One Hundred Years of Servitude

One Hundred Years of Servitude

Author: Rana Partap Behal

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 9789382381433

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This book presents a hundred-year history of tea plantations in the Assam (Brahmaputra) Valley during British colonial rule in India. It explores a world where more than two million migrant laborers worked under conditions of indentured servitude in the plantations, producing tea for an increasingly profitable global market. Behal traces the genesis and early development of the tea industry; the links between the colonial state and private British capital in fostering plantations in Assam; the nature of the 'tea mania,' and its consequences, which led to the emergence of the indenture labor system in Assam's tea gardens. The book describes process of labor mobilization and the nature of labor relations in the tea plantations. It deals with the operational aspects of labor recruitment, which involved the transportation and employment of migrant laborers, from the 1860s until the the indenture system was formally dismantled. It focuses on the power structure that ruled over the organization of production and labor relations within the plantations. This power structure operated at two levels: around the Indian Tea Association, the apex body of the tea industry, and the tea planters' coercive authority. The book examines the role of the colonial state and provides statistics on production, while also telling the story of everyday labor life in the tea gardens, and of the resistance to the oppressive regime by 'coolie' laborers who had been coerced into generational servitude. It analyses the forms of their protests, and raises the question whether the transformation of these migrant agrarian communities working in conditions of unfree labor was proletarian in nature.


Empire's Garden

Empire's Garden

Author: Jayeeta Sharma

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-08

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0822350491

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A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.


Tea, Love and War

Tea, Love and War

Author: Consultant Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon Honorary Consultant and Senior Clinical Lecturer David Mitchell

Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1780880898

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The range of the book: from wartime England to colonial Assam; from sapper training in India to jungle warfare in Malaya – Tea, Love and War tells the unique true story of the child of an exploited village woman gaining recognition and acceptance in suburban England. It is split into three parts: Stuart and Mary’s story, David’s story, and Ann’s story.Stuart, working on a tea estate in the jungles of Assam, fathers a child by a teenage native woman. Stuart’s letters to his family in pre-war England vividly describe his life as a planter in colonial India but conceal his secret love life. When war breaks out, Stuart joins the Indian army, trains as a sapper and is posted to Malaya, blowing bridges in the desperate rearguard action against the Japanese invasion. Back in wartime England, his sister Mary marries Stuart’s best friend, Arthur, who decides to train as an army officer. Mary, now a young mother pregnant with her second child, tells of the year’s delay in hearing news of her brother’s death at the fall of Singapore. Before the child is born, she learns that Arthur has been killed in action in Italy. The story switches to a jungle village in Assam where a small Anglo-Indian child named Ann fights her way through poverty and discrimination, always seeking the identity of her father and his family.Tea, Love and War is a gripping true story, narrated by Mary through her son David. “Much of the text is taken from the many exercise books that she filled with her memories, and whilst my investigations have expanded and updated her story, the history of the relevant elements of the Second World War, the Blitz and public perception of the Malayan campaign leading to the fall of Singapore are more eloquently seen from her individual viewpoint.” The book will appeal to fans of autobiographies, history and social history – Anglo-Indian culture and exploitation of women in India are key themes in the text – and has been inspired by Wild Swans.


The Planter's Bride

The Planter's Bride

Author: Janet MacLeod Trotter

Publisher:

Published: 2015-01-07

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 9780750541268

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Cousins and best friends, Sophie and Tilly are looking for love and adventure Sophie, orphaned at six, has been brought up by a radical aunt. Tilly meanwhile has lived a sheltered life in Newcastle. Tilly surprises everyone with a whirlwind marriage to a confirmed bachelor and tea planter, James Robson, following him to India. Thinking herself in love with the charming, enigmatic forester Tam, the independent Sophie decides to follow him when he also goes to India. Set against the vivid backdrop of post WW1 Britain and the changing world of India under the British Raj. THE PLANTER'S BRIDE is a passionate story of tragedy, loyalty and undying love


Tea Environments and Plantation Culture

Tea Environments and Plantation Culture

Author: Arnab Dey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-12-13

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1108471307

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Rethinks the tea plantation economy of colonial east India by highlighting its human and non-human networks and practices.


The Tea Planter's Daughter

The Tea Planter's Daughter

Author: Janet MacLeod Trotter

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781503934191

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Lush, green, fragrant: the Indian hills of Assam are full of promise. But eighteen-year-old Clarissa Belhaven is full of worry. The family tea plantation is suffering, and so is her father, still grieving over the untimely death of his wife, while Clarissa's fragile sister, Olive, needs love and resourceful care. Beautiful and headstrong, Clarissa soon attracts the attention of young, brash Wesley Robson, a rival tea planter. Yet before his intentions become fully clear, tragedy befalls the Belhavens and the sisters are wrenched from their beloved tea garden to the industrial streets of Tyneside. A world away from the only home she has ever known, Clarissa must start again. Using all her means, she must endure not only poverty but jealousy and betrayal too. Will the reappearance of Wesley give her the link to her old life that she so desperately craves? Or will a fast-changing world and the advent of war extinguish hope forever? Revised edition: This edition of The Tea Planter's Daughter includes editorial revisions.


A Time for Tea

A Time for Tea

Author: Piya Chatterjee

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2001-11-29

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0822380153

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In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system. Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion. A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.