Though isolation was a major obstacle, they enjoyed the favorable attention of British planters. At Sarah’s Hope, the large, imposing Catholic church, partially funded by a benevolent burra sahib, is a significant meeting area for panplantation celebrations of important ritual events in the Christian calendar. Though European missionaries visited their isolated congregations, these communities built their own places of worship and prachers (who led the missionya village councils) had considerable political autonomy. The postcolonial Catholic Church, however, has grown with the arrival of various orders of priests and nuns. Mission-run schools have ensured a steady growth of literacy in the community. As a result of access to this education, Catholic men hold higher-status jobs in the factory. Significantly, because of the custom of managerial benevolence, favorable essentialisms around discipline and cleanliness remain powerful in the postcolonial period. In my numerous conversations with lay catechists and parish priests and nuns I learn that the Catholic community carefully coordinates its cultural activities through a parish council. It is a coordination that not only presents the visible and formal organizing structure of the larger Church but provides social access to the ‘‘outside’’ worlds of privilege, such as boarding schools, education in English, and the like. Because most Catholics are also adivasi, their sense of community is double-pronged. Though the immediate definition of missionya personhood is religious, a person’s relationship to being adivasi (as for example, Oraon or Munda) is continuously, if not explicitly, negotiated.Cultural practices that existed before the mission and that are perceived as defining adivasi identity, such as dancing in the mixed jatras [festivals],7 or drinking rice-beer during ritual celebrations, are widely debated. Prior to Vatican II, Catholic orthodoxy did not permit or integrate these ‘‘older’’ customs, and the liturgy was celebrated in Latin and not in vernacular languages.8 Julian, a prominent member of the parish council, remarks that afterVatican II, when attention was given to local practices, ‘‘free think254

ing and discussions about our old customs were brought into the Church rituals. And this should be the case. I am a Catholic, but I am also Oraon. But now the children don’t want to be identified as adivasi, so they have stopped dancing.We have to have pride in being adivasi.’’ Within the political climate of Hindu nationalism, such debates have taken on compelling urgency. Julian comments, ‘‘There is a certain Oraon in Bihar who is a bjp mp [member of parliament] who has declared that Christian adivasis are not really adivasis and they are trying to create an Englishsthan (English land).9 This is really bogus and dangerous because there are many Christians who are Bengali, Nepali. . . . What they are basically trying to do is to say that we are not Indians. Because of this man’s comments, there were tremendous problems, and a church has been burned.’’ When a jat’s identity is explicitly ‘‘Christian,’’ then the tensions that arise among histories of conversion, the transformations of Church policy, and the contemporary politics of Hindu nationalism beg detailed analysis. Here, I will simply note that debates in plantation country about the primacy of religious practice and connections to adivasi identity wrestle with these explicit ideologies of authentic Indianness based on notions of unitary Hindu identity. In the words of an idealogue in not-distant Bihar, the mythical creation of an Englishland binds the Christian adivasi, through the potencyof anticolonial rhetoric, into the place of the foreign, the noncitizen, the enemy. Though these religious contests over what constitutes authentic citizenship have trickled into the plantation, they appear muted in daily practice. Missionya and nonmissionya emphasize that tolerance and equilibrium have not yet been rocked by the political storms of the ‘‘outside.’’ Thus far, the contests of religious difference are played out in a more subtle theater; they have not exploded into public ruptures of violence. Yet. I learn about the Christian community through narratives almost entirely created by prominent men.They provide a striking gendered contrast to my other teachers of the village’s cultural choreographies. I do meet a few nuns who organize women’s ‘‘societies’’ but find it difficult to speak to ordinary Catholic women workers. The men’s measured hospitality shepherds me into the terms of another kind of distance. The absence of a sustained dialogue with missionya women begs the question: Who, indeed, speaks for the jat? Though the Christian community is a minority religious community in the plantation, they are large enough to be visible and distinct. In contrast, the Muslims are a very small community of four households. A neighboring plantation, formerly owned by a Nawab of Jalpaiguri has a far larger Muslim Village Politics 255

presence, and I am told that the four families are linked to panplantation gatherings in a neighboring mosque. On several occasions, I am hosted by one of the more important factory overseers, who is Muslim. His wife and daughters have never worked in the field. It is a matter of honor that they don’t. During the annual celebration of Id, I accompany a woman, Suneeta Khan, to his house for lunch. She tells me she is Muslim and that her other name is Jahanara. Puzzled by this double naming, I sense a considerable reserve toward her on the part of my hosts. She tells me later that her mother is not Muslim but an adivasi Lohar [blacksmith]. Her father, who is Muslim, traveled with a troupe of mendicants and found a home in the village where he became involved with this Lohar woman. He married her, but then left her for another woman. Jahanara/Suneeta, who uses her Muslim name when introducing herself to other Muslims, sits in twilight. She is accepted by neither community. I even hear whispers from other women: ‘‘ ‘Her father was not a good man’ . . . ‘be careful of what she says, you don’t know what she gets up to. . . .’ ’’ Her reputation with men is suspect; sexual innuendo peppers these comments about her visible participation in unions. Perhaps the suspicion is deepened on account of her bodied and transgressive hybridity. Jahanara/Suneeta and I wander through the more distant section of the line where she lives. We do not spend much time reflecting on the enigma of her jat identity. She is far more interested in discussing her experience as one of the few women active in a local union. In my fluid rendering of some jat stories, a few basic themes emerge.They are not essences of fixed collective subjectivity but accumulations of the daily processes, and histories, of social life.They are told through particular locations, rooted in the ambivalence of power and dialogue, and within this creative flux, identify the nodes of cultural order and action: (1) subgroupings within the overarching rubric of the wider apellation adivasi negotiate hierarchy and distinction in intricate ways; (2) a central dichotomy between Nepalis and adivasi is discursively maintained, despite shared labor practice; and (3) the primacy of religious ascriptions and definitions is coupled with other markers of identity. In many instances, these social texts of distinction are written in terms of izzat (honor). It is a script that inscribes gender as the corporeal measure of separation and superiority; a woman’s body becomes the tabula rasa upon which power manifests the terms of community.

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Sexual Politics and Transgression When a non-Santhali boy throws color at a Santhali girl during a Hindu festival on the plantation, he incurs the wrath of the Santhal community’s male elders. Transgression is perceived because even symbolic ‘‘play’’ with a male ‘‘outsider’’ suggests a bodied connection as well as desecration. In the festival Holi, however, which is celebrated as a kind of bacchanalia, such transgression is widely ‘‘accepted’’ by most Hindus. To Santhals, who might not define themselves as a ‘‘Hindu,’’ these terms of liminality are a threat. Color spills over into a sexual politics that can threaten one of the most important boundaries of community cohesion and reproduction. Rules of marriage enforce jat ideology and status in the most significant ways. They are the other face of transgression. The legitimate informs the illegitimate; the publicly sanctioned mirrors the secrets of the socially impossible. Consequently, bhinjat (cross-community) alliances entail sanction, punishment, and negotiations to put ‘‘right’’ the threat of cultural disorder. Liaisons are defined as illegitimate when they are bhinjat, across jat. Arbitrations of such misalliances occur through the panchayats (councils) of both communities. While panchayat ‘‘elders’’ are primarily men, the entire society will participate. Marriage rules, and the sexual politics of transgression, cut through the social matrix within which an uneasy equilibrium of hierarchy floats.The lexicon of these hierarchies is constructed through the terms of marriage and sexuality. Their inextricability asserts a primary dialectic between gender and community that shapes village patriarchies in significant ways. Among the Nepalis in the Factory Line, if a marriage is within the rules of jat, economic assistance is offered by the whole village.The economy of the marriage, one of the most important displays of hospitality and solidarity, is crucial in these equations of support. Prem, the watchman who is disgraced when he assaults two women, once told me that if a family does not have the economic strength to conduct a marriage, then 2 kilos of rice and 5 rupees from each house is offered.This economy of assistance is an ideology shared by other communities: the Santhal elders comment that though the family should try and bear the expenses, ultimately the ‘‘marriage belongs to the society.’’ If a bhinjat marriage occurs, gender determines negotiations and the severity of sanctions. If a Nepali woman (of any subcaste) wants to marry an Oraon man, the Nepali community will sit with its panchayat. In most cases, the woman is disowned. Arbitration will consider how much her family will pay for reparation for such a ‘‘loss’’ of the collective face. However, if the

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situation is inverse and a Nepali man wants to marry an Oraon woman, the man’s jat (in this instance understood as a subcaste, e.g., Kami) will have to buy a ‘‘title’’ for her, that is, literally pay for someone of a lesser jat to come into its fold. These reparations for inclusion can cost up to a thousand rupees. The payments index the political economy of transgression. The social costs of bringing a woman ‘‘in’’ are considerable, but far less than the price paid by a woman who dares to marry ‘‘out.’’ She will become an outcaste, disowned by the community into which she is born. Gatekeepers of Distinction Among the Kumhar, the gatekeepers of marriage are women. Bhagirathi and her dol (labor gang) are outspoken and authoritative narrators of jat customs. She and her aunts assert that cross-jat alliances are strictly taboo and that social ostracism of a family is the ultimate sanction. As we eat some snacks one evening, Bhagirathi comments, ‘‘I can tell you some things about marriage customs. Anjali tells me that you are interested in these things and I don’t mind telling you some things. ‘‘Our husbands come to stay with us when we marry.They are called ghar jamai. My husband came from the country [Bihar] to marry me. I don’t remember how old I was. Anyway, the thing is that we must marry within our own jat. That is what is most important. If something happens outside this, then as a clan we conduct a kamkriya [funeral rites]. A kataha [‘‘big man,’’ arbitrator] is called from Bihar to read mantras and he is given some clothes, shoes, and 151 rupees. At the kamkriya, the men will sit together around the kataha, who faces the fire. Only the men, in a circle. This is the maradhana. The women will sit outside the circle. There is one black goat sacrificed for the samaj [society], and one white to the suraj bhagwan [sun god]. After the kataha and the men have eaten, then we will eat. ‘‘Before the kamkriya, the society will have agreed to punishment because the family will not want to leave the jat. But they will have to do many rituals like this funeral rite and have to feed the whole society. They have to pay for everything. In one case, a Kumhar girl and Lohar boy ran off together. Her parents had tried very hard to marry her within the customs, but she left with this man. Now she will never be able to come back to her mother and father. Once the funeral rites are completed, she is dead to her family and to the society. The mother and daughter can never speak, and if they do, we will catch them.To this day, we women do not look at her face.’’ Startled by this emphatic disciplining, albeit discursively emphasized, I ask Bhagirathi why the daughter is so stringently ostracised. Is it the same for a Kumhar man if he marries a bhinjat woman? ‘‘Look, didi,’’ Bhagirathi says, ‘‘a daughter is like a earthenware pot. If she leaves for another jat, she ‘breaks.’ Like a broken pot, she falls apart. 258

Because she breaks the izzat of her father, which is why the honor of her jat is broken. This is why her mother and father will turn their face away.’’ Bhagirathi crafts a customary metaphor—the object of the Kumhars’ traditional earthenware work—to explain gendered honor and the woman’s transgression: the woman-pot must not shatter. She continues: ‘‘If a Lohar woman marries into the jat, she will be slowly accepted by the jat. But, for the boy’s family to climb up into the jat, this means that they have to feed the clan and conduct a ritual. This can cost between 2,000 and 7,000 rupees [$48 and $166 respectively]. The only restriction for a bhinjat woman who marries into our jat is that she cannot conduct the funeral rites for her in-laws, and when she dies, the Kumhars will not do her last rites, though her own society still can, if they acknowledge her. You see this is why it is important that we try to marry within. In the end, when you are dead, who will conduct your funeral? If she is banished by her jat, then this is a curse.’’ Transgression, thus, exacts a steep price, and a political economyof social value is charted through rituals of arbitration and fiscal sanctions. However, a Kumhar family pays the highest price when a daughter transgresses. Her misalliance will cost her family not only two major rituals but also a lifelong loss of affective kinship. In contrast, a Kumhar son’s misalliance will be incorporated after ritual payments have been made. Most significantly, his children will belong to the Kumhar. Patriliny and jat reproduction are thus intimately linked. Her power lies in her capacity to literally bear the community.To take that power elsewhere constitutes the betrayal of community in a most immediate and bodied sense. Significantly, it is Kumhar women who offer a theoretical and pragmatic legitimation of the disciplinary practices that enact the terms of community. It is an authority that presents a paradox. On one hand, their wage labor and marriage value ensure a certain gendered authority and prominence in the village. It is one that could (and does) challenge their jat’s and the wider plantation patriarchies in significant ways. Yet, in their location on the outer perimeter of ritual, their subordination is also starkly drawn. From that position, they still police the borders of community cohesion in the strongest terms. Their wrath is finally aimed at other women. This too is the politics of patriarchy. Women uphold its terms by sanctioning the punishment of other women. The pot must not be shattered. The frontiers of community solidarity are protected by the rules of marriages whose outlines are often made manifest through transgression. Negotiations and disciplining of bhinjat alliances are shared by many communities. Its ideology presents the basic contours of plural but shared patriVillage Politics 259

archies. A woman marrying out threatens the community in radical ways. Her departure is a reproductive loss in a deeply social sense. Her child will enter the patriliny of another jat. If she is a wage-earner, she takes her earnings with her. To the Kumhar, she is an absolute outcaste. Her family must pay hefty ritual and monetary reparations to the community. A man who marries a woman from ‘‘outside’’ must offer payment, but he can never become an outcaste. He brings his bride’s flawed and ‘‘outside’’ body into the economy of patrilineage, which underwrites the continuity of community, its histories of honor. Sexual transgressions that cannot be contained within these accepted norms of hybrid balance create ruptures that come to mediation after conflict has broken through the fragile skin of equilibrium. They can start with seemingly innocuous and minorevents. A young woman from Anjali’s community goes to watch a film with a Sonar man who is who is from the uppercaste cluster sadan.When rumors of sexual impropriety dance through the village, the man defiantly states that he will ‘‘keep’’ her. Men and women from her clan arrived with bamboo canes to attack the small Sonar family. The man flees. Through the ‘‘gossip’’ in the laboring field and around the cooking fire, I learn that such liaisons are not uncommon. They are usually tolerated as long as they don’t demand the public legitimations of marriage. They must retain a certain invisibility, sinking below the surface of the possible. Such are the many definitions of the social: what can be collectively seen and what runs simultaneously through the catacombs of public impossibility. If one partner raises a head to breathe the open air (even to go to a film), the liaison can turn dangerous. Then, the vectors of class/jat/gender politics are pushed toward conflagration. Consider a Sonar woman who comes to the Nepali goddess Durga. The Durga Mata (Durga Mother) is a shamanness, faith-healer, doctor, and counselor. Jayati Sonar’s husband, Ganesh, a shopkeeper and permanent worker, has been involved with an Oraon woman who lives near their home. After listening intently to Jayati’s angrycommentary, the Durga Mata sagely tells her that Ganesh is possessed and she is willing to exorcise him. Jayati grasps at this supernatural diagnosis with an almost frenzied hope. It will take two months for this rather sordid and sad personal drama to switch into another register. The despairing Jayati belongs to a small but prosperous Bihari community, which defines itself in superior relationship to even the Kumhars. The valences within the caste cluster of the sadan are thus subtly indexed.

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Like Bhagirathi’s immediate family, the Sonar Bihari are also a class of shopkeepers and moneylenders. In contrast to Bhagirathi, however, Sonar women are not permitted to work in the field. Jayati pulls her sari low over her forehead when she walks the village path. Her eyes are veiled. She tells me that not entering the field of labor is a matter of family honor.This sense of superior apartness, indexed by the relative and extractive prosperity of shopkeeping, indexes internal class divisions. The tensions of class and jat burst through the fissures of uneasy tolerance. The break is codified through gender and a sexual politics of honor. I learn that Ganesh has fled from his house and taken shelter with a Kumhar family.The Oraon woman, Budhni Oraon has accused him of rape. Her family arrives with the long bamboo sticks to beat him. The family that shelters him denies his presence and seeks union and panchayat arbitration. Because of its escalation to the brink of violence and the growing number of people involved, the scandal is hotly debated. Consider the following fragments of the discussion. maya (Lohar): If the man was an upright person, this would not have happened. I heard that he was crying when he was being protected by them. So what! He should have thought about his wife and children. If she is pregnant, he must take care of it or finish it off.This is his responsibility. somri (Toppo): Don’t be silly. When X had her belly so big, did the man who was responsible admit to it? That would never happen. Ganesh will deny it all, and her clan will not support her. If she is going to have the baby then. . . . mongri (Oraon): She is in my clan because she is related to my own sister’s in-laws. I have heard many bad things about this Ganesh. That he has done this to other women. I know that something was going on, but she insists that it became bad, and he did rape when she wanted him to take responsibility for her pregnancy. mani (Singh): I am a friend of Jayati’s. I know the family. He may have done a bad thing, but this does not mean that the wife should also be attacked. I heard that Budhni actually hit her. I now hear that the Oraon women want to beat up Surbhi, the woman who sheltered him, because she insulted them. I have heard in the field people saying ‘‘sala Bihari ko pakarlo (expletive, get that Bihari.)’’ From several sources, I hear that a large panchayat is being called. The senior manager is kept apprised. The Oraon panchayat of the village involved has demanded 15,000 rupees. Ganesh must close down his business.

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If he does not close his shop, they threaten to burn it. I am eager to attend the meeting but am told I won’t be welcome. The managers have been informed but will not intervene.Thus far, it has remained an ‘‘internal’’ matter. Though disappointed that I will not be able to witness a major event, I know I will hear detailed accounts. Mongri Oraon tells me excitedly: ‘‘Oh, it was big. I think about one thousand people. I sat with the women of my clan. The men sat in front, there was more than one panchayat gathered in front. All the union leaders were there. The woman sat quietly, but her mother got up and slapped the man with her slipper. Our jat [Oraon] was there so nobody could do anything. There was a lot of commotion, but in the end, he agreed to pay her family money and give food for a big feasting for the jat and clan who live there. He had no choice. People were very angry.They were going to break down his store.’’ Public shaming and reparations constitute the ‘‘sealing’’ of this rupture. Though men orchestrate the actual public ritual of arbitration, it is women’s conversations and acts (of protection) that create its backdrop. The ‘‘character’’ of the alleged victim and the sexual behaviour of the alleged perpetrator quickly become the stuff of public currency. Significantly, it is an outraged mother who repairs her daughter’s collective dishonor with a slippered slap.Yet this disciplining occurs despite other rumors that the woman had consensual sexual relations with the shopkeeper. Veracity appears to take a backseat to the staging of a political theater more significant than the specific ‘‘truth’’ about what transpired between them. Sexual transgression, in this particular and exceptional instance, works in favor of the woman because her accusation catalyzes class and jat tensions simmering within the existing structures of power in the village. Her accusation infuses a script of collective and community honor with new life. Sexual politics becomes the mode through which the potent tensions of jat and class inscribe themselves upon the purportedly desecrated site of a woman’s body. The Oraon community challenged the daily domination of a ‘‘general’’ caste/class, which defined its superiority explicitly, because of its numbers and the clear simmering resentment predicated on a history of profiteering and extraction in the villages. In itself, the woman’s dishonor would have remained in the darkest recesses of the subterranean, where most cases of domestic violence and assault hide.

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Ritual Political Economies Jat hierarchies indexed through religious difference are marked by rituals that vary in the nature of their wider, more ‘‘public’’ claims. More frequently, religious sensibilities are filtered through the small claims of daily conversations.When Anjali and I discuss the leopards that hide in the field and sometimes maul fieldworkers, she remarks, ‘‘We accept the danger. But usually, they run away.Why would the leopard want anything from the poor? Don’t we also worship them as god? Doesn’t Ma Durga [Mother Durga] ride a tiger?’’ Jat and religious referents are closely linked. Anjali, whose community sits in the interstices of low-caste Bengaliness invokes the Mother Goddess, Durga, in a way quite different from the public and more spectacular claims of an upper-caste Bengali staff member who organizes the annual Durga Puja, one of the most important festivals in the Bengali Hindu calendar. To an Oraon man in the Purana (Old) Line, Durga is perhaps quite irrelevant. Because she is a major Hindu goddess of Bengal, references to her, as well as absence of reference, chart the politics of dominance. As such, these ritual economies create sites of incorporation and refusal, where women and men become bricoleurs creating anothercollage and aesthetics of cultural power. When the Durga Puja is organized and conducted by the Bengali staff and management, the Lines are relatively quiet, though the residents will be involved in some aspects of the spectacle enacted in the field just in front of the staff cottages. A certain assertion of Hinduness becomes inextricably connected to the managerial hierarchy and customary understandings of jat distinction. Within the contemporary landscape of Hindu nationalism, the dynamics of rituals, from priestly and textual practices to questions of funding, will trickle in and out of the immediate borders of household, village, and panplantation religious practices.Though the overt politicization of Hindu nationalism is muted, the resonance of these rituals is felt in the presence of some of the bahman priests who become ritual masters of household and village ceremonies. Conflict and refusals of nonsadan, noncaste, and nonHindu jats are subtly but clearly marked. They become sites of potential rupture. As with all cultural practices in the villages, rituals occur with a multiple, often bewildering, simultaneity. As heterodoxies, they also manifest a certain alterity to dominant religious practices. Though they lie in the shadow of spectacular and authoritative claims to the sacred, they assert other economies of power.When jat hierarchies are asserted through a wide range of ritual protocols, gender is Village Politics 263

implicated. In one case, a Nepali woman claims her incarnation as the Goddess. In another cosmological web, an Oraon woman is called a witch: her powers reside in the spaces of absolute threat to community solidarity. If suspected, she may be stoned to death. She inhabits an economy of both misfortune and secrecy.

A Ghar Puja (Home Ritual) Imagine again for a moment, that first ritual encounter with Munnu and her small ghar puja (home puja): its authoritative priest, the textual chants, the basic patterns of fire and fruit. In April, Munnu takes me to an Oraon family’s ancestor ritual, enacted to appease dangerous spirits, to seek the hearth’s health.10 A bleating goat is brought in. Its eyes know that the end is near. An ax and some brass thalis (plates) are being cleaned. Conducted every seven to eight years, this is one of the most significant house rituals that commemorates the spirits of ancestors.The goat is decapitated, its head placed over a hole in the ground. The elder son sits with the bhagat (ritual master/priest), who speaks in the traditional language. He makes a small sacred circle with white rice powder. I am anxious to ask him questions, but I am told that in the most critical moments of the ritual, women are not permitted.Women have already cleaned their houses with cloth, and the cloths have been gathered and deposited on the other side of the ‘‘border’’ at the Umesh Kholla.11 Unlike the men who will feast on the sacrificed goat, the women will not eat the meat. The ritual labor of men is both nontextual and participatory, though generational hierarchies are significant markers of status. Men of the household, though subordinate to the bhagat in the ritual, are still important ritual players in this simple and elegant version of a house ritual. This collective sense of ritual performance is a contrast to Munnu’s more Hinduized ghar puja, where an individual bahman (Brahmin) is contracted to conduct textualized ritual work. A textual economy, if you will, charts new hierarchies within the common and overlapping frame of a ghar puja. It is a frame that shares a gendered border. Indexing community as porous, flexible, and relational, and seeing it manifested through social practice, reveal the conceptual parameters through which we can understand seemingly contradictory social practices. How, for example, can we think of Munnu’s ritual participation in the gaon puja (village ritual) alongside her more Hinduized enactment of the ghar puja (house ritual)? Are they dichotomous moments, one negating the other? Or are they to be placed on a telos of ‘‘Hinduization’’? 264

It is more productive, perhaps, to consider the ways in which her ritual praxis suggests un/contradictory encompassments. Munnu crosses the borders toward ‘‘Hinduness’’ through a negotiation of territorial cultural space within which she is surrounded by non-Oraon and more Hindu communities.When she moves to her in-laws’ neighborhood, which is dominated by Oraons, she joins the social ‘‘place’’ of her natal community.Viewed as adivasi by managerial/caste elites and thus ascribed the behavioral essences of indiscipline, alcoholism, and uncleanliness, she walks through a field of negative possibilities. Ascriptions of inferior out/casteness present another layer of subordination.Those who are perceived as guilty of beef-eating and excessive drinking, for instance, will be kept at a social distance, even in moments of communitycelebration.Thus her gestures of partial incorporation also implicate the terms of power within ritual practice. She navigates a social minefield; her rituals are necessarily mutiple and hybrid.

Gaon Pujas (Village Rituals) Home rituals encompass the family and sometimes the extended clan.There are other rituals, however, that stretch across jat borders and create pancommunity solidarities.These village rituals mesh the terms of colonial patronage with the traditions of the ‘‘old’’ country. Sirdari khawai (feasts), for example, were partially funded by the planter and enhanced the ‘‘big man’’ status of a particular recruiter or overseer. Bonuses and wage payments ensured the political currencies of labor organization and control. The postcolonial village ritual is orchestrated by the village panchayat of elders, who are all men. The panchayat will decide a time, usually in June, calculate costs, and choose a ritual master (usually a bhagat or faith-healer). A month before the ritual, they will collect donations of approximately 30 rupees from each household. On the day of the ritual around the old peepal tree of the plantation extension, households will gather and make their own cooking fires. Though cooking oil, onion, salt, and chillies will be given to them, each family will bring its own vegetables. Goat meat, however, will be shared. Rules of commensality are thus maintained, and the separations of actual cooking are maintained, though stretched. At the gaon puja that Anjali’s family participates in, women will donate to the general coffer but will cook and eat separately from the men. This ritual around the sacred tree of the Purana (Old) Line enacts its own version of the customary Sarna Puja of the Chotanagpur. Munnu explains its basic philosophy. ‘‘There is a terrible and dangerous spirit/ghost, Village Politics 265

the Dara Bhoot, who will bring death and disease to the village if the Sarna Puja is not done. The women clean their own homes with cloth, and the older women collect these from all the different houses and put them across the border at Umesh Kholla.’’ Munnu draws a line across her palm to emphasize this idea of the border: ‘‘This is called simran par, to place the dirty things of the house across the boundary, to another country. At the border, a stick of incense is lit and prayer given.Only the older women do this.’’ Expanding on the theme of an earlier home ritual, Munnu says that the ‘‘men do a separate ritual, and we are not allowed to take any of the meat. In the evening, when we sit and drink the handia [rice beer], we will eat and drink separately. This is what our jat is like.’’ The gendered division of ritual labor suggests several things. On one hand, ritual masters such as bhagats and village elders, who are all men, enact a certain orthodoxy: the sacrifice, libations of handia, and chants at the base of an old tree. The gendered separation is imperative. Yet women enact a separate part of the ritual that does not appear to only supplement the ritual master’s work. Indeed, older women who pray at the ‘‘border’’ can be seen as laying claim to a relatively autonomous and authoritative space for their own ritual voice. In the Sarna Puja we see the transformation of customary practice into a hybridity that refracts the specific history of the plantation: the living artifacts of the sirdari khawai and the ways of the old country commemorated in the prayers of the bhagat. Consider how the contours of community are reimagined through such ritual practice. Though this particular Sarna Puja is enacted by the Oraons of the Old Line, it is shared by other communities from the Chotanagpur. The Munda, Gond, and even jats that define themselves as superior (like the Kumhar and Goala) recognize its ritual lexicon. Spoken in a different language, and perhaps charting a different commensality, its philosophy of worship—divine animations, sacred connections of earth/tree/sky—are widely shared. The old peepal tree, for instance, is claimed as sacred by other jats. It is, after all, an old Nepali watchman who shares a story about how the seed of the peepal fell from the wings of a bird and how Lord Vishnu rests in its leaves: ‘‘This is why the tree can never be taken away, memsahib, this is why.’’ During the actual day of the ceremony, non-Oraon communities participate in the nonreligious aspects of community making.

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Priests and Goddesses Women participate within the expanding frontiers of house and village rituals in important ways. Whether preparing the courtyard, making rice beer for libations, or accompanying a husband in a procession, theirs is a pivotal labor. However, their work and visibility contains a certain interiority. Bhagirathi sits in her courtyard, head covered, her body curved into the cloth, suddenly anonymous in the small crowd listening to the priest read from his text. During the Oraon ancestor ritual, Munnu tells me, women should remain in the house while men sacrifice the goat.When the men come to the door and ask to enter, a symbolic repartee of challenge ensues. ‘‘Strangers’’ must not be allowed into the hearth. Exempt from prayers of exteriority, women become ritual gatekeepers of the interior.Though they have already staged their own border-crossings with a relative autonomy, the gendered division of ritual work and the issues of public legitimacy to which it gestures cut across community. Priests are masters of ritual authority, particularly within the textual practices of folk Hinduism. Their monopoly of the sacred uses a literate currency. For the sadan jats (Kumhar, Goala, and Sonar), the bahman is a pivotal figure who is paid in cash and food. One priest from the Factory Line is a Bihari who began working as the hospital cook in 1976. He is now permanently employed in the factory and earns extra income by officiating at various rituals. Another priest, who is a prosperous shopkeeper, asserts that ‘‘twenty or thirty years ago, adivasis had no religion, no belief in a God like Krishna.’’ He suggests that rituals are becoming more ‘‘Hindu.’’ Bhagirathi introduces me to a migrant priest who travels through the villages earning his ritual wages.Though initially discomfited at encountering a memsahib in Bhagirathi’s home, he lectures me intensely on the Islamic conquest of India as a sasan (punishment) and emphasizes his membership in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an arm of the Hindu nationalist Bharitya Janata Party. As I struggle to argue with this right-wing mendicant, and try to escape by returning to my bungalow, he suddenly pulls out his dentures and asks me for money to pay for their replacement. Confronted by the spectacular contradictions between his toothless gums and rabid rhetoric, I remain speechless. After a minute, I persuade him that Bhagirathi and I will discuss his monetary needs. Though priestly authority legitimates the public Hindu rituals of home or village, the more profane politics of union leaders also shape the ritual economies of the plantation. Near the Santhal Line is a field with a dilapidated temple. In the early 1970s, a clash between political parties, which

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left two people dead, occurred in this area. Because temple activities were patronized by a union whose power was on the wane, its rival decided to challenge its patronage of this temple by building a small temple to Siva in the Canteen Field. The axis of village patronage soon shifted to the important social arena of the Canteen Field. Among the principals of this old drama was the patron of a Bajrangbali (Hanuman) temple in the Canteen Field, who remains a major union leader and runs the labor canteen next to the temples. Priestly legitimations and political patronage of certain ritual sites are shared within more Hinduized practices and sadan customs. Significantly, the narrative of union battles around the old and now deserted temple is also shared by some adivasi (and nonsadan) men who are bhagats, ritual masters among a range of adivasi communities.Union leaders, bhagats, and priests all stage symbolic tussles over a public legitimacy that is decidedly masculine. Their interactions indicate the unravelable weave of the politics of ritual and patronage, through which ‘‘big men’’ create themselves into charismatic leaders. Significantly, such contests over ritual space offer one strand of the web of patronage that permeates community politics and patriarchies. Below the surface of such ritual legitimations of masculine authority are other ripples. Anjali and Bhagirathi laugh uproariously when I tell them that the wandering priest had pulled out his dentures to get money from me. Bhagirathi looks annoyed. Munnu remarks that the same priest had tried to become her sister’s guru,12 but when he offered to massage her sister’s stomach with oil, nonspiritual matters were suggested. Munnu remarks wryly, ‘‘Many of these people make a lot of money off us, but when a man is not clean, it is bad. I am glad you sent him away.’’ Though women cannot climb the apex of ritual power and the public legitimizations of such power, a few claim a more immediate and direct access to the sacred.Theirs is a patronage of a flickering and feminized alterity. I learn that another Nepali Durga Mata (Mother Durga) lives in a small town near the plantation. She has gathered a large coterie of women around her and has a larger following than the Durga Mata who lives in the Factory Line. In contrast to the latter, this Durga Mata’s followers are women from the town, though some women workers also come to her. Local Marwari women, from the prosperous shopkeeping class of the town, have donated an image of Durga and raised funds for a small temple to be built in her courtyard. The second Durga Mata schedules her ritual of possession and healing every Tuesday morning. When she propitiates the Goddess, she speaks in 268

rapid Nepali, though the anxious women who surround her throw questions to her in various languages. A Bengali woman who is clearly distressed throws herself at the Mata’s feet, asking for treatment for dizziness and her daughter’s marital problems. It is striking that all of the Durga Mata’s patients are women and they come to her with a range of reproductive and counseling problems. Many seek her healing touch for problems with fertility. All want a son. This is a constituency of women, but it is also riven with jat distinctions. Munnu and Anjali, who accompany me oneTuesday morning, also ask questions. After we return to the plantation, Munnu says, ‘‘Did you hear what she said when she was in possession? She kept saying that there is a ‘black person’ in the room who is unclean. I know she was referring to me.’’ This Durga Mata and I have numerous conversations over the next few months, and she is welcoming and willing to talk about her gift of possession. ‘‘I am nothing without Her,’’ she remarks. ‘‘She started coming to me when I was young, and at first I did not understand what was happening. Now I realize that this is a gift. It may not happen tomorrow. She may stop coming to me. So I try to help people, though many say bad things—I am making money from people. But I take what is given. I ask for nothing. I wanted to build a small temple outside my house, but others in the village threatened to take the cement. I wanted to make the temple outside because I did not want my family to benefit from the donations.When it is Her birthday, it is big feasting, and I pay for it through selling my betel nut for around 12,000 rupees [$286]. But donations are given. I try and help people, but there are misunderstandings.’’ The Durga Mata ritual economy spells out the material possibilities and constraints of spiritual success. Donations made by a constituency of women who are from a business community create a feminized patronage that is resented by the community around her. Significantly, this village is not her natal community. She has married into it. Patronage and a growing popularity create an aura of public legitimation around her religious power. When she seeks to construct a ritual space outside her home, the limits of that ‘‘public’’ legitimation are made clear. Claims to certain kinds of sacred power are limited territorially by suggestions of her outsider status (as a daughter-in-law), her patronage by non-Nepalis, and the class power of some of her more devoted constituents.The political economy of the sacred is caught up in the triple helix of gender, jat, and class. Indeed, Durga Mata comments explicitly on the gendered contests around sacred claims and their public legitimations. She tells me of a wellknown wandering guru from the north, whose public meetings, and growVillage Politics 269

ing popularity in the area suggest considerable economic power and organization. She had been invited to a dinner where he was a guest of honor. Other guests were referring to her as Ma, or Mother, and he asked her, ‘‘in a neech [condescending] way’’ why she was called this. She said, ‘‘I did not like the way he was asking me this. I told him that my in-laws lived here and my house is here. I am bou-ma [daughter-in-law].13 I stay here. My children call me ma. My mother-in-law calls me ma [mother]. I am not like you. I cannot move around meeting my devotees. If I make a mistake, my family suffers. If I kill myself because I have dishonored my family, will my son be able to hold his head up?’’ The guru, apparently taken aback by her vehemence, challenged her knowledge of textual mythological history, and her insignificance within it. ‘‘He asked me where I was in the itihas [history] and I told him that ‘just because you read and write does not mean you know. I do not read but what I know is within me. She tells me all.’ ’’ Her brief but sharply contesting claim to sacred knowledges, and indeed to a certain understanding of history, presents a gendered analysis about ritual power and legitimacy. Indeed, such contests of symbolic power mediate larger spectacular claims around the Goddess. The October Durga Puja is one of the most important festivals of Bengali Hindus. The plantation staff, and some of the managerial elite, celebrate it with gusto.Workers and staff will donate money, deducted from their wages, to construct the structure in which the Goddess’s protima (statue) resides. Though some workers will sit on an organizing committee to work on the program, most will speak scathingly about the distinctions between ‘‘upper and lower’’ jats that are maintained in the grand ritual spectacle. Mita says bluntly, ‘‘I don’t mind giving the money, but sometimes we are treated like animals who should not stand too close to the Goddess. The maijis [staff wives] sit behind a screen because they cannot be ‘seen’ by us.’’ Though some of the younger staff encourage village children to dance in front of the Goddess’s statue, most villagers do not participate within the ritual. At night, the Goddess is splendidly lit. Her spectacular presence demonstrates one community’s power to mobilize resources, garner the patronage of the manager, and assume the consent of working communities that may or may not share the particular rites and celebrations of a Bengali goddess. The embodied claims of the Nepali Durga Mata present a counternarrative to these spectacles of power. Certainly, they share a basic cosmology, within which Durga is but one manifestation of the many faces of feminized divinity. Reverence for the Goddess as well as ontological and bodied claims moves within a shared mythography.Yet cosmologies are manifested 270

in the specificities of historical landscapes. When feudal distinctions between communities are explicit, then claims to the sacred will also chart the parallel contours of plantation power. A Nepali woman’s bodied claim to a goddess who sits in the center of a particularly Bengali pantheon is an assertion that is both ritual and political. It is, like the Goddess who possesses her, many-armed. Durga Mata knows this well when she admonishes the guru for patronizing her. Her direct access to the sacred bypasses his textual monopoly and asserts another modality of ‘‘knowing.’’ It is also the reason why her practice belongs to the heterodox. Its immediate knowledge does not require the intervention of a male priest. In ‘‘becoming’’ the Goddess, she challenges the very modality of mediation. He must act, move toward. She is. Yet her temple cannot be built outside her home compound. This does not prevent her from contesting the priest’s ritual work in the neighboring Durga Puja. On the Tuesday of the Durga Puja, she says, ‘‘Yesterday I had a dream. I dreamt of fire. I dreamt that fire would consume me. Today, I find out that the pandal [structure] is half-burned because the pandit [priest] was careless with matches. This is what happens when you are sinful.’’ Sure enough, the roof of the tent is singed. Ontology is not merely functional.This may be a convenient dream. Perhaps, She does dream. Perhaps, She celebrates a direct flame.

Other Ritual Masters and Witches Other struggles around religious power occur within philosophies that rest outside the dominant arc of Hindu priests and goddesses.14 Bhagats, who are ritual masters for a range of adivasi communities, define themselves as doctors and healers. They also perform exorcisms and prescribe herbs for common ailments. I hear many bhagat titles in the villages. The most common, Birsa Bhagat, commemorates Birsa Munda, the famous millenarian prophet of colonial Chotanagpur, who fought against the British. Some bhagats struggled against the plantation regime and its British rulers in the Dooars.15 The Tana Bhagat, for example, is remembered as one whose initiates had the ‘‘power to stop trains’’ with a simple look. Eager to probe into the memories of such pasts, I try to meet bhagats in villages across several plantations. Avoidance and recalcitrance are common and familiar responses to these efforts. I don’t insist in the face of such refusals, acknowledging in my own withdrawal, the now familiar miasma of gender and status politics.Yet some do speak, briefly, and I learn through these fragmentary offerings another narrative of ritual and power. Village Politics 271

Initiation into ritual status and power involves learning some basic disciplines that are dependent on the particular circle of the guru bhagat: fasting, eating certain kinds of foods, abstaining from drink, learning exorcism and herbal medicines are all part of the training. A bhagat may not claim to be a teacher; he might also have learned his skills from a grandfather or father. Munnu introduces me to Lohra Bhagat in neighboring Kolpara. He remarks, ‘‘It is simple really. We believe that each tree, each plant, has life. We are a small group here because in the old country, a bhagat can go into the jungle and be by himself. Here, I do the garden labor and my strength is lessened. But I also treat snake and scorpion bites and know medicines, which is why I am a doctor. At the hospital, they laugh at me when I say this but it is true. We don’t only do jhar-phuk [exorcism].’’ Bhagats are navigators of the spirit realm whose denizens threaten a mundane mortal existence with their caprice. ‘‘The darha bhoot,’’ Munnu tells me in hushed tones, ‘‘is very bad, and this is why we do the house rituals. Usually this is the spirit of someone who dies suddenly. He becomes a big man with a turban.’’ We are sitting in the low lantern light of her kitchen with Anjali, who nods and says, ‘‘Yes, there are things we don’t understand. I know someone who was pregnant, and this ghost slept next to her and she thought it was her husband. But her husband knew something was very wrong. He felt a great pressure next to him. So the Gaya Bhagat was called to do a ritual. He said there was a bad spirit there.When the woman’s baby was born, it had three heads. It died immediately.’’ Death sits in the twilight of the inexplicable. Shadows rest in dark corners. Worse, there are no shadows, only entities felt in sleep. Spirits also people the moral economies of the village.What explains a strange death, a freak birth? It may be a spirit, jealousy, the evil eye. The borders between human and supernatural are straddled by acts considered deviant because they cause harm. Such acts are deeply subterranean, and if humanly willed, they must be apprehended. The bhagat’s divination may pinpoint not only an evil spirit, but a human one who has set it to its terrible task. The sacred wrestles with its own negation. Enter the daini, the witch. Evil enters a woman. She has no shadow. A man may be a witch, but in the plantation, this is rare. There is, as the novelist-activist Mahasweta Devi notes, ‘‘nothing fixed about this daini business. Men or women whom you may meet everyday may suddenly become dains ordainis. If there is a daini in thevicinity, astonishing things happen, which no one has ever seen, though everyone has heard about them.’’ 16 A daini’s mastery of the sacred threatens the bhagat. Says Mongra Bha-

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gat, ‘‘A real bhagat can make a daini dance, beg for mercy. A daini has two and half gun [mantra/power], an ojha has one and half, but a real bhagat has five gun, which is why a bhagat can make a dain dance.’’ A mathematics of ritual mastery is thus plotted. The hierarchy is manifest. A daini can challenge a lesser shaman, an ojha, but not a true bhagat. But she still poses a threat. Where does a daini learn her sacred tricks? All is secret, I am told, but be careful of those who envy you. Mongra Bhagat says, ‘‘They come out only during the Kali Puja, when there is no moon. They dance around the tree that sits on the border, near the Umesh Kholla. They dance naked. My grandfather who was a great bhagat caught them once, made them unconscious while they were dancing. In the morning, the village found them there. Then everyone knew.’’ Stories of witchcraft capture the moral economies of village patriarchies in indelible ways. I hear only of one woman bhagat in a distant plantation. Most are men, and their powers are publicly legitimated; they become respected elders.Women can seize the sacred but must do so under the cover of night. The negation of the sacred wears a gendered body. It is usually a woman who dances madly. Women will accuse other women of witchcraft, though often through innuendo and suggestion. ‘‘So-and-so,’’ says Somri Ghatwar, ‘‘is a witch. I had loaned her money but she did not return it and we had some words. Next day, my son had a terrible stomach pain. Don’t tell anyone and drink anything there. She knows you and that I am with you.’’ I hear other whispers. An old woman is beaten to death by her own sons, accused by them of being a witch. She was a retired worker and a widow. She was living in her own labor quarter, refusing to leave. Three cows died in one day in this and neighboring homes, and she was accused of killing them through witchcraft. They killed her in front of the village. The matter is reported; the sahib shakes his head; the police are called; there are no witnesses. The matter is dropped. The women shrug their shoulders when I suggest that property inheritance battles, widowhood, and isolation may have caused her death.17 The political economy of her death, like the conflict over a loan, now resides in the catacombs of dark rationalizations. The secret and the sacred encompasses a space where value is coded through the ephemeral.This is no simple place of mystification. The body is still implicated in its very annihilation and within the insubstantiate spirit world in which it may roam.The sacred contains a political economy. Political economy implicates the patriarchies of the sacred.

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act 7, scene 3 The lights come in, subdued. A spotlight moves from the Narrator’s seated figure till it stops to stage left. From behind the gau backdrop, the four Women emerge. Each carries a large earthenware pot on her head. They walk in single file, they face you, they shuffle.There is a faint sound of drumming. For a minute, they shuffle to the sound of the drums. Suddenly, all sounds cease. There is a heart-stopping moment of silence. It is broken by a loud, shrill sound. The four Women are startled. Several pots fall and break.Two of the Women bend to pick up the shards. The others, stand, alert, breathing heavily. They clutch at their breasts. woman 1: What was that? That earth-shattering wail. woman 2: It is the witch’s cry. I have heard that her ‘‘screams tear the sky to shreds.’’ 18 Quick, quick, we must return to the village. She has come, bringing with her pestilence and death.Quick, we must gatherour stones. They rush out. The drumming begins, quickly reaching a cacophonous pitch. Again, sudden silence. Low spotlight moves across the stage to the Narrator. she: (as if reciting from memory) ‘‘Nature is their only hope. If it rains, crops grow, the forest flourishes, roots and tubers are available, there are fish in the river. Nature’s breasts are dry with no rain. So they hold the daini responsible, and are angry. The people of Bharat [India] don’t want them. If nature, too, turns away, they will be wiped out. (She pauses) The daini stands up. She doubles over, then limps forward. She stumbles again and again. It’s fruitless to throw stones in the jungle. The trees trap them. Anh-anh-anh! The howl is at times a roar, at times an agonized scream.’’ 19 The drum beats begin. The lights fade out.

A Coupled Patronage Village hierarchies are manifested through complicated intersections between patriarchal norms and customary jat distinctions.These intersections do not constitute historically inert registers.They cannot be separated from the enclaved pasts within which communities were placed together for the primary purpose of labor. This history of displacement and its forced diversities have shaped the plantation’s political culture in the deepest ways. Like the lingua franca of the villages, Sadri, which brings together the patois of the old country with the hybrid languages of labor, the boundaries of so274

cial identity and politics are in continuous flux. Such flux cannot, however, obscure the terms of power and agency through which gender, jat, and class are constituted. Imagine their links within biological frames. Consider their mesh as a tissue that wraps around a central helix. Picture power as blood, trickling through the membranes that separate gender/jat/class. It both re/constitutes those porous walls and slips through them: a thin gel, sticky to the touch. It seeps through the tiniest pores. It creates, separates, and gells the tissue of a human and social will. Perhaps it marks the terms of a primal, though not original, agency. Imagine such possible frames.

Multiple Patriarchies Consider the lexicon of such organic, cultural will and the moral economy it suggests: honor, shame, jealousy, acquiescence, the mai-baapwithin. Staged through rules and transgression, these are cultural economies of patronage worked out in the planter’s shadow and through relatively autonomous customary practices. The latter, such as the legitimation of the bhagat or priest, confers a customary authority that appears distant from the planter’s command. Nonetheless, such ‘‘customary’’ patronage is only relatively autonomous, because it is still inflected by planter power. A ritual master will garner more prestige if he is a union leader or an overseer.Wearing multiple hats, these village patrons are primarily men.They sit within the ubiquitous and powerful panchayats and arbitrate cultural events, marriage practices, and social conflict. During the colonial period, when plantations were tightly controlled fiefs, the planter played an active role in dispute settlement. Marriages, which might result in a loss of labor power, were monitored closely. This ‘‘control of matrimony’’ was essential for protecting economic loss, and the plantation into which a woman was marrying had to pay 150 rupees, to ‘‘cover the expenses’’ of her ‘‘natal’’ plantation’s recruitment costs.20 Whether or not this payment reflected a consistent policy across the plantation belt is difficult to ascertain. It suggests, however, the inextricable connection between labor, value, and gender politics. The planter-father, so to speak, initiates his own system of brideprice. It is layered into the customary economies of marriage. A colonial planter commented more generally on the importance of a sahib’s arbitration in the villages: ‘‘The planter had to keep up the White Man’s reputation for fair dealing which would require hours of patient hearing of a dispute and then a just and equitable settlement. If complicated, this Village Politics 275

was settled by a panchayat with the planter acting as a neutral chairman.’’ 21 Though this British planter’s description of adjudication might fulfill his own narrative of paternal (and ‘‘neutral’’) beneficence, he was also quick to note that panchayats ‘‘would leave if the sahib’s bichar [arbitration] did not suit them.’’ 22 The postcolonial planter does not have such a direct presence in village adjudication. However, even if he is absent he will be informed, by loyal union leaders and watchmen, of trouble brewing in the villages. Like his colonial predecessor, he will be called to arbitrate in cases not taken to the panchayat or union leader. The burra sahib’s individual acts of paternal benevolence do not erode his support and legitimation of ‘‘big man’’ authority. If the planter is shrewd and lucky, the ‘‘big man’’ is an important union leader and village elder who will continue to be the lynchpin of his indirect rule. The planter’s assiduously maintained social distance creates a dependence on this thin layer of masculine patronage. This subpatronage reinforces the knottings of patriarchal practices whose counter/effects can be seen in the mesh of panchayat, union, and wage politics. Young and old netas (union leaders) and elders are involved in panchayat negotiations across the villages. The neta, who will almost always wear a mukhiya (elder) hat, is an important actor in all deliberations. Depending on how serious the conflict is, the neta will become the broker-translator of the manager’s adjudication.When I spoke to various netas and mukhiyas (elders) about this brokering, they asserted that the manager’s office was the last resort of negotiation. Budhua Oraon, an elder notes, ‘‘Memsahib, many of the issues are about jat customs and family disputes.What will the sahib know about these? We prefer to keep our jat talk to ourselves. Even outside our society, nobody needs to know. But if it is something about housing or wages or work, then the manager must step in. If a union leader is not directly involved, he will be called in.’’ Because netas are rarely women, the power to broker and the aura of authority it garners are decidedly masculine. In the few instances when a woman is an outspoken union member, then she might participate more vigorously in deliberations. More frequently, she will organize the mahila samity (women’s society) of the union and through that office bring cases to the manager’s attention. Significantly, individual women will often bypass the community council and union leader and approach the manager directly. In many of these cases, domestic violence and alcoholism is involved. For example, a husband steals the wife’s weekly wage to buy alcohol; when she resists, he beats her. She may appeal her case to her panchayat, but because it involves her wage and labor, she will go to the manager. 276

The planter may rule in favor of the woman and punish the erring husband. Amit Chakravarty, a senior planter, comments, ‘‘You have to understand that many men live off their wives and are drunkards.They exchange their permanent jobs when they marry, so she goes out and does all the hard work. Then on top of it, if he starts to beat her up for wages so he can buy daru [hard liquor]. Then I see red. The women are the hardest workers, and if someone appeals to me, I will ask around, and if her story can be corroborated, I will tell him to stop it. I will put other kinds of pressures. For a while he might stop, but usually the cycle continues.’’ Benevolent paternal adjudication is corroborated by Soni Mirdha, a friend of Anjali’s: ‘‘There is a lot of unemployment in the garden, so a job will never be given up. It stays in the family. But there is a badli niyam [exchange custom] when a new bride comes in.The husband will give the wife his job—to work in the garden—and he will try to find work outside and temporary work. I will say that one out of five families in the Factory Line has done this. My own husband tried this trick. He took me into the office to talk to the senior manager and change the names but the sahib said to him, ‘Why do you want to sit and make her do all the work, eh?’ My husband was shamed and could not look at the sahib straight. Moniki and others were there in the office and they heard. They said to my husband ‘Chi chi, wanting to eat from your wife’s earnings. Don’t you have any shame?’ After this he learned his lesson and never tried it again.’’ Women’s perception that the manager might be approached directly, and that he may protect them, suggests not only their own agency, but a certain understanding and claim to the terms of patronage. A decision to bring a household conflict directly to the manager takes considerable courage, but it also reflects a historicized understanding of the manager’s role as maibaap. It is his duty to assist. A manager’s response to a woman’s appeal will be known in her community and village. It is a response that will shape the evaluation of his patronage. Significantly, the direct approach offers a subtle, but powerful, commentary about the coercive edge of customary patriarchy in the village. An appeal to the manager is an often desperate gesture against the absence of accountability within customary adjudication. I meet a Santhali woman, Deepa Murmu, on a few occasions in a friend’s home. She is deeply reserved. One night, I ask about the business of panchayats, if, and how, women are involved.We are sitting and sipping handia. Deepa looks intently at me. Someone responds, ‘‘Oh, that is men’s work. I think this is the same in all the jats but you should ask others. . . . The men involved are mukhiya like bhagats and netas.We women can sit, watch, participate in giving opinions, but they will ultimately decide. Usually most Village Politics 277

issues are small, and then only one of the mukhiya will come and speak to the family. Let’s say there is fighting between a man and woman, then the mukhiya will come and talk to both people. But if it gets to be a bigger thing, let’s say her family gets involved or she leaves, then everyone will sit.’’ Deepa interrupts suddenly, ‘‘Memsahib, my jat [Santhal] is rigid. Only men arbitrate. If a man is beating up his woman, then it may be brought to the attention of the panchayat. If the judgment is made against the man, he may be fined. But it will be drunk by the panchayat with the man there.’’ She laughs cynically and continues. ‘‘Look, even if it is a small quarrel, it will go to the panchayat, but then a woman has to stand up in front of all the men. Sometimes this is very hard. Sometimes she will call her friends to come and support her. But many times she won’t want to do this. But you remember meeting Mona in the field. She is from my jat, she is tough and will fight with the elders.’’ Public shame, dishonor, and an understanding that the panchayat is a maradhana [men’s space] thus constrains women’s participation in a formal political arena though it doesn’t entirely silence their participation from the margins. Adjudication processes in the plantation villages are not only profoundly gendered, they encompass a spectrum of political action.While women are not customarily permitted to become mukhiya in any jat, they can participate in public negotiations and consensus making. If a woman has brought a case, however, her participation is mediated by a sense of shame if there isn’t support of other kin. Participation in unions, women’s organizations, or a women’s society can bypass these limited paths of conflict and negotiation. However, a masculine hegemony of union leadership ensures that the avenue for leadership is opened only if singular and exceptional women fight for it. Yet an understanding that the planter can adjudicate in their favor and the fact of his paternal benevolence present an important paradox. On one hand, the sahib’s legitimation of netas and mukhiyas in the labor lines cements male authority; on the other, his individual judgments in favor of women workers can undercut that very authority. This situation indicates how patriarchies, and the cultures of patronage, are layered and multiple. The planter can, and does, override decisions made about what are viewed as more serious ‘‘law and order problems’’ such as homicide and looting. Indeed, in such cases even the elders will first approach the manager, because of his access to the larger judicial system. The planter is a distant mai-baap, but he is the pivot of the entire cultural system of patronage. Through labor disciplines, his patriarchal power encompasses both men and women. Within the villages, his power to punish 278

and sanction casts a heavy shadow. Village patriarchs in every community, though created by and within that shadow, assert the terms of women’s subordination through customary practices.Though many women evaluate the immediate coercive effects of these customary patriarchies in stringent terms, and use the greater power of a benevolent manager to strike against them, the manager’s decision about highly individualized cases does not challenge the larger systemic terms of women’s subordination. Indeed, his own patronage depends on that very subordination. His unequal alliance with a thin cadre of leaders in the lines implies the interdependent and paradoxical effects of plural patriarchies.

Waging Paradox If village councils, ritual masters, and union leaders create the mantles of gendered subordination, then the fact of women’s wage labor opens another window to the cultural economies of power. The bodied registers of labor and discipline have already demonstrated how women’s subordination is essential to plantation production. Yet its material rewards for women, in the very stuff of currency, presents a complicated story of empowerment and disempowerment. Women who are permanent fieldworkers, collect their wages, ration, and firewood allotments once a month. Cash wages vary according to season and are calculated through a piece-rate system. A fieldworker earns a hazira (daily wage) of 32.40 rupees a day though she must pick twenty-five kilos of leaf at peak season. Foreveryadditional kilo of leaf, shewill earn half a rupee doubly or piece rate. An extremely able plucker can pick 125 kilos in two shifts. Munnu and Bhagirathi, who are highly experienced workers, average 60 rupees a day. A high-end weekly income is 360 rupees. (See appendix, table A3.) One rupee equaled about 24 cents at the time of this study, so it is not surprising that in a single-wage household, even a reliable and stable wage barely covers essential food and clothing for a family of four.23 Within households of five or six members relying on one stable wage, like Anjali’s, the amount and kinds of food she can afford is severely constrained. Meat, for example, is a luxury. Kitchen gardens and a little livestock rearing offer some additional ‘‘income’’ in kind. Wage earnings create the avenues forcertain kinds of struggles to emerge against patriarchal constraints.The ‘‘openings’’ created by wage might allow a woman to articulate a general dissatisfaction with her position as a fieldworker or assert her understanding of gendered oppression within the larger Village Politics 279

web of poverty and hard labor. The notion of ‘‘empowerment’’ is indexed through the implicit and explicit register of such assertions. Yet its agency is mired in the contradictions of the resistance toward which it gestures. Dis/empowerment also hangs on the heels of such discursive and bodied action. There is, for instance, Munnu’s sense of pride in the consumption power of her earnings when she remarks that ‘‘everything in this house I have bought. Everything.This is why I never absent myself from work.Without work, I am nothing.’’ Her assertion is particularly powerful, given the fact that she kept her natal job in the neighboring Kolpara Tea Estate. For many women, the burdensome conditions of labor are coupled with tensions in families, where husbands, fathers or, brothers will attempt to control their earnings. Women’s attempts to keep financial control often results in violence. Indeed, violence against women cuts across jat boundaries. For many women, then, wages are Janus-faced. Burdened and de/valued for a labor that is underpaid and hard, many women will acquiesce to the bodied backlash and threat it represents for patriarchal codifications of power. Others will create a subterranean system of economic solidarity as an effort to resist the fiscal control of their kinsmen. Some will fight back with a bodied force.Thus wages both liberate and shackle plantation women with a paradoxical and stunning force. Labor and value are inserted into the cultural economies and histories of the body in the most immediate ways. They cannot be understood only through safe and bloodless models. Value can crouch in a corner, bruised, holding her weapon-pot of boiling water. Value can flesh out a currency of exchange that circulates in an economy difficult to consider at a remove. These are the heresies of a bodily economy. Women’s wages, labor value, and marriage practices are inextricably linked. Munnu’s out-marriage and retention of her natal job presents the basic patterns of patrilocality and family norms shared across communities. For a young woman, marriage is the habitus of the socially possible. If she has a job, the terms of marriage may be brokered in various ways, but it is still of primary importance. In general, patrilocal marriages and a general cultural ‘‘understanding’’ of a daughter’s liability are asserted.This liability is expressed by a Nepali kami father about his daughter’s future. He says frankly, ‘‘Memsahib, a daughter is a burden. She is my last daughter.We are looking for a good boy. We are poor so it will relieve us. . . . Look, memsahib, you won’t understand. How can you? It takes much to feed a family, and the quicker that she is well settled with a new family, the better it is for her and for us. She does not have a permanent job, so we will have to find 280

someone who has a permanent job. She will marry away from us, probably into another plantation. This is the custom.’’ When I ask him whether it would have made a difference if she did have a job, he responds, ‘‘Yes, but she would have to be married. It depends on whether the groom has a job in his plantation. If he does not, then he will come here, but usually what happens is that the daughter leaves and we exchange or sell her job. Someone else in the family will take the job.’’ This Nepali father’s commentary offers an economic logic that is informed by the social devaluation of girls and the practical concerns of employment. It is a deeply meshed habitus. In this particular case, however, patrilocal marriage takes precedence over the girl’s hypothetical employment. In a telling contrast, Munnu’s determination to keep her job when married ‘‘out’’ created considerable tensions with her father, who wanted to sell her job. Indeed, Munnu, who herself asserts an explicit sense of wage empowerment, is quick to dispel any generalized assumptions about the nature of the ‘‘freedom’’ it suggests. ‘‘Didi,’’ she remarks, ‘‘I don’t know how it was in the old country, but I think it has always been hard for women in our jat. We have always worked. As a young girl, I worked in the village land my father owned and also worked in the plantation. My brothers were treated differently.They did not work all the time. But we never saw the money that came from the village land. Sometimes, I had to wear an old sari with no blouse, all tattered. I am still ashamed when I think of that. This is why I fought to keep my job, and my brothers and father could do nothing because it was in my name.’’ Munnu is lucky to have married into a neighboring plantation. If a marriage had been settled further afield, she might not have won this particular battle. For most women, out-marriage means just that. Patrilocal norms ensure territorial estrangement from affective ties in natal villages as well as employment. Munnu has walked an extra ten miles daily, carrying her infant daughters, to work in her natal plantation. She asserts that her affective ties to village friends who are part of her dol and her wage are worth the bodily costs of traveling this extra distance. In 1998, a woman marrying into Munnu’s natal plantation from Sarah’s Hope exchanged her permanent jobwith Munnu at Kolpara.With the money she received from having her ‘‘name’’ cut from the wage registers, she financed additions to her home. Many new wives will try to work up the ladder from temporary fieldwork to a permanent position.With jobs selling at a high price, such purchases or exchanges are difficult to acquire. More frequently, another custom of exchange takes place: permanently employed men who are fieldworkers will Village Politics 281

attempt to give their ‘‘names’’ to new wives, and search for seasonal employment. Because a family’s fiscal strategy for economic survival may require that a man search for jobs elsewhere, a public traffic not appropriate for his wife, the intentionality of badli (exchange) custom is complex. However, its effects are clear.The gendering of labor value and the concomitant devaluation of fieldwork as iconically low-status women’s work are manifested in these economic exchanges. Because of the difficulty of eking out a living from temporary work or because he simply chooses not to work, a husband may live off his wife’s wages and continue to assert that those wages are his. Despite the fact of her labor, his claim to her wages manifests a sense of patriarchal entitlement. He still considers it his job. Isolated in their patrilocal marriages and negotiating the politics of in-laws, a new wife will frequently relinquish her control on the purse strings. The conditions and costs of women’s labor are thus detached from her wages. It is a detachment that maps patriarchal de/valuations. Significantly, this badli custom occurs most frequently with the low-paying and status job of fieldwork. By ‘‘giving’’ the labor to their wives, men acquire a certain freedom from the most protracted and lowest paid manual labor, while demanding and retaining control over her earnings. Value is marked most clearly by the kind of labor that is ‘‘exchanged.’’ Because a woman fieldworker does not move up the chain of labor command, her ‘‘overseer’’ husband will rarely give her his ‘‘name.’’ Measures of value are connected to the status of labor and its bodily costs. In striking contrast to what happens in these customs of husband-towife exchange, a woman’s wage employment can transform the terms of marriage and residence. Among Bhagirathi’s Kumhar community, women are powerful gatekeepers of jat continuity, and many have not married out of the village. Instead, their husbands become ghar jamais (house son-inlaws) who come into the village from Bihar.24 They tell me that an ancestor expanded and strengthened his lineage by refusing to marry his daughters and nieces out of the natal village. This new ‘‘matrilocal’’ custom did not erase other patriarchal norms. Kumhar women, for instance, continue to sit on the outer rim of the ritual circle. Yet, as a consequence of this partial reversal, Bhagirathi and her kinswomen are powerful and authoritative spokeswomen of community customs and labor politics. As a twogeneration ‘‘matrilineage,’’ they have become significant power brokers in village and field. They also assert their jat superiority and Hinduness by becoming the gatekeepers of distinction. In so doing, they engage the paradox of feminized wage power that also reinforces patriarchal caste norms. While they 282

challenge the masculine hegemony of trade unions, in which their kinsmen may be leaders, they will also punish women who dare to marry out of the jat. Patriarchies are both eroded and reinforced by Kumhar women, who contest, concede, and recraft the multiplicities of cultural power.They wage a battle, so to speak, of paradox and possibility.

Violence/Silence/Solidarity ‘‘I know a woman who will go hungry for four days because he has stolen her money. . . . I know how he has thrown kerosene in her rice the day she bought it with her money. She had to beg for fistfuls of rice for her children who were starving. . . . It is not my fault that I am so dark and my face is so big. It is like you have a wound, even after twenty years you will know there is a wound. He beats me because I am not beautiful and he drinks. I know there is another woman and if she is ever brought to this house, I will throw boiling water at both of them. . . . I was pregnant and he used to fall on my stomach. Fall on my stomach. . . . I sit in a meeting of women in a plantation I have never been in before. A piece of paper is passed to me with a woman’s name scribbled in Hindi. Another woman watches this calligraphic exchange with hungry eyes. She passes a fragment of paper with nothing written on it. Blank. She stares out into her own passionate silence. ‘‘Don’t mind her, memsahib, she is mad.’’ Writing women/violence into this alien-tongued text, into its calligraphies of literate privilege, is an act of betrayal. Perhaps, it is necessary.There are paths to create through canyons of silence, in and out of narrow gorges, into the pasture, through deceptive valleys. Yet it is betrayal. I search through the thickets of notes and recollections, tracing out the spaces of possible entry.There are no oral recordings of such discussions. If a tape recorder rested next to a lantern when someone wept, it was switched off. But there are scribbles that outline such cries of anguish and rage.They record the silences of weeping. If I find a space in this retrospective tracing, my finger penetrates into the word. How to write about violence through the violence of text? How to write about silence without silence? What makes this ‘‘violence’’ different from the violence of labor and hunger and an alienation that makes a man drink, which prompts him to lament his loss upon a woman’s body? How to thread the violence of his negation through the violence against her? The heresy of the body is this: that it cannot, finally, be caught by the written word. The heresy of silence is this: that it cannot be understood Village Politics 283

through language. But we are human, and our desperation seizes impossibilities.We are architects of another heresy.We create our own jat through customary desperations. We write against the annihilation that rests in the abyss of the irreducible. A serious problem with alcoholism among men has transformed gender politics in households. I am told that domestic violence stemming from alcohol abuse, triggered by struggles over wages, is common. The history and politics of liquor has a long historical trajectory: colonial administrative policies controlled liquor licenses so that government revenue was ensured, and, though many British planters lamented the ‘‘unruly’’ behavior of a drunk worker, they also used alcohol as a strategy of labor control and discipline.The iconic matal, ordrunkard, typified maleworking-class otherness, though the political economy of his drink was itself implicated with the wage-labor regime. The postcolonial legacy of such policies are deeply gendered. Because women are the primary wage-earners, men’s experiences of alienation through alcoholism and the terms of local patriarchies have had lasting and tragic consequences on village households. The othering of working-class masculinity suggests an experience of alienation that is about emasculation, an erosion of customary authority and its masculine honor.When this is coupled to women’s wage labor, which entails a displacement of power, alienation turns into violence. The drunk body is a site of numb loss. A woman’s body becomes the template through which this sense of lack is exorcised. Violence is the modality of both power and its lack. Its theater is raw with coercion and penance. ‘‘Eh, memsahib, don’t stand so close to me. I am a ma . . . tt . . . tt . . . aaaal.’’ ‘‘Memsahib, eh, memsahib, don’t walk away like that. I won’t harm you. I want to ask you something. . . . Don’t leave. Memsahib, I won’t harm you.’’ ‘‘Memsahib, the nights are cold. Long.You see how we live.What else to do?’’ Women will be quick to point out that there are two kinds of alcohol, which have differential effects upon household economies. Daru, distilled ‘‘raw’’ alcohol, is sold at government stills on both sides of the IndoBhutanese border. It is this raw alcohol that devastates men’s health. Handia or rice beer, on the other hand, has great ritual significance. Munnu tells me, as she mixes ‘‘medicine’’ with the fermented grain: ‘‘If the devta [God] has asked you to have handia for the puja, to offer to the devta, then how do you say no to it? As long as handia is in our rituals, nothing will stop us from drinking it. In most of our rituals, chickens are killed and handia is given.’’ Apart from its presence in rituals, it is offered through the terms 284

of daily hospitality. On hot summer dusks, you will be offered a cool tin mug of handia. I have been told that the ‘‘medicine’’ put in the handia and the kind of fermenting induced has considerable nutritional and medicinal value. During attacks of gastroenteritis, a frequent cause of death in the villages, handia is given because it ‘‘doesn’t eat up the insides.’’ Because of its rice base, it is also drunk when food is scarce. Indeed, it is also on these Monday market days, that Munnu prepares the rice beer with her kinswomen. After picking up her wages at four, they set their large pots of handia close to the gates of Munnu’s home, and soon there is a steady flow of customers. On a good summer day, three women can earn up to 300 rupees, a significant supplementary source of income. However because planters, who sporadically motor through the village on market days, still consider this rice beer ‘‘illegal,’’ women are quick to move their pots indoors when a planter approaches. The extent of planter control, now, is to pour handia into the ground, ensuring that women lose their supplementary income for the week. Within these terms of legality, handia and daru are conflated. Because of the supplementary income that handia provides and its customary social importance, some women assert that the liquor problem rests elsewhere. Indeed, liquor dealerships, a transborder business, are controlled by men who are not from the working communities. Local supply to small village shops ensures tidy profit margins on both ends of supply. This wider economy is based on a political nexus of outside business interests, government revenue shops, and cross-border supplies. Some women’s resistance to these economies of violence is explicit. Silence, for many, is not an option.The fragmentary commentaries I offered earlier are no simple rendition of victimhood. Some women who fight and endure this violence are clear that their wages are one of the reasons for being beaten.While many are trapped by the conventions of patrilocal marriages, they are women whose natal homes are in neighboring plantations. Natal kinship connections stretch across plantation borders, and women will leave abusive situations and stay with their natal families for months. An individual act of exodus might force an arbitration between several village councils for divorce and reparations. Alternatives to abuse are shaped by the specifics of a woman’s natal connections and the support she may receive in her new village. Collective protest catalyzes another level of challenge, which brings to the surface the powerful cross-community, cross-hierarchy alliances that are ranged against women. Though a formal antiliquor movement has not emerged in this plantation belt, there are some significant moments of rupVillage Politics 285

ture. In one case, a well-funded United Nations project aimed at women’s reproductive health, and contraception created a forum for protest. Administered through the Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association (dbita), the project has focused on contraception and family planning through basic maternal and infant health training sessions.With tacit approval of unions and the formal support of the planters, women were selected to create mothers clubs in their home plantations. The primary objectives were to create a cadre of village-level facilitators who would disseminate information on public health issues around family planning. Though general public health issues were discussed, the primary focus of the project was contraception and family planning.25 The feminization of the project, from the framing assumption of women as mothers as primary ‘‘targets,’’ as well as the modalities of actual topdown organizing, are suggestive on many levels. It gestures to ideological effects through which maternal roles are assumed, essentialized, and neutralized. Most clearly, the selection of these ‘‘mothers,’’ and the parameters of policy making, were entirely masculine. The borders were carefully controlled and calibrated between managers and unions. However, in some plantations, the opportunity to meet as a collective began to subvert the family-planning objectives of the project’s organizers. In these conflicts, the mothers clubs redefined the terms of maternal and reproductive health by demanding that questions of poverty, alcoholism, and domestic violence be addressed. These demands unmasked the structural contradictions embedded in an effort legitimized by tea companies and managers themselves. Nina Chhetri remembers her struggle to organize the mothers club in her plantation to confront issues of domestic violence and the liquor business. She remarks, ‘‘I had made enemies, in my work with the mothers club. There was a family in the lines who were big liquor dealers. Even the liquor dealer in Ambari has passed a threat about me—‘Who does she think she is? . . . She talks too much. Does she read and write?’ The sahib has also been a coward. He got scared at what we [the mothers club] were doing and called us in and told us not to go so fast. ‘‘But then he made a mistake. He called in a leader and said to him, ‘Don’t worry, I drink too. Just take it slowly.’ The next day, sixty litres of alcohol were brought into the lines in large plastic containers. What did the sahib think he was doing! By saying what he did, he basically made them think it was okay to bring in liquor. I did confront him about this, but he disagreed with me and the rival union leader agreed with him. The mothers club is now being split by interunion rivalry, and they are targeting me. You know what the sahib said! He called me Indira Gandhi. But then he actually called 286

me at the hospital where I work to apologize. But I am not so stupid. He knows he gave me chilli and spices for future battles against the company when he said that, so he wanted me to forget it. Because of all this dance, I was going to stop the mothers club from meeting the doctor, but I saw the sahib clutching his head and I felt maya [compassion] for him because after all, he is mai-baap.Why should I insult him?’’ In another plantation, women organized themselves to intervene confrontationally in cases of domestic violence and began to call for a halt to the sale of alcohol in the villages.They began to take village justice in their own hands, bypassing councils, union leaders, and managers, to take on a man who was beating his wife. The local union complained to the manager that this was not the job of the mothers club, and the women were reprimanded. The limits of public legitimation were thus clearly drawn. Soon internal union rivalries and payoffs within the mothers club eroded its solidarity. Nina, who remains active in organizing other events in her plantation, has a clear analysis of the project. ‘‘This is the thing, didi,’’ she notes. ‘‘Most of us appreciate the effort by the sahibs.Why should we not? There is nothing done here in terms of labor welfare, so it is good. But we are not fools either. After a full day of work, why should we be going into the village and spending time to do this? They give us a shoulder bag and a sari and think that this is enough. As if we can’t buy saris ourselves! They have the money to do things, why don’t they do it themselves? Not only that, we are threatened in the villages. I risked my life when I took on the liquor thing, but was I supported? This is why many women have stopped participating.’’

act 7, scene 4 The lights come on slowly but stay low. A lantern on the table where the Narrator has been sitting burns brightly. The Narrator paces on stage right, around the table toward Alice; she carries a book in her hand. She appears agitated. She takes a deep breath and turns to the audience. she: This is a fine moment to introduce Dopdi/Draupadi to you. Mahasweta Devi’s Dopdi: that fictional woman, adivasi, Santhal, subaltern, fugitive, jungle dweller, Third World dalit, black, who is most wanted, most wanted. How she is hunted, how she hides in the fathomless reach of the old forests. How she is apprehended, marched to the encampment, interviewed, and then the police officer gives the hukum: ‘‘Make her. Do the needful.’’ Make her? Make her what? (reading directly from the book) ‘‘Then a billion moons pass. A billion lunar years.Opening hereyes aftera Village Politics 287

million light years Draupadi strangely enough sees sky and moon. Slowly the bloodied nailheads shift from her brain.Trying to move, she frees her arms and legs still tied to four posts. Something sticky under her arse and waist. Her own blood. . . . She senses that her vagina is bleeding. How many came to make her?’’ Suddenly, from extreme stage left, the four Women dancers burst through the gauze-curtained backdrop. Each has a piece of paper. One steps forward, holding a piece of paper in front of her. Another stops her and speaks directly to the Narrator. woman 1: Why so upset, memsahib? Remember the end, memsahib? Remember. Remember how she refused the cloth they give to cover herself with—after that night of horror. She walks directly to the sahib who had given the hukum, naked, with her ‘‘two breasts, two wounds.’’ And none of them can stop her. Listen closely, memsahib. woman 2: (holding her paper out in front of her and enunciating slowly) ‘‘Draupadi’s black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing. Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is terrifying, sky splitting and sharp as her ululation,What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again?’’ woman 3: ‘‘Are you a man? She looks around and chooses the front of the Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, there isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, kounter me—come on, kounter-me?’’ woman 4: (slowly and with great emphasis) ‘‘Draupadi pushed Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unnamed target, terribly afraid.’’ 26 As she finishes speaking, the lights must go off suddenly, without warning, there must be a sound of a thunderclap. Then, pitch black, nothing.

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chapter 8 Protest

Shadow Fields

act 8, scene 1 Lights come on, brightly.The Narrator sits at her table, stage right. She is reading a book. She looks up, as if noticing the audience for the first time. She begins to read from the book. She speaks slowly. she: ‘‘The historian transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge’ is only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act.With no possibility of nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of his or her consciousness (or consciousness effect as operated by disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness does not freeze into an ‘object of investigation,’ or worse yet, a model for imitation.The ‘subject’ implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counter possibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups. The postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this, they are the paradigm of the intellectual.’’ 1 The Narrator closes the book gently, thoughtfully. She picks up the quill. The lights fade out. It is october, the year is to end soon, and I have yet to talk to women who were involved in the union battles of the late 1960s. I have heard some whispers about men with bows and arrows hiding in the forest, internecine union battles, and police with guns. I keep asking for some stories about women’s participation and am met with a blank silence, sometimes a shrug. ‘‘Ay, didi, we were too young then,’’ Anjali says. ‘‘There was fighting and we were told to stay inside. But yes, the pata-pati [party party] trouble was a bad time for us.’’ One day, casually, Munnu mentions that there is a woman I should meet.

‘‘Her name is Churamin . . . she is tough. She stays away from all the party things now, but once upon a time, everyone knew her name. I will try and find out if she will meet you. She stays very far away, so I will ask her to come to my house.’’ So one evening, sitting on the step of Munnu’s verandah, I begin to hear the fragments of a remarkable history. Churamin looks old, though I know that women in the plantation have lived too many lifetimes through their bodies, so it is difficult to discern her real age. She rolls tobacco and grins. There is a glint in her eye. ‘‘So memsahib, what is it you want to know?’’ ‘‘Anything,’’ I respond, ‘‘Anything.’’ She responds, ‘‘We would need to speak for many hours, memsahib, who knows what time is left. But I will begin to tell you. I have heard okay things about you.What does it matter anyway? . . . Do you know that I used to be so well-known that the rival parties like the Congress, I was in the cpi(m), would say, ‘‘If we catch Churamin, we will make chakma [a snack] of her.’ 2 They had a song about that. You should get the song, I have forgotten it.’’ (She laughs) ‘‘Yes, I gave my blood for the communists, the leaders, I was the only woman from here who had that courage. I did not care what anyone said. I even went into the jungle when I was pregnant, when we had to run and hide. I remember that well. They had to keep me in the shadows because when the moon was high and it was like daylight in the forest, my body would show that I was a woman.You know that my belly was big then. I had to stay in the darkness. Yes, this is what I did. But what happened is everyone forgot. . . . Leave it.What can be said about any of this? But this is also what I did, when my belly was so big’’ (reaching her hands out around her stomach). Turning to Munnu, she says, ‘‘Ay, chori, bring us some rice beer. Another day, I will tell the memsahib more.’’ I am haunted by this image of a full moon and a pregnant woman in the darkness of the old jungle. There are some shadow texts here. I don’t meet Churamin for lengthier discussions.When I return six years later in 1998, the late monsoon season, I read out this opening passage to Bhagirathi, Munnu, and Anjali, translating it line by line. Munnu listens intently.We discuss my use of their names, particularly around some stories of protest they have shared. The issues of literate accessibility, language, and recirculation in the plantations are explored. Though most of the narrative fragments about protest are shared by people who are, hopefully, protected by pseudonyms, and because these women and I have already discussed some of the ethical concerns around naming and representation, I want to 290

resume the conversation by sharing with them a tangible product: the heap of white paper, the black marks on them. I emphasize that the actuality of text, as a book, may have effects that are unintended by myself as an author, particularly if it circulates in plantation country. In our discussions, we recognize that given its literate circulations, and its language, it will probably not have much effect, or affect, within village communities. Anjali says, ‘‘Didi, we can’t read it. So I am not sure it matters at all.’’ However, there is a remote possibility that managerial perceptions might lead to forms of retaliation. Most planters can read English. In more complicated ways, union leaders and regional party bosses might interpret different moments in the text in negative ways. As I speak further about the snarls of interpretation, I recognize that such a discussion says more about my own authorial anxieties around the inescapable and irreducible problems of translation than their material concerns.What possible relevance do such ruminations have upon the political economy of their daily lives? I realize as we speak, and as I distill our various discussions into revisions of written text, that the politics of translation— of languages to language, orality to writing, its gendered and classed permutations, its cross-bordered reach—cannot be reduced to a safe point, a singular hypothesis, a transparent moment. Because I have been toughened by the vagaries of interpretation during fieldwork itself (inscribed upon my body, through rumor, through spectacles in which I was an unwitting performer), I fully recognize that local interpretations will cover the gamut of possibilities, if the book circulates here at all. Most probably, it will index the irrelevance and disdain that was present in many commentaries during the research process: ‘‘So you want to learn about the plantation? Are you a doctor? Are you from the welfare department? No? Then why are you here and what does it matter?’’ Yet, despite the futility of anticipating such discursive effects, I insist on reading out fragments of the text to Anjali, Munnu, Bhagirathi—and later, Rita—the women who have been my primary interlocutors in this plantation ethnography. I do so because I remain concerned about the subtle and unsubtle ways in which repression can be enacted. Bhagirathi shakes her head and says, ‘‘We have told you many things and who knows what you will say. But these things happened. Change the names if you think the burra sahib will be upset that we spoke to you. But we are not scared because these things are actually open.We are not scared of some sahib getting angry. Arrrey, what can they do?’’ I push into her comments despite her assertion that the ‘‘secrets’’ of the plantation are an ‘‘open’’ business. I am also aware, in that monsoon of AuProtest 291

gust 1998 when we are having this discussion, that they are embarking on a self-help initiative, an informal women’s organization, in which I am also somewhat involved. After some more intense discussion, and listening to portions of my analysis from this chapter, they tell me the points where they would like names to remain, and where pseudonyms are advisable. They choose the names, laughing as they do so.When I tell them that a long chapter on daily work also contains stories about sexual politics and back-talk, they tell me that this is such a regular occurrence, it really does not matter whether they are mentioned by name. They groan when I ask if I can read out portions of those chapters to them. Clearly not. It is peak season that August and they are giving me some precious time. Getting bored would be a waste of that time! Before we move into a discussion about future meetings, Bhagirathi tells me that Churamin died a few months ago. She had come to Bhagirathi’s store seeking help to get to the hospital because she was ill. Munnu tells me she remembered Churamin’s presence and her history of shadows. ‘‘But,’’ she reminds me, ‘‘I was also embarrassed because she kept asking you for money. Don’t you remember that?’’

Forest Cover The jungle, we have seen, is imagined by the planter as a place of considerable danger: serpent-like, fathomless, and a primal threat to his fields of cultivation. It is a place also of human retreat, a space from which the ordered annexation of land hastened by colonial settlement could be challenged. There are sudden fissures in the written record that suggest infinitesimal ruptural and episodic moments that run alongside Churamin’s fragment of postcolonial history.Within the signals of subterranean women’s histories, these are moments that meet. Consider what, in 1789, was defined as an ‘‘insurrection’’ in the Baikunthapur forests. A ‘‘large body of banditti,’’ also known in colonial parlance as dacoits, held the entrance to the forests against the company troops until they were starved out and fled to Bhutan. A ‘‘noted’’ leader was a woman dacoit called Debi Chaudhuri.3 Almost a century and a half later, in 1936, after wholesale settlement of forest reserves on the boundaries of plantations,4 the official planter record offers a vignette of tea plantation workers ‘‘poaching’’ in the forests: They [forest guards] lay in wait and saw a large number of coolies emerge, armed with bows and arrows and carrying the carcass of a sambhar deer. In

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the tussle that ensued, the man caught by Bhimbahadur Rai, a heavily built Santhal, broke away, fitted an arrow to his bow and at point blank range shot at the man.The scattered poachers were armed in the direction of their assailants and being outnumbered by ten to one, [the guards] decided that discretion was the better part of valour and escaped into the deep forest, chased by poachers whowent shouting, ‘‘Goli mara, goli mara! Maro salo ko, faras ko admi chor tir.’’ (They shot at us, They shot at us! Beat the salas.’’) 5

The planter analyzing the encounter asserts that ‘‘a bow and arrow is a weapon potentially far more dangerous than a long bladed knife or short sword even. I would almost be prepared to say, than a revolver. It is difficult to understand why they should be exempted from control.’’ 6 The specter of a group of adivasi workers with their traditional weapons of hunt is for this planter too primal a threat, one requiring the draconian threat of colonial legislation. By chasing the forest guards into the ‘‘deep forest,’’ the adivasis’ actions make transparent the anxiety and fear of a small colonial elite facing an increasingly and openly hostile political landscape in the twilight years of their Planter Raj. Yet the inscription of this dangerous ‘‘primitiveness’’ upon working communities is shared by a postcolonial planter, Joy Sinha, who related one of the first ‘‘laboroutbursts’’ hewitnessed as a young manager in Assam. Lighting a cigarette, he reminisces: ‘‘The incident happened very suddenly in the isolated division of what was a rather large plantation. I had heard rumors that my senior manager was not liked by workers. One day, he was suddenly surrounded by a group of about thirty angry men. Someone grabbed him from behind and held an ax at his throat. I don’t remember what really caused it. Maybe he slapped someone. I was a young manager, just starting really. It was touch and go.We had to negotiate the entire day. Later I learned that the workers thought that he was a demon because of his continuous harassment of them.You see these tribals are normally placid people: they will take and take. But then we forget that they also have that tribal primordial instinct. Once something sets them off, they will kill.’’ Joy’s memory of one dramatic moment of conflict is telling.While in his analysis and description he recognizes the reasons that catalyzed the incident, he completes his story by invoking a now familiar and essentialized inscription of primal, and primitive, behavior. Despite the reasoned possibilities behind such a ‘‘spontaneous’’ and violent action (a reputation of harassment, a sudden slap), the final reading is that of essential irrationality. ‘‘Placidity’’ turns to uncontrolled fury; the sudden shift to be explained in the last analysis by the descriptors ‘‘tribal’’

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and ‘‘primordial.’’ Fear creates the specter of savagery. Power creates its own absolution.

act 8, scene 2 A spotlight weaves across the stage as lights come on behind the gau backscape, stage left. The Narrator sits on her stool center stage, near the bungalow livingroom scene.There is the noise of excited children, some firecrackers. Drumming. Dham dham dham. These merry noises come around and through the audience. Figures move on to stage left as the Narrator sets the scene. She speaks from the background. The words are said slowly, sonorously. she: The stage is set on the edge of the forest. There is no proscenium, no arch, just a stream bed ringed by hungry-tongued children. Theirs is a magic circle.They clap with glee, they know the joys of bacchanalia.We sit to the side, twisting our opal rings and humming with unease. The air is pregnant with the smells of strange fruit.Welcome to the jatra! Do you hear the pounding of the dol, its dham dham dham sounds emerging from the forest? Who shall appear first, the wide-eyed children wonder. The sahib with his topi, carrying an umbrella? It is dusk, there is a small moon, some lanterns on the banks of the dead stream. Suddenly, a figure leaps from a corner of the jungle. ‘‘Eeeeh!’’ the children scream, ‘‘It is a rakhoshi [demon]!’’ (As she speaks, the figures onstage mimic what she says.) He leaps and cavorts, he is blue-bodied and red-eyed, he wears a loin cloth, he carries a gun. Suddenly he is joined by another figure. This apparition wears only safari shorts and a split mask, black and white. He carries no gun.They cavort around each other in silence.The only sounds are of the drum. There is a movement in the shadows. A sari-clad figure emerges quietly from the right, weaving slightly, drunk perhaps. Is it a woman? Is it a man? Its face is covered by a veil of head cloth. A hand moves the veil slightly, we glimpse three faces. In one hand, it carries a sickle. Lights fade out.

A Historical Theater The choreographies of resistance, within the heuristic confines of one plantation like Sarah’s Hope, will be placed against a sketch of the longue durée. I have gestured to powerful fragments already: ritual, corporeal, and oral 294

discourses that mesh together as colonial and postcolonial narratives. Yet these are to be viewed in a wider landscape, within which subaltern narratives are deeply embedded. These include the emergence of trade union movements,7 sporadic but explicit resistance through mass exodus within the colonial period;8 the impact and influence of nationalist politics within labor movements;9 and also millenarian struggles of charismatic prophets such as Birsa Munda.10 I will etch some moments within this historical spectrum to underscore their resonance within the postcolonial memories of plantation women and men. The sketch is no mere backdrop to the theater of daily political and cultural action within Sarah’s Hope. Episodic, charismatic, quotidian, and ‘‘openly’’ organized, the political background of this staging folds into the present with an immediate and vital force.11 I meet Premnath Singh, a prominent union leader, at the workers’ canteen near the club. I have been taken there by Julena Lohra, a woman active within the union, for some sweets and hot tea. This leader had been sizing me up from my first day in the plantation but waited for me to get within his radius to strike up a conversation. I waited, knowing that he was one of the most powerful leaders in the plantation and a respected elder. It was a matter of izzat that our encounter take its own time. In the canteen, he pushes the glass of tea across the counter and asks me how the research is going. ‘‘I have been hearing about you. I am told everything. Like the cia, you know.’’ He smiles and winks. ‘‘The sahib told me you were coming even before you got here and we know you are from Amrika and you are doing some university kam [work].’’ Uneasy with the reference to the cia, I rush in nervously: ‘‘Look, Mr. Premnath, I am really not interested in union politics. Really. I am interested in women’s lives and their histories in general. Not union business. I would like to know about women in the unions, yes, certainly. I am sure that some will tell me. But if you could tell me a few things about plantation history, if you remember the British period, your own history, I assure you that I will not use your name. But I hear that you have been in the plantation for a long time.’’ He interrupts my nervous rush authoritatively, holding out an open palm. ‘‘Don’t misunderstand me, memsahib, speaking about even union things is not that important. Why, we are very open here. You may even come to a meeting to see our mahila samity [women’s society] and I will tell you my history.What is the problem in this?’’ We quickly enter a long conversation about his own personal history within union politics at the plantation, a span of time covering almost the entire postcolonial period. I am surprised and disconcerted at the level of Protest 295

detail he is willing to provide about the history of in-garden union conflicts over four decades. I am aware that four months of sporadic intelligencegathering on his part has perhaps deemed me quite harmless. More importantly, his openness signals to me a measure of a self-assurance about his status within the plantation. He says, ‘‘I was lucky that I entered the garden school when I did. My father was a brave man, tough. He had a fight with the manager of the garden whereyou were fora short while last year. . . . See, I knoweverything. . . . So he left and came to work here. This was in the 1940s. Then we did not have any buses between here and the town’s station.We used bullock carts to transport the tea chests to the station. My father worked as the overseer of the bullock cart. He made sure that I was educated, and I stayed in the school for eight years. He bought me a Phillips bicycle on 15th August 1947, the day of our Independence so that I could cycle to the town. . . . ‘‘The thing is, and you will agree, that reading and writing is everything. And because we are adivasis it was very difficult to get any schooling. But my father was determined, so I was lucky to get this schooling.This is why I can read and write. Look, you want to know about the British period. They did not want us educated. They did not want Indians to be educated. They did not want coolies to be educated. It is that simple. Look, we were treated like animals. . . . They gave us liquor to keep us down and make us work.We had to buy licenses even for selling our rice beer.The government earned a lot of money. It was like that Chinese opium business. There were no timetables then, no set times for work. . . . What more can I say? ‘‘We were not allowed to gather in one place in the plantation.The chowkidars reported things. Because of this, we met in the fairs and local markets.12 They could not stop us at the fairs, but the police watched everything. The most dangerous thing was if anyone talked about Mahatma Gandhi. . . . That is where the people fighting for our freedom also came.The tea garden was their kingdom, so they could not allow that in the garden.’’ Till 1944, the Rege Comission reported that no trade union organizing was permitted in the plantations.13 The lexicon of planters and district administrators was peppered with terms ubiquitous to British colonial rule: ‘‘illegal assembly’’;14 ‘‘absconscions,’’ ‘‘riots,’’ ‘‘insubordination,’’ and ‘‘agitation.’’ 15 This was a vocabulary buttressed by the force of draconian colonial legislation, such as the punitive emigration acts, the infamous Workmen’s Breach of Contract Act,16 and surveillance by planter militias such as the North Bengal Rifles, whose records were burned on the eve of Indian independence.17 In isolated plantations, the planter served as both judge and jury of behavior characterized as criminal. This included refusal to exercise the full 296

terms of a labor contract, absence from work, drunkenness and neglect of ‘‘sanitary regulations,’’ and desertion.18 The Fugitive Slave Law of America informed a series of laws against ‘‘absconsions’’ and desertion.19 The colonial plantation was a tightly controlled fief. Yet it was a fief whose borders were being increasingly frayed, as ‘‘outsiders’’—with explicit nationalist aspirations—asserted a defiant challenge to colonial rule. In 1924, one planter-administrator noted that noncooperation activists were mobilizing in protest of the government-run alcohol business.20 This ‘‘spirit of insubordination’’ was not only fueled by nationalist activists meeting in local bazaars; it was also joined by trade union organizers with explicit communist ideologies. Any sign of organizing around ‘‘social welfare’’ causes such as temperance was viewed as suspect. A social worker, ‘‘Sri Singh,’’ wanted to ‘‘reform’’ workers in Matigara Tea Estate around the liquor question and used the local market as a space to rally workers. He was imprisoned in 1928.21 In 1921, the chairman of the planter’s association noted that ‘‘weekly meetings are being held, attended by chaprasis and duffadars [overseers], and I am informed that several agitators wearing badges and shouting ‘Gandhi ki jai’ [Hail Gandhi] arrived at Dam Dim on Sunday. I also understand that efforts are being made to give the agitation a religious turn and that a resurgence of the 1916 trouble is possible.’’ 22 Mahatma Gandhi himself is said to have visited the Dooars in the late 1920s, as a guest of Seo Mangal.23 Gandhi is remembered in a small Sadri song that wends its customary cadences into the Dooars from the Chotanagpur Plateau.24 I am told it is sung by women for the karam rituals, as they sit around their courtyards preparing food.25 Hayre hay, daya gandhi ke mahima bhari. Bina baadal ke pani to barasi gel gandhi mahima bhari. Radhali jayal bhat kera ke tarkari gandhi ke mahima bhari. Bina badal ke pani to barshi gel gandhi ke mahima bhari. Hayre hay, the kind Gandhi’s fame is great. Without clouds, it rained, Gandhi’s fame is great. I cooked lentils, rice and a banana curry, Gandhi’s fame is great. Without clouds, it rained, Gandhi’s fame is great.

What is significant about this indexing of the Mahatma’s presence within late colonial political history (whether in planter association records or in secondary analysis of early trade union politics) is the distance between his Protest 297

actual historical involvement in Dooars politics and interpretations (of this supposed involvement) that took on a life of its own. For colonial planters, any sign of Gandhi may have presaged large collective labor protests in the name of nationalism. Simultaneously, for the local organizers in the haats, wearing their badges and shouting his name, the ‘‘idea’’ of Gandhi was what mattered—and what could be recrafted within the popular imagination and the particular modalities of protest it engendered.26 Certainly, his naming within the lyrics of plantation women’s songs suggest the powerful ways in which symbolic and oral registers script another history of post/colonial women workers. Planter anxiety about ‘‘outsiders’’ causing labor ‘‘agitation’’ was noted in the annals of the Royal Commission on Labour in 1931. We find, for example, the case of one worker,Virana Tilanga, tried on August 15, 1928, and sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment on August 31, 1928. The unfortunate worker had gone to the Cinnamara Tea Estate in search of work ‘‘as he had heard there were many coolies in that garden from his district. The manager hauled him up, thinking he was an agitator, and the complaint was witnessed by the manager’s clerk, the peons, and the watchman. The manager suspected him of being a representative of the trade union congress.The coolie was charged with causing ‘annoyance’ to the manager.The accused said that he had never heard the name of the Trades Union Congress or its representatives. But on the evidence of the clerk and the chowkidar, he was convicted and sentenced.’’ 27

act 8, scene 3 The Narrator sits on her stool, center stage, next to the rattan chairs of the living room, slightly toward stage left. Her lantern on the ground is lit, the flame low. On the ground is a cup. She holds the small sickle, her fingers run up and down its blade. The British and Indian Sahibs sit on the chairs next to her. They are in darkness. indian sahib: (as if reciting from memory, staccato tones) ‘‘Erena Telenga. Charged for trespass. The accused stated that he came here for the purpose of speaking to the workers about desher katha, the story of their own country. He was caught and held by the chowkidar.’’ 28 british sahib: ‘‘It is my opinion that the present labor we are dealing with here is not sufficiently advanced for trade unions. Trade unions would lead to trouble and for that reason I say that we ought to keep our roads, and exercise control over the people that come in.’’ 29

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she: ‘‘Mobility within and outside the plantation was restricted, as anyone going out or coming in needed the prior permission of the manager. Any defiance of this was labelled as desertion. Edgar reported that planters often employed ‘savage hillmen’ to track down ‘absconders’ with the promise of a reward of Rs. 5 per head.’’ 30 Sounds of drumming. Dham dham dham dham. Lights fade out.

Lal Shukra Oraon Remembers I travel with some political activists from Siliguri to meet an old man who is a legend, involved in the first flickers of explicit and open labor organizing in the Dooars, in the mid-1930s. I am aware that he is a living embodiment of a time and place that I have imagined within the white and empty margins of old colonial documents. Frail and elderly, he is welcoming, though somewhat disconcerted at our sudden arrival. Given the isolation of his village, I am not sure that he received any message of our impending visit. He is reserved, but agrees to talk a little. My companions are trusted and old comrades of his. I have a tape recorder that I have seldom used in this research, and I ask permission to use it, knowing that I won’t return. Trust may be built slowly over time, through return visits, but somehow the onetime machine signals the probability that this won’t happen again. I don’t ask many questions. I have not returned. He speaks softly and slowly when I ask about the earliest days of protest: ‘‘In the beginning, I was at Murli. . . . In this garden the sahib oppressed us. . . . I had some bata bati [words] with the sahib and we called a strike, during the British period. . . . The sahibs expelled us. Hafta bahar . . . you may know this. . . . All our belongings were taken to the borders of the bagan and we were told never to come back. . . . This was in 1935–36. . . . [Was there any party involved, communist, cpi?] No, there was no party. . . . The sahibs could not do anything to stop the strike, even the chowkidars were on our side. . . . All were our people.’’ Despite the planter’s attempts to control the influence of outsiders and the increasing agitation of insiders, trade union organizing and the impact of the nationalist movement could not be stemmed. From the early 1920s, labor organizing in both Assam and Bengal was catalyzed by railway workers. Tea plantation and colliery workers joined railway gangmen in combined strike activities through the next two decades.31 In 1938, union activity of the Bengal Dooars Railways included some strategic alliances with plantation workers’ communities. Because railroad gangmen were often adivasis

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and had kinsfolk working in the plantations, these were connections that held firm. The Communist Party of India (cpi) began organizing in 1939, and labor ‘‘unrest’’ through strikes accelerated in the last decades of colonial rule. In September 1946, a peasant movement that demanded a redistribution of two-thirds of the crop to sharecroppers swept through North Bengal. The Tebhaga movement, as it is known, called for direct action against landowners. An armed volunteer force, comprised of villagers and tea plantation workers who were kinsfolk or retired ‘‘time-expired’’ workers, looted jotedars’ granaries.32 Communist organizing and the emergence of a ‘‘red flag’’ union within plantations added to what was already a turbulent political landscape in rural North Bengal. Police and planter repression against any sign of red flag activity within individual plantations was continuous, and any worker suspected of this activity was quickly expelled.33 By the time of Indian independence, planters knew that labor legislation permitting open trade union organizing was inevitable and began to support political parties that opposed the radical ideology and mobilization of the Communist Party of India.The ruling Congress Partyagreed with the planters, and in 1948, when it constituted the first national government of free India, the cpi was formally banned. While union activity was ‘‘legally’’ allowed through the 1950s and 1960s, and other political parties created a web of patronage of local unions, the relationship between individual plantation organizing and regional or national policy making remained a distant one. It was a distance charted by an urban/rural, north/south divide within the state-level politics of West Bengal. Furthermore, the ethnicized difference between the Bengali leadership (often underground, if they were members of the cpi) and its constituency of adivasi workers, marked a social distance that still defines plantation union politics within the communist-run state government. In the decades before the ascendance of official communist rule in West Bengal, however, the political culture was defined by the terms of the old Raj. Its geographical isolation from the centers of rule in Calcutta, and even regional centers like Siliguri, underscored the fact that this enclave economy continued to be a political enclave in definitive ways. On paper, unions were permitted. In reality, repression was a constant, and responses, though episodic, were also violent. In the mid-1960s, the split in the communist movement sparked one of the most important peasant rebellions in postcolonial Indian history: the Naxalite movement. Beginning in a village in North Bengal from which it takes its name, Naxalbari, 300

this was a political movement that first involved villagers and local communist activists, working with explicitly Maoist strategies of peasant guerrilla warfare. It quickly captured the revolutionary imagination of college and university radicals in Calcutta, and its sudden spread fueled immediate and widespread repression by the then Congress Party–run state government.34 An entire generation of radical intellectuals was decimated by police repression.They were killed, tortured, imprisoned, or went underground. It is a history that has returned to the subterranean, except in political and theoretical analyses of its ‘‘failure’’ and in the anguished stories of mothers who kept daily vigil for sons who did not return home, a history that continues to rage in the village and jungles of northeastern India. I stumble into this powerful and tragic theater of revolutionary history as I begin to listen to the many histories of North Bengal. Sarah’s Hope lies a few hours by bus from Naxalbari. Like the Tebhaga rupture of the mid 1940s, alliances between plantation workers and villagers occurred in a variety of ways: through daily forms of support, such as hiding activists from the towns, to participating in union battles in the plantation. Internecine fights between now fragmented communist-run unions and Congress Party–run unions pepper the memories of plantation workers of this time. I hear, again, fragments of this history through the words of Churamin and even Munnu, who remembers hiding in a barrel when a ‘‘party person’’ was fed and hidden for the night. She says, ‘‘My family had supported the lal jhanda [red flag] party for a long time, so we were trusted. All I remember is that suddenly some Bengali man would come for the night. We gave them all the food we had. Some of these people are now big leaders, but we would never see them again. I was too young to be really involved, not like Churamin, but because my family had a long history, I would see these things. Most of us were not directly involved. I remember many times that police jeeps would come to the garden.’’

act 8, scene 4 The Narrator sits on her wicker stool. She turns up the lantern light.The Sahibs have left the stage. She is joined, quietly, by a Man. His head is covered by a shawl and he wears a lungi [sarong]. He carries a metal tumbler. He squats on the ground, pulls out some bidis [handrolled cigarettes], lights two, and offers one to her. They inhale deeply. Silence. she: Here we sit, smoking and drinking glasses of sweet hot tea.You, incognito, sitting huddled against the smoke that has betrayed you. You, who Protest 301

let me know in gestures of disavowal, that history evades an earnest net, and slithers its scales against the rough web of thewritten word.You, who told me, that history has sounds as guttural as a villager who has fingers broken, one by one, but will not commit the betrayal of words.You, who join me kindly and temporarily, in the interstices of my silences, what do you say? She pauses. He does not speak.The shawl almost hides his face. He passes another bidi to her. The lights fade.

Unruly Women A shift from the wider historical and cultural landscape into the confines of a few plantations can only serve as a heuristic framing. I have suggested that these macrohistories are highly porous.The plantation spills in and out of them. However, the shift into an analytic confine is significant because of limitations within histories and historiographies, which are partial and gendered. It is, for one, difficult to trace the presence of women within this grand arc of historical narrative. It is a gendered macrohistory in which I have only suggested, through gestures within my narrative, the place of women. Like the histories of the plantocracy, we can only discern sudden twists within what is still an overwhelmingly masculine historiography of subaltern politics in the plantation belt of northeastern India. The unusual mention of a woman bandit in the Baikunthapur insurrection of 1789 suggests that organized resistance, and the important histories of union movements and larger more ‘‘public’’ social movements, suppress the role of women as significant players within these histories. Literacy, and literateness, the capacity to write, remains the purview primarily of radical elites who are men and sometimes, but rarely, men from the communities. It would be an important and revisionary project to both read carefully against the written sources as well as collect fuller oral histories in order to document what are, for the most part, shadowed scripts within the contiguous and ruptural flows of subaltern plantation histories of northeastern India. There is a triple reading against the grain that is demanded when one seeks the shadow histories of women.Take for example, the Telengana peasant rebellion of 1948 and the importance of women’s testimonies/oral histories in deepening our understanding of rural social movements.35 Village women fromTelengana were deeply involved both in thevanguard of political upheaval and organizing.They cooked, cleaned, joined guerrilla bands, and faced equal hardships as male organizers. Only recently has this history 302

been rendered visible, along with the insistence that the ‘‘public’’ domain of political action must be understood through the warp and woof of the ‘‘private.’’ Indeed, the economy of political action is simultaneously the economy of a private body politic: one that is gendered, sexualized, procreative, and quotidian. Underscoring women’s daily acts of nurturance and support within social movements is not only a resuscitative move. It challenges our very assumptions about the nature of collective mobilization. If we are also interested in the full, complex, and often contradictory cultural meanings that are the fabric of such politics, then the careful rendering of a gendered, and indeed a women’s, history is critical. Certainly, Churamin’s pregnant selfhood and the bodily meanings that she gives to the memory of her involvement in the ruptural histories of the late 1960s are not mere resuscitative moves. Her fragmentary comments suggest that our understandings of the history of North Bengal is problematically partial. By gendering our analysis of daily history, we find that the doubled or tripled ‘‘invisibilities’’ of conventional historiography elide the issues of structural power within which women remain marginalized. An emphasis on their actions and their consciousness—fragmentary and partial certainly—suggests that this is a marginality that is both contested and endured in potently re/visionary ways. Within the narratives that follow, I make no easy claim for historical visibility or the plottings of ‘‘insurgent-consciousness.’’ 36 I recognize unbridgeable gulfs. Yet, because of my often tense ramblings through these landscapes of memory and power, and because I met and spoke to some women who also urged me to ‘‘tell stories,’’ I lay claim to certain unsimple subterranean ‘‘effects.’’ These are the quotidian effects of partial perspectives, situated actions, and intellectual/political location. They trace the subtle cadences of work, the daily talk of the kitchen, the inflections of the body in flight, the murmurs of endurance. Through these particular framings of power/dialogue, they register oppositional effects.

act 8, scene 5 The Narrator picks up her stool and moves to stage left. A spotlight follows her. Another falls on one of the four Women, who has walked from behind the gauze backscape. She squats on the ground next to the Narrator’s stool. she: ( pulling two rumpled pieces of paper from a deep pocket in her robe) Pretend I am a British sahib and you are Miriam Mussulmani. Here, take Protest 303

this paper. I tore it from one of the old books from the British zamana [period]. You read Miriam Mussulmani. woman: (straightening out the paper) Why? You are crazy.Why? she: Because in making you read, I pull you out. Does this hurt, this yanking? Is this because you, in the context of my production here, are ‘‘more deeply in shadow’’? 37 woman: What is all this shadow-fadow? I don’t understand this. Arrey, I will do it. You are the sahib; I am this Miriam Mussulmani. she: ‘‘What do you wish to complain about?’’ woman: ‘‘I want to get my name cut off the book so that I can go back to my own country.’’ she: ‘‘Were you beaten?’’ woman: ‘‘Yes, by the babu.’’ she: ‘‘What were you beaten with?’’ woman: ‘‘With a cane.’’ she: ‘‘Have you any marks?’’ woman: ‘‘Yes, on my arm.’’ she: ‘‘The witness exhibited a bruise in the form of a double line, several inches long on the lower arm, which in Col. Russell’s opinion was probably not caused by a cane.’’ 38 The Narrator and Woman put down their pieces of paper. The Woman looks at the Narrator and shrugs. She pulls out some tobacco and begins rolling.The Narrator picks up the papers, rumples them, and places them in her robe pocket.The lights fade.

Munnu and the Blues Munnu and I have come back from a long day with Lachmi Maya Chhetri, one of the only women union leaders in the Dooars. I am taken to her plantation through an introduction by a Nepali friend of Munnu’s, Kaki Chhetri, who works in Munnu’s natal plantation, Kolpara. Kaki is Lachmi Maya Chhetri’s daughter.We get off the local bus at dusk. It is raining, and suddenly against the headlights of the bus and the rain, we see the silhouette of a rearing cobra. It is poised and still, glittering against the rain and artificial light. The snake slithers away into the dark, but we are momentarily stunned by its phantom-like appearance. I keep asking Munnu whether it was an apparition, but she too witnessed its rearing. ‘‘Eeeeh,’’ Munnu whispers, ‘‘Didi, remember what I told you about the Umesh Kholla and the cobra I saw there? Maybe it is the same one. It is an auspicious sign.’’ We

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both know that Siva is heralded by a cobra. I am only pleased that we did not step on it as we alighted from the bus. We decide to meet in my bungalow for some tea after Munnu and I have rested, and to talk about the day. Munnu comes back with two kinswomen. In the bungalow kitchen they go to the fridge and pour three glasses of cold water, drinking deeply, delighted at its crispness. Munnu laughs and declines the water, saying, ‘‘If I drink this water, it will become a habit.’’ She spreads out the bamboo mat in my bedroom to sit on the floor while we talk. Her companions look around in amazement. Sunita Oraon, one of Munnu’s kinswomen, tells me it is her first time inside a sahib’s bungalow. Munnu reaches over to my small tape recorder and a clutter of cassettes. I suggest that she listen to Billie Holliday. The melody of ‘‘Strange Fruit’’ fills the room. Munnu looks closely at the cover picture of Holliday: ‘‘Is this memsahib of America? But she is not white.’’ I then tell her that there were gardens in America as well, and that people were brought from elsewhere to do the work. And they were black. She interjects quickly, ‘‘Are they black the way we are black?’’ I am not sure how to answer this but talk a little about plantation history in the Caribbean and southern United States. Munnu listens intently and is mostly interested in the kinds of bodily work done in cotton and sugar cane fields. Since I have only seen pictures or read descriptions of this work, I draw an analogy to pruning in the winter season and the way that the force of the body from the waist is used to swing the large sickles through the tea bushes. We talk a little about the blues. I tell her that they came out of the plantation experience and that many women sang these songs of their sorrow (aurat ki dukh, women’s sorrows), and many songs were about men leaving women in search for work and leaving them for other women. She listens again with some intensity, and then breaks into my halting exegesis about the blues: ‘‘Have you written what she [Lachmi Maya Chhetri] said? Have you? Can you believe the stories she told us about the English period? Have you written it down yet? Have you? Did you write about Jaman Singh’s sister also . . . what she said about how she had been doing pruning, and she came back to eat one piece of bread before going out to collect grass, and when she got home the dog had eaten the bread. And she did not have anything else to eat. Did you write that?’’ Her words come to me in a torrent.

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Framing Protest Women’s narratives of resistance and protest can be situated within a spectrum of conflict: of escalation, negotiation, resolution, and rupture. At one end of this spectrum rest events of open rupture: incidents between workers and managers that halt work in the field and/or factory. Yet, because of the spatially diffuse and temporally dispersed organization of work, an incident may not involve the entire workforce, or the entire span of villages. More frequently, one section of women may suddenly mobilize against a specific order, and stop work in one area of the field. These ruptures are remembered by workers who either witnessed the incident or participated in both its escalation and denouement. These are the sediments that form history. They are episodic and fragmentary.39 They circulate in whispers. They are not forgotten. In some instances of explicit ‘‘larger’’ collective protests, managerial interpretations and the legitimation of measures to regain control are critical for an understanding of the final demarcations of power and patronage. What are the commentaries that draw the outer perimeters of mai-baap rule and its terms of legitimacy? How are these gendered? Open conflict and its containment are mediated by actual location in field or factory. A common strategy of containment is to move participants, often women, into the factory compound and its concentrated arena of administrative power. It is here that union leaders may take over negotiations. Conversely, a similar event within the factory can catalyze a ‘‘spontaneous’’ gathering of the workforce in ways not commonly seen in the field. Here, union leaders may play a primary organizing role. If not, they will still present a show of support to the constituency of aggrieved men. The scale and significance of each collective act of protest is unconsciously, but critically, measured by a gendered litmus test. The importance given by both workers and managers in their response to each locus of protest is strikingly different. A threat from the ‘‘field’’ can be moved into the center of power, the office compound, and paternally diffused. At the other end of the ‘‘spectrum of resistance’’ are the more daily forms of protest, almost imperceptible shifts in the cadences of control that permeate plantation patronage. When women’s politics are rarely seen within union policy making, both at local and regional levels of administration, then it is significant to read their ‘‘informal’’ commentaries about plantation labor and its coercive paternalism.40 Yet these acts of historical consciousness are not located within analytic dichotomies: collective/individual, private/public, informal/formal, ‘‘primitive’’/‘‘rational,’’ and women/men.

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Rather, they can be viewed as occurring along a spectrum, in the flow of social and political action that engages a dialectical multiplicity. Women’s commentaries will demonstrate, for example, how their marginalization within unions is constructed by seemingly insignificant inscriptions of sexual ‘‘immorality.’’ Innuendo, rumor, and a potent sexual politics limit women’s involvement within the formal political arena of collective organizing. In its place their casual talk embodies a discourse that is politically consequential.Their words chatter out an analysis of power and protest with trenchant humor and historical clarity.

Union Talk There are some singular women who participate with great energy in union politics. I meet Rita Chhetri, a woman from a neighboring plantation, toward the end of my year at Sarah’s Hope. She and a friend find me at my bungalow. She has heard about me through kinswomen who live at Sarah’s Hope. She is active in her local union and tells me she has ‘‘no problem’’ speaking about these issues. At the outset, I tell her that I know the senior manager of her plantation, and she must judge whether she should speak to me. She is not disconcerted by this information. ‘‘Didi, everyone knows who you know, why you are here,’’ she says. ‘‘Things that could happen are for everyone to see. I know what can happen, but that is not your concern.’’ It remains an ethical concern. I tell the manager, Joy Sinha, that I am conversing with Rita and our discussions are ‘‘general.’’ He has been supportive of my research presence, but I have not moved into ‘‘his’’ villages and am not confident that there won’t be pressures on Rita. Informing him directly is a strategically preemptive act of ‘‘protection.’’ It is a strategy that has worked well in other cases. He assures me that there will be no ramifications as long as I do not talk about pending ‘‘cases.’’ I ask Rita to let me know if there is any retaliation, but since most of our conversations are about what goes on in the communities, she and I anticipate that retaliation, if at all, would come in the form of innuendo and rumor from within the village. I ask her specifically about women’s participation within the organizational structure of the union. She says, ‘‘It depends on each plantation, but I can speak for mine. We have a mahila samity [woman’s society] within the union. I am its leader, though also its secretary treasurer and also vice president of the union. Yes, we arbitrate about women’s things, like when a man is beating a woman and she complains to us. We may take it up in

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the union. The man will have to come in front of us, and if we decide that he is to be punished, it may end with fighting. Many times, he will refuse to come to speak with us as a group. Then we will pressure the council to arbitrate. If this is not done depending on how bad the case is, it will go to the center, the burra sahib, for negotiation. The thing is that there is union ka bat [‘‘talk of the union’’] and there is samaj ka bat [‘‘talk of the society’’]. If some kind of molestation has taken place, then the woman will usually go to the samaj, to the village council.’’ How is it then that a woman is elected as the secretary of the mahila samity? Rita responds, ‘‘She is usuallya worker, and if the samaj wants her to stay then assistance will be given.41 If a samaj does not want her to stay, then a meeting will be called and a majority of the voters will have to place her back as the secretary. The executive committee of the union has thirty-one members, and the women’s wing has twenty-five. If someone is willing to put in time for a leadership position, she will be given a chance.The problem is that usually this is not the case.’’ Two sets of issues appear ambivalent enough to compel more questions within Rita’s sketch of women’s participation in one grassroots union structure. I am first intrigued by both the overlap and the distinction made between the samaj and union talk. What are issues of enforcement around a judgment made by either group? Could she give me any examples of such conflicts within a concrete case? The second set of issues cohere around customary norms and pragmatic issues that might inhibit women to join the union organization. ‘‘Well, memsahib, let me give you one samaj case,’’ she responds, ‘‘something that happened to a close friend of mine, Mala. Here in the villages, many things have been said about her.Where did she get her clothes from? Why did she wear lipstick? This one Nepali man, a man from our community, who had one wife and children, started saying bad things about her. You see, once he had said to others that he wanted to marry her. Then, he started spreading rumors that made us, and her, angry. One night, she took a knife and was going to cut him to pieces when some adivasi boys in her line stopped her. They really helped. They said this should be taken to the samaj.’’ She continues, ‘‘So in the house next door, we were having a meeting and the man sent some people from his family to find out what we were doing. He did not have many people here, so he got his people from other gardens. We insisted that he come to face Mala which he had to. Didi, she spat on him so much he was dripping, and then she slapped him with her

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slippers . . . across his face and he could not do anything. In fact, the men insisted that he place his head at her feet for forgiveness. She slapped him again. His family was alone, which is why he did this. But how could he have said all these bad things about her? My village knew that she was a good person.’’ Mala’s status in the village, culled from a long family history and her own courage, coupled with the support of young men in her village resulted in a favorable outcome. Significantly, the alleged slanderer was isolated in the village.The story, Rita agrees, would have taken a different turn if he came from a family that was well-connected in the village. What, I ask, did the union, then, have to do with Mala’s case? Rita responds, ‘‘There was nothing direct from the union. It was resolved through the men in the village taking action because they felt Mala had been wrongly dishonored. Also, she was ready to take action and her friends would help there.’’ It is indeed striking that though an energetic participant in union politics, Rita herself did not take Mala’s case to her union directly.The negotiation occurs within the village, and the union is not involved. Rita’s choice reflects the fact that unions are inconsistent in their response to sexual politics and the limitations it places on women’s mobility and independence. Rita is a remarkable woman and though there are other singular women like her elsewhere, she (like them) is an anomalous figure. Recall Jahanara/Suneeta, my twilight companion who is neither Hindu nor Muslim. Like Rita, she is unmarried and, in the customary norms of both communities, reaching a stage where her unmarried state can be stigmatized.42 Because she does not have the structural protection of a husband, she is vulnerable to charges of sexual impropriety.This is coupled with her strikingly liminal social position. I am told that her father is a shadowy figure, and there is a story of conversion. Is he Muslim? Is he not? Why does it matter? What does matter is that Jahanara/Suneeta embodies transgression. As a woman of two religions and two jats, who will accept her as a bride? Perhaps it is this interstitial status that allows her to say defiantly, ‘‘Some of my friends ask me how it is that I go with the men, which includes the babu’s sons, to party meetings in Jalpaiguri and Siliguri? I go in trucks late at night. They think I don’t have honor or they are worried of what people might say. My father does not care. He knows that my mind is clean.’’ At Sarah’s Hope, women’s participation in the union’s women’s wing is minimal. ‘‘Didi,’’ says Sabina, ‘‘we work as we do. You have seen it. Everything we do. Some of the union work is good, but I don’t have the strength. If I have to go to someone’s house late at night for some meeting, who will

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care for the children? And my husband will object. It is too much, and then how people will talk, this-or-that, so this is why I don’t go. I will support them. I will pay the union dues, but I cannot do more.’’ A few women, usually married or allied to important leaders constitute the backbone of the union’s women’s wing. Indeed, women’s participation is viewed as problematic by men and women in the wider plantation communities, not only because of time spent away from household responsibilities, but as Suneeta/Jahanara’s defiant commentary suggests, women’s involvement with strange men at night is seen as sexually suspect. This is a domain of activity that, unlike the necessary public labor of women, is explicitly sexualized. It is inscribed by shared pancommunity understandings of appropriate and ‘‘moral’’ behavior. A woman, even a married one, might be labeled a prostitute, and most women will not risk this ultimate loss of honor. As a consequence of these culturally mediated alignments away from party work, women are excluded—and exclude themselves—from policy decisions not only at the local level but from town and state-level union meetings.The explanations and interpretations they present suggest the explicit ways in which cultural ideologies of sexuality, and the constraints of field and household work, mitigate against women’s participation in formal organizing. However, this absence in policy making or daily union work does not translate into inaction when union-organized political actions occur. In the most common form of organizing, the gherao, in which a manager is surrounded by workers, women are often seen on the frontlines.43 Indeed, both managers and union leaders comment on this pattern of women’s coming forward in the gherao and suggest strikingly similar, even laudatory, reasons for this form of women’s participation. The first is that women have more courage and verve than men, and when a gherao is announced they will openly participate. Secondly, union strategy scripts a symbolic vocabulary that they share with the managers. Physically touching a woman or harming her in any way can incur great wrath at the tense moments of open confrontation. It is a touching that transgresses a shared recognition of sexual honor. This lexicon of bodily izzat, written by both men and women, prevents the management from retaliating with potentially violent counterstrategies of repression. Honor is animated through the woman’s body. Power marks the politics of sexuality on the bodied frontlines of labor protest.

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A Dol Challenges the Union (and the ‘‘Nation’’) 44 Sexualized innuendos and the constraints they create for women like Rita may be juxtaposed to the occasional challenges made to union hegemony by groups of women who are married, work together in the fields, and share community solidarity. Sometime in early August 1992, I walk with Bhagirathi and Moniki’s dol of twelve women from the field to factory for leaf weighment. The siren for lunch had sounded. Bhagirathi grouses about the unions: ‘‘Look at the amount of donation/dues they take for 15th August [Indian Independence day]. The children get a toffee and we are lucky if we get a luddu.45 Isn’t this day supposed to be about the freedom of the country? The government should be feeding us, the garib (poor). Instead, we feed them.’’ In this critique, Bhagirathi conflates the government with the union. I ask her if she knows where the union money goes. She shrugs, ‘‘Who knows? What can we do? These people are mén [‘main’] people.’’ Later in the evening, at her home, I learn that an open conflict with their union leader is brewing. A verbal skirmish occurred because her dol had been asking for the arbitration of a case that involved a fellow Kumhar kinswoman.This sister’s family had to share labor quarters and was now demanding new housing allocation. The leader in question was not paying much attention to this case, and after much inaction, had declared that the case had to go to the government. ‘‘I told the neta, didi, I told him: ‘Who is the sarkar [government] to us?’’ Bhagirathi says forcefully. ‘‘We want you to speak to the manager, make him hear our sadness at this. He has not done anything yet. Because of this, we are not putting up the union flag in the chowpatty.46 In the past, the union flag has gone from here to the factory. This year we will not allow this. In fact, we are thinking of doing another flag ceremony ourselves. But the youth in the lines are telling us that we can’t do this. The other union has already told us that they will arbitrate. Now, our union leader has told us that he does not want to lose us to another union.’’ As the story around this conflict emerges, it is clear the grievances are multilayered. The complaint of the sister with inadequate housing is now joined by another complaint: a woman’s husband did not get the permanent bungalow service job he was promised by the union leader. The dol is now also refusing to pay the union independence-day dues of 10 rupees. After some negotiations with the union leader, the dues are paid, and the threat of secession (to another union) is negotiated away.On August 15, the Indian

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flag is carried from the chowpatty to the factory, as is the custom in this village cluster. Several intersecting themes of community solidarity, collective organizing, and symbolic negotiations emerge from this specific instance of women’s protest. For one, the Kumhars are a prominent community in the villages. Kumhar men have married and moved into the clan networks in the villages. They are ghar jamais, sons-in-law who live with their wives’ families. These men, including their fathers-in-law, have garnered some of the status jobs in the plantation—as watchmen, cooks, and overseers. Bhagirathi and her husband run a small but successful store that opens out on the chowpatty. He, too, married into her family.The higher economic status of the Kumhar, their self-constructions of superiority, and the place of their women within the partially matrilocal and multigenerational kinship structures of the jat make their threat of boycott and secession a serious one. The dol does not fight only on behalf of other women within the jat but also for men.What is at stake is the issue not of women’s prestige as such but of their community status and honor. The protection of men is an integral part of their ideology of protest. Yet it is precisely their collective gendered identity (as respected wives in a high-status community) and their reputation as tough and outspoken women that is activated. It is a conflict that the rival union is keen to join because they know the women can be formidable allies. Yet the story of the reasons behind the quick denouement in this instance of the women’s threats to union hegemony remain unclear. I am told, casually, that ‘‘it has been worked out.’’ The young men’s verbal disciplining of the women’s threatened boycott of the flag procession suggests that there may have been a masculine veto from within the clan itself against such action. This cannot be verified. The possibility of rupture sinks without a ripple. This incident is a theater of political action that threatens to seize a significant symbolic and ritual event within the plantation year: the celebration of Indian Independence day. The leader risks a public loss of face in front of the managers and rival union leaders who will participate in flag hoistings near the union canteen behind the factory. The procession from the chowpatty in front of Bhagirathi’s store is a small but important journey that connects this vital compass of ‘‘lines’’ to the center of village life, the canteen field. A strategic takeoverof that site by Bhagirathi and herdol is a symbolic act with repercussions well beyond a small dol-union skirmish. It will reach the

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ears of workers in other plantation villages, rival unions, and even the managers. If they decide to have their own ceremony, it would be tantamount to a mutiny. Though the threat is not actualized into an outright challenge of the union, what is significant is the way in which gender, jat, and status do mobilize the dol to symbolic action with considerable effect. Recall for a moment Bhagirathi’s critique and conflation of sarkar (government) and union: ‘‘Look at the amount of donation/dues they take for 15th August [Indian Independence day]. The children get a toffee and we are lucky if we get a luddu. Isn’t this day supposed to be about the freedom of the country? The government should be feeding us. . . . Instead we feed them.’’ In her reflection on the meaning of national freedom, she demonstrates an understanding of the plantation as a ‘‘state,’’ and its ‘‘rule’’ by the union as sarkar. The sahib as mai-baap ruler is momentarily hidden. Most significantly, in her triply conflated register of plantation/state/nation, Bhagirathi recognizes that these are politics that contain a failed reciprocity, the wider political economy of obligation is not shared by rulers. The unionsarkar has not done its duty in the micronation of the plantation. For a small moment, it becomes illegitimate, not worthy of a flag and a procession.

Daily Dis/Orders A woman’s response to a manager who catches her coming late for work, or who upbraids her for not plucking quickly enough, constitutes the most frequent kind of daily protest against his hukum (order). Foraging for firewood within the plantation field entails a severe reprimand because of the potential damage to the tea bush. Yet a woman’s ability to find firewood in the underbrush can save her miles of walking. Mona Gond notes how an altercation around foraging tarnished her reputation with an assistant manager. She says, ‘‘I went to the office and screamed about the sahib trying to do kamjam [stop-work] because he had caught me getting wood in the garden. From that day, he has called me chuchri [shrew] and jhagrain.’’ 47 For another woman, walking alone to the village with the firewood balanced on her head, a sudden encounter with the manager entails both fear and mortification. However, if a woman is with her friends, then a manager’s verbal reprimand is staged as a theater of shouting, a game of decibel bluff. Mongri Ghatwar notes with some asperity: ‘‘They bark loudly like dogs to scare us.

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I tell my friends that actually, if we scream back, even if we are alone, they won’t try it again.We bark louder, I have done it.The sahibs and babus don’t say anything to us. They tell us we are khachar [prickly, tough].’’ The manager’s focus on tardiness, particularly during peak harvest, leads to another altercation between him and a hurrying woman. Mongri notes, ‘‘One day, the senior manager himself caught me going in late, you know, with those big eyes. . . . He said to me, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Then he pointed to his watch. . . . ‘Time is moving.’ So I told him ‘If the needle is moving, then time must be moving.’ He was not pleased with me and said, ‘Your mouth moves a lot.What if I send you back and you miss your wage?’ So I told him, ‘Well, do that, and have an extra piece of fish with it.’ ’’ She laughs uproariously. Her final comment about the ‘‘extra fish’’ spoke directly to the manager’s Bengali background, by invoking his community’s preference for fish curries. Her sarcasm, and the knowledge on which it was based, is itself gleaned from stories circulated in the plantation village by old cooks who have prepared large meals for the staff and managerial banquets. Interestingly enough, the mocking connection between Bengali sahibs, babus, and their fish was made frequently and scathingly. In this particular incident, the mai-baap was benignly irritated and Mongri was sent ahead for work. Other altercations occur at the site of the weighment shed, where women’s ire is directed toward the clerical staff who register the weight of leaf in their large red ledger books. The fish trope is, yet again, deployed, to the Bengali staff’s chagrin. Many women suspect that leaf weighment involves microcheating, where actual weight is reduced by at least one kilogram. Because most women pluckers cannot read or write, this loss in wage, though microscopic and incremental in amounts, when multiplied over a season adds to considerable daily profit for the plantation. On occasion, a woman will make an explicit comment to the staff about these customary practices of cheating. Munnu wryly comments, ‘‘I have had several fights with the babus at Kolpara. Once I saw he had put down 23 kilos instead of 25 kilos, saying my cloth was wet and so I screamed at him. He told me he could prove it to me, and I said that if he wanted to eat a good piece of fish with the money from the extra two kilos, he was welcome to it. ‘‘At another time, I was so angry, I asked him, ‘Will you put food in my child’s stomach?’ And do you know how he replied? ‘You do not know how to read and write, so why are you challenging me?’ Well, that made me really angry. I told him, ‘Yes, babu, if I knew how to read and write, then there would be no need for you to be sitting there.’ ’’ 314

In most cases of altercation within the factory shed, however, other women will not support these spontaneous outbursts. Munnu herself argues that a major problem rests in the attitude of her own friends who mock her by saying, ‘‘Eh, eh, look at that one, she thinks she is such a big person. . . . She reads and writes and so she scolds the babus.’’ Yet, despite incurring the admonishment of peers, individual women who are vocal like Bhagirathi and Munnu, will gain a reputation for being jhagrains. It is a reputation that compells both sahibs and babus to keep a marked distance from them. At the same time, some women will articulate the explicit need for collective mobilization against small acts of injustice. Bhagirathi offers an instance of one such spontaneous women’s mobilization during a winter day of pruning: ‘‘The manager was telling a woman to prune properly. But as always, he was barking at her as if she was a goat. . . . So this woman got angry and asked him, ‘Why don’t you do the pruning, and I will learn by following you?’ And, ha, he got angry because he doesn’t know pruning and said to her, ‘Oh, if this is so, then you can do my job in the office. You watch it, your mouth moves too fast.’ ’’ Bhagirathi pauses, ‘‘Didi, we were not far away, and we realized, too late, what was going on. I mean, how dare he speak to anyone of us like that.We started heading in his direction to hand in our knives and stop work, but both he and the babu jumped into the jeep. Since that time, he has not come around our pruning section.’’ It is important to note that the protection of an individual woman from an unjust reprimand was possible only because of the dol’s solidarity and ‘‘spontaneously’’ collective decision to hand in their collective knives.Their spontaneity is rooted within the strong ties of kinship, community, and friendship, social networks hitherto unplumbed by union organization. On occasion, however, a politicized women’s dol can cause considerable commotion within the ordered day. Take another story related by Munnu about an incident in Kolpara that occurred, as she said, ‘‘in the time of my mother’s mother.’’ A Nepali dol of women were daily forced to work excess hours in winter pruning, which was ‘‘against the garden’s custom.’’ She says, ‘‘The women used to conduct fine pruning with a special bamboo stick and they became so enraged with the garden babu who made them do this that they beat him senseless with the bamboo.’’ Munnu ends her vignette by underscoring that ‘‘the Nepali women in my garden are himmatwali aurat [women with courage and verve], which is why, didi, that I stay with them.’’ A dol’s nascent powers were displayed at Sarah’s Hope in a more recent incident, where ruptural events within the field were taken directly into the Protest 315

factory. The event was precipitated by an incident that had happened the previous day when an assistant manager had caught Mongri Ghatwar taking dried wood after a pruning shift of work. Despite her pleas about her sick child and lack of firewood in the house, he ordered her not to come to work the following day. The next morning, when Mongri duly reported for her early morning shift, the overseer informed her that the sahib had cut her daily wage. She continues, ‘‘I went to the union leader and, though I knew he was not going to do anything himself, I wanted him to know what I was planning. He said they knew what was happening and were waiting to see the fireworks. All at once, two tea blocks of women, three hundred of us, with my dol leading and with pruning knives in hand, charged into the office. The babus quickly shoved the assistant manager into the office and the senior manager came out.We had out knives raised.The union leaders stayed in the back, watching.The burra sahib called the assistant sahib outside and yelled at him in front of us. He told us that all five fingers on one hand are not the same, and we should excuse him. It was enough.We went back to work.’’ Significantly, the escalation of Mongri’s ‘‘spontaneous’’ protest took several distinct steps. Initially, she verified her actions with her union leader, who gave tacit support to her grievance and plan of action, while also making implicitly clear his background position during the actual confrontation within the office compound.Consequently, Mongri’s contact with the leader gestured to his important, albeit silent, support. The collective movement of large numbers of women from field into the factory and office compound also hints at the manner in which its escalation in intensity, and the importance given to its ‘‘seriousness’’ by sahibs and union leaders, was linked to a cartographic shift. This was a shift in which women’s movement from field spaces into the factory arena catapulted the potential seriousness of their ‘‘spontaneous’’ organizing into another level of political action. The women’s appearance within the concentrated locus of planter power within the factory also suggests the possible reasons for the event’s rapid containment.

Primal Fields The image of the women’s raised sickles, pointedly noted by Mongri Lohra in her recapitulation of her dol’s momentary uprising, begs the question of the planter’s perceptions of this transformation of pruning sickles—implements of plantation work, tools of discipline—into suddenly powerful

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weapons, threatening, in a most immediate way, the disciplined laboring of his body politic. Indeed, his characterization of the human impulse that transforms the sickle into a weapon, is itself inextricably linked to colonial visions of primordial savagery, suggested by the ensnarled forest and its ‘‘wild’’ inhabitants. Recall, for a moment, one manager’s recollection of one ‘‘outburst’’ and the term he used to characterize its cause: ‘‘tribal primordial instinct.’’ This envisioning of sudden savagery, captured acutely in the characterization ‘‘primordial instinct,’’ is striking because it occurs not in the diary of a longdead colonial burra sahib but in the memory of a contemporary planter. It is an invocation of a capricious and ‘‘primitive’’ spirit lurking below the surface calmness of the workers, resonant of the nineteenth-century planter’s fears of what lay hidden within the tangled emerald jungle. Yet the sahib’s recollection of this event itself suggests a mutual construction of savagery, one in which the manager is personified by workers as a rakoshi [demon]. In so doing, they tear open the masks of mai-baap’s legitimacy. Furthermore, workers were themselves cognizant of the planter’s fears of their alleged capacity to unleash a ‘‘primordial’’ killing instinct. In the recollection of one old worker, this very perception of the sahib’s latent terrors presents a theater of telling subversion, and suggests as well the malleability of the dominant iconography of primordial ‘‘tribal’’ violence. Budhua Xaxa, an elderly Missionya worker, now retired, had arrived in the Dooars in the late 1940s, when coolie depots facilitated immigration. Moving from plantation to plantation as a fifteen-year-old, he recalls his precipitous departure from one plantation. ‘‘The garden babus and sahib were harsh, memsahib,’’ he notes. One day, tired of continuous harassment, he brandished his hoe over his head and ran through the row of tea bushes. He remembers this rushing through the plantation field with a shake of his head and a laugh: ‘‘I didn’t go near the office, but of course the sahib was informed. He told me the sirdar who had commissioned me that I had gone into the office with my hoe. And so I was unreliable and dangerous. I got kicked out of that garden, which is what I wanted.’’ Thus, a theater of bluff—Budhua’s play with the dominant image of savagery, and the inherent capriciousness signified by his upraised hoe— presents a dialectical staging of politicosymbolic action. It is one in which a mutual though unequal construction of otherness created a performance in deadly earnest, a play of momentary and conscious subversion.The field, then, is a historical space, distant from the planter’s concentrated locus of power. It is a place where the hoe and sickle can be suddenly transformed.

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Gendered Ruptures The managers’ perceptions of the political field are filtered through the lens of gendered ascriptions about the potential of acts of protest or violence. It is no accident that Budhua’s raised hoe is viewed as dangerous: he inhabits the genealogical space of an iconic male working-class ‘‘primitive.’’ Women workers, by contrast—despite their back talk and their small and quickly contained ruptural acts—are still viewed by managers as the ‘‘best’’ workers. This characterization is predicated on women’s consistent attendence at work as well as their less ‘‘troublesome’’ ways within the field.Thus, even an occasional gathering of women’s dols in the factory compound can be placated by the burra sahib’s loud admonishment of his erring assistant manager.Work resumes again. If the same incident involved men, however, the sahib would have to contend almost immediately with union organizing. In important ways, then, the planter’s self-representation of pioneering fearlessness and superior masculine courage is directed toward crafting the perceptions of men workers. Recall one assistant manager’s emphasis on ‘‘keeping face’’ when confronted by a trapped leopard within the field. It is a display of power directed explicitly at men, whose sharp observations on the manager’s bravery, or lack thereof, creates his reputation.Their gaze is public and powerful, one that he hopes will enhance his reputation of decisive strength within the plantation. There is, for the planter, a concomitant wariness of men’s activities within that field, which indexes two distinctly different, though connected, locuses of political action: field and factory. Note the words of the same assistant manager, who challenged the leopard: ‘‘I don’t accept any nonsense from the men workers. I also know that strategy is cooked up in the garden. The kichdi [mixed curry] is made there in the field, which is why I will not challenge them there. But I will get them in the office.’’ The field remains a space that threatens to spill over the planter’s boundaries of control. Its furthest distances from the center of his power suggest a spatial diffusion, a circle so expanded as to make him anxious about his capacity to control the effects of that very expansion. A leopard sits tense and golden-eyed, grunting in the distance of the field’s borders. Women’s acts of protest are configured differently, within the dominant stereotypes of ‘‘docility.’’ The potent solidarity of a dol’s actions, signified by raised sickles, appears to the managers as a threat, certainly, but a relatively marginal one. Due to women’s marginalization in the formal arenas of political organizing, their small ruptural politics are quickly dismissed, while men’s field talk is viewed far more seriously.The assistant manager will

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only draw them into confrontation within his concentrated, administrative locus, the factory compound.

Event 1: The Jhagrain versus the Chota Sahib Consider the following narrative about a conflict between a woman and an assistant manager. Julena Munda, an outspoken woman who used to be active in the union. Her reputation in the village is controversial. Most nonunion men contemptuously refer to her as a randi (prostitute), while one woman, shaking her head, noted: ‘‘There are so many stories about her, it is hard to know what is true. She should be careful of her izzat. Certainly, many see her as a jhagrain (shrew). The following event, which occurred many years ago, involves Julena and a chota sahib (assistant manager). The narrative is given as three short vignettes, each offering a different perspective on the encounter in question. julena: I don’t know if you know the sahib.When he was younger, he was kachar [aggressive] and used to push us around a lot. He would actually touch us—as if we didn’t have izzat. We were getting angry. One morning, I was wearing a green nylon vest under my sari and he threw a cigarette down my blouse and burned me. I was so angry that I went after him. He told the boidar’s [timekeeper’s] wife to hide him, but since I called her ‘ma’ (mother), she didn’t. Some Nepali bous [women/wives] tried to hide him, so he sat under the bushes. I found him, though, and scratched his face and nose. I think the scratch on his nose bled. Anyway, I was taken to the office and the burra sahib (I think he was angry but laughing inside) said he would file a case against me because the sahib’s nose was so scratched. I told him to try it. I run the mahila samity [women’s society] in the union and I know their tricks. The only thing he could do was order me to go to the hospital and get my nails cut. The union did nothing for me then, though the sahib stayed away from me. somri: (woman who lives in the Factory Line) Yes, this did happen. We heard about it and one of my sisters was in the chopol [tea block] where the sahib was trying to hide. Julena did not think when she was doing what she did. How can you strike a sahib? She should be careful about her izzat. I always think it is good not to make a scene. I am surprised that she was not given kamjam [work stop], but this must be because of her union work. But didi, be careful of some of her stories; she talks a lot, and who knows? This one is true, though, that I will say.

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govind: (chowkidar who lives in the Factory Line) I know what she did to the sahib because I was his kothi [bungalow] chowkidar. He was always good to me. I can’t believe he did that to her with the cigarette. Anyway, she has no right. He is the sahib. I don’t speak with her when I see her: She is a randi anyway. All three narratives of the conflict between Julena and the sahib confirm it as memorable, as containing its own facticity. Julena, protagonist of the event, gives some background to her precipitous behavior by highlighting the sahib’s previous actions of violation: his small invasions of women’s bodily izzat by physical pushing. Furthermore, in her rendition of the event, she also presents the differing alliances among fellow women workers in the field: the boidar’s wife who was spontaneously loyal to Julena’s fictive claim to kinship and the Nepali dol who tried to hide the sahib among the tea bushes. Even within the concentrated disciplining radius of the office, while facing the burra sahib, Julena asserted her access to institutional power, the unions, as well as hinted at her own knowledge of the sahib’s ‘‘tricks.’’ Significantly, fellow union members did not assist her at any stage of the quick conflagration. However, because the sahib was aware of Julena’s direct access to the union and had some protolegal understanding of her rights, he orders her to merely trim her transgressive nails. Somri, a woman who did not witness the incident, but heard it through the talk circulating in the plantation villages, was quietly disapproving. Her commentary is characteristic of many women’s opinions of Julena’s actions. It is also representative of the powerful quiet conformity implicitly demanded by fellow women of their peers. As such, Somri’s commentary articulates a potent internal disciplining among plantation women; one that not only suggests the importance of keeping quiet (‘‘not creating trouble’’) but also hints at the sense of impotence about realistically challenging the plantation’s status quo. Govind’s brief comments about Julena are explicit in their condemnation of her, articulated through the clarion call term randi (prostitute). Govind’s cross-class and cross-hierarchical sense of alliance with the manager is singularly important in its momentary indexing of a gendered solidarity between the planter and a man of the labor elite.This cross-class alliance is also powerfully articulated by the union’s silence not only in regard to the catalyzing action of the sahib’s flung cigarette but also in any collective support of her case. Consequently, this combination of paternal silencing, as well as the territorial shift from the field landscape into the ambit of planter power, 320

reduced the import of the cigarette burn and Julena’s response to a mild, quickly contained (though remembered) tremor within the plantation day.

Event 2: A ‘‘Thief ’’ and the Chota Sahibs One late afternoon, two assistant managers caught a man stealing tea from the factory. Note the following perspectives on the event, one offered by a factory worker who was a witness, and the other by an assistant manager directly involved. mangal gond: The burra sahib was away around the time it happened. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise; he has more sense than theseyounger sahibs.They caught this worker stealing some tea, and they dragged him into the office and skinned his fingers. He was left there, and in the beginning, the union leaders did nothing. They knew what was happening. A few of us went and passed the news in the garden and toward the end of the shift, hundreds of people had gathered in the compound. The burra sahib came back in his jeep and a rock was thrown at him. The sahibs were in the office with him. The union leaders were now involved, and the burra sahib had to come out and apologize. There were at least five hundred people there then. The sahibs were suspended by the company for a month. The thing is this: if someone is caught stealing, then send him to jail or charge-sheet him, but why hit his fingers so that they are skinned? To me, this is paap [sin]. a sahib: Tea theft is common in the factory, and we have to be alert. It is an unspoken agreement that if anyone was caught, we could thrash them, and stop their work.Well, yes, it is illegal, but that is the way it is. How else do you prevent these continuous problems with theft? The company loses lots of money. So, we caught this one chap and we gave him a hiding. One person got overexcited and hit his fingers with the edge of a window pane. It was a mistake; we did not mean for it to go that far. We were blamed for it, and I almost got hacked to pieces. But I have my eyes on that man; he is a regular thief, and I will catch him again. The trajectory of the event, its escalation and containment, provides a significant contrast to Julena’s act of protest.While Mangal does suggest in his narrative that union leaders were not involved in the first phase of organizing, within a couple of hours the situation has resulted in explicit union involvement. Because of the workers’ rapid and extensive mobilization, the senior planter was not only forced to publicly apologize for the incident, but he Protest 321

and the tea company had to suspend the men involved. Not only was the senior planter’s physical safety threatened by a carefully aimed rock thrown as he barricaded himself behind closed office doors, but an all-plantation strike-call was sounded. In short, the ‘‘small’’ matter of tea theft had turned, in this one instance, into a flashpoint. Julena’s singular protest in the field prompts general disapproval of her various public actions, explained partially by whispers of heralleged promiscuity.Cultural norms about sexual im/propriety filter into this social disapproval of her activities. The watchman’s powerful hostility also signals the threads of a gendered, cross-class alliance between planter and labor elite. Coupled with the union leader’s tacit acceptance of the manager’s order that she clip her nails, it translates into a paternal marginalization of her protest against the microcosmic, but potent, invasion of her sense of bodily honor. On the other hand, the assault on the alleged thief precipitates an unambivalent and complete support from plantation communities and various political unions.What could help us understand the startlingly different responses to these events? In the first place, the communities of workers perceived the ‘‘thief ’’ caught in the factory as a victim of the sahib’s coercive actions, and the alleged thief had not fought the managers. Julena, on the other hand, had acted on her own initiative, even though it was against an unprovoked assault. It was her strident claim to autonomous agency that was measured negatively by many women and men in the plantation. Significantly, what catalyzed her protest—the assistant manager’s act of violence—is utterly eclipsed by the explicit and transgendered silencing of her response. These moments of rupture and containment highlight the important ways in which gender and power define the coercive edges of the labor regime. Planters view their encounters with women as less threatening than their conflicts with men. It is the latter’s gathering in field tasks that feeds the planters’ fears of political resistance and violence against the plantocracy. Women’s own choreographies of organized collective action, meanwhile, are constrained by a pancommunity lexicon of honor. Strategies of containment are charted through cartographic shifts.Tense field encounters are moved, almost invariably, into the concentrated ambit of managerial power, the factory. It is a movement to construct a panopticon that signals focused containment. The field’s vast dispersal is no longer relevant or dangerous. Conversely, a conflict which begins within the factory is invested with great significance, because its locus of collective confrontation suggests the final and most potent threat to the planter’s center of power. 322

Consider, for a moment, the rock suddenly thrown. Consider, again, the sickle raised.

‘‘Let us not walk alone’’ Anjali and I walk across the extension area of the plantation. New tea seedlings are being laid in careful rows by women and children. We talk to the overseer and head back toward the bungalow.The sun is high, we unfurl our umbrellas. I pause to catch my breath, and Anjali turns to me. ‘‘You know, didi, when I think of all this paper you are collecting about the garden, my head begins to go dizzy. How are you going to make sense of it?’’ Since I am already overwhelmed by the sheer scope and diversity of issues in this one plantation, I can only concur. She continues, ‘‘Well, I think you should just write about what you know. I have lived here my whole life, and I don’t know about all the jats and all the customs. It is not possible and you will become mad if you try.’’ That evening, we are planning to walk to Kolpara, four miles in from Umesh Kholla through the spread field of the plantation. Munnu is taking me after work, and Anjali may come. She shakes her head. ‘‘Didi, what can I say? Let us not walk alone. Everything will be empty and we are only women. Aurat ki jat, dukh ki jat he. [The community of women is a community of sorrow.] Who knows who might jump out and attack us? If we were men, we could puff up and not have to worry but we aren’t men. . . . So, Didi, be careful.’’ Anjali can’t make it for this evening visit. Munnu and I do walk by ourselves across the stretch of tea bushes to Kolpara. It is still light and this is a familiar walk for her. On our way back, when it is too dark for two women to walk alone, some kinsmen from her natal village escort us back to Sarah’s Hope. Carrying long bamboo stick and lanterns, they accompany us on the main road. Bhutua, a village dog who has adopted me, lopes alongside, pausing to sniff the edges of the road. Munnu points out a ripple of bushes that follow the dog and says, ‘‘A leopard is following the dog, do you see it? If we were walking through the tea bushes, he would have eaten the dog.’’ Slightly chilled, I watch the small ripple in the dusky green of the field. Bhutua’s hackles are raised.We near Sarah’s Hope with no sudden appearance of the leopard tracking us. We thank the men, and part company ourselves, walking the last few steps to our respective homes alone.

Protest 323

chapter 9 A Last Act

act 9 The spotlight turns on the Narrator who is standing extreme stage left. She holds in her hand, the black oil lantern. It glows brightly. She turns it down. She walks around the crescent of the stage and arrives back at her table, stage right. As she does so, all the characters of the play appear quietly and take their customary places. Alice, the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and the Doormouse sit at their tea party. The Sahibs and Memsahibs sit on rattan chairs, center stage. The son of the forest, the four Women, the Goddess holding a sickle, come out from behind the gauze backdrop, stage left and squat on the ground. She looks around at them. Her fingers move across the artifacts of the story on the table: a clutter of false nails, the quill, the porcelain tea cup, the teapot. She holds up her fingers; the long nails flicker in the light. she: (turning in her seat to look at Alice) So here we all are, Alice, spiraling back to the beginning.To our fingers, our nails, their thin cuticles. Nothing begins or ends, perhaps, but this flexing of flesh. The fingers curling around stones. Then throwing, throwing, throwing. There is a long pause. Five slow, steady but loud beats from a drum. Who can say anything about the endurance of women? Perhaps the plantation is like Singbhum, ‘‘a white-haired old woman collecting firewood in the jungles, who never answers a stranger, never looks at anyone. Keeping the intruders into her grief, at a distance, beyond the barrier of her silence, she continues collecting firewood.’’ 1 A second long pause. Five slow, steady but loud beats from a drum. Keeping the intruders into her grief at a distance . . . . Keeping the intruders into her grief at a distance . . . . The lights are turned off suddenly. The silence must be absolute.

Appendix

table a1. Monthly Rated Salary/Wages for Grade A and B Staff A.Wage Chart

Category

Total Starting Salary (monthly)

Clerical Grade I

Rs. 

Clerical Grade II

Rs.  

Clerical Grade III

Rs.  . 

Medical Grade I Medical Grade II

Rs.   Rs.  

Technician Grade ‘‘A’’

Rs. 

Technical Grade ‘‘B’’

Rs.  

Grade Head clerk Head factory clerk Clerk in charge of out-garden (field staff ) Seniormost garden clerk (field staff ) nd clerk (office/garden) nd factory clerk Senior stores clerk Typist Junior clerk Stores clerk Doctor Laboratory technician Theater nurse Staff nurse Special mechanic Special carpenter Head mechanic Head engine driver Head electrician Certified boiler attendant (st class) Master carpenter Latheman

B. Authorised Amenities for Clerical, Medical,Technician Grade ‘‘A’’ and ‘‘B’’ Staff [Excerpts] 1. Free Quarters: For each employee and his/her family as defined in the Plantation Labour Act. 2. Firewood: 1 peel per month per household. Firewood maybe of any type or types which are available and may include, as a whole or part of the scale, uprooted tea bushes, shade trees and wood from other local sources. If sufficient firewood is not available, other suitable types of fuel may be substituted, such as coal, soft coke, etc. Measurement of a peel is 5 × 5 × 2½ feet. Two quintals of soft coke equals to one peel of firewood. 3. Rations at the scale and concessional rate as may be prescribed from time to time for himself, his wife and children up to the age of 18 years and unmarried daughters. Ration to children to be given if fully dependent on parents, living on the garden and not employed. Husband of a working wife will be considered an adult dependent provided he is physically handicapped and incapable of working. 4. Medical Facilities: Free use of medical facilities provided by the industry in accordance with the West Bengal plantations Labour Rules for himself and his ‘‘family’’ as defined in the Plantation Labour Act while residing on the garden. ‘‘Family’’ when used in relation to a workman means: (1) his or her spouse and (2) the legitimate and adopted children of the worker dependent upon him or her, who have not completed their eighteenth year, and include, where the worker is male, his parents dependent upon him. 5. Maternity Leave: As per Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 (1 week = 7 days) 6. Lighting: Where supply of electricity is not available, kerosene oil at the scale of 9 litres per month per household will be issued. Source: Excerpted from Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association, Pay, Allowances and Other Conditions of Service (Circular no. 28, September 1998), 1–5.

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table a2. Monthly Rated Salary/Wages For Other Monthly Rated Employees A.Wage Chart

Category

Total Starting Salary

Grade 

Rs.  

Grade 

Rs. . 

Grade 

Rs. .

Grade Head foreman (factory), Head overseer (garden)/Head munshi, Overseer (garden) munshi, Seniormost nurse/midwife without certificate, Seniormost factory sirdar, Seniormost boidar, Headwatchman/Head chowkidar Senior foreman, Garden chaprasi, Field writer/ boidar, Head storeman (garden), Chief foreman (garden), Head field writer, Senior foreman & factory writer, Senior medicine carrier, Senior hospital attendant, Midwife without state midwifery and nursing certificates but locally trained Watchman/chowkidar, Foreman/duffadar/ Factory sirdar, Timekeeper (factory), Oilman, Tubewell attendent, Stenciller/Stencil foreman, Postman/Storekeeper, Blacksmith, Untrained midwife (Dhai), Mason

B. Authorised Amenities [Excerpts] 1. Free Quarters: For each employee and his/her family as defined in the Plantations Labour Act. 2. Firewood: 3 peels annually per household. 3. Rations: At the scale and concessional rate as may be prescribed from time to time for himself, his wife—if incapable of working or have been refused employment—and children up to the age of 18 years, living on the garden, fully dependent on parents, and not employed. 4. Dry tea: 400 grammes per worker per month. Source: Excerpted from Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association, Pay, Allowances and Other Conditions of Service (Circular no. 28, September 1998), 9–11.

Appendix 329

table a3. Scales of Pay and Allowances for Daily Rated Garden Workers Time Period

Adult

Child

A.Wages: Garden Workers / / to //

/ / to // / / to //

Rs. . Rs. . Rs.  . 

Rs.  .

Rs. . Rs.  .

B.Wages: Factory Workers / / to //

/ / to // / / to //

Rs. ./. Rs.  ./ .  Rs. . / .

Rs. . / . Rs.  . / .

Rs. ./.

Notes: 1. Paniwalas (watercarriers) [other than bungalow and hospital], malies (gardeners), sweepers, lorry and tractor mates, helper to mechanic, carpenters and masons, cowherders (where employed) will receive Rs. 2.00 and tea makers and helpers to fitters will receive Rs. 2.50 as ‘‘Additional Compensation’’ as shown under Factory Workers; 2. Extra leaf pice 50 paise per kg.W.e.f 1/5/98. B. Authorised Amenities 1. Free Quarters: For each employee and his/her family as defined in the Plantations Labour Act. 2. Firewood: 2½ peels annually per household as per agreement dated 1/2/97. Management shall supply coal briquettes in lieu of firewood. One standard Dooars peel of firewood will be equivalent to 286 kilos of coal briquettes. A household of a daily rated workman in receipt of . . . will received coal briquettes amounting to 715 kgs in Dooars area. A ‘‘chulah’’ is to be supplied free of cost at time of introduction. 3. Rations: At the scale and concessional rate as may be prescribed from time to time for himself, his wife—if incapable of working or have been refused employment—and children up to the age of 18 years, living on the garden, fully dependent on parents, and not employed. 4. Maternity Leave: As per Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 (1 week = 7 days) 5. Dry Tea: 400 grammes per worker per month. Source: Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association, Pay, Allowances and Other Conditions of Service (Circular no. 28, September 1998), 9–11.

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table a4. Gendered Muster and Field Labor Tasks, Peak Season 1992 Permanent Field Task

Casual (Bigha)

Men Women Adolescent Children Women Men Children

april  * Weeding 

 * Plucking   — — Manuring — — — — *Only one day worked in the fourteen-day sample.

—  

— — —

—  —

may Weeding 

Plucking    *Only three days worked.

 —

— —

 —

june Weeding 

 — — Plucking

  ** *Only eleven days worked; ** Only three days worked.

 * —

— —

 —

july Weeding 

Plucking   *Only eight days worked.

 * —

— —

— —

 —

— —

 —

  *

— —

— —

 

august  Weeding 

 * — Plucking    ** *Only ten days worked; ** Only five days worked.

Note: All compilations collected from Daily Kamjari (Work/Attendance) Book at Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate in 1992. Monthly averages were calculated from fourteen days of statistics.

Appendix 331

table a5. Sample Labor Return: Particulars of Numbers Working During the Week March 22–30, 1991 and Weekly Report of Crop

Date       

 

Total Haziri (No. of Workers)

Total Kilograms Plucked

Total Kilograms Manufactured

Total Kilograms Packed

  

   





  

      

 

         



   





      

Notes: 1. Estimated crop = 1,250,000 kg.; 2. Average number of field pluckers (out of total number of workers) = 642.

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Glossary

adivasi: indigenous communities on the lower rungs of the caste system or who do not participate within it; also known as dalit angrezi zamana: ‘‘English period’’; the epoch of British rule ayah: maid; domestic who cares for children; woman who does housekeeping and washing babu: clerical and garden staff on the plantation, usually Bengali bagan: garden bara aadmi: ‘‘big’’ person; person of higher status basha: house, home; staff cottage on the plantation bat: talk, usually informal bhadra: civil; gentlemanly; describes class gentility bhadralog: gentleman, usually Bengali bhagat: ritual master; faith healer; shaman; doctor bigha: unit of land; temporary worker boidar: timekeeper; person who checks attendance on the plantation burra sahib: senior manager; ‘‘big’’ sahib burra memsahib: senior manager’s wife chota sahib: assistant manager; of several ranks chowkidar: watchman coolie: plantation worker; someone who does heavy manual work; a

disparaging term that is used ubiquitously cha: tea (Bengali); chai (Hindi) daffadar: first-level garden overseer daini: witch daru: country liquor didi: elder sister dol: group; labor gang faltu: of no use; temporary labor firanghi: foreigner garib log: poor people, often used self-referentially ghinna: repulsion gora sahib: white or fair man, often in reference to British men handia: homebrew rice beer; also known as pachwai hat: country and local market hukum: order itihas: history izzat: honor jat: community, caste jatra: drama; festival; dance kam: work kala aadmi: black person kanun: rule, regulation lal cha: red tea; liquor tea consumed by workers and villagers mahila samity: women’s organization or society maiji: workers’ term for wife of babu/clerk, usually Bengali mashal: home-made torch with open flame, used to scare elephants matal: drunkard; alcoholic

mazdoor: worker missionya: of the ‘‘mission’’; Christian natak: theater, play nazar: attention; gaze neta: leader, usually union or political party chief panchayat: village council puja: religious ritual, usually Hindu raj: kingdom; used to describe ‘‘rule’’

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of, e.g., British, Planters, as in Swaraj randi: prostitute; hussy, promiscuous samaj: society shakti: power, strength zamindari: landowning; measure of land owned by a landlord (zamindar)

Notes

chapter 1 Alap 1 ‘‘Association, intercourse, speaking, conversation, discourse, enumeration of the question in an arithmetical and algebraic sum; modulation or rising of the voice in singing, tuning up and prelude to a song. Alap chari is tuning the voice preparatory to singing. In Hindi, turned a verb called alapna and that means to tune the voice, to run over the notes previous to singing, to catch the proper key, to pitch or raise the voice, to cry with pain, moan, groan.’’ (John T. Platts, ed., Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English, 2nd Indian edition [Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1988]). Alap in colloquial north Indian usage simply means ‘‘introduction.’’ 2 (Burra) sahib is a Hindi vernacular term from the colonial period which loosely translated suggests ‘‘master/ruler/gentleman.’’ Burra translates loosely as ‘‘big.’’ In the colonial period, it referred explicitly to a European, Briton, or English person. In postcolonial India, sahib (like its feminized counterpart, memsahib) connotes upper-class/caste, urban,Westernized status. Burra sahib is less common than the generic salutation of sahib. In the contemporary plantation, burra sahib refers explicitly to the senior manager or planter, who is contrasted to his assistant manager, the chota (small/secondary) sahib. 3 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Little Ones,’’ in Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans. Ipsita Chandra (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998), 2. 4 Jatra refers to the folk theater of rural Bengal. My use of it here encompasses this meaning as well as the hybrid adivasi (noncaste, non-Hindu) and non-Bengali dance gatherings in the plantations of north Bengal. 5 Kichdi is a vegetable and lentil dish, mixed together with rice. It suggests culinary confusion, a mixing of what should otherwise remain separate in the rites of cooking, consumption, and commensality. I deploy it to connote a purposeful categorical hybridity. 6 As a way to highlight the central presence of these three women who were my primary interlocuters, I do not use pseudonyms for them. I use their first names and their family surnames or ‘‘titles’’ as a way to mark their centrality in the narratives which follow. Rita Chhetri, who appears later in the book, also goes by her real name. The politics of naming is an important

7

8

9

10

11

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index of worker’s experience as very often new recruits refused to give their names or were given ‘‘day names’’ after the day of the week, and their jat (community) status. Thus, Sannicharwa Oraon literally means, ‘‘Saturday Oraon.’’ I have tried to remain attentive to these historical ironies and the political ontology of naming in what has been ‘‘chosen’’ for this narrative. I was careful to ask both their preference and permission to do this after reading out sections of the manuscript to them. We discussed the political ramifications of such transparency in the text. In other cases, particularly in connection with the labor protest discussed in the last chapter, some of the women involved asked that pseudonyms be used and even chose the names they wanted. In the case of other individuals, I ascribed pseudonyms, giving them last names, too, to index coeval ontological effects. Madhuri Dixit is one of the reigning film ‘‘goddesses’’ in the contemporary Hindi film pantheon. Her films, popular Bombay (‘‘Bollywood’’) productions, are shown on rented videos in the workers’ clubs or screened at the local cinema hall in a nearby town. Memsahib, like its masculine counterpart sahib, referred initially to colonial British women. For an excellent discussion of the emergence and transformation of this term within Anglo-Indian and imperial discourses, see Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 85–110. I am indebted to Amalendu Guha’s use of this term. See Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1977). I use the term Planter Raj interchangeably with British Raj in the context of northeast Indian plantation histories. I extrapolate from Fernand Braudel’s famous formulation of the ‘‘long, even very long time span.’’ (Braudel, ‘‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,’’ in On History ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 26). For the phrase narrative seedbed, I am indebted to a conversation I had with filmmakers and writers Kabir Mohanty, Amitabha Chakravarty, Sharmistha Mohanty and Mandira Mitra in Calcutta in December 1997. Kabir Mohanty suggested that the notion of a ‘‘narrative seedbed’’ might be useful forasserting an authorial voice that was collective, relational, and dialogical.While this seedbed rests within the contours of a quite specific selfhood, it can gesture to the plural and psychic construction of ethnographic authority. Anna Tsing, ‘‘From the Margins,’’ Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (August 1994): 293. See also her brilliant placement of a historical, global discourse through the words of Uma Adang in In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle (London: John Gifford, 1945), 50. The ‘‘moral economy’’ argument in the context of labor history has been

14

15

16

17

18

most brilliantly and carefully made by E. P.Thompson. My argument about plantation ‘‘moral economies’’ deploys this notion of consent, solidarity, and resistance. See E. P.Thompson ‘‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. ‘‘Folklore, Anthropology and Social History,’’ Indian Historical Review 3, no. 2 (1977). I am indebted to Sumit Sarkar’s excellent discussion of Thompson’s formulation of class-in-culture consciousness, as well as his assertion of Thompson’s continuing importance for the study of Indian historiography and, I would add, for Indian historical anthropology. See Sarkar, ‘‘The Relevance of E. P. Thompson,’’ in Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 58–63. I will include records of the rare instances in which women were allowed entry into the cadre of overseership. However, central to my argument is that a paternal system of labor discipline constructed a strategic, though unequal, alliance between planters and some working-class men. Indeed, the construction of a masculine labor elite was predicated upon women’s subordination within the social organization of labor. My use of the term ‘‘counterstances’’ both borrows and extrapolates from Gloria Anzaldúa, who locates it specifically within the context of Chicana/o oppositional consciousness: the ‘‘counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs. . . . The counterstance stems from a problem with authority, outer as well as inner, it is a step towards liberation from cultural domination.’’ Though Anzaldúa draws out the limitations of this positioning as strategy in the context of Chicana/o cultural politics, I find it useful to view the bodied and historical orality of Indian plantation women as both ‘‘inner’’ (psychic) and ‘‘outer’’ (material) defiance against the terms of plantation subordination.The dialectic of interior/exterior is critical for a sense of cultural meaning, personhood, and solidarity. The suggestion of a conscious and bodied ‘‘posture’’ in the term stance resonates with the grounded locations of Indian plantation women’s daily commentaries and their resistance. See Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘‘La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,’’ in Making Face, Making Soul: Hacienda caras—Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. G. Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), 378. This is a small makeshift store. It sells betel nut leaf and condiments ( paan) with cigarettes and sweets.Clusters of men are frequently seen buying items, and whether in village, town, or city; it is a sphere of decidedly masculine commerce. Administrative documents that exemplify such colonial ethnographies include the Tea District Labour Association’s Handbook of Castes and Tribes Employed in the Tea Estates of North-East India (Calcutta: tdla, 1924); and such magisterial accounts as W. W. Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri and the State of Kuch Behar, vol. 10 (London, 1876). Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism and

Notes to Chapter One 337

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the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 288. See Chandra Mohanty, ‘‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,’’ in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Chandra Mohanty, ‘‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,’’ in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. C. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L.Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 51–80; cf. Lata Mani, ‘‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception,’’ Feminist Review 24, no. 35 (summer 1990): 24–41; Caren Kaplan, ‘‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Practice,’’ in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. I. Grewal and C. Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 127–152; M. Lazreg, ‘‘Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,’’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (spring 1988): 81–107; Adrienne Rich, ‘‘Notes towards a Politics of Location,’’ in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986). For arguments about authorial hybridity and its impact on postcolonial and feminist ethnographic writing, see Kirin Narayan, ‘‘How Native Is a ‘‘Native’’ Anthropologist?’’ American Anthropologist 95 (1993): 671–686; Mary E. John, ‘‘Post-colonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field: Anthropologists and Native Informants?’’ Inscriptions 5, no. 6 (1989): 49–74; Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, ‘‘ ‘Native’ Anthropologists,’’ American Ethnologist 11 (1984): 584–86. For an excellent critique of the category of postcoloniality within the politics of race/class in the United States and United Kingdom, which is relevant to the circuits of postcolonial feminist ethnographies, see Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘‘Cross-Currents, Cross-Talk: Race, ‘‘Postcoloniality’’ and the Politics of Location,’’ Cultural Studies 7, no. 2: 292–310. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’’ Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory 5, no. 9 (1990): 7–27; Judith Stacey, ‘‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’’ Women’s Studies International Forum 11, no. 1 (1988): 21–27; Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). In raising these questions, I remain indebted to a growing body of work by postcolonial scholars, that examines their own institutional location, displacement, hybridity, marginality and privilege as integral to the analysis of imperialism, travel, ethnography, literature, feminisms and so on. See Mary E. John, ‘‘Post-Colonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field: Anthropologists and Native Informants?’’ Inscriptions 5, no. 6 (1989): 49–74; Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Chandra Mohanty, ‘‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,’’ in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra

Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80; Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 277–313; Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion: Exoticism and Decolonization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Banerjee, Himani. ‘‘Geography Lessons: On Being an Insider/Outsider to the Canadian Nation,’’ in Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality in Education (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23–42; Ali Behdad. ‘‘Traveling to Teach: Postcolonial Critics in the American Academy,’’ in Race Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McArthy and Warren Crichlow (New York: Routledge, 1993), 40–49; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1989; Aihwa Ong, ‘‘Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Representations of Women in NonWestern Societies,’’ Inscriptions 3 and 4 (1986): 79–93. 23 In this gesture to the ‘‘transnational,’’ I refer explicitly to Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, ‘‘Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,’’ in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. I. Grewal and C. Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1–36; Caren Kaplan, ‘‘Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,’’ Cultural Critique 6 (spring 1987): 187–198. For an excellent critique of the hegemonic place of the U.S. nation-state in relation to feminist ethnographic production, see Deborah Gordon, ‘‘U.S. Feminist Ethnography and the Denationalizing of ‘America’: A Retrospective on Women Writing Culture,’’ in Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights, ed. Rae Bridgeman et al. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1999), 54–69. 24 In this case, I refer quite specifically to the state power of the United States, through its immigration and legal policy, to determine when and if a person may enter, leave, and return to the United States. See Chandra Mohanty, ‘‘Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on Being South Asian in North America,’’ Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, ed. G. Kirk and M. Ogazawa-Rey (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing, 1998), 92–97. See also Ali Behdad, ‘‘Traveling to Teach: Postcolonial Critics in the American Academy,’’ in Race Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McArthy and Warren Crichlow (New York: Routledge, 1993), 40–49. I am mindful of Behdad’s important cautionary note about postcolonial privilege vis à vis other immigrant and migrant communities who are not protected by the class status and education in their experiences of displacement and exile within the United States. 25 I am thinking specifically of a wor(l)ding of the ethnographic text in which the ‘‘actual’’ social world that it purports to represent remains in a tense dialectical movement with it. See Dorothy E. Smith, ‘‘Textually Mediated Social Organization,’’ in Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (Routledge: London, 1990), 209–24; Dorothy E. Smith, The

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Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987). The theories and debates of a gendered stance of ‘‘knowing,’’ or of feminist epistemology, has a vast literature. Gender standpoint theory and feminist critiques of science have proven to be the most fruitful for my own understanding and deployment of feminist knowledge claims within ‘‘Third World’’ and postcolonial frames. See Donna Haraway, ‘‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,’’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 4 (1988): 575–599; Helen Longino, ‘‘Feminist Standpoint Theory and Problems of Knowledge,’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 1 (1993): 201–212. For some important critiques of U.S. feminist theory and gender standpoint theory, see bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); and Cathy O’Leary, ‘‘Counteridentification or Counterhegemony? Transforming Feminist Standpoint Theory,’’ Women and Politics 18, no. 3 (1997): 45–72. Here, I am suggesting another kind of stance with regards to the selfreflexivity of a certain postmodern, North American anthropology.Within these important creative moments, the hyper/self-conscious and reflexive subject position of the ethnographer and his or her ‘‘engaged relativism’’ can—in its apparent transparency—obscure the actual terms of power that chart ethnographic encounters. See Elizabeth Enslin’s excellent discussion of this in ‘‘Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography,’’ Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 4 (1994): 537–568; cf. Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen, ‘‘The PostModernist Turn in Anthropology: Caution from a Feminist Perspective,’’ Signs 15, no. 1 (1989): 7–33. Dennis Tedlock, ‘‘The Analogical Tradition and the Emergence of a Dialogical Anthropology,’’ Journal of Anthropology Research 35, no. 4 (winter 1979): 387–400; Kevin Dwyer, Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Antonin Artaud, ‘‘Preface: The Theatre and Culture,’’ in The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 12. While I find Artaud’s positing of a self/other binary in his lauding of Balinese theater against the inertia of ‘‘Western’’ theater problematic, I find his assertion of an alternative theater springing from Balinese philosophies of artistic expression creative, tense, and inspiring. Artaud, ‘‘On the Balinese Theater,’’ The Theatre, 63. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: Southend Press, 1984); hooks, ‘‘Writing from the Darkness,’’ Triquarterly, no. 75 (spring– summer 1989): 71–75. See Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ As Spivak remarks, ‘‘a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism.’’ See her extended critique in ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ (291).

33 Dorothy E. Smith, ‘‘Textually Mediated Social Organization,’’ Texts, Facts and Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990), 210. 34 In this recognition of refusal as a certain codification of power, I am interested in Spivak’s fleshing of Pierre Macherey’s meditations on ‘‘silence.’’ In the context of subaltern representation, she argues that what he notes as a ‘‘task of measuring silences’’ can be fruitful within critiques of imperialism. As she notes, ‘‘Although the notion, ‘what it refuses to say’ might be careless for a literary work, something like a collective ideological refusal can be diagnosed for the codifying legal practice of imperialism. . . . The archival, historiographic, disciplinary-critical, and inevitably, interventionist work involved here is indeed a task of ‘measuring silences.’ ’’ ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak,’’ 286–287. 35 Bhagirathi Mahato’s commentary begs the question of textual capital and circulation, and the politics of audience and accountability that are embedded in such critiques. 36 See Edward Said’s critique of anthropology’s cartographies and the perspectives of required distance in the writing of ethnography, in ‘‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocuters,’’ Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 205–225. 37 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ in The Complete Stories of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, 1993), 68.

chapter 2 Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 1 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ The Complete Stories of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, 1993), 71–72. 2 William Ukers, All about Tea (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, 1935), 2:31. 3 This indelible connection with the Chinese/oriental ‘‘East’’ was noted many centuries later by G. K. Chesterton who, with explicit and racialized orientalism, wrote: ‘‘Tea is like the East he grows in / A great yellow Mandarin / With urbanity of manner / And unconscious of sin.’’ Quoted in James M. Scott, The Great Tea Venture (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), 55. 4 Marshall Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘the World System,’ ’’ Proceedings of the British Academy 74, no. 4 (1988): 1–51. 5 Ukers, All about Tea; Lu Yü, The Classic of Tea, trans. and ed. Francis R. Carpei (Boston: Little, Brown 1974), 65. William Ukers notes that the text attributed to Shen Nung was not written until the neo-Han dynasty (25– 221 a.d.), 3,400 years after his imperial claim to its goodness. 6 Charulal Mukherjee, ‘‘From Old Files: Tea, Its Magic and Logic,’’ Assam Review and Tea News 77, no. 5 (July 1988): 35. Japanese Buddhists believe that this Boddhidharma brought the faith from India to China in the fifth century and grew sleepy at the end of seven years.The same story is told of the opium poppy, see Jason Goodwin, The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through

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India and China in Search of Tea (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 4. Ironically, it is only centuries later that the histories of tea and opium mingle in definitive ways, to herald both the onset of British governance in India and the end of Chinese imperial, dynastic rule. Another legend has a Chinese monk, Wu Li Chien, returning from Buddhist studies in India during the late Han dynasty with seven tea plants, which he planted in Sichuan. See Ukers, All about Tea, 10. Ukers, All about Tea, 3. Robert Gardella, Harvesting Mountains: Fujians and the China Tea Trade, 1757–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 23–24. Ibid., 24. I am indebted to Robert Gardella’s exhaustive study of the Fujian tea trade for this summary. Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 27. John C. Evans, Tea in China: The History of China’s National Drink (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 52. Ibid., 79. Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 25. Lu Yü, The Classic of Tea. Evans, Tea in China, 42. Scott, The Great Tea Venture, 3. In some cases, silk gloves were worn, covering hands and fingers, exposing only fingernails pushing through the openings at the fingertips. All these descriptions are from English accounts of travels in southern China and from secondary texts. As such, a refetishization in terms of the emphasis given might be already happening in this rereading. John Blofeld, The Chinese Art of Tea (Boston: Shambala Publications, 1985), 74. Another striking instance of dis/embodied fetishism is the classification of tea known as hyson-skin. Derived from the original Chinese term in which connection to the skin meant refuse, this word is an allusion to the hide of an animal. In preparing hyson tea, leaves that are coarser are set aside and sold as refuse. Robert Fortune, Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China (1847; New York: Garland, 1979), 69. Blofeld, The Chinese Art of Tea, 74. Ukers, All about Tea, 3. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (Boston: Shambala Publications, 1993), 26. Goodwin, The Gunpowder Gardens, 42. Blofeld, The Chinese Art of Tea, 34. Lu Yü, The Classic of Tea, 40. Ukers, All about Tea, 15 (excerpt from the Ch’a Ching). Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 246. Okakura, Book of Tea, 33. Sen Sohitusu XV, ‘‘Reflections on Chanoyu and Its History,’’ in Tea in Japan:

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Essays on the History of the Chanoyu, ed. P. Varley and K. Isao (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 235. Lt.Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations,’’ Assam Review and Tea News 77, no. 66 (April 1987): 33. Evans, Tea in China, 73. Ukers, All about Tea, 22. Ibid.; A. Ibbetson, Tea: From Grower to Consumer (London: Pittman and Sons, 1962).This reference to early temperance is confirmed by Giambattista Ramusin’s note of an encounter with a Persian merchant, Hajji Mohammed: ‘‘He told me that all over Cathay, they made use of another plant or rather its leaves.This is called by these people, chai catai, and grows in the district of Cathay which is called Cacian fu [Sichuan]. It is so highly valued and esteemed that everyone going on a journey takes it with him, and these people would gladly give a sack of rhubarb for one ounce of chai catai.’’ Quoted in Michael Cooper, ‘‘The Early Europeans and Tea,’’ in Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of the Chanoyu, ed. Paul Varley and Kamakura Isao (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 103. Souchong translates ‘‘small’’ or ‘‘scarce.’’ Fortune, Three Years’ Wanderings, 60. Marshall Sahlins, describing the splendid displays of Chinese imperial wealth, notes that a French missionary found it ‘‘incredible how rich this sovereign is in curiosities and magnificent objects of all kinds from the Occident.’’ See his ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism’’ (for a detailed description of these other imperial collections). Ibid.; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 252. Evans, Tea in China, 57. In a letter dated June 17, 1615, we find a Mr.Wixam writing to Mr. Eaton, a company agent posted in Macao: ‘‘Mr. Eaton, I pray you buy for me a pot of the best sort of chaw in Meaco, 2 Fairebowes and Arrows, and half a dozen of Meaco quilt boxes squares for to put in to barque and whatsoever they cost you I will be alsue willinge. . . . vale, yours, R.W.’’ Ibbetson, Tea, 72. Ukers, All about Tea, 44. Eric Wolf notes that ‘‘Asia, since the Roman era, a purveyor of valued goods for tribute taking claims, drained Europe of precious metals. Expanding conquest and trade in Asia thus promised to reverse the asymmetrical relation between debtors and creditors.’’ Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 124–25. See also his excellent summary of the silver trade between the Americas, which paid for Chinese tea.The bullion drainage reproduced what he calls ‘‘an ancient problem’’ (225). See also Marshall Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism.’’ See Sahlin’s detailed discussion of this ‘‘thick’’ symbology of the Confucian state order within the spatial and ordered universe of this display—both in the imperial court and its summer palace. Ibid. Ibid., 252.

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44 Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 34. 45 By early 1800s, consumption levels had crossed the 20 million pound mark. See Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism,’’ 13. 46 Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 45. 47 Ibid., 46. 48 Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey from Portsmouth to KingstonUpon-Thames; through Southampton . . . With Miscellaneous Thoughts; in Sixty-Four Letters: Addressed to Two Ladies of the Party to Which is Added An Essay on Tea With Several Political Reflections; and Thoughts on Public Love by Mr. H (London, 1757), 35. 49 Edward Bramah, Tea and Coffee: A Modern View of 300 Years of Tradition (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 77. 50 Ibid., 78. 51 Carole Shammas, in her extensive study of preindustrial consumerism in England and the United States, notes that the rise in tea drinking was reflected in consumption data through the century. Colonial allegiance, she notes, to caffeine drinks can be measured by the amount of equipment—tea kettles, teacups, tea tables, coffee, and chocolate pots that they bought to accompany their consumption. See Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 63–64. 52 T. H. Breen, ‘‘ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,’’ Past and Present, no. 119 (1988): 79. 53 Ibid., 83. 54 Bramah, Tea and Coffee, 79. 55 The Boston Tea Party, December 1773, illustration by H.W. McVickar (New York: Dodd Mead, 1882), 17–19. The poem accompanying this illustration was written by Josephine Pollard (1834–1892), a well-known nineteenthcentury author of children’s books who was also famous as a composer of hymns. 56 Breen, ‘‘ ‘Baubles of Britain,’ ’’ 92. 57 Ibid., 93. 58 Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism,’’ 257. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 255. 59 E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 324. 60 Om Prakash, ‘‘The Opium Monopoly in India and Indonesia in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 34, no. 1 (1987): 70. 61 Analysis of the themes in William Hogarth’s rich and satirical lithographs have suggested that the monkey symbolized the Jewish merchants who patronized ‘‘Christian ladies,’’ a common theme in South Sea prints, and in his more famous ‘‘A Harlot’s Progress.’’ This racist, anti-Semitic symbolism was an important commentary about ‘‘outsider’’ mercantile success within the heady commerce of eighteenth-century England. See David Dabydeen, Hogarth,Walpole and Commercial Britain (London: Hansib Pub-

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lishing, 1987), 24–25, 82; David Bindman and Scott Wilcox, eds., ‘‘Among the Whores and Thieves’’: William Hogarth and The Beggars’ Opera (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art, 1997), 95. Denys Forrest, Tea For the British: The Social and Economic History of a Famous Trade (London: Chatto Windus, 1973), 26. Ukers, All about Tea, 10. Bramah, Tea and Coffee, 133. Agnes Reppelier, To Think of Tea! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 32. Bohea, pronounced boo hee, is an inexpensive type of black tea consisting mostly of orange pekoe or pekoe leaves that have been broken or crushed during manufacture. It became synonymous with tea itself in the eighteenth century because of its low cost and also low caffeine level. It was used almost as a slang word. Ibid., 92. P. G.Woodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves (London: Random House, 1934), 65. Sixteenth-century coffee houses were the meeting grounds of merchants and traders and were demarcated as masculine spaces. Known as ‘‘penny universities,’’ these meeting places cut across class in such democratic ways that the king had them closed. See John MacDonald, A History of the Sale and Use of Tea in England (London: 1871), 21. Reppelier, To Think of Tea! 22. Ibid., 57. Scott, The Great Tea Venture, 102. Mukherjee, ‘‘From Old Files,’’ 35. Ukers, All about Tea, 20. Hanway, A Journal, 35. Forrest, Tea for the British. See Thomas Mayhew, London Labor, London Poor (London, [1880]). Quoted in Scott, The Great Tea Venture, 93–94. Italics mine. Forrest, Tea for the British, 56. Hanway, A Journal, 272. Forrest, Tea for the British, 59. Ukers, All about Tea, 47. George Haggerty notes that William Hogarth’s lithographs do occasionally offer a glimpse of the connection between ‘‘effeminacy and sexuality’’ in the eighteenth century. For the purposes of my argument, it is the placement of the teacup—as a signifier of an effete male sexuality—that is most interesting in Haggerty’s discussion of these constructions of male sexuality.What is begged is then the connection between this fear of effeminacy as sexual transgression (in terms of male same-sex desire) and the construction of virile nationhood—and empire. See George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 61–63. I would like to thank Parama Roy for pointing this reference out to me. Reppelier, To Think of Tea! 8.

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84 Scott, The Great Tea Venture, 89. 85 William Hogarth’s referencing to that external world is explicit in his other work. For a comprehensive discussion of this, see Dabydeen, Hogarth,Walpole and Commercial Britain. 86 Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ 22.

chapter 3 Cultivating the Garden 1 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ in The Complete Stories of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, 1993), 26. 2 Ibid. 3 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle (London: John Gifford, 1945), 12. 4 William Nassau Lees, Memorandum Written after a Tour through the Tea Districts of Eastern Bengal in 1864–1865 (Calcutta, 1866), 56. 5 Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—4,’’ Assam Review and Tea News (August 1987): 7. I would like to thank Dr. Navinder (Guddi) Singh for sharing her treasure trove of old tea magazines and journals with me at Karbala Tea Estate in late 1991. These magazines are part of her private collection. 6 Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—6,’’ Assam Review and Tea News 76, no. 10 (December 1987): 15–23. 7 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London, 1861), 7. 8 See Richard Grove’s exhaustive study of colonial expansion in the ‘‘tropics’’ and environmentalism in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). He notes: ‘‘ ‘Wild’ landscapes, apparently little altered by man, meant that the whole tropical world became vulnerable to colonialism by an ever-expanding and ambitious imaginative symbolism’’ (13). 9 Grove argues that the ‘‘search for an eastern-derived Eden provided much of the imaginative oasis for early Romanticism, whose visual symbols were frequently located in the tropics, and for late eighteenth-century Orientalism, for which the edenic search was an essential precursor’’ (ibid., 4). 10 For a comparative, but analogous, discussion of race, colonialism, and the disciplining of the ‘‘black body’’ in South Africa, see Jean Comaroff, ‘‘The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism and the Black Body,’’ in Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, ed. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 305–329. 11 Om Prakash, ‘‘The Opium Monopoly in India and Indonesia in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 24, no. 1 (1987): 68. 12 James Scott, The Great Tea Venture (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), 90. See

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also William Ukers, All about Tea, vol. 2 (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, 1935). Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files’’ (August 1987), 7. One English observer asked rhetorically: ‘‘As inhabitants of Canton were in the habit of shipping themselves on board our Indiamen, whenever hands were wanted, why should not their tea-growing neighbours in Hunan embark their shrubs, their tools of cultivation, and themselves, and set up business in newly established botanic gardens in Calcutta?’’ Quoted in Scott, The Great Tea Venture, 101. British opinion about the quality of Chinese workers was mixed. Chinese ‘‘coolies’’ noted one planter, were ‘‘poorly selected and a quarrelsome lot . . . shoemakers and carpenters from the bazaars who knew nothing of tea making’’ (Ukers, All about Tea, 2:48).The few who remained in the Dooars and Assam worked as carpenters and contractors. During the Indo-China border conflict of 1962, people who lived in Makum (Assam) who were descendents of these Chinese ‘‘teamen’’ and carpenters were imprisoned by the Indian government (interview, Bimal Guha-Sircar, Calcutta, July 1991). A Century of Progress: Gurjanjhora Tea and Industries Ltd., Jalpaiguri, 1882– 1982, Souvenir in commemoration of the Centenary Celebrations, May 7 and 8, 1982 (Jalpaiguri: n.p., 1982), 2. C. A. Bruce, The Manufacture of the BlackTea as Now Practised at Suddeya in Upper Assam by the Chinamen sent Thither for That Purpose with some Observations on the Culture of the Plant in China and its Growth in Assam (Calcutta, 1838), 15–16. In one diagram, the slender hand of a tea roller is sketched in elongated detail and a strikingly detailed rendition of tea rolling is offered: ‘‘The left hand grasping the leaves about to be rolled, resting on the little finger; the extended right hand with the fingers close together, except the thumb which is stretched out, ready to be placed on the leaves received by the left hand.’’ The almost obsessive detail of the fingers and their action on the plucked leaf suggests an early colonial sketch of the fetishistic aura that surrounded tea production. ‘‘Nimble’’ dexterity, thus, extended into the early technologies of manufacture, and the hand fused with the leaf created a powerful image of bodied and crafted value. Ibid., 20, fig. 8. Samuel Baildon, Tea Industry in India (London, 1882), 63. Lees, Memorandum, 89. Almost a century after the first cautionary characterization of ‘‘treacherous’’ tribes, Lord Wavell, one of British India’s last viceroys, lauded the participation of planters in the allied defensive against the Japanese army’s impending invasion of India’s northeastern borders. Lord Wavell noted that it was perhaps surprising to some that ‘‘the profession of planting tea in remote and peaceful Assam was likely to engender qualities of toughness, determination and improvisation in emergencies’’ (italics mine). See Navinder Singh, Organized Groups in the Tea Industry (unpublished manuscript, 1991, personal collection of author), 15.When referring explicitly to a global

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war waging on plantation borders, Lord Wavell invoked yet another edenic myth about the plantation histories of eastern India: a suggestion of interior hinterlands, almost hermetically sealed from the ‘‘outside’’ world, in which physical isolation helped create a peaceful Planter Raj. See also Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1977); For a comprehensive history of tea planters’ involvement on the AssamBurma frontier duringWorld War II, see Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London: Widenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), 683–690. Griffith’s discussion, an entirely proindustry account, begs another kind of military history, of subaltern agency, during this crucial period. A. K. Sen, ‘‘Western Duars, Past and Present,’’ in Jalpaiguri District Centenary Souvenir, 1869–1968 (Jalpaiguri: n.p., 1970), 55. W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. 10: Districts of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri and the State of Kuch Behar (London, 1876), 22. Ibid., 89. Ranajit Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri, 1869– 1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6. Lees, Memorandum, 25. Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal, 42. J. A. Milligan, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the Jalpaiguri District, 1906–1916 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1919), 6. A literal translation of dobhasiya is ‘‘of two languages.’’ J. F.Gruning, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers: Jalpaiguri (Allahabad: n.p., 1911). Hunter, A Statistical Account, 221. Ibid. For a lively and comprehensive history of Darjeeling, see Fred Pinn’s The Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters, 1839 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1986); cf. Jahar Sen, ‘‘Darjeeling—An Entrepot of Central Asian Trade,’’ Calcutta Historical Journal 6, no. 2 (January–June 1982): 2–32; Sunil Munshi, ‘‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Frontier Settlements: A Case Study of Hill Darjeeling,’’ Occasional Paper 34,Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (1980). Abdul Bari, ‘‘The Birth of the District,’’ in Jalpaiguri District Centenary Souvenir, 36. Milligan, Final Report, 36. A colonial administrator noted: ‘‘A large body occupied the Baikanthpure forest, whence they issued on their predatory excursions. The forest was composed of tree jungle interwoven with cane, and was impassable except by narrow paths known only to dacoits. The collector of Rangpur got together a force of 200 barkandars and held all entrances. . . . The robbers were at length starved out, and those who did not escape to Nepal and Bhutan were captured and brought to heel. It is said that within twelve

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months, 549 dacoits were brought to trial in this and other parts of the district.’’ Quoted in ibid., 36. This phrase is from a broadsheet on the Boston Tea Party that illustrates the costumes of the ‘‘Indians:’’ ‘‘with artful Disguise and Grotesque Decoration / Like Sons of the Forest.’’ See The Boston Tea Party, December 1773, illustration by H.W. McVickar (New York: Dodd Mead, 1882), 18. P. Malik, ‘‘The Boundaries of Jalpaiguri,’’ in Jalpaiguri District Centenary Souvenir, 6. Ibid., 20. Milligan, Final Report, 38. Malik, ‘‘The Boundaries of Jalpaiguri,’’ 7. Hunter, A Statistical Account, 282. Ibid., 260. Asim Chaudhuri, ‘‘Merchant Capital in a Colonial Social Formation: The Political Economy of Duars Tea Plantations in Jalpaiguri District,’’ North Bengal University Review 4, no. 2 (1984): 98. For excellent discussions of agrarian politics prior to colonial rule and the impact of colonial plantation settlement policies, see Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Evolution of Agrarian Structure and Relations in the Jalpaiguri District (West Bengal): A Case Study in Subsistence Setting,’’ Sociological Bulletin 29, no. 1 (March 1980): 62–85; Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Colonial Capitalism and Underdevelopment in North Bengal, Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 39 (September 28, 1985): 1659, and Tapash K. Roy Choudhury, ‘‘Land Control: Class Struggles and Class Relations in Western Duars (1781–1805)’’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 32, no. 1 (June 1987): 23–49. Through the colonial period, both East Bengali immigrants and Marwari merchants came to dominate the agrarian commerce in the region. Prosperous Bengal families consolidated their scattered jotes (land plots) to start their own tea plantations. Marwari merchants frequently loaned cash to the new planters in a system known as the hundi and bought land from local jotedars.These commercial activities laid the foundations of an Indian plantocracy in the Dooars. For statistics of demographic impact of this selling off of land, see Roy Choudhury, ‘‘Land Control,’’ 37. W. Nassau Lees, comp., The Resolutions, Regulations, Despatches and Laws Relating to the Sale of Wastelands and the Immigration of Labour in India: Corrected up to 1st July, 1864 (Calcutta, 1864), 13. Rana Partap Behal, ‘‘The Emergence of a Plantation Economy: The Assam Tea Industry in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Occasional Papers on History and Society 21 (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1985). Government of Bengal, Board of Revenue, The Bengal Wastelands Manual (Alipore: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1936). Kalyan K. Sircar, ‘‘A Tale of Two Boards: Some Early Management Problems of the Assam Company Ltd., 1839–1964,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 21, nos. 10 to 11 (March 8–15, 1986): 455. The process of land grabbing for early experimental plantations, in Bihar and the Kangra Valley (Himachal

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Pradesh) was initiated by a mapping of ‘‘barren’’ lands ideally suited for tea cultivation. Once these ‘‘wastelands’’ were demarcated, military officers were sent out for ‘‘negotiating the conveyance of wasteland from the communities to parties wishing to bring them under cultivation,’’ a negotiation necessary because ‘‘communities are generally averse to dispose of their property right by sale.’’ (See ‘‘Appendix E: Notification. Lahore 28th December 1859,’’ in Alexander MacGowan’s Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah [London, 1861]). However, in the next year, efforts at ‘‘negotiation had fallen away and local authorities adjudicated to purchase lands outright.’’ (See ‘‘Appendix G: Taken from the Mofussilite of 25th May 1860,’’ ibid., 63.) Rai Bijoy Bihari Mukharji Bahadur, Final Report on the Land Revenue Settlement Operations in the District of Jalpaiguri, 1931–1935 (Alipore: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1939), 53. Dooars Planters Association, Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association [hereafter dpa Report] for theYear 1908 (Calcutta: dpa, 1911), 29. dpa Report, 1919, 109. Hunter, Statistical Account, 39. Ibid., 40. Hunter also notes, for example, that a yearly revenue of 4,790 rupees was realized from a farmer who took a lease from the government for pasture land for five years. R. Johnson, Johnson’s Notebook for Tea Planters: A Complete Up-to-Date Guide (1951; Colombo: R. C. Johnson, 1961), 121. Hunter, Statistical Account, 59. Gruning, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers, 36–37. Gruning notes: ‘‘The Mech are disappearing, absolutely dying out faster than any race whom I have known or read. The reason is, no doubt, that their distinctive cultivation is by jhum which is barred by government conservancy, and the spread of settled plough cultivation from the south.’’ ‘‘Every encouragement was being given to immigrant cultivation, and once the inhabitants of surrounding territories, especially the Nepalese, realized that their habits and prejudices would not be unduly restricted, began to flock in and by 1860, large settlements or khas mahals were formed.’’ See Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—2,’’ The Assam Review and Tea News 76, no. 6 (August 1987): 8. In contrast to the situation in Assam and the Dooars, Nepali immigrants into the Darjeeling cantonment area assured planters of a steady labor supply ‘‘without formalities and without the cost of importing it.’’ This fortunate state of affairs for planters was largely due to the efforts of Dr. A. Campbell, a superintendent of Darjeeling who encouraged Nepali peasant settlements. The Nepalese migration was assisted by the active recruitment of Gurkhas for the growing British army. These migrants became archetypal workers, ‘‘a pushing and thriving race who would occupy the whole district’’ (W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri and State of Kuch Behar, vol. 10 [London, 1876], 53.); cf. Tanka Baha-

61 62 63 64 65 66

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68 69

70 71

72

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dur Subba, ‘‘Migration and Agrarian Change in Darjeeling,’’ North Bengal University Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (June 1989): 127–135. On the world market, see Gruning, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers, 3. On overseas investment, see Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations,’’ Assam Review and Tea News 76, no. 2 (April 1987): 29. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Hunter, Statistical Account, 60. ‘‘They have passed beyond the savage or hunter state, and also beyond the herdmen’s state, and have advanced to the third or agricultural grade of social progress, but so as to indicate a not entirely broken connection with the precedent condition of things; for though cultivators, they are nomadic cultivators, with so little connection with any one spot that their language possesses no name for village.’’ Ibid., 67. For a succinct critique of the orientalist traditions of administrative history and ethnographic categories of Himalayan communities, see P. K. Po’ Dar and Tanka Bahadur Subba, ‘‘Demystifying Some Ethnographic Texts on the Himalayas,’’ Social Scientist 19, nos. 8–9 (August–September 1991): 78–84. Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, 1840–1859,’’ 295. Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Tribal Migration to Plantation Estates in North Eastern India: Determinants and Consequences,’’ Demography India 14, no. 1 (1985): 71. dpa Report for 1938, 111. Special Report: The Working of Act I of 1882 in the Province of Assam During the Years 1886–1889 (Alipore: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1890), 88. Hunter, Statistical Account, 167. Another planter asked, ‘‘Can anyone reasonable expect that this true-born freeman upon whom Nature has set the seal of perfect independence will work for the planters on their gardens?’’ (George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam [Calcutta, 1884], 78.) Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations,’’ 40. Assam Review and Tea News 76, no. 2 (April 1987): 28. Bodo-Kacharis were initially employed by the Assam Company, and though considered good jungle clearers, were seen as a ‘‘wild and intractable race’’ who frequently stopped work until they were paid. It was also clear that Kachari workers would not ‘‘settle’’ on plantation lands, being more interested in buying small plots for their own cultivation. Quotation in the text is from Kalyan K. Sircar, ‘‘Labor and Management: First Twenty Years of Assam Company Ltd., 1839–59,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 21, nos. 10–11 (May 1986): 39. Ranajit Das Gupta, ‘‘From Peasants and Tribesmen to Plantation Workers: Colonial Capitalism, Reproduction of Labor Power and Proletarianisation in North East India, 1850–1947,’’ Economic and Political Weekly (1986): PE2–10; Asoka Bandarage notes that when Sri Lankan villagers ‘‘failed to pay the taxes, the state expropriated paddy fields with the logic that the

Notes to Chapter Three 351

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pinching of the stomach is ‘morally good’ because it will induce the peasants to work in the plantation.’’ Bandarage, ‘‘The Establishment and Consolidation of the Plantation Economy in Sri Lanka,’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14, no. 2 (1982): 11. Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal, 24. That opium cultivated in Bengal and Assam paid for Chinese tea and assisted in creating a thriving business in opium in southern China presents an unintended historical irony. Lees, Memorandum, 43; italics mine. For discussions about how such essentialist characterizations of ‘‘native’’ behavior becomes a colonial trope, see Syed Alatas, The Myth of the La Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Cass, 1977). Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937; New Delhi: Arnold, 1988), 23. MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, 9. Ramkrishna Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspectives of Labour Legislation in India, 1859–1932: As Applied toTea Plantations,’’ Ph.D. dissertation,University of Calcutta, 1987, 19. Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Recruitment and Migration Policy in Tea Plantations in West Bengal,’’ Bulletin of the Cultural Research Institute 15, no. 1 (1981): 24– 25. For further contrast, wages of textile workers increased from 7.75 rupees per month in 1860–62 to 13.75 rupees in 1883. A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle (London: Gifford, 1945), 65. While the label ‘‘tribal’’ is the most commonly used designation for these varied communities, its colonial/administrative roots remain problematically homogenizing. I employ the term Jharkhandi, used more widely by various communities in the Chotanagpur plateau, to designate their ‘‘original homeland,’’ the Jharkhand.The term adivasi, which is more encompassing, is sometimes used interchangeably in the text because it is also used self-referentially by both Oraon and Munda, as well as by low-caste communities such as the Goala and Kumhar. Ramkrishna Chattopadhyahya, ‘‘Social Perspective of Labour Legislation in India.’’ The ryotwari system was a revenue collection system in which the colonial official settled tax rates and administered collection directly from a cultivator. Ideally, it sought to displace the absolute authority of the zamindar and his middlemen.Certainly, the translation of customary law into the juridical definitions of ‘‘private property’’ remained a highly vexed matter for these administrators, ethnologists, and historians. For a detailed accounting of the debates of categorization and actual practice of colonial policy in rural India, see Peter Robb, ed. Rural India: Land, Power and Society under British Rule (London: Curzon Press, 1983). For the most comprehensive discussions about the ideologies and staggered policy/implementation of ‘‘private property’’ law in British India see Ranajit Guha, Rule of Property for Bengal:

86

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An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); and Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For a succinct and comprehensive overview of the colonial transformation of land rights and impact on ‘‘tribal’’ politics, see K. S. Singh’s introduction, ‘‘History, Anthropology and Colonial Transformation,’’ in his Tribal Society in India: An Anthropo-Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1985), 1–26. This was an argument made by a Jharkhandi activist during a discussion on colonial recruitment in January 1993. Xaxa, ‘‘Tribal Migration,’’ 74. Marina Carter, ‘‘Strategies of Labour Mobilization in Colonial India: A Case-Study of Returnee Recruiting in Mauritius,’’ Conference on Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam: Center for Asian Studies, 1990), 4. Chattopadhyahya, Social Perspective, 70. Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House 1981), 47. dpa, Report for 1929, 154. Tea Districts’ Labour Association, Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st August, 1937 (Calcutta: tdla, 1937), 24. In one case, 800 acres were marked off in half-acre plots: ‘‘We give the coolies a license to cultivate for some months and charge 6 annas rent per month so they can’t have conversion to rights’’ (Indian Tea Gazette, Indian Tea Cyclopaedia (Calcutta, 1887), 201. Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1977), 14. Government and company debated the issue of allowing workers whose contracts had expired to settle, coming to the general conclusion that permitting settlement and cultivation would create a ‘‘labor force to a great extent attached to the soil and supplemented by the voluntary [sic] labor of time-expired labor,’’ Chattopadhyahya, Social Perspective, 117. This was a common strategy with plantation indentureship and created a village base whose labor, and the supply thereof, was aligned toward if not dependent on the plantation’s needs. Rather than a dual system of peasantvillagerand plantation worker, a more fluid arrangement between plantation and village emerged in what Ann Stoler has called an ‘‘oscillation in relation to power and production’’ in Stoler, ‘‘Plantation Politics and Protest on Sumatra’s East Coast,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies 13, no. 2 (January 1986): 126. See also Stoler’s Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), for a comparative and theoretical perspective. For a thorough and excellent discussion of the dual economy thesis in the context of the Dooars, see Asim Chaudhuri, ‘‘Enclaves in a Peasant Society: The Political Economy of Dooars Tea Plantations in the Jalpaiguri District of West Bengal,’’ Special Lecture 2, Centre for Himalayan Studies, mimeograph, University of North Bengal,

Notes to Chapter Three 353

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Bogdogra, 1983; cf. Xaxa, ‘‘Colonial Capitalism and Underdevelopment in North Bengal,’’ 1662. Dasgupta, ‘‘From Peasants to Tribesmen,’’ PE-5. Colonial coercion will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4. Other strategies of constraint and bondage included management’s advances toworkers against wages and issuing rice at concession rates on credit to be paid monthly. See Dwarkanath Ganguli, Slavery in British Dominion, ed. Sris Kumar Kunda, comp. K. L.Chattopadhyay (Calcutta: Jijnasa, 1972), 13; Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence: Assam and the Duars (Parts I & II) (London: hmso, 1939). On the use of subsidized weekly rations as payment ‘‘in kind’’ with control of bazaars and moneylenders’ activities, Mulk Raj Anand notes that ‘‘this practice of ‘payment in kind’ extended the managerial authority over the very physical existence of the worker.’’ See his Coolie (Delhi: Hind, 1972), 18. George Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam (Calcutta, 1884), 70. This song was collected during field research and translated by Munnu Kujoor,Uma Gop, and the author at Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate (November 1992). Special Report: The Working of Act I of 1882 in the Province of Assam During the Year 1886–1889 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1890) [hereafter Special Report, 1890], 9. Invoking famous images of African slavery, a district commissioner offered the following comment: ‘‘The business was not very long ago done in a way savouring of African methods, numbers of coolies have been seen handcuffed, a rope around their wrists, dragged by a couple of emissaries, and encouraged to a quick pace by one or two other heroes with the well-known brass-knobbed lathi [stick].’’ Government of Bengal Report of the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, 1906 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), 54. For a comprehensive account of immigration and indentureship, see Rana P. Behal and Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘‘ ‘Tea and Money versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies, nos. 2 and 3 (1992): 142–171. Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission. The testimony of these Santhals was compelled by what was called ‘‘the Sonthal Pargannas Emigration Scheme.’’ Concerned about an explicitly hostile response to recruitment in Santhal-dominated districts, the British decided to invite a ‘‘representative body of Santhals . . . to visit some of the principal gardens in the Brahmaputra in April 1894, so that its members, on their return, might be able to give a true account of the actual state of affairs’’ (45). After collecting this ‘‘evidence,’’ a scheme was introduced whereby ‘‘coolies would be recruited locally by paid servants of the manager and sent to the gardens which joined the scheme without the assistance of middlemen’’ (46). ‘‘Appendix Q: Proceedings of the Labour Commission and Record of the Evidence Given before Them: Santhal Pargannas, 16th December 1895; Dumka, 7th January 1896.’’ Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, xlvii. Tea Districts Labour Association, Addendum to Handbook (Season 1923–

104 105 106

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109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

24): For Use in Season 1924–1925, part 2: Dooars, 9–10 (Calcutta: tdla, 1924). These handbooks of recruitment, used as guides by planters, remained wary about a sphere of activity that they had little control of. The association advised planters to use maps locating the sirdar villages. The sense of caution was constant and indicated that the sirdari system was not fully within the ambit of planter/colonial administration. Report of the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, 1906 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), 46. dpa, Report for 1920, 291. Government of Bengal, Department of Public Health and Local SelfGovernment, Annual Report on the Working of the Jalpaiguri Labour Act, for the Year Ending 30th June, 1938 (Calcutta: Bengal Government Press, 1939). Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence: Assam and Dooars (London: hmso, 1930), 173. Catholic missionaries played an active role in labor recruitment: ‘‘There is an attempt being made to form a labour union at Ranchi of coolies converted to Roman Catholicism.The union drew up a labor contract which they proposed should be accepted by the Dooars tea industry, and the union would undertake to find labor recruits from the mission’’ (India Tea Association, Detailed Report of the General Committee of the India Tea Association [hereafter ita, Report] for the Year 1925 (Calcutta: ita, 1928), 27). In 1922, the dpa noted that ‘‘Roman Catholic missionaries were now very antagonistic towards recruitment for Assam. This is due to stories of poor pay spread about by returned coolies, more especially those recruited through the mission who have reproached the Fathers, and even occasionally abused the latter for sending them to Assam. Altogether, spirits are bad’’ (dpa, Report for 1922, 80). ‘‘Appendix Q: Proceedings of the Labor Commission and Record of the Evidence,’’ xlvii. Tea Districts Labour Association [hereafter tdla], Handbook for Season 1933–1934 (Calcutta: tdla, 1933), 60. Government of India, Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, vol. 6, pt. 1: Assam and the Duars (London: hmso, 1930), 121. tdla, Handbook for Season 1929–1930 (Calcutta: James Glendye, 1929), 11. dpa, Report for 1919, 210. No. 53, Camp Calcutta, 21 February 1919. From the deputy sanitation commissioner, Rajsahi Circle, to the sanitary commissioner, Bengal. tdla, Handbook for Season 1933–1934, 14. Special Report, 14. ita, Report for 1924, 5. Special Report 1890, 17. dpa, Report for 1914, 192. Special Report 1890, 17. Ibid., 17. Italics mine. Labour Enquiry Commission, Report of Labour Inquiry Commission, 34.

Notes to Chapter Three 355

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126 127

128 129

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Ibid., 34. Italics mine. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34. dpa, Report for 1918, 482. Evaluation of the ‘‘right’’ castes and communities entered into discussions about the British-administered emigration of Indian labor to British Guiana, in direct relation to labor recruitment for mining companies in Bihar (Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, 15). A tracing of these intersecting debates around the ‘‘best’’ labor, within the global patterns of late-nineteenth-century Indian labor emigration to South East Asia, Fiji, and the Caribbean, might reveal an important history of ideological and pragmatic connections intraregionally, regionally, and internationally. See Government of India, Annual Report of the Working of the Tea Districts’ Emigrant Labour Act 1946 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1947), 143, for another discussion of the same. Ibid., 143. See also Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 30; Rhoda Reddock, ‘‘Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship inTrinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 43 (October 1985): WS80. Special Report, 42. Chattopadhayaya, Social Perspectives, 42.Within two decades, the surveillance had its intended effect. Statistics show that between 1886 to 1888, emigration of men and women to Assam was in the ratio 48,883 men to 36,289 women. Special Report, 24. Special Report, 32–33. Ibid., 36. Special Report, 32–33. However, officials also discovered that some women actually chose to leave, because of abusive family situations. Between October 1888 and August 1889, 875 women passed through Dhurbi, Assam, who ‘‘had either been turned out by their husbands, or left because of ill treatment.’’ tdla, Addendum to Handbook (Season 1923–24). See also Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, 54. However, interesting ‘‘irregularities’’ were noted: ‘‘Single men and women were sometimes paired off, regardless of caste and inclination, and sent off as ‘family coolies.’ These ‘depot marriages’ as they were generallycalled were rarely fruitful. . . . Moreover, single women frequently refrained from settling down finally with one man till they had been for some time on the garden’’ (R. K. Das, Plantation Labour in India (Calcutta: Prabasi Press, 1931), 113. dpa, Report for 1929, 149. Special Report, 16. dpa, Report for 1923, 94. ita, Report for 1916, ix. Rana P. Behal and Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘‘ ‘Tea and Money versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plan-

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143 144 145 146 147

tations, 1840–1908,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies, nos. 2–3 (1992): 158. The authors note that between 1880 and 1901, plantation birthrates averaged only 86 per 1,000 compared with 127 births in the rest of Assam. The authors report that medical opinion at that time suggested that this low birthrate was due to a ‘‘widespread practice’’ of abortion and one medical officer reported that ‘‘on some gardens, 65 percent of pregnant women do not give birth to living children’’ (160).Though highly speculative, such an assertion (by colonial medical officers) does suggest that women were responding to planter reproductive policies. However, this agency (in conducting abortions) must be carefully balanced with the high rates of mortality already existing in the plantations. Ibid., 273–274. Another report noted, ‘‘It was a well-known fact that abortion was performed by professional women permanently living in the gardens, the main objection to child-bearing being the trouble caused by having to work and look after children as well.The loss of wages during the period following child-birth and often beforewas an additional reason’’ (Das, Plantation Labour in India, 113). For an interesting comparative perspective on these discussions about reproductive policy and women’s responses to birth rates and mortality issues, studies of Caribbean slave plantation history are instructive. See Mary Butler, ‘‘Mortality and Labor on the Codrington Estates, Barbados,’’ Journal of Caribbean History 19, no. 1 (1984): 48–67; Hilary Beckles, Afro-Caribbean Women and Resistance to Slavery in Barbados (London: Karnak House, 1988); Marietta Morrisey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 1989). Das, Plantation Labour in India, 119. External pressures for labor protection laws and labor legislation was a significant catalyst for these changes, at least at the policy level. dpa, Report for 1922, 93; Government of India, Written Evidence. The extent to which maternity and labor welfare bills were translated into practice needs to be investigated further. Ibid., 94. ita, Report for 1916, ix. tdla, Handbook for Season 1933–1934, 60. Government of India, Written Evidence, 289. tdla, Handbook for Season 1933–1934, 60.

chapter 4 The Raj Baroque 1 Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937; New Delhi: Arnold, 1988), 91–92. 2 Business Today, January 7–21, 1992, 27. 3 Telegraph (Calcutta), November 24–30, 1991. 4 If, as one old English planter noted, the French get distinctions for being wine experts, so should Darjeeling planters for tea: ‘‘The Darjeeling Plant-

Notes to Chapter Four 357

5 6 7

8

9 10

11 12 13

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ers Association Chairman should be called the ‘Grand Officier de la Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tas de Thé.’ ’’ Quoted in Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—14(i),’’ Assam Review and Tea News 77, no. 4 (June 1988): 10. Business Today (January 7–21, 1992), 150. These were located in present-day Himachal Pradesh and in the Uttar Pradesh Garwhal Himalayas, respectively. Kalyan Sircar, ‘‘A Tale of Two Boards: Some Early Management Problems of the Assam Company Ltd., 1839–1864,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 21, nos. 10–11 (March 8–15, 1986): 453. Sircar, ‘‘A Tale of Two Boards,’’ 459. For a detailed account of these struggles between English merchants and the Calcutta nabobs, see H. A. Antrobus’s A History of the Assam Company, 1839–1953 (Edinburgh: Constable, 1957). Ibid., 459. Amalendu Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, 1840–1859,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 4, no. 4 (December 1967): 302– 308. For the most detailed and comprehensive study of British and Indian capital investments vis à vis tea cultivation and its impact on the overall economy of Assam, see also Amalendu Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Years of Transitional Crisis (1825–40),’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 5, no. 2 (June 1968): 125–140; and Amalendu Guha, ‘‘A Big Push without a Take-Off: A Case Study of Assam, 1871–1901,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 5, no. 3 (September 1968): 199–222. Ibid., 290. Ibid. Ibid., 291; and Omkar Goswami’s ‘‘Then Came the Marwaris: Some Aspects of the Changes in the Pattern of Industrial Control in Eastern India,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 22, no. 3 (1985): 141–79. See Goswami’s discussion of Marwari ascendency in the annals of Indian business during the colonial period in which he argues against a ‘‘story of unrelenting, hegemonic European management’’ in Indian business history. By the eve of World War II the presence of a considerable number of Marwari entrepreneurs like the Birlas ensured their place as the premier banking and capitalist class of postcolonial West Bengal. For a comprehensive study of the history of Marwari ascendence into the ranks of the postcolonial Indian business elite, see Thomas Timberg, The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists. (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978); and Gita Piramal’s Business Maharajas: The Inside Track on Some of India’s Most Powerful Tycoons and the Business Strategies They Follow to Keep Their Companies at the Top (New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 1996). Cf. Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Evolution of Agrarian Structure and Relations in Jalpaiguri District (West Bengal): A Case Study in Subsistence Setting.’’ Sociological Bulletin 29, no. 1 (March 1980): 62–85. See also his later and more comprehensive discussion of agrarian relations and the construction of a plantation enclave economy: Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Colonial Capitalism and

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Underdevelopment In North Bengal,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 39 (September 28, 1985): 1659–665; Virginius Xaxa, Economic Dualism and Structure of Class: A Study in Plantation and Peasant Settings in North Bengal (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1997). Asim Chaudhuri, Enclaves in a Peasant Society: The Political Economy of Dooars Tea Plantations in the Jalpaiguri District of North Bengal, special lecture 2 Center for Himalayan Studies, University of North Bengal, Bagdogra, 1983). Rana Partap Behal, ‘‘The Emergence of a Plantation Economy: AssamTea Industry in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Occasional Papers on History and Society (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1985): 1–37. mim Tea Estate, Correspondence Files, Letters to Agents, November 14, 1930. Stephanie Jones, ‘‘Merchants of the Raj,’’ Sunday Statesmen Miscellany, February 26, 1989, 17. Andrew Yule and Co. Ltd., 1863–1984 (Calcutta: Andrew Yule, 1984): 35. Ibid. The title of this section comes from William Nassau Lees, Memorandum Written after a Tour through the Tea Districts of Eastern Bengal in 1864–1865 (Calcutta, 1866), 62. Dooars Branch of the IndianTea Association, Centenary Souvenir 1878–1978 (Binnaguri: abita, 1978). Assam Branch of the IndianTea Association, Centenary Souvenir, 1889–1989 (Guwahati: abita, 1989). By the term ‘‘planter,’’ I mean the small European elite of the plantation. These included senior managers (burra sahibs), and assistants (chota sahibs), who served as field overseers and factory engineers. The creation of the ‘‘planter’’ icon, which I discuss later, was concentrated largely around the person of the burra sahib. However, because many assistants and engineers, over the decades, became burra sahibs, I use the appellation more widely. Kul means ‘‘tap’’ in both Nepali and Hindi. Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations’’ (July 1987): 36. Hannagan, a former Darjeeling planter, was quick to assert that Kulwallah Charlie had ‘‘little of the dialect.’’ Interview with Mr. Teddy (Edward) Young, Tumsung Tea Estate (Darjeeling, November 1991). Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files’’ (June 1988): 9. Indian Tea Cyclopaedia (London, 1893), 15. Interview with Teddy (Edward) Young. Ibid. Jones, ‘‘Merchants of the Raj,’’ 12. A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle (London: John Gifford, 1945), 73. Ibid., 46. If visions of a noble life of sporting and hunting led many young men of ‘‘good families’’ to enter tea planting, there were some planters, at least,

Notes to Chapter Four 359

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37

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whose romantic sensibilities did not lead to success. Louis Mandelli, for example, a descendent of an aristocratic Maltese family, arrived in Darjeeling in 1864 with a contract to manage a 330-acre garden. A gifted ornithologist, who preferred bird-watching to planting, he once admonished a friend who wanted to pay for a gift of Darjeeling tea: ‘‘Don’t mention about the Tea. Do you think that being a Tea Planter it would be right on my part to sell Tea to friends? Of course, being so, I have the satisfaction to oblige my friends with the produce of my garden . . . certainly it is more value to me than all payments.’’ Ornithology and generous gifts of tea may have been his undoing; he lost fiscal backing for his mortgage from his bank, which ‘‘might have easily reasoned that anyone so occupied with birds did so at the expense of tea.’’ In February 1880, Louis Mandelli committed suicide. Fred Pinn, L. Mandelli: Darjeeling Tea Planter and Ornithologist (London, 1885), 26. Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud, 45–46. Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), 585. Griffith notes that ‘‘salesmen employed in other industries have joined with tea salesmen in building the displays in stores and carrying the story of tea to the retailers,’’ 600; cf. Report of the International Tea Market Expansion Board, 1 January to 31 December, 1939. International Tea Committee, Report by a Commission Representing India, Ceylon and the Netherlands’ East Indies, with a Reference to Tea Propaganda in the United States of America (London: International Tea Committee, 1934), 2. International Tea Committee, Report . . . with a Reference to Tea Propaganda, 5. Ibid., 5. It was noted in the same report that attention should be drawn to tea’s healthful and youthful properties: ‘‘Our advertising should . . . address itself largely to the youth of the nation, and particularly to the male youth, and our illustrations, for instance, should feature hardy, outdoor young people, and should associate tea drinking with games and manly pursuits.’’ International Tea Committee, Report of the International Tea Market Expansion Board Ltd. (1939), 20. Ibid., 15. International Tea Committee, Report of the International Tea Market Expansion Board Ltd. (1937), 13. International Tea Committee, Report of the International Tea Market Expansion Board Ltd. (1939), 20. Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry, 617. The dhoti is worn by men in rural and urban India. In rural contexts, it is a cotton cloth tied simply around the waist and through the legs, much like a sarong. In urban contexts, and on ceremonious or ritual occasions, the dhoti is often made of silk and ornately pleated. In this particular image, it is shown in its simplest form.

46 Indeed Indians were involved in early ‘‘sterling agency’’ investments from the outset. Amalendu Guha has argued that ‘‘recent research has established without a doubt that it is the partnership firm of Dwarkanath Tagore (1794– 1846)—Carr,Tagore and Co. (1834–48)—which took the first steps in promoting the Assam Company. . . . Amongst the promoters of the Assam Company were five prominent leaders of Calcutta—Dwarkanath Tagore, Prasanna Kumar Tagore, Rustomjee Cowasji, Motilal Seal, and Haji Ispahani. Of them Seal and Prasanna Kumar Tagore served . . . as directors on the Calcutta Board of the Company.’’ See Amalendu Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, 1840–1859,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 4, no. 4 (December 1967): 306–307. 47 See Krishnadev Goswami’s ‘‘Indian Tea Entrepreneurs in Western Dooars of Undivided Bengal—I,’’ Assam Review and Tea News 75, no. 10 (December 1986): 11–37. This is an excellent discussion of indigenous business history though the author does argue against calling this ‘‘entrepreneurship’’ because it did not have ‘‘long-term’’ goals. However, the assertion is debateable, given the sustained proprietary ownership of Indian plantations into the postcolonial period. 48 See Amalendu Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, 1840–1859,’’ 307. 49 Sibsankar Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs in Tea Plantations of a Bengal District, 1879–1933,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 13 (October–December 1976): 489. 50 See Bernard S.Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 51 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ 490. 52 Ibid., 33. 53 Ibid., 498; and Ranajit Dasgupta’s Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri, 1869–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Ranajit Dasgupta’s comprehensive study of colonial Jalpaiguri is an excellent introduction to the history of local communities and the immigrants who became the new ‘‘owners’’ of land in the district. 54 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, 52–54. Dasgupta notes that the wealthy Muslim immigrants were Noakhali Muslims from Southeastern Bengal, who were ‘‘service holders and professional maulvis.’’ Large landed jotedars who were Muslims also encouraged Muslim migration from two districts. Many of these settler families were nonagricultural and more orthodox than local Muslims. 55 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ 499. 56 Dasgupta, Economy, Societyand Politics, 285; Krishnadev Goswami, ‘‘Indian Tea Entrepreneurs,’’ 21. 57 Gurjanjhora Tea Industries Ltd., A Century of Progress: Souvenir in Commemoration of the Centenary Celebration, 1882–1982 (Jalpaiguri: Gurjanjhora Tea Industries, 1982), 14. The page in this small volume reproduces a copy of ‘‘An Honor of Merit Awarded to Gurjanjhora Tea Company for Tea

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Exhibit at the World Columbian Exposition, Mexico, in the Year 1902.’’ It also lists in its 1882 Board of Promoters, Khan Bahadur Rahim Baksh (of the district commissioner’s office) and ‘‘J. A. Paul, merchant, Jew’’ (8). B. C. Ghosh, ‘‘The Development of the Tea Industry in the District of Jalpaiguri,’’ Jalpaiguri District Centenary Souvenir, 1869–1968 (Jalpaiguri: n.p., 1970), 281–310. Interview with Mr. Bimal Guha-Sircar, then executive director, Tea Division, Andrew Yule & Co. (Calcutta, 14 December 1991). Williamson Magor: Stuck to Tea (Cambridge: Cambridge Business Publishing, 1991), 108–109. Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ 493. During the postcolonial period, significant transference of shares to non-Bengali (primarily Marwari) hands occurred. IndianTea Planters Association (itpa), ‘‘Chairman’s Address,’’ Detailed Report of the General Committee of the ITPA for the Year 1952 (Jalpaiguri: itpa, 1952), vi. Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, 60. itpa, Detailed Report of the General Committee for the Year 1948 (Jalpaiguri: itpa, 6, 1948): 148. Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, 62. Asim Chaudhuri, ‘‘Merchant Capital in a Colonial Social Formation: The Political Economy of Dooars Tea Plantations in Jalpaiguri District,’’ North Bengal University Review 4, no. 2 (1984): 99–115. Ibid. itpa gave a petition to the governor of Bengal during a visit to Jalpaiguri in 1921. Ibid., 64. itpa, Detailed Report for 1952, 41. dpa, Report for 1919, annual general meeting of 1920 (reference to grant no. II 2473-G, Jalpaiguri, June 17, 1919), from the chairman, dpa, to the district commissioner Jalpaiguri, 159. In another application case earlier that year, the district commissioner sent a circular to the dpa chairman defending his inability to refuse the application. The reasons he gave are telling: the case had precedence; the plantation would have an English manager, Mr. A. Hutchings, who was also its promoter and a proposed director of the Dooars Tea Association. What is most interesting is that while an English manager swayed the district commissioner, the land was bought by a wealthy Muslim couple. (Letter no. 407-G, Jalpaiguri, January 23, 1919, from the deputy commissioner, Jalpaiguri, to the chairman, dpa, Conversion of Joteland—Petition filed by Moulvi Waliur Rahman and Bibi Manya Khutum for conversions of Jotes No. 547 and 548. dpa, Report for 1926, annual general meeting of January 12, 1927, Circular No. 30-G,Calcutta, 4 October, 1926, from the assistant secretary, Indian Tea Association (ita), to all agency houses with interests in the Dooars; Report of the Conference Held on 19th August 1926 between Revenue Officials of the Govt of Bengal and Representatives of the Tea Industry, 56.

72 dpa, Report for 1924, annual general meeting of January 14, 1925. No. 64, Jalpaiguri, the 26th November. From the Secretary, itpa, to the Chairman, dpa, 160. 73 dpa, Report for 1926, annual general meeting of January 12, 1927, 56. Circular No. 30-G, Calcutta, October 4, 1926, from the assistant secretary, ita, to all agency houses with interests in the Dooars. Report of the Conference Held on 19th August 1926 between Revenue Officials of the Govt of Bengal and Representatives of the Tea Industry. 74 dpa, Report for 1927, annual general meeting of January 1928, 83. 75 ita, Report of the General Committee for the Year Ending 31st December 1923 (Calcutta: Criterion Press, 1924), 8. 76 Ibid., 8. 77 Maurice Hanley, Tales and Songs from an Assam Tea Garden (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1928), 89. 78 Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937, Delhi: Arnold, 1988), 24. 79 Ibid., 24. 80 Sanat Kumar Banerjee, ‘‘Bold Steps towards 75th Year of Service,’’ itpa, Platinum Jubilee Souvenir of the ITPA, 1915–1990, 2. Banerjee, then chairman of the itpa, notes that in the post–World War I period, Indian planters began to be ‘‘intimately associated’’ with the Indian independence movement. 81 abita. Assam Branch of the Indian Tea Association, 1889–1989: Centenary Souvenir (Guwahati: ita, 1989). 82 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ 498. 83 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, 59–60. Dasgupta argues that the characteristics of north Bengali entrepreneurship puts ‘‘a hitch in the popular belief about Bengali middle-class aversion to business and finances.’’ He argues that this entry was motivated by ‘‘nationalism’’ and, contradictorily, the entrepreneurs’ connections with British officials and planters in their capacity as government employees. 84 ‘‘Rupiyah’’ companies contrasted to the ‘‘sterling’’ companies of British Agency houses—whose capital investments were, ostensibly, in pounds sterling, held in London and Calcutta. 85 Sanat Kumar Banerjee, ‘‘Bold Steps towards 75th Year of Service,’’ in itpa, Platinum Jubilee Souvenir, 2. 86 itpa, Detailed Report for 1951, 6. 87 itpa, Detailed Report for 1948, 10. 88 Ibid., 9. 89 Ibid., 37. 90 itpa, Detailed Report for 1953, 47. 91 Nonviolent mass meetings that followed the Gandhian philosophy; literally ‘‘truth-force.’’ 92 itpa, ‘‘Proceedings of a Conference Held on 20th September 1953 at itpa to Consider the Threatened Direct Action of the West Bengal Cha Shramik Union,’’ in Detailed Report of the Indian Tea Planters Association for

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the Year 1953: Annual General Meeting Held on 10th April, 1954 (Jalpaiguri: itpa, 1954). 93 For a definitive examination of the role of tea plantations in defending the northeastern borders of India from the Japanese incursions during World War II, see Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry, 685–690. 94 Debates about the implementation of fera on foreign-stock holding companies continued through the 1970s. See ita, Report for 1976, 148–151, for a discussion of income tax and profit-sharing allowances within the law. 95 These are images that still echo the planterdictum of advertising: ‘‘The basic idea was to bring home the fundamental appeal of Indian tea as a beverage to the educated and semi-educated Indians, both male and female, who exercise control the home and community life of the nation.’’ dpa, Report for 1935, xxii.

chapter 5 Estates of a New Raj 1 Zenana is an Urdu word describing the household ‘‘inner’’ space of Muslim women. Its demarcation of necessary feminized interiority is patriarchally and religiously coded. However, it also inflects the aristocratic and bourgeois ‘‘private’’ places of non-Muslim women. I understand it within such a hybrid and historical matrix. 2 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle (London: John Gifford, 1945), 50. 3 Maurice Hanley, Tales and Songs from an Assam Tea Garden (Calcutta; Thacker, Spink, 1928), 87. 4 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London, 1861), 26. 5 Samuel Baildon, Tea Industry in India: A Contemporary Review of Finance and Labour and Providing a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants Engaged in the Industry (London, 1882), 36 (on the agreeability of the planter’s occupation); MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, 23 (on the planter as an outdoors man). 6 It would be interesting to compare the emergence of this hybrid post/ colonial domesticity and its Victorian threads with the construction of Victorian domesticities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. See Kathleen McHugh, American Domesticity: From How-to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The manner in which this hybrid, feudal and postcolonial ambit of plantation domesticity is linked to its colonial, urban past needs further scrutiny. For example, traces of the inside worlds of nineteenth-century Calcutta bhadramahilas (gentlewomen) can be glimpsed in these fortified and interiorized worlds of postcolonial memsahibs. For the most detailed discussion of the former, see Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in 19th-Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989).

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What this also suggests about nationhood and its modernities deferred is particularly interesting in the context of postcolonial connections of gender, status and hierarchy. I extrapolate such possible connections from Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,’’ History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians 36 (autumn 1993): 1–34. Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ in The Complete Stories of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, 1993), 68. It is no accident that in late-nineteenth-century England, the Victorian middle class began to organize and lobby for prohibition in the name of industrial discipline, efficiency, and productivity. Ironically, tempering the intemperate English working class with work breaks on the assembly line involved serving them tea. George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam (Calcutta, 1884), 174. The use of alcohol as a means of extraction of labor power is an old one within colonial labor history. Supplying country liquor became one strategy of bondage, which underwrote indentureship in the plantation of liquor and discipline, as K. Ravi Raman noted with some clarity: ‘‘It is a subject of grim jest that it strengthens their hold on a number of coolies, who without this state incentive to drunkeness might save money and at the end of their term leave the garden to become independent ryots.’’ K. Ravi Raman, ‘‘Global Capital and Peripheral Labour: Tea in South India, c. 1860–1957,’’ Proceedings of the Conference on Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam: Center for Asian Studies, 1990), 195; Despite the transparent encouragement of the liquor trade by the colonial elite and the careful marking through revenue legislation of what was to be demarcated as ‘‘licit’’ and ‘‘illicit’’ liquor, planters would still comment that increased liquor sales would detrimentally affect ‘‘the health, prosperity and working habits of labourers.’’ See also Dooars Planters Association (dpa), Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the Year 1917, 73. I have transposed this imagerydirectly from a dance sequence in a film about Caribbean slave plantation women and history called I Is a Long Memoried Woman (prod. Ingrid Lewis, dir. Frances-Ann Solomon, 1990). Government of India, Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence: Assam and the Dooars, parts 1 and 2, 6. It is important to consider, again, the colonial and historical economy through which such a negative rendering of the ‘‘detestable’’ Bengali babu emerges. See Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘‘Manly Englishman’’ and the ‘‘Effeminate Bengali’’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, 32. See Rudyard Kipling, ‘‘The Head of the District,’’ Selected Prose and Poetry of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Garden City Publishing 1937), 604–619. I will continue to use the term babu interchangeably with ‘‘staff’’ because

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it is widely used by all members of the plantation hierarchy, including staff members.The term is also connected explicitly with theirdivision of labor in office tasks: factory babu, garden babu, ojon (Weighment) babu, and so on. This is a particularly interesting connection because it also privileges Bengali planters and obscures the fact that although Bengalis represent a dominant community within the plantocracy, many Dooars planters are also Punjabi and Nepali. This is a reference to Indian-owned proprietal concerns. Adhiars share-cropping means that labor on land is paid in kind, and workers receive half of the produce and sometimes food during the day. Workers’ families who had received land from the colonial period could also pass it on from one generation to the next. Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Seeds,’’ in Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans. Ispita Chandra (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998), 35. In brief, four planters and twenty-six clerical staff who, together, administer and manage a community of over 6,300. Of this number, approximately 1,200 workers are employed on a permanent basis throughout the year, though casual workers increase the actual labor force to 2,000 workers. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, 136. Ibid., 106. Commissions were also given on wage payments: ‘‘The difference is that our own payment is a commission on profits while theirs is a commission on the payment for work done by those they supervise’’ (A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter, 106; italics mine). This would open up considerable scope for corruption in payments of actual wages; the Rege Report of 1946 offered a more detailed account of commission payments: ‘‘The sardar . . . is paid at the rate of one pice per head of the first hazira (daily wage); in other words, he is paid one pice per day for every worker under him who turns out for work. Further, he may be employed as a chaukidar [(watchman)] or daffadar [(overseer)] and for this he receives his usual pay. In addition, he receives Rs. 5 for every new recruit who stays for a minimum period of 12 to 18 months’’ (D. V. Rege for the Labour Investigation Committee Report on an Enquiry into Conditions of Labour in Plantations in India (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1946), 87. dpa, Report for 1938, 84. For a detached examination of trade union politics, see Sanat Kumar Bose, Capital and Labor in the Indian Tea Industry, Trade Union Publication Series, no. 8 (Bombay: All-India Trade Union Congress, 1954; Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing House, 1981); S. Chakravarty, ‘‘Working Class and the State: A Study of the Dooars Plantation System (Ph.D. dissertation, Calcutta University, 1988); R. Sarkar and P. P. Rai, ‘‘Trade Unions: Origin and Early Development,’’ in Tea Plantation Workers in the Eastern Himalayas: A Study of Wages, Employment and Living Standards ed. R. C. Sarkar and M. P. Lama (Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons, 1986), 12–20; Manas Das Gupta, ‘‘Trade Union Move-

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ment in Tea Plantations and Problems of Increasing Productivity,’’ unpublished manuscript, Department of Economics, North Bengal University, 1992; Manas Das Gupta, Asoke Ganguly, and Paritosh Chakladar, ‘‘Labour and Trade Union Movement in the Tea Plantation of Terai (1862–1955): Problems of Class Formation,’’ University Grants Commission Paper, presented at the All India Seminar, North Bengal University, Bagdogra, Darjeeling,West Bengal, January 6–8, 1987); All India Plantation Workers Federation (aipwf), Fifth Conference, April 18–20, 1986 (New Delhi: Ranadive, 1986). I would like to thank Professor Manas Das Gupta of North Bengal University for generously sharing his time and work with me on several visits to his campus. These names are pseudonyms. Labour Investigation Committee, Report on an Enquiry, 57. The season, held usually every October, includes both the Durga and Kali pujas (rituals/celebrations). These are pan-Bengali traditions celebrated with great panache in the cities and rural areas. For a comparative perspective on gender and postcolonial urban servitude, see Raka Ray, ‘‘Masculinity, Femininity and Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the LateTwentieth Century,’’ Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 691–718. Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, 109. Notes on Tea in Darjeeling by a Planter (Darjeeling, 1888), 75. On daffadars in plantations: Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, 109. On daffadars in reserve forests: W. W. Hunter. A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. 16: Districts of Hazaribagh and Lohurrdaga (London, 1877), 108. Labour Enquiry Commission, Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, 1896 (Calcutta: lec, 1906), 36. Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937; New Delhi: Arnold, 1988), 171. Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, 103. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, 162. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971), 246. This is a colloquialism to indicate that the man was behaving ‘‘above his station,’’ not only like a sahib (suggested by the walking stick), but like an even ‘‘bigger’’ one. The lingua franca within the garden is a mixture of several Chotanagpur linguistic traditions, as well as Hindi. dpa, Report for 1933, 159; ita, Report for 1928, v. Dewan Chamanlal. ‘‘The Khoreal Case,’’ Coolie: The Storyof Laborand Capital in India (Lahore: n.p., 1932), 70. Ibid. I am working here with dramatic licence, intertextuality, and the ‘‘fictions’’ of history through which Mulk Raj Anand creates the most important and

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climactic scene in his novel, Two Leaves and a Bud. He uses a documented story known as the Khoreal case as a pivot within a thickly textured narrative about the sexual and racial politics of the Planter Raj. The novel ends with the murder of a worker, called Gangu (in place of Gangadhar) who tries to protect his daughter, Leila (Hira) from an assistant manager. The confrontation, which ends in the killing, constitutes the novel’s climax and closure. In the play segment earlier in this chapter, I used Chamanlal’s Coolie, which contains the transcript of the case on which Mulk Raj Anand based his novel. Both texts are twined in the play and in my discussion of the sexual politics of the plantation. Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud, 51. See Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).There are some instances in this historical study of Worthy Park, Jamaica, where the politics of racialized upward mobility were played out by women seeking manumissions of ‘‘whiter’’ children. In this instance, as in the tea plantations, positing these relations as ‘‘consensual’’ remains deeply problematic because of the degree of coercion involved in the system as a whole. In one conversation with a senior planter in the Dooars (who had served in Assam) I was also told that some male elders of certain communities considered it a matter of upward status mobility for their daughters to have the unequal alliances with the gora sahibs, the ‘‘white sahibs.’’ Because I could not corroborate this story with some of the plantation communities, I offer these suggestions as preliminary speculations. Phillip R. Longley, Tea Planter Sahib: The Life and Adventures of a Tea Planter in North Eastern India (London: Tonson, 1967), 102.

chapter 6 Discipline and Labor 1 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London, 1861); 7; Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—3,’’ Assam Review and Tea News 76, no. 5 (July 1987): 3–11. 2 In chapter 3, where I discuss colonial settlement of the plantations, I have demonstrated how this mind-over-body split is understood within the constructions of leisured entitlement. That reason and labor—as a mind and body dichotomy—was integral to the philosophies of rule, and the regimes of work that were subsequently created. 3 Edward P. Thompson, ‘‘Time,Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,’’ Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97. 4 In deploying the phrase ‘‘the language of command,’’ albeit within the micropolitics of plantation rule, I am indebted to Bernard S. Cohn’s ‘‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command,’’ in Subaltern Studies, vol. 4, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329. 5 Consider the strange synchronicity between my narrative about the over-

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seers and a colonial planter description of a daffadar in the field: ‘‘He parades up and down between the rows of tea bushes armed with a small stick and the dignity that his position of authority gives him, in and out amongst his pluckers, yelling at the top of his voice . . . deriding or swearing at them . . . always inciting them to make haste and get along faster (che lao, che lao).’’ George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam (Calcutta, 1884), 106. While I respect the reasons that have compelled other anthropologists to join in their subjects’ labor, my own location and the contradictions of patronage did not permit this. I also had some political/epistemological problems with a participatory knowledge base that might claim a certain ‘‘truth’’ about the work regime because of such participation.The subject-positions of my own voice are one effort to move away from any such claims of ‘‘authenticity through experience.’’ Yet, if such a bodily pedagogy leads to collaborative work with subjects, then the epistemological locations shift into the arenas of social practice rather than text. Such a shift did not happen in this ethnography of labor practice. It is significant that the sirdar groupings create a paternal transference and codification made explicit from the colonial period. Note the following commentary: ‘‘For purposes of identification, a sirdar’s name would be more effectual than ‘father’s name’ or ‘husband’s name.’ As you may be aware, on all tea gardens there are many persons of the same name and it is customary to identify labourers by the name of the sirdar in whose gang they work. Further, in the case of elderly labourers, the father’s name may be forgotten, or in any case he may have had no connection with the garden in which the elector resides.’’ Dooars Planters Association (dpa) Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the Year 1934, 108. Madhuri Dixit, Meena Kumari, and Rekha have been reigning queens in the Bollywood firmament of Hindi films, which are regularly shown in labour club videos or in town film theaters and talkies. I have marked ‘‘home’’ because one cannot assume that for many women, particularly new brides, that the village is ‘‘home.’’ From women’s perspectives, ‘‘home’’ is created through the life cycle and the various locations of power and disempowerment inhabited within those life cycles. The allotment of firewood is 2.5 peels per household for daily-rated work per annum. One peel of standard firewood is equivalent to 286 kilograms of coal briquettes. A peel is a stack of firewood 4 foot high. See Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association (dbita), Pay, Allowances and Other Conditions of Service, Circular No. 28 (September 14, 1998), 12. Cattle pounds are called kuhars. Government-run kuhars are free, but plantation chowkidars are paid a commission of between 2 and 5 rupees for each cow. Livestock grazing land is a major problem for families who own cows; sometimes, unemployed or retired workers are paid to graze cows in ‘‘legal’’ areas. In positing a ‘‘uterine economy,’’ I am thinking quite specifically of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s meditations on the location of a ‘‘woman’s body’’ in

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marxist-feminist discussions of reproduction, production, exchange value, and so forth. She does so by reading these debates through the ‘‘protagonist subaltern,’’ Jashoda, in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘‘Stanadayini.’’ Spivak’s discussion of Jashoda’s role as a wet-nurse for an upper-caste family suggests that dichotomies of ‘‘reproduction’’ and ‘‘production’’ cannot encompass the sexualized and maternal labor (extraction) of breast-feeding, in this instance. My understanding of a ‘‘uterine economy’’ in the plantation (as read against Spivak’s detailed critique) is that it traffics through and beyond these binaries. Spivak, ‘‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World,’’ in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 247–252. This average amount is calculated from number of fieldworkers in a given eight-day period March 22–31, 1991, and total quantity of leaf brought in for manufacturing. See Labour Return: Particulars of Numbers Working During the Week and Weekly Report of Crop, 22–31st March 1991. Faltu literally means useless or worthless. It is used analogously with the common term bigha, or temporary workers, an etymological genealogy and link that is significant within the discourse of value. Furthermore, statistics of employment gleaned from daily work log and ration books, as well as wage registers, offer only a partial demographic account of the plantation’s large population in two important ways. In the first place, even as a registry of the workforce, they do not include an accurate record of the large reserve pool of bigha workers who augment the permanent workforce during the peak plucking season. ‘‘Ghost’’ bigha workers (also employed on a daily casual basis) have an important economic function in the plantation’s larger calculus of profit. According to the Plantation Labour Act of 1952, only permanent workers are entitled to full pension, ration, and firewood benefits so plantation management use bigha workers to avoid these costs. Demographic accuracy therefore remains moot and politically unnecessary within this explicit strategy of labor extraction. Indian Tea Gazette, Indian Tea Cyclopaedia, 116. A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle (London: John Gifford, 1945) 19. E. Valentine Daniel presented an interesting analysis of the languages of plantation work in Sri Lanka in ‘‘Tea Talk: Measures of Labor in the Discourse of Sri Lanka’s EstateTamils,’’ at the Conference on Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia, September 26–29, 1990, Center for Asian Studies Amsterdam, Netherlands. Leonard Smith, ‘‘Field-Report Notebook.’’ Unpublished manuscript, 1990. Notes on Tea in Darjeeling by a Planter (Darjeeling, 1888), 122. H. A. Antrobus, A History of the Jorehaut Tea Company Ltd., 1859–1946 (London: Tea and Rubber Mail, 1951), 120. MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, 60 (my italics). Pablo Neruda, ‘‘Girl Gardening,’’ in Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda, trans. Ben Bellit (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 252–257.

24 For a comprehensive account of the relationship between labor laws and practice around child labor, see Vasanthi Raman, Child Labor in the Tea Plantations of North East India (New Delhi: unicef and Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, 1991). See also Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Plantation Labour Act and Child Labour,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, (October 1992): 2287– 2289; J. John, S. Lahiri and A. Nanda, ‘‘The Plight of ‘Unfree’ Tea Workers,’’ Labour File: A Monthly Journal of Labor and Economic Affairs 5, nos. 7–9 (July–September 1999): 1–51. 25 This song was translated from tapes, to Sadri and Hindi and then into English, by Uma Gop, Bhagirathi Mahato, Nirmala Pandey (of Calcutta), and myself. Uma Gop, in particular, spent one entire day on the initial transcription into textual form.The song forms part of a collection of forty women’s songs collected during initial field research. 26 Notes on Tea in Darjeeling by a Planter, 26. 27 Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, 123. 28 Alexander MacGowan, Tea-Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London, 1861), 18. 29 Ibid., 19. 30 Indian Tea Cyclopaedia, 15–16; 20, fig. 8. 31 Antrobus, A History of the Jorehaut Tea Company, 117. 32 Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, part 1 and 2: Assam and the Dooars, 42. 33 Ramsden, Assam Planter, 43. 34 Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—7,’’ Assam Reviewand Tea News 76, no. 1 (January 1988): 22. 35 The literature on this is vast. For a sampling critique of gender, rural labor, and technology, see Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, In Search of Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi (London: Zed Press, 1991); and Maria Mies, Indian Women in Subsistence and Agricultural Labour, Women, Work and Development Series, no. 12 (Geneva: Sage/Vistaar, 1987). 36 MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, 19. 37 Ibid. 38 For an interesting comparative perspective on the politics of ‘‘desire’’ in the colonial plantation systems of Fiji, see John Kelly, ‘‘Gaze and Grasp: Plantations, Desires, Indentured Indians and Colonial Law in Fiji,’’ in Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure. Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 72– 98. 39 Here, I am working through a certain assertion of a ‘‘uterine economy’’ within Spivak’s discussion of production, reproduction and labor value. Because mothering in this instance is embedded within the realms of ‘‘productive’’ work, then reproduction is embedded inside the matrix of production. See Spivak, ‘‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World,’’ 247–252. I would like to thank Parama Roy for referring me to this essay.

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40 These were the wage rates (April 1, 1999 to March 31, 2000). See dbita, Pay, Allowances and Other Conditions of Service, 11. 41 Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing House, 1981), 34. 42 An in-depth conceptual examination of this specific ambit of postcolonial mimesis in the plantation is needed. For brilliant theoretical stagings of the complicated and hybrid nature of Indian ‘‘mimesis’’ see Parama Roy’s Indian Traffic: Postcolonial Identities in Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 43 Indian Tea Cyclopaedia, 149. 44 Two well-known ethnographies of Colombian and Bolivian workers demonstrate that such narratives about machines, alienation, and laboring annihilation might contain a bodied globality. See June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 45 I am reminded, again, of Spivak’s discussion of a fictional figure, Jashoda, who is a wet-nurse in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘‘Stanadayini.’’ Spivak has a focused reading of the labor of breast-feeding (of milk as value) in the context of this story. I am interested, in this very different context of labor—and the assertions of a historical, contemporaryagent of field (hence productive) work— how such meditations on value, both exchange and surplus, might be read. See Spivak, ‘‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World,’’ 247–249.

chapter 7 Village Politics 1 My understanding of the ‘‘dialectical’’ comes from Sumit Sarkar’s interpretation of E. P. Thompson’s discussion: ‘‘as an openness to the possibilities of tensions and contradictions in the heart of all processes.’’ See Sumit Sarkar, ‘‘The Relevance of E. P. Thompson,’’ in Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79. This sense of dialectic as working through antinomies (as described by William Blake) breaks it out of the reductive binaries of dialectic found in more conventional Hegelian and Marxist formulations. 2 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘The Witch,’’ Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi (Calcutta: Seagull, 1998), 68–69. 3 I am indebted to Marta Savigliano’s powerful metaphor of power’s ‘‘viscosity’’ in myown descriptive deployment of this rendering of bodied power in the plantation. See her Tango and the Political Economy of Passion: Exoticism and Decolonization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995). 4 Further scrutiny of the important ways in which upper-caste, and Brahminical texts, underwrote this colonial taxonomy is required. For instance, we need to reexamine colonial documents as ethnographies which gathered

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information (often from local elites) through which Victorian social evolutionisms could be ‘‘proved.’’ In so doing, we also need to explore the ways in which upper-caste knowledges (and interpretation of these) mediated the construction of ‘‘primitive-ness’’ and its British Indian category of the ‘‘tribe.’’ See Bernard Cohn’s brilliant critique of H. H. Risley’s magisterial study Castes and Tribes of Bengal as a model for future excavations, Bernard S. Cohn, ‘‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,’’ An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. (Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1987), 245–247. Such an examination is particularly important fora postcolonial administrative discourse that has reproduced these assumptions of lineal evolutionism and taxonomies of ‘‘backwardness.’’ The impact of social policies which have emerged from these hybrid neo-colonial ascriptions of lack are profound and far reaching. See Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Tribes as Indigenous People in India,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, 34, no. 51 (December 18, 1999): 3589–3595; Mahasweta Devi, Dust on the Road: Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. and trans. M. Ghatak (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997); K. S. Singh, ‘‘History, Anthropology and Colonial Transformation,’’ in Tribal Society in India: An Anthropo-historical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1985), 1–26. Fora comprehensive discussion of Santali involvement in the radical politics of West Bengal, see Edward Duyker, Tribal Guerillas: The Santals of West Bengal and the Naxalite Movement (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). Ironically, Munnu Kujoor’s positive ascription has some resonance with the way in which managers talk about Nepali workers. Their historicized and transgendered essentialism about Nepali vitality and valor is situated in a political landscape where organized movements for Nepali autonomy in North Bengal continue to challenge Bengali state communism. Though there is little explicit connection with such movements in this specific plantation, in West Bengal such political claims by Nepalis for ‘‘Gorkhaland’’ is well charted. The jatra in Bengal is basically folk theater where Hindu mythology and folktales are enacted by village troupes. In the plantation, the jatra can include this, but it also encompasses adivasi dancing and rituals, such as the all-night circling within the akhra (the sacred circle). Pope John Paul I’s encyclical, which urged Catholic theological and liturgical practice to be more open to its local contexts, created the space for a more radical Catholicism (liberation theology) to emerge, particularly in South and Central America. Though I have not traced the impact of Vatican II within the Indian Catholic church and its specific interpretation in the plantation context, my numerous discussions with prominent parishioners, lay catechists, priests, and nuns told me that there are important tensions and ideological differences in the Church’s institutional imperatives on serving ‘‘the poor.’’ The Bharitya Janata Party is the national party which, as this book goes to

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press, runs the central government with a coalition-based politics. The literature on the history of ‘‘communalism’’ and the emergence of religiously based nationalist politics and the bjp, is vast. See Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Batalia, eds., Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995); and Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu, eds., Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 1998). Hearth pujas are shared by other communities: Nepali Kami [blacksmiths] conduct an October puja called the Kul, to exorcise bad spirits and ensure good harvest and household health. The Umesh Kholla is the narrow gorge that cuts between the two plantations, Kolpara and Sarah’s Hope; it is viewed as a ‘‘natural’’ border. Siva’s Rock is a temple and sacred site. Within folk and orthodox Hinduism, a guru is seen as a spiritual teacher and guide. He can also be a ritual master. This Durga Mata’s emphasis on ma (mother) and on bou-ma, the Bengali term fora daughter-in-law, is significant. At one moment, she resists his condescension by emphasizing an essential maternal power, which is valorized in her very claim to be the Goddess. Yet she does this by coding that power within a patriarchal structure of the family: that, as a daughter-in-law her limitations are clear, but she respects and honors her role as a daughter-inlaw, at least within this self-presentation. In her retelling of this encounter she uses the dominant, and familial, language of Bengali. Rather than examine the interface between the consistently ‘‘Hindu’’ practices of either orthodox priests or heterodox goddesses, and these cosmologies, I highlight the gendered modalities of their practice. I do so because the arguments around alignments to the village communities and ‘‘Great Traditions’’ of Hinduism are skillfully made elsewhere and are not central to my own focus on gender and ritual power as integral to the symbolic and political economy of the plantation. See McKim Marriot, ‘‘Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,’’ in Village India: Studies in the Little Community, ed. McKim Marriot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 171– 22; Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1972). The involvement of ritual masters in anticolonial/antiplantation protest was carefully tracked by planters from 1916. See Dooars Planters Association (dpa), Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the Year 1918 (Calcutta: dpa, 1919), and the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, Report 1921–1922 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1922), 9. Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘TheWitch,’’ Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans. Ipsita Chandra (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998), 58. I am indebted here to a growing literature on witchcraft as a patriarchal strategy of controlling women in the Chotanagpur and elsewhere.The mesh

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of both economic and ritual catalysts for witchcraft accusations are complicated would require further research. See Mahasweta Devi’s numerous essays in her Dust on the Road: Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. and trans. M. Ghatak (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997); Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan, Gender and Tribe: Women, Land and Forests in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1991); Dev Nathan, Govind Kelkar, and Yu Xiaogang, ‘‘Women as Witches and Keepers of Demons: Cross-Cultural Analysis of Struggles to Change Gender Relations,’’ paper presented at the Indigenous Asia: Knowledge, Technology and Gender Relations Conference, New Delhi, December 1–4, 1998. Devi, ‘‘The Witch,’’ 79. Ibid., 116. Ram Krishna Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspective of Labour Legislation in India: 1859–1932, as Applied to Tea Plantations,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Calcutta, 1987, 198. Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London, 1861), 10. Ibid. In using the term ‘‘household,’’ I understand that diverse kinds of family structures are embedded within the family unit in the villages.These households range from a nuclear unit to the more common multigenerational family networks. Administrative definitions of family and household are based on nuclear models. This is particularly important in the mathematics of food and firewood rations and residential allocations. In actual practice, a household and family contracts and expands through the year (when relatives come to visit for periods of time) and are frequently multigenerational. An accurate representation of household composition would require careful demographic sampling over time. This statistical sampling and survey is necessary for policy analysis around food budgets, nutrition, wage distribution, and so on. My own methodological constraints, and eventually epistemological problems, with implementing such a survey have been discussed earlier. For more details on wages and how they are computed, see chapter and appendix table 3. This practice of a man’s marrying and living in his wife’s home may be a more common practice in the Chotanagpur Plateau. To assert that this is a complete reversal of patrilocal norms would be hasty. Indeed, the Kumhars are more ‘‘orthodox’’ in theirdefinition of gender norms in the families. Economic pressures in one generation compelled this reversal, but in the second generation, daughters are being married within patrilocal norms. However, further work is required to trace the practice among othercommunities.Certainly, the economic pressures—and the fact of women’s primary wage— appears to be the most important catalyst in this partial reversal of marriage norms. Fora positive assessment of the mothers’ club program, see Maitreya Ghatak and Lipi Chakrabarty, The Dooars Story: Empowerment of Women and Com-

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munity Participation in Health and Family Welfare (Calcutta: Indian Tea Association, 1998). 26 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Draupadi,’’ in Bashai Tudu, trans. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (Calcutta: Thema, 1990), 160–162.

chapter 8 Protest 1 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 287. 2 Communist Partyof India (Marxist). As this book went to press, it continues as the ruling party in west Bengal for a record sixth term. 3 J. A. Milligan, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the Jalpaiguri District, 1906–1916 (Calcutta: 1919), 36. 4 The history of colonial forest settlements and reserves has significant ecological and social ramifications. The complex weave of subaltern histories within the ecocommercial impetus of such policyenactments has a considerable literature. See Ramachandra Guha and Mahdav Gagdil’s ‘‘State Forest and Social Conflict in British India,’’ Past and Present, no. 123 (May 1989), 141–177. In the postcolonial context, the Forest Department continues to be a powerful landlord. In the northeast of east Jalpaiguri, for instance, a small village, Khunia Basti, was created to supply easy labor to the forest department and followed the ‘‘tangya plantation system’’ constructed by the British.Villagers who worked for the Forest Department would get land and bullocks for ploughing and in exchange would offer their labor services (e.g., as watchmen) for free to the department. See Amal Datta’s ‘‘Some Aspects of Migration in a Forest Village of Jalpaiguri,’’ North Bengal University Review 6, no. 1 (June 1985): 1–11. 5 To call a man a sala is to confer a kinship reference (wife’s brother) with a derogatory twist.When a man calls another a sala, he is basically suggesting that he is involved with the other man’s sister. Sexual implications of dis/honor in terms of insult to ‘‘his’’ women are implied. This is one of the most common terms of colloquial insult in northern and parts of eastern India. Sexualized aspersions of dishonor, in terms of insult to ‘‘his’’ women, are strongly implied. Thanks to Parama Roy for helping me compose this sentence and discussing the connotations of the insult with me. The quotation is from Dooars Planters Association (dpa), Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the year 1936 (Calcutta: dpa, 1937), 289. 6 Ibid. 7 For a sampling of research on colonial tea plantation labor movements, see Sanat Kumar Bose, Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, Trade Union Publication Series, no. 8 (Bombay: All-India Trade Union Congress, 1954); D. Chamanlal, Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India (Lahore: n.p., 1932); Rana Partap Behal, ‘‘Forms of Labour Protest in the

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Assam Valley Tea Plantations, 1900–1947,’’ Bengal Capital History Journal 1 (July–December 1984): 30–78. For literature on contemporary conditions and political organizing, see Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1981); R. L. Sarkar and P. P. Rai, ‘‘Trade Unions: Origin and Early Development,’’ in Tea Plantation Workers in the Eastern Himalayas: A Study on Wages, Employment and Living Standards, ed. R. L. Sarkar and M. P. Lama (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1986); Virginius Xaxa and Sharit Bhowmik, Manual on Rights of Tea Plantation Workers, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1994); Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Labour Welfare in Tea Plantations: An Assessment of the Plantation Labour Act,’’ in Tea Garden Labour in North Eastern India, ed. S. Karotemprel and B. Datta Ray (Shillong: Vendrame Institute, 1990), 186–199; S.Chakrabarty, Working Class and the State: A Study of the Dooars Plantation System (Ph.D. dissertation,Calcutta University, 1988); J. John, S. Lahiri and A. Nanda, ‘‘The Plight of ‘Unfree’ Tea Workers,’’ Labour File: A Monthly Journal of Labor and Economic Affairs 5, nos. 7–9 (July–September 1999): 1–51. The 1921 Chargola Exodus in Assam was the most famous of these politics of flight. See Chamanlal, Coolie, 19–20; Government of India, Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, vol. 6, parts 1 and 2: Assam and the Dooars, 24 (London: hmso, 1930); Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1977), 130; Bose, Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, 100. For an excellent analysis of the wider landscape of nationalist movements, see Behal, ‘‘Forms of Labour Protest in the Assam Valley Tea Plantations’’; and Guha’s Planter Raj to Swaraj. For a discussion of the relationship between noncooperation movements and colonial labor organizing, see Bose, Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, 100; Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj; Ranajit Das Gupta, ‘‘Peasants,Workers and Freedom Struggle: Jalpaiguri, 1945–1947,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 30 (July 27, 1985): PE 42–52; Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Tebhaga Movement in Dooars: Some Issues Regarding Ethnicity and Class Formation,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 22 (May 31, 1986): 977–980. Colonial planters argue for a direct connection between a bhagat-led movement in Dooars in 1916 with millenarian protest in Chotanagpur. See the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, Report of the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, 1921–1922 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1922), 8; Ranajit Das Gupta, ‘‘The Oraon Labour Agitation: Dooars in Jalpaiguri District, 1915– 1916,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 24, no. 39 (September 30, 1989): 2197– 2202. For the most comprehensive discussion of millenarian movements in the Chotanagpur, see Susan Devalle, Discourses on Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand (Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); and S. P. Sinha, Life and Times of Birsa Bhagwan (Ranchi: Tribal Research Institute, 1964). See Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘Notes on Italian History,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 54–55.

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12 Colonial administrators remained alert to what they defined as sedition in these local markets. In 1921, a planter’s journal remarked that large markets were unwise in view of ‘‘recent disturbances.’’ dpa, Report for 1929, 40; dpa, Report for 1921, 40; One particular market, the Satalli haat, was suspected to be a center of ‘‘noncooperation agitation’’ and was closed down in 1922, though this remained a controversial decision. dpa, Report for 1934, 156. 13 Government of India Labour Investigation Committee, Report on an Inquiry into Conditions of Labour in Plantations in India, by D. V. Rege (Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India, 1946). 14 Rules under the Assam Labourand Emigration Act VI of 1901, Court of Assam, 1923 (Shilling: Assam Secretariat Printing Office, 1923). Yet ‘‘illegal assembly’’ occurred from the very beginning. Between 1902 and 1903, eighty-two workers in one Assamese plantation were imprisoned for illegal assembly, including rioting. 15 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Colonial Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 16 For a detailed discussion of the Workman’s Breach of Contract Act, see Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj, 12; Rana P. Behal and P. Mohapatra, ‘‘ ‘Tea and Money versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies, nos. 2–3 (1992): 142–171. For the most detailed and comprehensive critique of colonial legal policy in the plantations, see Ramkrishna Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspectives of Labour Legislation in India, 1859–1932, as Applied to Tea Plantations’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Calcutta, 1989), 103. For a colonial analysis of labor legislation see the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, Report for 1906. 17 Occasional references in official planter reports indicate the importance of these auxiliary military forces. Consider the following statement by an officercommanding the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles in 1933: ‘‘I need hardly remind you that the internal security of the district greatly depends on the efficiency of the Auxiliary Force and that it is essential that the Mobile force should be as large and active as possible in order that, if trouble should arise, it will be able to strike quickly and with sufficient force to put down the trouble before it has time to spread.’’ Dooars Planters Association, Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for 1933 (Calcutta: dpa, 1934), 159; see also Manas Das Gupta, Asoke Ganguly, and Paritosh Chakladar, ‘‘Labour and Trade Union Movement in the Tea Plantation of Terai (1862–1955): Problems of Class Formation,’’ University Grant Commission Paper, presented at the All-India Seminar, North Bengal University, Bagdogra, Darjeeling,West Bengal, January 6–8, 1987. 18 Das, Plantation Labour in India, 61. Technically, Dooars workers were considered ‘‘free’’ labor, while Assameseworkers were controlled within a penal system (See Bhowmik, 55). 19 Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspectives,’’ 75. Desertions were met with a series of labor laws to punish and limit an activity that had a serious detri-

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mental impact on labor supply; see my discussion of punitive legal practices and immigration policy in ‘‘Secure This Excellent Class of Labor: Gender and Race in Labor Recruitment for British Indian Tea Plantations,’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27, no. 3 (1995): 43–56. dpa, Report for 1924 (annual general meeting of January 1925), 102. An example of the on-going communications between colonial planters and administrators about the possible connections between the local organizing against liquor sales and nationalist activities is the following report: ‘‘Tea garden coolies were constrained to purchase their liquor from and to pay the higher price demanded by the border government shop. The noncooperation movement speedily captured the imagination of the coolie population of the tea garden area.The liquor shops were picketed and boycotted and in some instances had to be closed down altogether. Temperance enthusiasm was short-lived among the liquor-loving coolies of the tea gardens but the spirit of insubordination and contempt for authority remained ’’ (italics mine). Manas Das Gupta, Asoke Ganguly, and Paristosh Chakladar, ‘‘Labor and Trade Union Movement in the Tea Plantation of Terai (1862–1955), 19. This may have been a certain Seo Mangal Singh who the authors describe as a ‘‘Behari gentleman, a resident of Siliguri, who was an important local Congress leader. He was imprisoned a number of times because of his participation in the swadeshi movement. Ibid. An examination of Gandhi’s involvement in labor organizing and the plantation’s trade union movement is still needed. An initial survey of some primary documents suggests that he was not a supporter of trade union activity. The Dooars Planters Association noted that in Assam, Gandhi ‘‘agreed to the planters’ request to abstain from political agitation among the laborers’’ (ita, Report for 1928), quoting an article from the Times, June 6, 1928; Gandhi and noncooperation activists also made statements that workers’ and noncooperation movements were incommensurable. See Bose, ‘‘Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry,’’ 108. dpa, Report for 1921, 57. The lingua franca of plantation communities, derived from Sadhani, a language of the Chotanagpur Plateau. Among the important clusters of harvest pujas in the Chotanagpur, the karam and jitya are the most well known. Different variations of the Chotanagpuri traditions are practiced in thevillage rituals of the plantation.This particular song was offered not within the context of a puja but in a long session of translations. Bhagirathi Mahato and Uma Gop spent considerable time with me as I transcribed verses from the Sadri into Hindi script and retranslated them into Hindi. They have also assisted me in translations, as has Nirmala Pandey in Calcutta. In this brief analytic gesture, I have used as a comparative foil Shahid Amin’s brilliant discussion of how the ‘‘idea’’ of Gandhi was ‘‘reworked in the popular imagination’’ and how this influenced a range of political activity and discourse in eastern Uttar Pradesh during 1921–22. What I have not done

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is extend my discussion into a wider consideration of the relationship between Gandhi, trade union activity, and the indices of peasant consciousness and protest in colonial Dooars plantations. See Shahid Amin, ‘‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern up, 1921–2,’’ in Subaltern Studies, vol. 3: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 1–61. Government of India, Royal Commission of Labour in India, Written Evidence, vol. 6, parts 1 and 2: Assam and the Dooars (London: hmso, 1930). Ibid., 107. Ibid., 89. M. R. Anand, Coolie, 16. Royal Commission of Labour, Written Evidence, 1921; and Bose, Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, 114. Dasgupta, ‘‘Trade Union Movements,’’ 23. The relationship between this peasant movement and workers’ union organizing needs to be studied in greater depth. A simple alliance cannot be assumed, because of the ethnic differences among Muslim and Rajbansi villagers and adivasi workers. Bose, Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, 118. See S. Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (Calcutta: Subarnekha, 1980); A. K. Ray, Spring Thunder and After: A Survey of the Maoist and Ultraleft Movements in India, 1962-1965 (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1975). Stree Shakti Sanghathana Editorial Collective, We Were Making History: Women of the Telengana Movement (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). I am mindful again, of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s careful warning about postcolonial intellectual representations of the subaltern voice. See ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’’ 287. Ibid., p. 287. Royal Commission on Labour, Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India (Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, 1931), 284–285. Gramsci, ‘‘Notes on Italian History,’’ 54–55. What explains the absence of adivasi women within trade union organizing needs further research and comparative work. This would require a closer look at the structure of the party apparatus (for example, the CPI(M)’s union organization) and the involvement of both Bengali and adivasi women within these. For an excellent detailed critique of peasant women, contemporary activism and the communist state apparatus in West Bengal, see Amrita Basu, Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women’s Activism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Rita uses samaj (society) in two ways.When speaking of molestation cases, she speaks generally, referring to the cluster of lines or village, which has its own panchayat (village council).This would include members of all unions. Union leaders may sit on panchayats as well. In speaking of a woman’s election as secretary, however, it appears she is referring only to her union’s constituency.

42 In the summer of 2000, I learn that Jahanara/Suneeta is now married and has a child. Some of the women in the Factory Line tell me this but also emphasize that she does not come around this end of the villages much. 43 The term gherao translates into ‘‘surrounding’’; it connotes literally ‘‘to surround.’’ In urban factories, for example, managers will be surrounded by large groups for hours in offices or factory compounds till demands are met, or negotiations in good faith are promised. The gherao is an ubiquitous strategy of organized labor protest throughout the subcontinent. 44 Sections of this analysis are in my essay, ‘‘A State of Work: Women and Politics on Plantation Frontlines,’’ in Frontline Feminisms, ed. M.Waller and J. Ryecenga (New York: Garland Press, 2001), 419–436. 45 Luddu is a large, round sweet sold in dhabas (tea stalls), and offered at weddings at rituals. It is also used to suggest, humorously, that one is ‘‘taken for a ride.’’ ‘‘Getting a luddu’’ is ‘‘getting nothing,’’ or ‘‘being suckered.’’ 46 Chowpatty connotes a central space, a public walk-through area in a bazaar. In this instance, the chowpatty was a small clearing in front of Bhagirathi’s store that had a water pump and was a thoroughfare for three different clusters of lines. 47 Jhagrain can be loosely translated into a woman who likes to fight, or picks a fight. She is characterized as waspish, a troublemaker.

chapter 9 A Last Act 1 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Witchbath at Singbhum,’’ in Dust on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. Maitreya Ghatak (Calcutta: Seagull Press, 1997), 48.

Notes to Chapter Eight 381

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Index

Adivasi, 72–73, 246, 254–56, 293, 296, 350 n.83, 378 n.40 Advertisements for tea, 66, 68, 93–96, 110–14 Agency houses, 86–89 Alcoholism, 130–32, 212–13, 276– 77, 284–86, 297, 363 n.9, 377 n.20 Authority: of ethnographer, 10–12, 290–91, 367 n.6; labor organizing as threat to, 296–301, 377 n.22; of mahlia samity (women’s society), 276, 307–8, 319, 378 n.41; of panchayat (village council), 236–37, 261–62, 265–66, 276–78, 308– 9; and planter as mai-baap, 5–6, 120–22, 134, 143–46, 154–58, 216, 225, 276–79; of planter militia (North Bengal Rifles), 104, 296, 376 n.17; of priests, 267–68; of women on marriage customs, 257–60, 282–83, 308–9; workers’ discipline, 169–70, 184–85, 216– 18, 258–59, 313–15, 319–22. See also Labor unions; Plantation management Bengalis, 57–62, 98–101, 105–6, 116–17, 136–39, 347 n.46, 364 n.15 Body and body parts: and the discipline of labor, 53, 71–72, 170–71, 189, 192; gazes, 91, 115, 187, 194, 204, 220–21; ghinna (pollution), 139–40, 186; images of hands and fingers, 27–28, 46–47, 115– 16, 169, 192–94, 324, 345 n.18;

physical capacity for labor, 203–5, 209, 232–34; purity and women’s bodies, 26–27, 86, 319–21; skin color, 9, 18, 134–36. See also Gender; Izzat (honor); Sexuality; Women Britain: American colonies and, 34–35; British land policies and plantations, 62–63; East India Company, 21, 32, 34–38, 57–61; Indian tea interests and, 87–88, 97–99, 103–10, 356 n.13; land annexation by, for tea cultivation, 56–61, 65–67, 71–73; Marwari business community and, 87–88, 108–10, 347 n.46, 356 n.13 Buddhism, 23–25, 30–31 Castes: adivasi, 72–73, 246, 254– 56, 293, 296, 350 n.83, 378 n.40; Bengalis, 57–62, 98–101, 105– 6, 116–17, 136–39, 347 n.46, 364 n.15; bhinjat (cross-community) alliances, 250, 252–53, 257–60, 264–66; ghinna (pollution), 139– 40, 186; jat distinctions, 183, 246– 53, 256, 370 n.4; labor recruitment and, 7–8, 76–79, 130, 142, 354 n.125; marriage and, 252, 257–60, 264–65, 282; Nepali agricultural, 65–66, 77, 253; and Oraon identity, 251–52; religion and, 254–55, 263–66, 371 n.8; Santhalis, 65, 248–49, 251 Children, 76, 199–201, 206, 328, 329

China, 23–26, 29–34, 46, 54–56, 341 n.33 Christian communities (missionya), 148, 240, 253–55, 353 n.108, 371 n.8 Civilization: discipline and, 169–70, 184–85, 216–18, 258–59, 313–15, 319–22; and image of the gentleman planter, 6, 54, 90–93, 125–26, 357 n.22; and the imperial frontier, 60, 64, 89, 169–70; jungles and, 43, 49–50, 91; land cultivation and, 52–53, 344 n.8; leisure and, 6, 29, 39–43, 47, 52–54, 90–93, 123–24, 357 n.22; primitivism and, 53–54, 65–73, 115, 246, 254–56, 293, 344 n.8, 349 n.66 Class: babus (plantation staff ), 136– 51; caste distinctions and women, 13–14, 120, 248–51; entrepreneurship and, 89–90, 98–101, 105–6, 116–17, 359 n.47, 361 n.83, 364 n.15; the gentleman planter and, 6, 54, 90–93, 357 n.22; tea consumption and, 22, 28–29, 33, 43, 89–90, 95, 105–6, 110–14 Coffee, 42, 46, 343 n.68 Communist Party of India (cpi), 144–45, 300–301 Community: adivasi, 72–73, 246, 254–56, 293, 296, 350 n.83, 378 n.40; bhinjat (cross-community) alliances, 250, 252–53, 257– 60, 264–66; bhinjat (crosscommunity) marriages, 257–60, 264–65, 282; and food production, 73, 351 n.94; jat distinctions and, 246–48, 250–53, 370 n.4; land annexation for tea cultivation, 56–61, 65–67, 71–73; mapping lines of, 119–20, 174–75, 240–46; Marwari business community, 87–88, 108–10, 347 n.46, 356 n.13; missionya (Christian communities), 148, 240, 253–55, 353 n.108, 371 n.8; taxation of, 69, 349 n.74, 350 n.86

412

Dance, 2, 85, 254 Demonstrations and protests, 105, 296–302, 310–17, 377 nn.20, 22, 379 n.43 Discipline, 169–70, 184–85, 216–18, 258–59, 313–15, 319–22 Dols (work groups), 182–83, 213, 311–13, 315–16 Domesticity, 41–42, 47, 117, 125–27, 134–35, 166–67 East India Company, 21, 32, 34–38 Education and literacy, 148, 191, 296, 302, 314 Entrepreneurship, 89–90, 98–101, 105–6, 116–17, 359 n.47, 361 n.83, 364 n.15 Ethnographer: authority of, 10–12, 244–45, 290–91, 367 n.6; and class boundaries, 14, 117–18, 122– 23, 128, 134, 166–67, 198–99, 367 n.6; kinship of, with women plantation workers, 180–81, 198–99, 238–39 Factories: machinery in, 210–14, 229–30; men in, 177, 213–14, 223; time management in, 176–79, 212–13; wages in, 178, 222; women in, 213–14, 314–16 Food, 2, 14, 73, 333 n.5, 351 n.94 Forests and logging, 60, 64, 89, 292, 374 n.4 Gandhi, Mahatma, 297–98, 377 n.22 Gardens: as ideal, 21, 42–43, 169; jungles compared to, 43, 49–50, 91; primitive landscape, 53–54, 344 n.8; for tea drinking, 47; tea plantations as, 17, 52–53, 92 Gender: boundaries in field labor, 206–8; dols (work groups), 182– 83, 213, 311–13, 315–16; feminization of tea drinking, 22, 33, 40– 43, 45–50, 94, 110–14, 343 n.82; izzat (honor) and sexual conduct, 13–14, 220–21, 261–62, 308–10, 319–22; and physical capacity for

labor, 203–5, 209, 232–34; purity and women’s bodies, 26–27, 86, 319–21; rituals and, 264, 267–68; social space and, 117–18, 123– 27, 134, 213–14, 223, 241–43, 362 n.6; violence against women, 236, 276–77, 280, 283–87; women’s labor value and, 80–83, 195–96, 203–5, 209, 279–84, 368 n.13, 369 n.39, 373 nn.23, 24 Gramsci, Antonio, 155 Greed, 194, 209, 227–28 Grove, Richard, 344 nn.8, 9 Hinduism, 247–49, 252, 264–65, 267 Hogarth,William, 38–40, 39, 47–49, 342 n.61, 343 n.82 Honor. See Izzat (honor). Izzat (honor): bhinjat (crosscommunity) marriages and, 257– 60, 264–65, 282; caste distinctions and women, 183, 248–53, 256; sexual conduct and, 220–21, 261–62, 308–10, 319–22; status and, 220–21, 236, 242, 257–59, 261–62, 308–10 Jungli, 7–8, 77–79, 103, 130–33, 140–41, 349 n.66, 363 n.9 Labor: alcoholism, 130–33, 212–13, 297, 363 n.9, 377 n.20; badli (job exchanges), 280–82; birthrate among workers, 82–83, 286, 354 n.138, 355 n.139; casual worker (bigha, faltu) employment, 73, 191–93, 329, 368 nn.14, 15; child labor, 76, 199–201, 328, 329; demonstrations and protests, 105, 296–302, 310–17, 377 n.20, 22, 379 n.43; dols (work groups), 182– 83, 213, 311–13, 315–16; gender boundaries in field labor, 206–8; importation of laborers, 55, 71– 72, 345 n.15; indentureship within plantations, 73, 351 n.95, 352 n.97; indolence in labor force, 65–70,

115; jungli, 7–8, 77–79, 103, 130– 33, 140–41, 349 n.66, 363 n.9; labor organizing, 296–301, 377 n.22; machinery, 210–14, 229–30; migration of, 7–8, 55, 65, 69– 74, 80–83, 348 n.60, 349 nn.73, 74, 354 n.125; opposition to tea drinking, 44–45; tea plucking, 6, 8, 26–28, 46–47, 54, 194–96, 329; wages, 73, 78, 178, 189–90, 203, 222–23, 325, 327, 328, 352 n.97, 355 n.139, 368 n.15; women’s labor value and, 80–83, 195–96, 203–5, 209, 279–84, 368 n.12, 369 n.39, 373 nn.23, 24 Labor recruitment: family recruitment, 80–83; migration and, 7–8, 55, 65, 69–79, 80–83, 348 n.60, 349 nn.73, 74, 354 n.125; missionaries and, 65, 353 n.108; sirdars and, 74–75, 143–44, 183, 352 nn.100, 101, 364 n.22, 367 n.7 Labor unions: casual worker (bigha, faltu) employment, 73, 191–93, 329, 368 nn.14, 15; control of plantations space, 241–42; labor organizing and, 295–301, 377 n.22; panchayat (village council) and, 276; paternalism, 143–46, 218– 19, 275; rituals and, 267–68, 275; and social reform, 107–8; women in, 276, 289–92, 306–11, 319– 21, 378 n.40. See also Plantation management Land: jotedars, 98; land annexation for tea cultivation, 56–61, 65–67, 71–73; wasteland policy in India, 62–64, 68–69, 98, 347 n.50 Leisure, 6, 29, 39–43, 47, 52–54, 90–93, 123–24, 357 n.22 Machinery, 210–14, 229–30 Mahlia samity (women’s society), 276, 307–8, 319, 378 n.41 Mai-baap (father and mother), 5–6, 120–22, 134, 143–46, 154–58, 216, 225, 276–79

Index 413

Marriage: bhinjat (cross-community) alliances, 256–60, 264–65, 282; ghar jamais (house son-in-laws), 182, 282, 312; woman’s izzat (honor) and, 242; women and marriage customs, 257–60, 282– 83, 308–9; women’s labor value and, 80–83, 203–5, 209, 279–84, 368 n.12, 369 n.39, 373 nn.23, 24 Marwari business community, 87– 88, 108–10, 347 n.46, 356 n.13 Men: and alcoholism, 130–32, 284– 86, 297, 363 n.9, 377 n.20; bhinjat (cross-community) marriages, 257–60, 264–65, 282; in factories, 213–14, 223; gender boundaries in field labor, 206–8; ghar jamais (house son-in-laws), 182, 282, 312; image of the gentleman planter, 6, 54, 90–93, 357 n.22; mobility of, 209, 296; overseers and, 208– 10, 215–16, 222–23; in panchayat (village council), 278; and pesticide use, 209–10, 227; physical capacity of, for labor, 203–5, 209, 232–34; priests, 267–68, 270; rituals and status, 264; sirdars, 74–75, 143–44, 183, 352 nn.100, 101, 364 n.22, 367 n.7; social space of, 123–27, 134, 187, 241– 42; and tea drinking, 45, 94–97; wage scale for, 222–23, 325, 327; women’s labor value and, 80–83, 203–5, 209, 279–84, 368 n.12, 369 n.39, 373 n.24, 373 nn.23, 24. See also Planters Migration of labor, 8, 55, 65, 69–74, 80–83, 348 n.60, 349 nn.73, 74, 354 n.125 Missionary work, 65, 148, 353 n.108 Missionya (Christian communities), 148, 240, 253–55, 353 n.108, 371 n.8 Mythology: Garden of Eden, 52–53, 169, 345 n.21; of the gentleman planter, 90–93; human sacrifice and machinery, 229–32; of tea, 23–24

414

Names and identity, 4, 183, 185, 256, 290–91, 333 n.6, 367 n.7 Narratives, women’s, 15–18, 305–7 Nationalism, 10–11, 105–8, 263, 265, 337 nn.23, 24, 364 n.15 Naxalite movement, 300–301 Nepalis: as agricultural castes, 65– 66, 77, 253; in plantation hierarchy, 138, 147–48, 252–53, 256 North Bengal Rifles (planter militia), 104, 296, 376 n.17 Okakura, Kakuzo, 31 Opium, 32, 38, 70–71, 339 n.6, 350 n.76 Panchayat (village council), 236–37, 261–62, 265–66, 276–78, 308–9 Paternalism: labor unions and, 143– 46, 218–19, 275; in plantation management, 118; planter as maibaap, 5–6, 120–22, 134, 143–46, 154–58, 215–16, 225, 276–79; planters’ sexual liaisons with women workers, 163–66, 187, 219–21; women and marriage customs, 257–60 Plantation management: babus (plantation staff ), 136–41; Bengalis in, 105–8, 364 n.15; coercion by, 161–62, 172, 190, 218–19, 229, 351 n.95, 352 n.97; daffadars (field overseers), 147, 366 n.5; greed, 194, 209, 227–28; labor unions and, 143–46, 296–300, 377 n.22; and male plantation workers, 208–10, 222–23; Nepalis in, 138, 147–48, 252–53, 256; overseers’ hierarchy, 143–44, 150–53, 297, 327; paternalism in, 118; planter militia (North Bengal Rifles), 104, 296, 376 n.17; sirdari system of, 74–75, 143–44, 183, 352 nn.100, 101, 364 n.22, 367 n.7; and women workers, 150–53, 183–85, 190–95, 201–5, 215–18, 276–77, 313–15, 319–21, 335 nn.14, 15; and workers’

discipline, 169–70, 184–85, 216– 18, 258–59, 313–15, 319–22 Plantations: British land policies and, 62–63; capital investments in, 86–89, 97–103, 105–9, 116–17, 356 n.13, 359 n.46, 361 n.83, 364 n.15; demonstrations and protests on, 296–302, 310–17; as gardens, 17, 52–53, 92; greed, 194, 209, 227–28; indentureship within, 73, 351 n.95, 352 n.97; inherited jobs on, 181, 191–92, 196, 200, 277; labor recruitment, 6, 8, 65, 69– 74, 77–79, 348 n.60, 354 n.125; mapping lines of, 119–20, 174– 75, 240–46; Marwari business community and, 87–88, 108–10, 347 n.46, 356 n.13; pesticide use, 209–10, 227. See also Labor; Tea and tea drinking; Tea cultivation; Women Planters: class and, 6, 54, 90–93, 357 n.22; as father figure (mai-baap), 5–6, 120–22, 134, 143–46, 154– 58, 216, 225, 276–79; image of gentleman planter, 6, 54, 90–93, 125–26, 357 n.22; planter’s wife, 126–28, 134–35, 362 n.6; and relations with Indian elites, 104–8; reputation of, 125, 132–33, 140, 146–48, 156–60, 224–26; rituals and, 121–22, 224–26; sexual liaisons with women workers, 163–66, 187, 219–21 Political activism: labor organizing, 296–301, 377 n.22; of Mahatma Gandhi, 297–98, 377 n.22; Naxalite movement, 300–301; women and, 14, 253, 285–87, 302–3, 311– 13, 318–19 Primitivism, 53–54, 65–73, 115, 246, 254–56, 293, 344 nn.8, 9, 349 n.66 Religion: Buddhism, 23–24, 30– 31; castes and, 254–55, 263–64, 371 n.8; Hinduism, 247–49, 252,

264–65, 267; Indian identity and, 254–56; missionya (Christian communities), 148, 240, 253–55, 353 n.108, 371 n.8 Rituals: bhagat (faith healer), 172, 224, 243–44, 271–73; of consumption, 22, 34, 38–40; daini (witch), 272–74, 372 n.17; Durga Mata (shamaness), 260, 268–71, 372 n.13; Holi, 248, 257; men’s status and, 264; panchayat (village council) and, 265–66; planters and, 121–22, 224–26; priests, 267– 68, 270–71; ritual space, 174, 225, 242, 264, 304; of tea drinking, 28–30, 41, 44; trees and plants as sacred objects, 226–29, 265–66; union leaders and, 267–68, 275; village ritual, 224; women and, 135, 260, 267–68, 272–74, 372 n.13 Sahlins, Marshall, 21, 341 n.36 Sexuality: izzat (honor) and sexual conduct, 220–21, 261–62, 308–10, 319–22; planters’ sexual liaisons with women workers, 163–66, 187, 219–21 Sirdars, 74–75, 143–44, 183, 243, 352 nn.100, 101, 364 n.22, 367 n.7 Social space, 41–42, 47, 117, 123–27, 134, 166–67, 187, 241–42 Songs, 1, 74, 197, 201, 215, 297–98, 377 n.25 Status: bhinjat (cross-community) marriages, 257–60, 264–65, 282; of domestic workers, 149–50; jat distinctions and, 246–48, 250– 53, 257–59, 370 n.4; names and, 4, 183, 256, 333 n.6, 367 n.7; overseers’ hierarchy and, 150–53, 183, 297; planters’ reputation, 125, 132–33, 140, 146–48, 156–60, 224–26; woman’s izzat (honor) and, 220–21, 236, 242, 257–59, 261–62, 308–10; women’s labor

Index 415

Status (continued) value and, 80–83, 203–5, 209, 279–84, 368 n.12, 369 n.39, 373 n.24, 373 nn.23, 24 ‘‘Sterling companies,’’ 86–89 Stoler, Ann, 351 n.95 Taxation, 34–35, 64, 69, 349 n.74, 350 n.86 Tea and tea drinking: advertisements for, 66, 68, 93–96, 110–14, 113; Bengalis and, 57–62, 98–101, 105– 6, 116–17, 136–39, 347 n.46, 364 n.15; capital investments in, 86– 89, 97–103, 105–9, 116–17, 356 n.13, 359 n.46, 361 n.83, 364 n.15; China and, 23–26, 29–34, 46, 54– 56, 341 n.33; entrepreneurship in tea production, 89–90, 98–101, 105–6, 116–17, 359 n.47, 361 n.83, 364 n.15; equipment for, 21, 32, 40, 85, 342 n.51; gendering of, 22, 33, 40–43, 45–50, 94–97, 110–14, 343 n.82; and health, 43–46, 96; and leisure, 29, 39–43; and opium, 32, 38, 70–71, 339 n.6, 350 n.76; rituals of, 21–24, 34, 38–40; tea trade associations, 75, 81, 101–3, 107; trade in tea, 21–22, 31–35, 40 Tea cultivation: cycles of tea cultivation, 173–76, 180–81, 201–4; greed, 194, 209, 227–28; impact on local communities, 57, 60, 65–67; machinery’s impact on, 210–14; pesticide use, 209–10, 227; pruning, 201–5, 315–16; tea harvest quotas and, 178, 187, 191– 92, 203–4, 314–15, 330, 367 n.12; tea plucking, 6, 8, 26–28, 46–47, 54, 194–96, 329 Time and timekeeping: cycles of tea cultivation, 173–76, 180–81, 201– 4; and surveillance of workers, 181–84, 190–93, 314; time management in factories, 176–79, 212–13 Tools as weapons, 292–94, 316–18

416

United States, 34–36, 42–43, 94, 342 n.51 Villages: bhinjat (cross-community) marriages, 257–60, 264–65, 282; family ties within, 182; panchayat (village council), 236–37, 261–62, 265–66, 276–78, 308–9; village rituals, 224 Violence: against women, 236, 276–77, 280, 283–87; tools as weapons, 292–94, 316–18 Wages: in factories, 178, 222; tea harvest quotas and, 178, 187, 191–92, 203–4, 314–15, 330, 367 n.12, 368 n.15; women plantation workers, 279–82, 284, 373 nn.23, 24 Wasteland Rules, 62–64, 68–69, 98, 347 n.50 Women: birthrate among, 82–83, 286, 354 n.138, 355 n.139; casual worker (bigha, faltu) employment, 73, 191–93, 329, 368 nn.14, 15; dols (work groups), 182–83, 213, 311–13, 315–16; domestic work of, 149–50, 181, 187–89, 222–23; gender boundaries in field labor, 206–8; hands and fingers, images of, 27–28, 46–47, 115–16, 169, 193–94, 345 n.18; images of, 3–4, 22, 26–27, 43, 47, 54, 68, 218; inherited plantation jobs, 181, 191– 92, 196, 200, 277; izzat (honor), 220–21, 236, 242, 257–59, 261–62, 308–10, 319–21; jat distinctions and, 246–48, 250–53, 370 n.4; kinship and, 13–14, 118, 181–82, 250–51; labor migration and, 80–83; mahlia samity (women’s society), 276, 307–8, 319, 378 n.41; and marriage, 257–60, 264– 65, 280–83, 308–9; names and identity of, 4, 183, 185, 256, 290– 91, 333 n.6, 367 n.7; narratives of, 15–18, 305–7; pesticide use and, 209–10, 227; plantation manage-

ment and, 183–85, 190–95, 201–5, 215–18, 276–77, 313–15, 319–22, 335 nn.14, 15; planter’s wife, 126– 28, 134–35, 362 n.6; and political activism, 14, 253, 285–87, 302– 3, 311–13, 318–19; pregnancy and child-rearing, 200–202, 222, 233, 326; and rituals, 135, 260, 267–68, 272–74, 372 nn.13, 17; sexual liaisons with planters, 163–66, 187,

219–21; tea harvest quotas and, 178, 187, 191–92, 203–4, 314–15, 330, 367 n.12; tea plucking and, 6, 8, 26–28, 46–47, 54, 194–96, 329; union activism and, 276, 289–92, 306–10, 319–21, 378 n.40; value of women’s labor, 80–83, 195– 96, 203–5, 209, 279–84, 368 n.12, 369 n.39, 373 nn.23, 24; violence against, 236, 276–77, 280, 283–87

Index 417

Piya Chatterjee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chatterjee, Piya. A time for tea : women, labor, and post/colonial politics on an Indian plantation / Piya Chatterjee. p. cm. – (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-2679-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-2674-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tea plantation workers–India–History–20th century. 2. Tea trade–India–History–20th century. 3. Women tea plantation–India–History–20th century. I. Title: Women and post/colonial labor on an Indian plantation. II. Title. hd8039.t182 i438 2001 331.4'8372'09540904–dc21

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