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: 1108610153

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Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agronomy in shaping the history of tea and its plantations in British east India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India.

A Cupful of Secrets
A Cupful of Secrets

Author: AMULYA SHARMA

Publisher: Zorba Books

Published: 2022-05-23

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9390640873

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Chai. The word evokes memories of rainy afternoons, road trips, and long conversations. No gathering in India is complete without a few cups of hot, steaming tea. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, ‘Some people will tell you that there’s a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea’. This book truly encapsulates this feeling, while never departing from its main purpose of being a useful and erudite manual for novice and seasoned tea planters with detailed instructions about tea manufacture, right from which seeds to select to newly evolving sustainable practices. The book details the advantages and disadvantages of different processes and methods for raising tea plants successfully. It is written in a clear and lucid manner and covers a wide range of practices related to the manufacture of tea. The author is an experienced tea planter with decades of experience, which allows him to offer practical and easy-to-follow advice about improving the quality of the crop through appropriate scientific techniques. The author also takes into consideration the changing demands of tea production as a result of climate change, bringing together both traditional and moderns methods for adapting to the needs of the current market. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone who wishes to improve the quality of their crop and produce superior tea.

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.

Coolies of Capitalism
Coolies of Capitalism

Author: Nitin Varma

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-05-07

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 3110461285

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“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

Contagion and Enclaves
Contagion and Enclaves

Author: Nandini Bhattacharya

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2012-11-20

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1781386366

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Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market.