Chatterjee, P. A Time For Tea PDF

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A Time for Tea
A John Hope Franklin Center book

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A Time for Tea

, ,  /
    
Piya Chatterjee
Duke University Press Durham and London 

Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
©  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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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

Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
 Alap 
 Travels of Tea,
Travels of Empire 
 Cultivating the Garden 
 The Raj Baroque 
 Estates of a New Raj 
 Discipline and Labor 
 Village Politics 
 Protest 
 A Last Act 
Appendix 
Glossary 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Illustrations
. A box of Brooke Bond tea 

. A box of Brooke Bond PG Tips teabags 
. ‘‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’’ 
. A box of Celestial Seasonings tea 
a and b. ‘‘Like Sons of the Forest’’ 
. ‘‘The Colonies as a Captive Maiden Forced to Drink Tea’’ 
. Taking Tea in England 
. The High Life, or Taste à la Mode 
. A Comfortable Dish of Tea,  
. ‘‘A Harlot’s Progress’’ 
a. Portrait of Sir Thomas Lipton 
b. Garden scene 
c. Sacks of tea on a Ceylon plantation 
.Women pluckers on the plantation waiting for their leaf to be
weighed 
. ‘‘From the Tea Gardens to the Tea Pot’’ 
. ‘‘The refreshment that maintains stamina’’ 
. ‘‘The vital drink for the Indian worker’’ 
. ‘‘Keep your family strong and healthy with Indian tea’’ 
. ‘‘It’s your privilege and pride’’ 
a. ‘‘When only a certain flavour will reflect your unique taste’’ 
b. ‘‘Contemporary Tea Hand Book’’ 
c. ‘‘The Lore of Tea’’ 
. Two leaves and a bud 
. Attendance log 
. ‘‘First Apparatus Used in the Manufacture of Tea in India’’ 
. ‘‘Supremely yours’’ 
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Acknowledgments
Or Another Kind of Introduction
The paradoxes and realpolitik of patronage, power, and labor build the bed-
rock 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 dias-
pora 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, Jalpai-
guri, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
kinswomen, have given their valuable time. For offering me their hospi-
tality in Calcutta, I thank Bimal and Monica Guha-Sircar, Renu and Pro-
noy 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 , and then again in  and . I extend my appre-
ciation 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  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 Pran-
jal Neog of  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 gener-
osity, the fieldwork on two separate occasions (–, ) 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 back-
bone of their lives might appear a facile gesture. It is a gesture, however,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 re-
silient 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 Ma-
hato, Baldo Mahato, Anjali Mirdha and Arun Mirdha, Agapit, Christopher
Pracher, B. Gop, Rita Chhetri and her friends at Debpara, Kaki of Katal-
guri (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.) Ru-
pak Mukherjee, Bithi Chakravarty, and Shukra Rautiya (who took me to the
remarkable Lal Shukra Oraon) welcomed me on various travels in the re-
gion. Nirmala Pandey also assisted me with translations and transcriptions
of songs and oral histories. Father Sebastian Martis, whom I met in , 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 fol-
lowing: 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 Uni-
versity 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 im-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
measurably 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 Bou-
ziane 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 deep-
est gratitude and respect to Bernard S. Cohn, Jean Comaroff, Raymond T.
Smith, John Comaroff, Susanne Rudolph, and Lloyd Rudolph. Since ,
Chandra Mohanty has honored me with her kindness and support. Because
her writing on Third 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 , Erla Maria Marteins-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
dottir 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 encour-
agement and have offered their own intellectual practice as models of a
brilliant and powerful pedagogy. Parama Roy’s keen and ironic wit, her hu-
mility, 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  and , , ,
and  has come from various sources.They include the American Insti-
tute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship, Regents Faculty Fellowship, Uni-
versity of California Riverside, Faculty Research Incentive Grant, (UCR),
and several Academic Senate Grants for extramural research from the Uni-
versity of California–Riverside awarded between  and .
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 Court-
land, 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 imagina-
tion of the design has captured the leaves of text beautifully. Nancy Zibman
provided the index.Two anonymous reviewers of the raw manuscript made
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 photo-
graphs 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 plan-
tation 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 en-
couraging 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
xvi
chapter  Alap 1
A Time for Tea: The Play
Dramatis personae: She/Narrator; Alice, of Wonderland fame, and compan-

ions; 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.
 ,  
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, ‘‘con-
tinuous 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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.
: 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.
 
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

. and . ‘‘Choicest Blend,’’ from the outer packaging

of a box of Brooke Bond tea, bought in London,
England, circa , courtesy Jean Comaroff;
‘‘Finger/Tips,’’ from the outer packaging of a box of
Brooke Bond PG Tips teabags, bought in Riverside,
California, circa .
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 photo-
graph/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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Alap 
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 conversa-
tions 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 com-
modity’’ is made possible because of gendered and racialized practices of
‘‘the body’’—fingers hard, dark, and understood within frameworks of en-
durance 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 con-
nect 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 plan-
tations 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 con-
stitutes its material bases, its colonial cultures of management and political
isolation chart a particular economy of rule. Indeed, the terms of indige-
nous feudal norms are grafted through the colonial imperative into a hy-
brid 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 con-
nected to regional processes through dialectical connections among labor,
commoditization, and the circulation of international and domestic capi-
tal. 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 market-
place, 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 neo-
imperial 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Alap 
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 neces-
sary 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 perime-
ter 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 gen-
dered 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
sahib remains distant in the villages, it resonates within the immediacy of

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 cre-
ate the vivid strands of plantation patronage. Through them emerges a
feminized habitus of labor that connects imperial trade, commodity fetish-
isms, 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 fac-
tory, village and the global market, be imagined as overlapping and layered
domains? When women’s subordination is essential to these fields of pro-
duction and consumption, the circulation of patriarchies shapes the hege-
monic and counterhegemonic contours of the postcolonial plantation.
 
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 mur-
murs 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 En-
glish ‘‘jungle.’’ Thus, a connotation of ‘‘wildness’’ was inscribed upon com-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
munities searching for work during labor recruitment forcolonial tea planta-
Alap 
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 racial-
ized 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 interna-
tional 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 ethno-
graphic fleshing of her stories, this calligraphy of body/silence/word, sug-
gests 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 en-
clave. 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
aesthetic foregrounds another coporeal and feminized story, a postcolonial

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 prod-
uct 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 An-
jali 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 defer-
rals 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 planta-
tions 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 ex-
uded 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:
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
another rendition of fallen status, marked by the fiction of my ‘‘fieldwork’’
Alap 
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. Patron-
age 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 situ-
ated 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 pro-
duction 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 dis-
ciplinary practitioners, many of whom come from ‘‘there’’ and who them-
selves 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 di-
chotomy, 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 here-
there-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 re-
gional state-power. Transnational anthropology is a given for those of us
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 counter-
paradigmatic dance. Yet its practice is implicated within the actualities of
late-twentieth-century globalization and its imperial orders. It is simulta-
neously, 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 reflec-
tion 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 medita-
tions 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, theo-
rists, and activists. They are crafters of the spoken and written word, nar-
rators 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 char-
acters 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Alap 
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 en-
tangled.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 in-
tegral 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 de-
tailed 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 narra-
tive. 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 con-
stituted: 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 ethnog-
raphy 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 re-
quires a language to express its manifestations.’’ 29 By staging the play as
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

text, through text, I am seeking a language of interruptions: one that be-

gins 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 ca-
pacity 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 continu-
ously open to its own sad ruptures. This is its only claim.
Situated Knowledges
In the first weeks of , when I finally find a place to stay, I am rarely
alone. Embraced by honest curiosity, I am invited to many rituals of wel-
come. 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 fac-
tory 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 ar-
rival, 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 trickle-
down effects of this information engenders hostility and suspicion. How-
ever, it would be a mistake to interpret such sharply gendered acts of dis-
tancing 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Alap 
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 en-
counters 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 plan-
tocracy, 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 gov-
ernment.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 contra-
dictions of my research. Questions about its product, the thesis or book,
occur. More often, the daily effects of our growing kinship is discussed. An-
jali 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 com-
mentary 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Grinding against the sieve of authorship are commentaries, interrogations,

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 anthropologi-
cal 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 decoloniza-
tion. 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
 
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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
As a postcolonial ethnographer navigating the cartographies of new em-
Alap 
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 un-
able 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 re-
fusal 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 suf-
focating 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 re-
mind 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 circu-
lations.
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  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 legend-
ary 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
scenes that were like photographs in my mind. Still pictures.

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 under-
stands 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 stom-
ach, 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 redemp-
tion.
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 ex-
plained 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
cups.Who is the Mad Hatter, and where to begin?
Alap 
. ‘‘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, .
 ,  
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 Wonder-
land: 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.
: 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
oriental Alice, I say: I disdain the flat hyphen, its Cartesian plane. The

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, sit-
ting 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Alap 
chapter  Travels of Tea,

Travels of Empire
 ,  
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.
: Poor, poor Alice. How she shrinks! How she expands! How she searches
fora way to get into the perfect garden.Considerall her journeys: the cau-
cus 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.)
 : (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!’ ’’
: (exclaiming) ‘‘How dreadfully savage!’’
 : (in a mournful tone) ‘‘And ever since that, he won’t do a thing
I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’’
: (brightly) ‘‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?’’
 : (sighing) ‘‘Yes, that’s it . . . it’s always tea-time, and we’ve not
time to wash the things between whiles.’’
: ‘‘Then you keep moving around, I suppose?’’
 : ‘‘Exactly so, as the things get used up.’’
: ‘‘But what happens when you come to the beginning again?’’
 : (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.
T    juxtaposes images of imperial refinement and im-

perial rupture: folktales of ‘‘civilization’’ and conquest that made possible
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 imagi-
nation 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 splen-
dor, tea would take on an aura of exoticism that would be domesticated
and made quintessentially ‘‘English.’’ 3 A commodity that was alluring be-
cause 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 histo-
ries 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 ar-
gues, 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 impor-
tant 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
a singular commodity player in the theater of early modern maritime trade.
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

Cultures of consumption, fed by the very wealth of trade expansion, now

demanded commodities that signified the success of ‘‘discovery.’’ The re-
markable demand for tea was enacted through a symbolic praxis that indi-
cates 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 transfor-
mations 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 aris-
tocratic 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 plan-
tation 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 civiliza-
tion 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 postcolo-
nial 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 south-
ern 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 cul-
tural economy of consumption within which the allure of an exotic pictur-
esque remains an enduring theme.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
There is considerable debate about the precise time period when tea cul-

. ‘‘Spice and Flowers,’’ from the outer packaging of a box

of Celestial Seasonings tea, bought in Chicago, Illinois,
circa .
tivation became widespread in China. Villagers in Sichuan were known to

cultivate the camellia plant around  .., and tea concentrate sealed
in earthenware jars circulated within agrarian markets of southern China’s
mountain provinces. By the late Zhou dynasty (– ..), these earth-
enware jars signaled a flourishing trade on the Yangtze River. Tea is impor-
tant 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  .. 5 In another textual
etching, the character t’u, which referred to a popular herbal drink, appeared
in a book of songs dated  .. It was a mere stroke away from the char-
acter 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 ‘‘trick-
led up’’ from the rural countrysides into the locus of textual refinement, it
enjoyed widespread acceptance in China’s vast rural and cultural econo-
mies. Certainly, the circulation of tea long antedates its entrance into the
shipholds of sixteenth-century East India clipper ships.
During the Confucian era (– ..), 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 aris-
tocratic 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  .., was
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

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 .. , vowing to meditate for seven years without sleep-
ing. 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 enlight-
enment he sought.6 These folk histories, rooted in the earth and the wander-
ings of monks, suggest that tea drinking was a potent and quotidian presence
in the social worlds of rural China.
The ‘‘Dignity of Government’’

By .. , Chinese imperial bureaucrats were calling attention to the im-
portance 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 (–) enhanced tea’s
commoditization and visibility in the rites of popular and elite consump-
tion.9 Because of the rule of a rival dynasty in northern China, the Jin (–
), the southern Chinese tea trade was monopolized by the Song aristoc-
racy.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 econo-
mies. So lucrativewas this trade that these small plantations created a system
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

of labor organization that anticipated the vast plantation systems of colo-

nial South Asia. Imperial ‘‘estates’’ monopolized the production of lacha,
but the ripple effects of the state monopoly also ensured a boom in micro-
proprietorship. 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 estab-
lished 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 insti-
tuted 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
(–).11 However, the Mongol invasion and the subsequent Yuan dy-
nasty (–) 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 im-
perial plantations would be expanded again by the Ming dynasty (–
).
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 fur-
ther west. Ming trade expansion was not limited to its terrestrial northern
borders, and rulers like the famed emperor Yung Lo (–) sent naval ar-
madas 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

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 sys-
tem. 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 planta-
tions of the T’ang and the dynasties that followed. From these sites of pro-
duction—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 morn-
ing’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 man-
agement, 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 be-
lieved, 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 planta-
tions. Consider the following observation of labor organization: ‘‘The pick-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ers, controlled by drum and cymbal signals, had to work in the chilly hours

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 deli-
cacy. 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 emerg-
ing measurements of worth. Tea was valued through a corporeal mythog-
raphy 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 inno-
cence—even when plucked out of that state through the tainting action of
human labor. Indeed, some grades of tea destined for the imperial house-
hold 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
 ,  
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 fix-
ing 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 shad-
ows 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 ‘‘femi-
nine.’’ What I call ‘‘significations of the feminine’’ emerge through ascrip-
tions of purity within explicitly feminized bodily disciplines. From these
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
emerged the iconic image of dismemberment and allure: women’s fingers
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

poised over a flutter of green leaves. Metaphoric dismemberment and actual

acts of dismemberment feminize the history of tea. Tea ‘‘cultivation’’ is im-
bued, for now, with a slight gesture toward the violence of descriptive dis-
memberment, 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 de-
marcate the kinds of tea to be plucked and processed in the imperial plan-
tations. Perhaps spaces of aristocratic consumption were created into cul-
tivated 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 aristo-
cratic 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 Si-
chuan tea is Meng-Ting (Hidden Peak); its name constructed from topo-
graphic 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 ram-
shackled 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. Con-
nected 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 aristo-
crats and scholars that threaded the cultural economies of its consumption.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Private teahouses of the wealthy were surrounded by gardens with lotus

ponds, grottoes, bamboo groves, and miniature trees. Nature, thus trans-
formed 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 didac-
tic 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 (–) wrote the Ta Kuan Ch’a Lun, which offered detailed infor-
mation about tea production and consumption. From an emperor-scholar
ostensibly isolated in the northern courts, the book offers a detailed ethno-
graphic study of fieldwork.23 Unfortunately, the emperor was fated to suffer
for his epicurean ethnology, when he was deposed for not attending to mat-
ters 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 sequest-
ers 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
 ,  
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
speaks from her corner.
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

: 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.
 : ‘‘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 sci-
entific inquiry was . . . .’’
 : (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.
I   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 cen-
turies 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 Bud-
dhism 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

time combined bodily refinement explicitly with Taoist and Buddhist phi-
losophies.
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 cere-
mony. And strangely enough, it was often successful; a subtle philosophy
lay behind it all.Teaism was Taoism in disguise.’’ 29 The simplicity of move-
ment 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 mer-
chants 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 . Though no direct reference to a tea trade
was made, Marco Polo did note the dismissal of a Chinese finance minister
in , who had dared to raise the tax on tea.32
Three centuries later, Giovanni Botero wrote in his  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, posi-
tive 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

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 ‘‘dis-
covery’’: the fragmentary knowledges of these early travels would help cre-
ate 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 tra-
versed 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 six-
teenth 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 Seven-
teen to their director general in Batavia. From , 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 , when the first direct import nexus was established by the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
newly constituted East India Company, British merchants purchased tea

from their other European rivals. Two small gifts were made to the English
king in , and the first large batch (. pounds) was shipped from Ban-
tan, Java, in . Tea’s arrival on English shores is indexed within aristo-
cratic 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 associa-
tion 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 ban-
ning 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 far-
flung 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 obei-
sance 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 () tightened control over foreign trade and by the
late s 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  and , however, the
British were permitted to anchor their ships at the Whampoa anchorage in
Canton.
Between  and , , pounds of tea were consumed in Britain.
By , England was purchasing one-fifth of all tea being imported into
Europe. Between  and , tea comprised – percent of all cargoes
outbound from Canton and  percent of Dutch East Indian Company pur-
chases during that period.44 In , the English East India Company had
sold  million pounds of tea, and in two years the sales had reached a stag-
gering  million pounds.45 By  it was the most powerful trade cartel in
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the world and owed  percent of its net profit to the Chinese tea trade. Tea
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

ranked fourth in value of the seven commodities exchanged on an empire-

wide 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 off-
set high shipping costs, included ad valorem taxes of – percent and
yielded about  percent of the gross public revenue of eighteenth-century
Britain.47 Between  and , £ 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 , smuggled tea
fetched  pence per pound (compared to the retail cost of  shillings) and
farmers’ servants ‘‘demanded tea for their breakfast.’’ 49 Smuggling of tea
was so widespread that the  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 . Through the next century, tea and its accoutrements were
filling the finest parlors of colonial Boston and New York.51 Economic de-
pendence 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 par-
lors: ‘‘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 consump-
tions would enact a dramatic volte-face. Tea would come to symbolize the
tyranny of the British crown.
In , the British government, urged by its powerful East India Com-
pany 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 , through which the colony had to bear a portion of the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 car-
goes to the eastern seaboard of North America, and the East India Company
found itself saddled with large supplies of surplus tea. Given its balance-
of-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  permitted the East
India Company to restore the full amount of the  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 Har-
bor, it was the final dramatic act of a party that had been brewing since the
late s. In an illustrated poem of the time, this costumed appropriation
of an internal ‘‘otherness’’—and the disorder that it signified—was expli-
cated: ‘‘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 other-
ness (still negative and ‘‘grotesque’’), the tea chest–throwers appropriated
the costumes of their own ‘‘sons of the forest’’ (both native and black), cre-
ating 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,’’ Afri-
can ‘‘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 re-
sistance.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 power-
ful 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

a and b
‘‘Like Sons of the
Forest.’’ Illustration by
H.W. M. Vickar,
from The Boston Tea
Party, .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
. ‘‘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, .
‘‘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 cot-
ton 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 , Emperor Qian Long’s [Ch’ien-Lung] (r. –) 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

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 Am-
bassador 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 ,
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 be-
tween 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 preci-
sion. 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 con-
tained image of plentiful domesticity. Painted by the satirist William
Hogarth in the mid-eighteenth century, Taste in High Life suggests an al-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
most frenetic activity, cluttered with symbols of wealth and disorder. The

. ‘‘Taking Tea in England.’’ John Gray and his sisters, circa . Victoria
and Albert Museum, London. Reproduced in Anthony Burgess et al., The
Book of Tea (Flammarion: France, ).
. The High Life, or Taste à la Mode. Engraving by William Hogarth,

. Reproduced in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
vol.  (), .

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 accou-
trements of porcelain and delicate bamboo whisks, they wrote home of a
beverage worthy of an emerging imperial nobility. European maritime jour-
neys 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 sug-
gest that this was a commerce both material and symbolic: a traffic of goods
that would chart global imperial expansion through daily practices of con-
sumption.
Sexual politics, class distinctions, and the creation of lush, exotic back-
drops 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 pleni-
tude. 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 pub-
lic hurly-burly, the work of the exterior (outside the frame) is irrelevant.
Their actions of leisure—holding a cup, playing cards, writing—signal the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 Con-
sider the English East India Company’s gift to Catherine of Braganza in
, 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 pro-
ductions 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 upper-
class women. Anna, the seventh duchess of Bedford, is credited with estab-
lishing 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 con-
trolled 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 Bo-
hea 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. Mon-
tagu, women become aristocrats of the interior, their spaces clearly demar-
cated 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

 ,  
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.
: (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 be-
come 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.’’
: ‘‘No doubt, you are right.’’ 67
Light fades out.
W’  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 Vaux-
hall 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, kin-
dred to the ideal enclosure of parlors. One contemporary observer enthu-
siastically 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
landscapes were powerfully deployed in the new colonies. The garden be-

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  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 camp-
ing 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 assem-
bly lines, on the edges of still parlors.Whether in the factories of the indus-
trial 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 depen-
dent 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 dis-
ciplined 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 mo-
ment, 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 en-
sured 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 , opponents of the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

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 descrip-
tion 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 coloniza-
tion that enabled it, this discourse of moral health and disciplined labor was
essential for the task of imperial nation making. Indeed, Victorian meta-
phors 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 quo-
tidian 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 disci-
pline. 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 drink-
ing 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of responsibility to heap on a mere commodity. Anxiety about class dis-

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 interrup-
tion of work, an insidious rupture within the rituals of factory disciplines.
A feminine ritual par excellence, teatime threatened a vital, indeed a mas-
culine 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 coun-
tered 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 cheer-
fulness 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 nar-
rative 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 inti-
mately connected the imperial fortunes of Europe and Asia. In its journey
from the mountains of southern China to the parlors of Georgian and Vic-
torian England it became one of the most important commodities to circu-
late in the expanding trade on ocean frontiers. Through the economies of
barter emerged, finally, one of the most lucrative ventures of the East India
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Company. Immortalized on the stone entrance of the East India Office in
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

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 splen-
dors 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 Ori-
ent 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 cul-
tural economy. It combined, within one cosmological universe, notions of
bodily order, delicacy, and harmony. Tea’s ancient pharmacological prop-
erties 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 gen-
dered 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 prac-
tices in Chinese imperial plantations, and more visibly in European rites of
consumption.Within plantations, the discourse around women’s labor sug-
gests 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 dis-
memberment 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
While no causal path can be drawn between the feminized and fetishized

labor of Chinese plantation women and the tea parlors of English women,
this construction of femininity (inflected by class and status) is striking. Sip-
ping 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 woman-
hood, 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 patri-
archy 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 hur-
ried 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 im-
perial Chinese plantations had marked the beginning of a journey in which
leaf and powder, product and commodity, would create an unbreakable con-
nection 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 pictur-
esque, 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 fea-
tured: 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, ‘‘ex-
terior’’ world.The women contemplate the signs of this exteriority—its sig-
nifications of wild otherness—with smiling fascination. The engraving in
figure  thus suggests an explicit domestication of these signs of difference:
to be seen, absorbed, consumed.85
In the engraving in figure , 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
black/brown boy-servant carries a tea-kettle. He might have been about to
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

. ‘‘A comfortable dish of tea in the high life.’’ From an engraving

published in . Reproduced in Michael Smith, The Afternoon Tea
Book, .
. ‘‘A Harlot’s Progress.’’ Engraving by William Hogarth, reproduced in

Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, vol.  (), .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 com-
modity 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 sym-
bols of otherness, of a wild within. The other—plumed, chattering, and
black/brown—belongs to a distant landscape, redolent of tropical wild-
ness 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—in-
deed British civilization—depended upon imperial expansion. Fueled by
the desire to taste otherness, this was an expansion that promised a bounti-
ful 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 ‘‘sav-
age parlor’’ epitomized the process of cultivation and its aesthetics of taste.
Like the ordered landscape of another garden, it suggested a primal cul-
tivation: of domesticating wildness, pruning the tangled branches into a
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
civilized harvest. Imperial leisure and its in/visible ‘‘other,’’ colonial labor,
Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

would thus constitute the fulcrum upon which anothercultivation occurred,

in the jungles and the so-called savage frontiers of India.
 ,  
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 (Trap-
pist 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. Sud-
denly, 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 com-
panions are still; they seem bored. The Mad Hatter fiddles with his tea pot. The
Narrator speaks to Alice.
: 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.
: (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 child-
ish 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.
  and  : (in a chant) ‘‘Pluck’d in a far-off land, /
Pluck’d in a far-off land.’’
: (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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

chapter  Cultivating the Garden
Wildness and a Possible Eden
 ,  
The stage is empty of the props and scenery of earlier scenes except for the Nar-
rator’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 colonial-
style 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.
: Poor Alice.What a trauma. First, seduced by what she believes beck-
ons 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 Won-
derland. Poor Alice. This was beyond her reckoning.
 : (interrupting in loud song) ‘‘Up above the world you fly / Like
a tea-tray in the sky. / Twinkle, twinkle. . . .’’ 1
: 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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
T   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 land-
scape. This was ‘‘Nature’’ with all Her unbound and fertile bounty, a sexu-
alized (‘‘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 ‘‘civiliza-
tion’’ 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 prime-
val myths of Judaeo-Christian traditions. Original innocence, the fall from
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Grace, loss and the constant search for redemption are the potent and re-

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 ‘‘gar-
den,’’ a living metaphor, was to be worked ‘‘through’’ the realpolitik of ma-
terial 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 imag-
ined—lay at the heart of the cultivating enterprise. The settling of forests
was only possible if people could be harnessed for the task. The sugges-
tion 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 topographi-
cal essence—upon the various communities brought into work offered an
analogue to the more abstract metaphoric suggestions of ‘‘cultivating’’ wild-
ness. Settling the landscape through cultivation was dependent upon the
civilizing of native labor. Indeed, colonial discipline, rationality, and rea-
son 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 im-
perial 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 pos-
sible by the necessary labor of others.
 ,  
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the background, an attendant fans them slowly with a large hand-held punkah.
Cultivating the Garden 

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.
: 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  and , 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 . He also sent tea seeds to the new botani-
cal gardens in Calcutta. Indeed, it was Joseph Banks who asserted to the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
directors of East India Company that serious efforts be made to cultivate

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 Val-
ley of contemporary Himachal Pradesh. Not only did , saplings lay the
foundation of new plantations, but ‘‘skillful Chinese workmen’’ 13 accompa-
nied 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 in-
exorably toward the direct colonization of India. In  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 : ‘‘The Singh-
pos 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 ten-
der 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 Mut-
tuck 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The early enterprise to make this ‘‘fine Tea Country’’ was dependent on hy-
Cultivating the Garden 

brid knowledges. Local Singhpo knowledges, Bruce’s own survey of the

‘‘tea tracts,’’ and experimental nurseries planted with the assistance of Chi-
nese 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 (sort-
ing, 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  with an initial capital investment of £,. By ,
, 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 entrepre-
neurs 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 tan-
gible commercial possibilities of tea planting could be realized in their new
colony.The Japanese folktale of the Indian Buddhist monk, Dharuma, tear-
ing 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 overarch-
ing 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 an-
nexation in Assam and North Bengal. In response to the challenges offered
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
by many communities in the region, colonial administrators argued for a

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 guaran-
tee 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 poli-
cies of settlement viewed indigenous communities (classified as ‘‘tribes’’) as
a considerable threat to plantation settlements.21
Political struggles with powerful local rulers informed territorial annexa-
tion. As in numerous stories of colonial frontier conquests, the region be-
came the site of military battles between company troops, local rulers, and
various indigenous communities. So protracted were these struggles that,
as late as , 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 Com-
pany incursions. In a humorous and coincidental mimesis of the Chinese
emperor’s demand of obeisance from Lord McArtney, a Bhutanese minis-
ter, Tongso-Perlon, threw a bowl of barley paste at the East India Com-
pany emissary, Mr. Eden, who had traveled to the Bhutanese court in .
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 contre-
temps 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 determi-
nation 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 Bhu-
tanese 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the neighboring Dooars helped to shape larger imperial strategies toward
Cultivating the Garden 

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 cen-
tered in the Kamrup Valley of Assam controlled a large swath of northeast-
ern India, including Mymensingh and Sylhet in contemporary Bangladesh.
Kamrup kings claimed lineal descent from a chief of the Koche, an autoch-
thonous 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 weak-
ened the Cooch Behar king, who faced a serious challenge from his north-
ern 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 Bhu-
tanese 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 cen-
tury, 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  from Shah Alam, the En-
glish 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 Com-
pany became the new overlord of Cooch Behar and began assessing its land
revenue.27
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Undeterred, the Bhutan court continued to collect rent from its old vas-
salage, and the East India Company did not have the power to halt this reve-
nue 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 , the uneasy tolerance flared into open military con-
flict. 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 overlord-
ship. 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 col-
lectors.30 By creating an essential cultural divide, however, the Company
legitimized its annexation and declared its intent to occupy tracts ‘‘of coun-
try 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 co-
operate cordially with British authorities.’’ 31
In , the British emissary’s encounter with Bhutanese barley paste cat-
alyzed the final military confrontation that resulted in the defeat of the Bhu-
tanese king on November , .The ensuing Peace at Sinchula facilitated
the annexation of , 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. Be-
tween  and , the Nepali court controlled a region that had previ-
ously been under Sikkimese rule, and the British initiated an alliance with
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the weaker kingdom of Sikkim. The colonial objective of this alliance had
Cultivating the Garden 

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 , Sikkim ceded the region to the Company, and a cantonment town,
Darjeeling, was founded in .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 dis-
appearance compelled the military annexation of a region far larger than
what was accomplished through the Sikkimese Deed of . Dr. Campbell
was returned, unharmed. But by , 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 sub-
terranean, 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 , increas-
ingly 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 mili-
tary 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 en-
compassed skirmishes and microstruggles: with banditti as well as with un-
friendly ministers and royal courts. Indeed, colonial perceptions of corpo-
real 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 settle-
ment: the conquest and administration of a region that would bring gold,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
and glory, into the treasure chests of empire.

 ,  
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 For-
est: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 be-
gins, 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 admin-
istration who investigated and classified customary practices of the rural
economy in ethnographic detail. After the Grant of Diwani in , Ben-
gal was carved into sixteen districts, though administrative mapping was a
continuous process ‘‘of jurisdictional changes necessitated by dacoits, vio-
lent disturbances of public peace, conditions of the police and pressures
of work.’’ 38
In North Bengal, the Jalpaiguri District inclusive of the Dooars foot-
hills was created in  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 Baikun-
thapur 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 legisla-
tive 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 Ben-
gal.’’ 40 As a result, the Bhutan Dooars was deemed as part of a ‘‘nonregula-
tion district.’’ No act of the Calcutta legislature was automatically applicable
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
to the region.
Cultivating the Garden 

The political implications of this special provision were considerable. It

gave autonomous power to the district commissioner and his judicial appa-
ratus, which could regulate essentially on its own terms, ‘‘any activity preju-
dicial 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 press-
ing concerns: first, the construction of an administrative system through
which customary land revenue practices could be understood and incor-
porated with colonial spheres of control; and second, the creation of plan-
tations, 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 Ben-
gal. 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 mea-
sures of land value became inextricably connected to the kinds of culti-
vating labor performed. From these connections between land and labor
emerged a typology through which various immigrant and local commu-
nities were measured. Significantly, a social evolutionary continuum con-
trasting ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘settled’’ classes of labor began to define the pro-
curement and disciplining of plantation workers.
‘‘Interests in the Soil’’

How did the district collector categorize the ‘‘imperfectly understood’’ sys-
tem 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 commu-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
nity,’’ pradhans (headmen) assisted the katham on his rounds. The katham,

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 ten-
ants had occupancy rights for a year or more, rayat-adhiar (peasant share-
cropper) paying rent with half of the land’s harvest after the jotedar sup-
plied 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 con-
solidated their now legally demarcated private properties, peasant share-
croppers 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 busi-
ness 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 pro-
prietorship 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  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 legis-
lative 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 discov-
ered 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 re-
vealed 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Cultivating the Garden 

encroached on those areas of local cultivation, disputes had to be adjudi-

cated in local courts. Planters were thus advised by the local district com-
missioner 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 expand-
ing plantations, a process exacerbated by increased land taxes. The district
administration’s assistance in systematizing legislation such as the Waste-
land Rules benefited the British tea companies who began to settle their new
property.
Colonial administrators also created government forest reserves, block-
ing off territories where they saw a potentially lucrative business in com-
mercial 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 en-
sure 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 reve-
nue. 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 for-
est, 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 docu-
ments. 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

characterized as a ‘‘nomadic’’ working of the soil that ‘‘exhausted’’ the ‘‘pro-

ductive 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 plan-
tations. Other colonial settlement policies were encouraged through mis-
sionary work. In , 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 
Christian and  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 culti-
vating 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 devel-
opment. At the positive end of this telos of cultivating development were
Nepali agricultural castes such as the Newars and Murmus, ‘‘capital agricul-
turalists.’’ 62 Their ‘‘advanced’’ forms of tillage were viewed as a necessary
example for those who inhabited the negative end of the cultivating con-
tinuum, the ‘‘nomadic’’ swidden cultivators: ‘‘The Nepali system of agri-
culture is decidedly in advance of the primitive jhum method followed by
the Meches and other aboriginal people. It appears probable that as avail-
able 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 favor-
ably 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Cultivating the Garden 

a. Portrait of Sir Thomas Lipton visiting his Ceylon gardens, on his verandah, and at a
London auction. Triptych. (below) b. Garden scene. From an advertisement for Lipton’s
tea. Both reproduced in Anthony Burgess et al., The Book of Tea (Flammarion: Paris,
).
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
c. Sacks of tea on a

Ceylon plantation.
Photograph, late nineteenth
century. From Anthony
Burgess et al., The Book of
Tea (Flammarion: Paris,
).
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 situ-
ated, 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 evolu-
tion, presented qualities of indolence and instability that were considered
unsuitable for regular wage employment. For example, colonial administra-
tors 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
located its actors into a ‘‘human’’ absence.
Cultivating the Garden 

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 a).
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 land-
scape. 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 b), a nineteenth-century advertise-
ment for Lipton tea proudly proclaims its ‘‘largest tea sale’’ and empha-
sizes 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 sil-
houettes 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 c), a photograph. Here, the text in-
scribes 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 hold-
ing 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 bunga-
lows, and plant tea nurseries—remained a critical issue. Despite large land
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
grants and generous lease terms, tea planting was plagued by acute labor

shortages exacerbated by the Wasteland Rules, which ‘‘tempted the planters

to take possession of more than they could manage.’’ 68 In , only ,
workers were available for employment, against a requirement of ,.69
As early as , planters were convinced that the ‘‘importation of for-
eign 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 s, an organized system of labor re-
cruitment 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  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 en-
gendered 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the ‘‘body’’ into nonwork.
Cultivating the Garden 

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. Assam-
ese 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 in-
terpreted 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
 ,  
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.
 : (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
 : ( grunting) Darling, you know how it is. ‘‘All that wonder-
ful sitting posture is natural to the race, huddled up to the cooking fires,
toasting their bodies, and smoking that universal panacea, the hubble-
bubble—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.)
: (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?
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

: 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.
: 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-and-
trouble . . . .
 : 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.
R  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, how-
ever, was the fact that plantation wages were considerably lower than wages
for migrant and casual labor. In , 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 cul-
tivators 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  Naga hill tribesmen
and swarms of Singhpo. I soon had  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 ‘‘primitiv-
ism’’ 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Cultivating the Garden 

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 contem-
porary Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal), for millennia the
homelands of Jharkhandi 83 communities such as the Oraon, Munda, San-
thal, and Gond, was throughout the nineteenth century profoundly affected
by incursions of outsiders called dikus. These dikus, merchants and land-
owners, both Hindu zamindars and Muslim jagirdars, supported by colonial
land revenue policies, inexorably dispossessed adivasi (indigenous) com-
munities of both land and livelihood.
Among the Munda, customary forms of land tenure known as khunt-
katti stipulated that land belonged communally to the village, and custom-
ary rights of cultivation, branched from corporate ownership. Because of
Mughal incursions, non-Jharkhandis began to dominate the agrarian land-
scape, 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 impe-
tus 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 ten-
ants, 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  to the millenarian struggles of
Birsa Munda at the turn of the century. One argument about colonial re-
cruitment schemes suggests that the British intensified recruitment around
Ranchi in the s in order to siphon away the core constituency of the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 demo-
graphic factors such as high population density, land sales, and evictions.89
The Inland Emigration Acts of  noted that the attention of the ‘‘govern-
ment 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 ap-
proximately one-third of their total holdings, no additional capital outlay
was required, and the workers’ small-scale paddy cultivation was benefi-
cial to the management on several counts. For one, they would partially re-
lieve the planter of supplying food to the workers, and there was an ‘‘under-
standing 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 ac-
count of [their] dirt and disorder.’’ 98 It does not occur to the planter, per-
haps, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Cultivating the Garden 

the coolie depot, remain shrouded in the spaces of unwritten histories: they
can only be stitched together in the imagination, heard in the flickering mo-
ments 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 San-
thals were called to offer evidence.We meet Jugal, a ‘‘pargnait of Gopi Kan-
doo’’ 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.– 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 con-
sisted 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 con-
tractors, statements of village origin and intent to return with recruits, how-
ever, 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 dis-
likes in a way which no European can do.’’ 104 The sirdar becomes a ‘‘works
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 re-
sponsible 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 certifi-
cation 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 s, the contractors or arkutti continued to be important bro-
kers 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 , a central recruiting body,
theTea Districts Labour Association (), was created to systematize and
coordinate recruiting efforts of colonial administrators, middlemen, and tea
managers.108
 ,  
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.
   : ‘‘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
: (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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Cultivating the Garden 

   : ‘‘The sahib would send sirdar to come and ‘break my
jungle’. You would be given one piece of cloth, two pots. You might be-
come 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.  per head I think it was.The sirdar would get a commission accord-
ing to how many people he had. All the calculations of the money owed
him was between the sahib and the sirdar.’’ 111
: (singing to the tune of ‘‘Tradition! Tradition!’’ ) Commission! Coom-
miiisshhun. ‘‘The full rate of  Rs is charged on minors who do not suf-
fer from any physical defect which would be likely to render them unfit
when they attain the age of ’’ . . . Twelve rupees.Twelve rupees.Twelve
rupees.112
 : (speaking from his dark corner) Number , dated Camp
Calcutta, February , . 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 As-
sam 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
: (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 matter of fact, junglis—to which
he coolly replied that there were as good junglis as a man could expect to
get at Rs.  a head.115
As the British mapped prime labor catchment areas, they simultaneously

evaluated which adivasi communities would prove to be the ‘‘best castes’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of labor for their tea estates. Plantations described as ‘‘unhealthy’’ were ad-

vised by commissions of enquiry to ‘‘employ good castes, whatever they

have to pay for them.’’ 116 Criteria of excellence depended on notions of ap-
propriate 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 ‘‘un-
healthy 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 jan-
gal (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, cal-
culations of monetary loss were directlyequated to a recruit’s poor physique:
‘‘Another gentleman of many years experience writes that the cost of 
adult coolies sent up to him was Rs.–, and that out of this number more
than half were of poor physique and of the wrong caste. He experienced num-
bers of deaths and desertions.’’ 122
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The market for able workers was, at bottom, a set of busy commer-
Cultivating the Garden 

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 , the prices offered
 . Company Prices for Workers

For Pure Aborigines or Junglies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rs.
For Good, Hardy Coolies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rs.
For Coolies Suitable for Healthy Gardens
in the Brahmaputra Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rs.
For North Western Province Coolies Suitable
for Healthy Gardens in the Surma Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rs.
Source: Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, 
(Calcutta: , ).
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 , the cost was  rupees per month. ‘‘Now the best coolies cost the
planter quite Rs. , and even Kols and Gonds from the Central Prov-
inces cannot be obtained for less than Rs. . 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 equa-
tion of ‘‘inferior’’ and ‘‘superior’’ types of labor. ‘‘Inferior coolies’’ were cal-
culated as a direct monetary loss for the garden: ‘‘Second-rate coolies landed
on their gardens in Assam cost  rupees, or in other words, . . . a gar-
den 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 racial-
ized 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 mem-
bers of the Damai, Sarki, Kami and Gaini castes.’’ 125 Despite planter objec-
tions that these Nepali strictures would result in a paucity of ‘‘able bodied
labor’’ 126 within the plantations, it was these same subordinate caste groups,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

.Women pluckers on the

plantation waiting for their
leaf to be weighed. Photo-
graph, late nineteenth
century. From Anthony
Burgess et. al., The Book of
Tea (Flammarion: Paris,
).
like the blacksmith Kamis, who continued to be recruited and began to

dominate the Nepali communities of contemporary North Bengal planta-
tions.
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 wild-
ness, characterized the various Chotanagpuri communities who, desper-
ate for work, moved into North Bengal and Assam. It is an inscription
that can also be located within the larger classificatory compass of colo-
nial settlement and its ethnologies of cultivation. Inserted into the laboring
chain of being, constructed upon the customary work of various autochtho-
nous communities, colonial administrators thus catalogued new immigrant
workers.
Weaving this calculus of essence into customary cultivating work, colo-
nial 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 meth-
ods of cultivation began to create from the vast jungle landscape a veritable
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
garden of civilization: the new Planter Raj.
Cultivating the Garden 

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 planta-
tion 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
, 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 –% of women’’ out of the total number of immigrants.128
From the very beginning, then, planters and colonial officials were con-
cerned 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  (). The superintendent of emigration could refuse em-
barkation passes if the batch contained less than one female to every four
male laborers to ‘‘facilitate stabilization of the labor force, and the promo-
tion of community life on the estates.’’ 129
However, planters found that in some cases encouraging women’s mi-
gration (to constitute the ideal of settled plantation families) was not having
its desired effect, because numbers of ‘‘solitary’’ or single women were ar-
riving 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 offi-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 willing-
ness is expressed and is otherwise evident.’’ 131 As a consequence of this ad-
ministrative unease, an explicit policy around women’s immigration began
to emerge. The Tea District Labor Association () 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 s, the policy of family migration and a paternalistic
control of women were formalized through the ’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 , the  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 with-
out 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 , 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 cer-
tain degree of continuous family life among the new immigrants.’’ 135
Within the plantations, planters viewed unmarried men as potentially un-
stable labor. In one instance, single men from Bastar (Madhya Pradesh) pres-
sured 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 re-
cruited 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 ab-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
sconding male workers. Women, and their children, were critical for the
Cultivating the Garden 

reproduction of an increasingly expensive labor force. However, till the

s, the harsh conditions of indentureship resulted in mortality far out-
stripping the birthrate.138 Reasons given ranged from ‘‘abortions,’’ 139 mal-
nutrition 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  that the birthrate began to exceed
deathrate.’’ 140 Not coincidentally, pronatal policies and some attention to
labor legislation were announced.141 For example, the  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, de-
fined their growing importance in field cultivation. By the turn of the cen-
tury, women had emerged as dominant agents in the outer margins of plan-
tation 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 Com-
pany 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.
 ,  
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.
 : (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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

bands were originally illegally recruited and could not be sent down to
take up their families.’’ 144
 : (against the sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat tele-
graphic 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
 : Shall I send?
 : Shall I send?
Pause. The sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat
: ‘‘Have you got a child?’’
 : ‘‘Yes, when a child is born, we get Rs.  bakshish for each child.’’
: ‘‘Were you paid when you were off work?’’
 : ‘‘We only get Rs.  bakshish.’’
: ‘‘Are you given special light work?’’
 : ‘‘No, we do the same work.’’ 146
 : (against the sound of rat-a-tat . . . rat-a-tat . . . tat tat tat tele-
graphic 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
: (together) Shall I send? Shall I send? Shall I send?
Lights fade out.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Cultivating the Garden 

chapter  The Raj Baroque
 ,  
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 Nar-
rator 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. Sev-
eral 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.
: ‘‘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 val-
ley, its wide verandah overlooked a vast polo ground, tennis courts, cro-
quet 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, . A fantastic spectacle, a
presidential party, hot air balloon rides, an auction on the mall of the
finest tea from the most famous estates.
  (Balwant a.k.a. Bobby): (turning to the British Sahib, in per-
fect Queen’s English) Charlie, do you want to make a bet on Castleton
bringing in the best price? Remember when it sold for , rupees per
kilo, more expensive than gold? 2 And the Japanese, I am sure, will outbid
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
you European brokers.

: (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 twenti-
eth. Circumnavigating the globe within the imperial collage, Indian tea
now weaves its own commodified magic. Green gold! Green gold!
 : (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.
: (moving with the party of four but slightly stage right) Enjoy the pictur-
esque.The hills, oh the hills with their majesty, their color, their shangri-
las. (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 dio-
rama 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.
 
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 market-
place. This was, after all, Darjeeling tea. Aristocracies of an old world, im-
bued 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
taste exemplified through the commodity and its symbolic play: a fetishism
The Raj Baroque 

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 de-
pendency. 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 neocolo-
nial commerce that must be predicated on the picturesqueness, and the in-
visibility, 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, , 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 shad-
ows 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 pro-
prietary concerns owned by English ex-soldiers, who were encouraged to
settle in the pleasant mountain valleys of this region.6 By the s, how-
ever, joint public stock concerns with capital assets in London and known
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 , East India Company merchants raised £, 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. Lum-
gua; Maniram Datta Barua, a minister of the Assamese king; and Dwar-
kanath 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 s 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 mobi-
lization 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 ser-
vices.11
This was a tangible traffic into the Northeast, vulnerable within its iso-
lated 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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

nessmen in Calcutta and other burgeoning towns in the Northeast were im-
portant 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 capi-
tal and profit from the region, but they also remained dependent on the so-
cial 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 s, 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 consign-
ments from the plantations and coordinated tea sales in Khidderpore’s auc-
tion 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 accoun-
tants and agency house bureaucrats. They disdained the lack of practical
knowledge among these desk-bound workers and saw their control as inter-
fering 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 want-
ing 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 inde-
pendence in , just thirteen leading agency houses controlled over 
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 illus-
tration 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 Man-
chester,’’ 17 arrived in Calcutta and in  built a spinning unit near the city.
He quickly, and shrewdly, invested in tea, and by  his family-run busi-
ness had become a small conglomerate owning three tea companies, two jute
factories, and several cotton mills. In , 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  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 ‘‘dis-
covered,’’ 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 cur-
rencies of European enterprise.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

‘‘And others equally well born and bred.’’
If Andrew Yule and his successors recreated themselves as the new im-
perial 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 post-
colonial 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, for-
merly 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 ser-
vants 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 appro-
priate ‘‘manly’’ work. Noted one manager: ‘‘Skillful men have charge of the
garden now. Instead of tea being the refuge and last resource for the com-
parative destitute as it was not many years since, it is now looked upon as
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 colo-
nial 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 gen-
try.’’ 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 gar-
den with , 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 fief-
dom: a civilized garden circling the center of a colonial manor-bungalow.
This was a tropical garden, however, and one that could never be an En-
glish 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 deli-
cious 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 nos-
talgia) 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 mascu-
line 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 thou-
sand 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 self-
mythology and the necessity of impressing upon that large group of sub-
ordinates (the ‘‘coolies’’) his supreme authority, his monopoly of might.
The coolies’ ‘‘dead silence’’ remains opaque, an unreadable and powerfully
enigmatic script.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

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 ele-
phant and entertaining a visitor from the home country. Pioneer, hunter, and
gentleman of leisure, sipping Scotch under the punkah (fan) of his veran-
dah, the burra sahib was a technicolor, indeed even florid, embodiment of
imperial strength and benevolence.33
 ,  
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
hoo
eats, the only sound.
: 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
again when he first came here, until now he could summon from his sub-

. ‘‘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, ).
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
global competition.
The Raj Baroque 

From the s 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 , 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 magnifi-
cence.’’ 35 Lipton won the ‘‘highest honours’’ at the same exhibition and pro-
claimed 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 , sub-
scriptions 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 demonstra-
tions. ‘‘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 s.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. mar-
ket.They concluded from surveys that advertising strategies were essential
because ‘‘more than anywhere in the world, consumers in the USA are sus-
ceptible 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 un-
worthy 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 re-
port, ‘‘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 feminiza-
tion 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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, travel-
ing 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 do-
mestic market in the colony.Under the auspices of the Indian Tea Cess Com-
mittee, the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board was constituted to plumb
the possibilities of this vast internal market. ‘‘Pice [paisa] packets’’ (indi-
vidual 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 s, 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 middle-
aged 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 econ-
omy of images was creating tea as a drink for ordinary Indians. By the mid-
s, advertisements in Indian-owned newspapers such as The Hindu were
extolling the virtues of tea for workers, youth, and villagers. In the first ad-
vertisement from the March , , 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 fac-
tory 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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

. and . ‘‘The refreshment

that maintains stamina.’’
Advertisement by the Indian
Tea Association, The Hindu,
March , . ‘‘The vital
drink for the Indian worker.’’
November , .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 con-
stituted 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 popu-
list—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 colo-
nial plantocracy is the most significant and determining aspect of mercan-
tile 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 intro-
duced Robert Bruce to the Singhpos.The dewan (minister) as he was known,
was one of nine Indian shareholders of the Assam Company; he held  per-
cent 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of indirect rule as well as a protonationalist proved to be his undoing. Mani-
The Raj Baroque 

ram Dewan managed two plantations yet was hanged by the British in 
for taking part in the freedom struggle (or Mutiny) of .
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 plantoc-
racy 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 , an offi-
cer 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  acres.The commissioner’s office
was responsible for parceling out and legislating Wasteland Rules. The pa-
tronage 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 ‘‘in-
direct 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 , was, as the range of investors’ back-
grounds suggests, a settlers’ district. The immigration of merchant com-
munities 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 jote-
dar.Often jotedars employed an administrative middleman to supervise rent
collection.51
As the process of settlement accelerated and land became available at
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
very nominal prices to outsiders, jotes (landplots) were acquired by absen-

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 upper-
caste Bengalis were not customarily inclined to engage directly in commerce
or cultivation, though they did begin to get involved as lawyers in loan com-
panies and small banks that were managing the fiscal affairs of the landown-
ing 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 , the first Indian joint stock company was founded by leading
lawyers in Jalpaiguri who raised , 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 , 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  acres, the
Gurjanjhora plantations sold their first tea in . 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  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 
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 aris-
tocratic commerce of tea suggests an infinitesimal ruptural moment: a slight
counterhegemonic gesture to the othered tale of a ‘‘native,’’ but still mas-
culine, plantocracy.
 ,  
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
British Memsahib checks the tea and begins to pour.
The Raj Baroque 

: (speaking to the audience and her companions) Has anyone heard the
story of the memsahib of Mim, that garden in Darjeeling? There are sev-
eral versions to the story that I have heard.The plantation was started in
 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.
 : 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 (Turn-
ing to the veiled Woman who unclips her mouthcover as she is addressed.) But
you . . . you were the most enigmatic.
: (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 no-
where 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.
: 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.
T,   , the family history of the planting clan I encoun-
tered briefly in Calcutta and Jalpaiguri at the end of . During the last
decades of the nineteenth century, Mr. Banerjee’s grandfather immigrated
from Bikrampur (British Indian East Bengal) to Jalpaiguri’s bustling town-
ship. He established a successful legal practice, and his family joined the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
comfortable ranks of a Bengali-settler middle class. They entered the plan-

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 legisla-
tion 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  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 back-
drop of English settlement and colonial rule. On the ground, a motley crew
of displaced regional elites (the Bhutanese), new emerging elites (absen-
tee Bengali landlords), and financial brokers (Marwaris) enacted their own
lordship by manipulating, bypassing, and entering the ruling projects of the
Planter Raj.
Between  and , Bengalis dominated indigenous investment in
tea.61 From  to , Jalpaiguri-based entrepreneurs floated eleven com-
panies with a total investment of . 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  and , 
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 , the Chairman of the Indian Tea
Planters Association () 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 com-
panies for the production of quality tea in .’’ 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’’ entrepreneur-
ship within the terms of imperial rule was, however, a daunting one. The
postcolonial rendition of a glorious history is, certainly, a necessary strand
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of the incipient politics of nationalism that undergirded these ventures.Yet,
The Raj Baroque 

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 in-
vestors and planters thus faced considerable structural obstacles as their
interest, and success, in the tea business grew.65 Till , colonial legisla-
tion around land acquisition was relatively open (for settlers to buy up jotes)
but as the world market stabilized and overseas interest in tea investment in-
creased, European planters lobbied theirdistrict officials to halt the purchase
and ‘‘clubbing’’ of jote plots.66 The Dooars Planters Association (), the
planters’ political organization and lobbying conduit, pressured the district
commissioner to prohibit this ‘‘clubbing’’ of separate plots of land to cre-
ate new plantations. In response, Indian owners constituted themselves into
the Indian Tea Planters Association and lobbied against the ban, which was
finally lifted in .67
In addition, financing was an internal, often family affair, because in-
stitutional financing was not available and not open to Indians.68 Not only
did Indians start their own banks, they often financed their annual manu-
facturing operations with money borrowed on ‘‘hypothecation’’ (a mort-
gage against sale) of crops.69 In the manufacturing phase of plantation
work, which was the most expensive infrastructural aspect of tea produc-
tion, Indian plantations utilized old factory machines that were discarded by
British plantations. Because the  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 adminis-
trative decision making was consistent and effective. The district commis-
sioner’s office sent all applications submitted by Indians to the European
planters association for commentary and veto. For example, in , a land
grant request of , 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Food supplies and the settlement of ‘‘time-expired’’ workers were among

the major reasons for which conversion was denied. Sometimes self-
aggrandizing 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 out-
set, but few Indians risked their capital.’’ 71 Indians, who were permitted to
have one representative in the , tried to counter these denials with let-
ters and petitions. In , the chairman of the  sent a letter to the 
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 deter-
mined 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 , a circular from the Indian Tea Association () 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 iso-
lated colonial fiefdoms? British administrators were well aware that the
wider political landscape of the s was rife with grassroots nationalist
activity and the onset of the noncooperation movement. In a  chair-
man’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 de-
gree to which planters were registering political resistance at the most local
levels.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

 ,  
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 some-
thing. 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.
 : 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 every-
day; / 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)
 : (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?
: (looking up momentarily to face the audience, as light fades on bunga-
low 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.
T  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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
They were, in important ways, a greater threat to the Planter Raj, for

they marshaled considerable symbolic and material resources against colo-

nial rule. As part of an emerging regional elite class, Indian planters could
invoke social allegiances with plantation and village communities by ap-
pealing 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 main-
tained 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  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 ex-
ample 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 sub-
continent, 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 con-
ducted its terms of rule. ‘‘Native’’ loyalty and momentary nationalist alli-
ances 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 plant-
ing. Within institutionally political frameworks, this shadow plantocracy
emerged from the community base that later became the lynchpin of the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Planter Raj.These were the classes of clerks, lawyers, and brokers that lubri-
The Raj Baroque 

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 as-
sociation 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 in-
vestment, 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 entre-
preneurship 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 commit-
ment to blending their ‘‘Indian heritage, nationalistic ethos with Indianisa-
tion of trade’’ 85—remained constant throughout late colonial rule. Note
the anticolonial pride in a commentary made in the immediate postinde-
pendence period. ‘‘We were kept,’’ remarks the chairman of the  in ,
‘‘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 bene-
fit 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 con-
nection 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 paral-
lel 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 national-
isms were, not surprisingly, contained within the frameworks of class pro-
tectionism.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 , for example, the  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  (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 au-
thority for the maintenance of law and order.’’ 90 In  when newly legal-
ized trade unions like the West Bengal Cha Shramik Union organized a mass
satyagraha,91 the  remarked: ‘‘The satyagraha might take the shape of
demonstrations, squatting, fasting before the offices of the  and 
[Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association] and the offices of estates. . . .
Other undesirable activities may be launched.’’ 92 ‘‘Undesirable activities’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
thus compelled the political parlance of colonial rule: ‘‘law and order’’ had
The Raj Baroque 

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 counterhege-
monic 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 plantoc-
racy 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 sub-
versions 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 owner-
capitalist 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 man-
sions 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’’ commu-
nity 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 () gov-
ernment (Communist Party of India–Marxist). The contradictory alliances
(and their attendant contests) between Bengali communist leaders and Mar-
wari 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 post-
colonial tea industry. In the first phase of postcolonial economic consoli-
dation (–), British sterling companies with small holdings in Assam
and Bengal sold their stock to Marwari brokers. The English disinvestment
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 Lon-
don.These sterling companies kept their distance from the new Indian cor-
porations. Despite the presence of Indian management, the old status dis-
tinctions between sterling and rupiyah companies were maintained.
A second phase of disinvestment began in the mid s when the
national economic policy emanating from Delhi shifted to explicit nation-
alization of major Indian industries. The Indo-Chinese border conflict in
—where armed skirmishes took place near Tejpur, Assam—also pro-
voked the departure of English planters. However, central government
legislation such as  (Foreign Exchange Regulation Act), which dictated
that majority shareholdings of international corporations must be Indian-
owned, led to the departure of many remaining sterling companies.94 Until
, for example,  percent of AndrewYule’s stock was European-owned;
 percent of shares were sold to Indians, though  percent remained in
British banks. In , British shareholders decided to sell their remaining
stock to a Marwari family corporation, a move blocked by the Indian gov-
ernment. The company was finally sold to the ‘‘President of India’’ and is
now a Government-of-India-owned company, with  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  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 hold-
ings 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 Good-
ricke. In the early s, Inchcape, the multinational company that owned
sixteen plantations in Assam, sold its Indian subsidiary—the Assam Com-
pany—for . million to an  (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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

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 subsidi-
aries of Unilever, the British Dutch corporation, Brooke Bond and Lipton
earn  million from their Indian tea exports:  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 envi-
ronment, 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, par-
ticularly in the Dooars—whose tea sales cannot compete with the export
value of Darjeeling or the finest Assamese leaf—depend on domestic con-
sumption. 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 , ,
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 moder-
nity, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

. ‘‘Keep your family strong

and healthy with Indian tea.’’
March , .
(below) . ‘‘It’s your privilege
and pride.’’ Advertisement by
the Indian Tea Association, The
Hindu, November , .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
a. ‘‘When only a certain flavour will

reflect your unique taste.’’ Advertisement
for Green Label Tea. Telegraph magazine,
Calcutta, circa .
b. ‘‘Contemporary Tea Hand Book.’’ Front
cover. Calcutta, .
c. ‘‘The Lore of Tea.’’ Advertisement for
British Paints. Advertising supplement, The
Statesman, Calcutta, circa .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 ar-
rayed. 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 re-
produced again and again within the postcolonial domesticities of an inde-
pendent nation. Postcolonial Indian women create their own parlors. Sand-
wiches 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 sexual-
ized, attractive—an unsettlingly similar image to the middle-class house-
wife 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 world-
wide 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The Raj Baroque 

 ,  
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.
: 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 Hat-
ter 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

chapter  Estates of a New Raj
 ,  
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 blood-
red mouth and kohl-rimmed eyes, her face is pale. Powdered. Her fingers move
across the objects restlessly.
: (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 defini-
tively: 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Alice walks over with a small scrolled piece of paper and places it on the table.
: 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 Wonder-
land, 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 insubstan-
tial. / 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.
 
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 middle-
class 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 Ben-
gali 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 nineteenth-
century 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 conserva-
tion around issues such as habitat loss for elephants, leopards, and tigers has
become a more visible business.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Then, taking a sip of water, he leans over and pats me on the hand: ‘‘Well,

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 re-
siding 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 Palladian-
style 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 fac-
tory 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 cam-
era’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 plan-
tation. 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
me a message.’’
Estates of a New Raj 

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 immedi-
ately 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 imag-
ine 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 splen-
dor, I am aware of a certain late-twentieth-century kinship to her watching
but hidden gaze. The contradictions between the ideals of my research ob-
jectives 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 chowki-
dars [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 ances-
tress.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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
reach what will be my home for the next year: Sarah’s HopeTea Estate.Close

to the Bhutan border, ‘‘Sarah’s Hope T.E.’’ is one of the largest plantations
in the central Dooars. Running about  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 assis-
tant 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 bunga-
lows appear silent, immaculate in their stillness. Arcing away from the burra
sahib’s bungalow is a large open field, around which, in an almost horse-
shoe 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 her-
ald 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 assis-
tant manager’s bungalow and lies within the fenced perimeter. The sprawl-
ing 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,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
watchmen, and maids keep it outwardly groomed. Soon after my arrival, the
Estates of a New Raj 

perimeter of hedges grows wild and the goats graze on the lawn. My neigh-
bor, 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 other-
wise abandoned bungalow, live five minutes from its borders, and it is pri-
marily 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 iso-
lation 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, be-

ginning with the person of the planter himself, who was known as the mai-
baap.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’’ be-
came 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 be-
came a symbolic father standing at the center of the plantation family in
which workers were, most definitively, his children.The planter came to jus-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 sys-
tem 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 explic-
itly 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 administra-
tion 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 late-
twentieth-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 Hunt-
ing Birds.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

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 hunt-
ing 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 signifi-

cant 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 family-
planning 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 au-
tonomous 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 (gentle-
man) 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 fortu-
nate 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 respon-
sibility for my welfare. ‘‘My daughter,’’ he says affectionately, ‘‘is a pagli
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
[mad girl]. Who knows where she will go and what she will do? Tell her

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 de-
parture. ‘‘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 dis-
concerted, 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
down, / Hitting it here and there, / Riding like ll with excitement, /
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 post-
colonial planters and their families. These families live in considerable dis-
tance 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 pub-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
lic school manners offer the styles of a hybrid aristocracy. These are young
Estates of a New Raj 

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 Col-
lege, 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 postcolo-
nial 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-representa-
tion, the image of hardy pioneering gives shape to a persona that is remem-
bered 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 recre-
ated 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 watch-
men, 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 intol-
erable. 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 entitle-
ment, 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 disci-
plined 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,’’ ‘‘insuffi-
cient 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 appro-
priate work—is made manifest through its negation. Thus, the planter’s
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

non/work creates its inevitable alterity. His labor is reasoned and acor-
poreal; the bodied labor of others is its necessary foil.Through the looking-
glass, then, that labor made invisible (orcaptured within the commodity pic-
turesque), lies at the core of this cultivation of masculine authority and rule.
Memsahibs and Another Tea Party If masculine courage is one impor-
tant facet of the mai-baap image, then the balancing image of leisured non-
chalance is created by the inside worlds of planters’ wives. The plantation
bungalow, that architectural symbol of power and leisure, is most defini-
tively 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 dis-
tance maintained by her postcolonial counterparts. The postcolonial mem-
sahib 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 im-
peratives 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 patri-
archal 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 construc-
tion of either remains profoundly dialectical, making possible an unequal,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
but powerfully coupled, vision of aristocratic rule within the plantation.

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 Victo-
rian 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 pub-
lic 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 main-
tained, or enhanced, by his masculine managerial progress, but codes of a
domesticated femininity also chart its routes.Within the circumscribed am-
bit 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 tem-
pos 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
manager because the boy’s wages are paid through the main office. A burra
Estates of a New Raj 

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 bun-
galow.’’ 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 social-
ization 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.
 ,  
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.
: 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.
 ,  , : (crying out in unison) ‘‘No room!
No room!’’
: (indignantly) ‘‘There’s plenty of room!’’
 : (encouragingly) ‘‘Have some wine.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

: (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.’’
: (who has been looking at Alice with great curiosity) ‘‘Your hair wants
cutting.’’
: (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 de-
scriptive 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 sig-
nificant 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 ideo-
logical terms of its rule through a feudalism that is firmly rooted in caste-
based 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 prac-
tices of ritual, commensality, and pollution. However, the commentary can-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

not be extricated from its own specific placement within a social history that
is also colonial.Within such a historical framing of dominance, subordina-
tion 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 middle-
class and upper-caste Bengalis, such ideal comportment is considered bha-
dra: 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. Upper-
caste 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 mar-
ket 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 con-
scious 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 labor-
ing otherness. A young scion of a Marwari planting family in Assam asserts,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
‘‘The problem is that these tribal people are backward and don’t want to

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 al-
most 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 reve-
nue 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], carous-
ing 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 be-
yond 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
heavy jungle. Huts were built close together because people were so scared.
Estates of a New Raj 

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 drink-
ing, 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 build-
ing 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 recog-
nized 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 admin-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
istration and burst into open rupture. The narratives of the matal are not,

then, hegemonic icons of masculine otherness. They are historicized chart-

ings 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.
 ,  
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.
   : (in a slurred voice, drawing out his words) Meemsh-
hahib . . . 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? Meemsh-
hahib, 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

Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
also make and sell the customarydrink, handia (rice beer), a crucial source of
Estates of a New Raj 

income for their households. However, what is significant is the manner in

which a dominant ideology inscribes a gendered essentialism of bodily in-
discipline 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 work-
ing 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 pluck-
ing season, the height of premonsoon summer, and I wander through the
village toward the ‘‘division’’ section of the plantation where new tea nurs-
eries 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 inter-
rupts: ‘‘But you should be careful, you will become darker. Already, I see
the difference.’’
Reminded immediately of an earlier comment made by a planter asso-
ciate, 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 be-
come kala [black].You also should be careful.’’ When I tell him that women
fieldworkers also carry their large sturdy umbrellas as common-sense pro-
tection against a high sun and they don’t appear to be concerned about their
complexion, he responds with some irritation: ‘‘Memsahib, what I am try-
ing 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 um-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
brella becomes a symbol of protection in multiple ways, an insignia of izzat

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 move-
ment 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 cot-
tages, 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 fash-
ionable 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 Cal-
cutta.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 sym-
bolic shielding against the defiling blackness of their very being (trans-
mittable by even a gaze). Their commentaries underscore with a dramatic
clarity connections made among status, gender, and race.The feminine, in-
terior world symbolized by the closed windows present an image of peaceful
domesticity. It also appears to those watching from an exterior and labor-
ing 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 col-
lective 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of status for their families and communities.
Estates of a New Raj 

 ,  
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 recog-
nizes 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 bhadra-
lok 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
and upper-caste backgrounds, the British recruited them in the nineteenth

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 pros-
perous. They own petrol pumps, movie theaters, and equipment stores in
nearby townships.
As the epigraphs suggest, the apellation babu is embedded in the cul-
tural taxonomies of British colonialism. For British administrators whowere
dependent on this emerging middle-class to lubricate the cogs of daily busi-
ness, the babu soon inhabited a space of caricatured essentialisms; innate
intelligence, a bookish ‘‘effeminacy,’’ and laziness emerged as enduring as-
criptions of these ‘‘native gentlemen.’’ Immortalized by Rudyard Kipling,
the ‘‘Bengali Babu’’ became the archetype of an emasculated colonial sub-
ject.13 Contrasted to the virile masculinity of Pathans of the northwest fron-
tier, Bengali ‘‘effeminacy’’ also came to define the typologies of ‘‘martial’’
and ‘‘nonmartial’’ races in the subcontinent. Within the plantation, the in-
scription 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 s, 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. Inter-
estingly, this particular sahib discursively attempts to erase the status and
class distinctions that continue to exist between the two strata of the plan-
tation 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 post-
independence context. As in the colonial period, informal socializing be-
tween sahib and babu is rare, despite the fact that two senior planters at
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Sarah’s Hope are from a long staff lineage. In Calcutta, one senior planter
Estates of a New Raj 

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 fes-
tivities, such as the Durga Puja. In some cases, assistant managers will par-
ticipate 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 lit-
erate 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 Catho-
lic 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 iden-
tity 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-the-
country’’ gardens],16 the babus would mix with us more. This garden’s cus-
toms are more angrezi [English], so the same distance remains. Here, these
old things are alive.’’ However, a few staff sons, some of whom are unem-
ployed, 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 cot-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
tages as cooks, will comment on how they are not permitted to touch certain

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 (share-
croppers).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 exten-
sions, 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 weigh-
ment, accounting, and garden administration), most staff members are in
consistent and dailycontact with workers, more so than the planter.Theiren-
counters 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 commen-
taries about these discourses of negative difference.The term, ghinna, con-
notes 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
It was a mistake. I don’t know why he got so angry but he started giving me
Estates of a New Raj 

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 per-
ceptions 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 cross-
class and masculine kinships that can create political alliances for union mo-
bilization. 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 in-
vited 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 mem-
ber 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 en-
counter in Bhagirathi’s kitchen, I accompany Munnu and Anjali to Jalpai-
guri.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 planta-
tion, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
her question rankles. ‘‘It is because of what you look like, didi, I think that

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 indi-
vidual 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 dis-
tinctions, though not as clearly coded on colonial racial terms, are enacted
rigidly. Social distance with adivasi workers is maintained through custom-
ary 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, sug-
gests one refraction of the planter’s own terms of cultivated selfhood.
Ghinna is a trope that can trace the longest span between the cultivated cen-
ter of cottage and bungalow. It is a marking that settles the jungli into the
black margins of a social periphery.
 ,  
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 cos-
tume, sickle in one hand, emerges from your right. She holds a pirhi, which she
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
places on the ground and sits on. She moves her mouth veil to one side. A light
Estates of a New Raj 

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.
: 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?
: (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 be-
fore. 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 hari-
jans 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 black-
skinned 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 as-
sisted 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 be-
tween foreign planters and their new workforce. They were sent back to
home villages to recruit and to organize the new batches of workers. Be-
cause 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 estab-
lished 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 work-
force, it was a small price to pay.
If the plantation’s new headmen agreed to bow to the planter-lord in ex-
change 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 re-
port the movements of all bad characters within his locality and the arrival
of suspicious characters in the neighborhood. . . . Any incidents of Mur-
der, 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 colo-
nial sirdar’s status and embody the upper layer of the overseer cadre. Sig-
nificantly, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
shaped the political landscape of North Bengal. However, there is no visibly
Estates of a New Raj 

radical or vibrant union politics connecting these large political claims to

the local level within the plantation. Since the radical ruptures of the Naxal-
ite movement in the late s, 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 cul-
ture, 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 them-
selves assert the political alliances between certain union leaders and plant-
ers. 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 net-
work of surveillance. He takes me for numerous excursions but gets exas-
perated when Anjali or some of my other women associates accompany us.
When I assert that my research is about ‘‘women,’’ he sounds encourag-
ing. 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 accom-
pany me as ‘‘memsahib’s reeesurch ashishtants.’’ They shake their fists at
him with knowing humor and I laugh. The subtext of our laughing thrust-
and-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 power-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ful leaders follow lines of direct descent. These ‘‘mantles of inheritance’’

are historically transformed, but they are living residues of that same past.
For example, the colonial sirdar’s name may be commemorated in the mem-
ory 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 ()
and Congress-sponsored unions are direct descendents of well-known sir-
dars. 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 s, 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 .’’
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 – laborers under him.’’ 26 According to Ganesh Sirdar’s descendent,
these commissions were paid by Sarah’s Hope’s planters as late as . Most
importantly, he also asserted that sirdari ‘‘commissions’’ have been trans-
lated 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 employ-
ment. 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 de-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
partment,’’ an apt description (in English) of his own position as a planta-
Estates of a New Raj 

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 gar-
den, 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 per-
sonhood. 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 politi-
cal legitimation of various unions through a state government, itself run
by the (), leads to a manager’s dependence on the loyalty and acumen
of a handful of union leaders. If he cannot ensure a threshold of compli-
ance, union leaders will appeal to wider regional and state-level mobiliza-
tion 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 politi-
cal 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
some awe by ordinary workers and villagers.

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 dis-
trict 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 broad-
est 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. Man-
agers will characterize Nepalis as ‘‘braver’’ than their adivasi counterparts.
It is a positive and essentialist ascription that has resulted in this commu-
nity’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 hard-
working community. These are generalizations that also include an ascrip-
tion of a ‘‘fierce’’ courage. Perhaps this essentialist ascription of valor ex-
plains 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 plan-
tation, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
bravery. Not surprisingly, these inscriptions of discipline with their sug-
Estates of a New Raj 

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 secondary-
school education even rarer. The missionya (person of the mission) has his-
torically 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 disci-
pline, 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 colo-
nial 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 posi-
tions 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 com-
munities 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
view themselves as more ‘‘Hindu’’ than others.While this sensibility is pal-

pable in rituals, marriage rules, and within issues of commensality, a com-

mon 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 bunga-
lows, 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. Depend-
ing on the proclivities of either, bonds of loyalty do develop, and favors
are bestowed. Many bachelor assistant managers are served by personal ser-
vants 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 in-
ferior 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 hier-
archy 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 al-
ready gathered information about the memsahib.There are no secrets from
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the village. Is she tough? Is she stingy? Will she give you food if minding
Estates of a New Raj 

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 per-
manent 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 theirown sense of prestige and status, it is the labor
elite within field operations upon whom the planter remains most depen-
dent. 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 adminis-
trative staff-in-charge, the garden babus of the main plantation. Planning
and deployment of various field tasks are relayed directly to him from the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
staff. Experience as a worker from the lowest level of the labor chain, skills

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 repre-
sentation of labor rule, one assistant manager described the munshi’s posi-
tion 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 as-
pect of plantation disciplines: the management of time. One of the boidars,
a union leader, checks muster around the bungalows on his scooter; a ve-
hicular 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 daffa-
dars. 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 administra-
tors described the daffadar as the unscrupulous contractor of the emigration
system. ‘‘The daffadar,’’ one noted, ‘‘is an excrescence of the ‘free’ emigra-
tion 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 struc-
tures 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. Ap-
proximately thirty daffadars supervise the separate groups of women, chil-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
dren, men, and convalescing older workers.Though no specific caste pattern
Estates of a New Raj 

can be discerned among this group of overseers, membership in union cote-

ries 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 com-
munity: ‘‘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 per-
mit 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 higher-
status 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 ‘‘com-
pany’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 bun-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
galow, I do it. But if someone else asks me, I will not. They are mén aadmi

[main people].We are the mazdoor [workers] who are at the bottom.What
are we, memsahib, we are nothing.’’
 ,  
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.
: ( 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 conversa-
tion 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 ward-
ers, 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
 : (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.
 : We are watched.We are watched.
 : The land was never ours. The land can never be ours.
 : But we also watch.Our eyes are not lowered absolutely.Our eyes
are not so still.
 : 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
They sit quietly as the light fades.
Estates of a New Raj 

Patronage and Patriarchies:

Toward the Moral Economies of Rule
For living years among kindly, simple people from Chotanagpur or else-
where, 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 ser-
vants, 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 jharu-
wallah (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 legiti-
mate rule through garnering the consent of an overseer cadre. The recog-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
nition of a cultivated core of power is, however, crucial. It is created by

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 patron-
age 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, understand-
ings 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 work-
force. 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 mar-
ket 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 concep-
tual 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 hege-
mony; 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 in-
clude 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
and possessions, to the outer borders of the plantation.
Estates of a New Raj 

Yet the terms of domination that constitute the warp and woof of plan-
tation patronage suggest that an emphasis on the coercion aspects of plan-
tation 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 un-
spoken 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. Simulta-
neously, the planter’s desire and wish that the hukum be followed is sug-
gested when he states after a given order, ‘‘Yeh mera hukum he’’—‘‘This is
my desire/command.’’ Workers’ perceptions of that desire, and thus the im-
portance 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. Be-
hind, 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.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 appropri-
ate 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 percep-
tion 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 kin-
ship. 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 di-
rect connection to planter concerns with ‘‘law and order’’ within the labor
regime, such as marriage and family disputes, do come to the sahib’s atten-
tion. 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 con-
sensual 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 knowl-
edge of marriage customs and disputes are considerable. Nikhil, a senior
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

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 plan-
tation, 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 steward-
ship, 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 continu-
ous, 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 pa-
tronage.
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 arbi-
tration they exercised. Personal attention from the planter is viewed as a
special dispensation.To have come under the planter’s good attention is re-
membered for years as a measure of his benevolence. Thus, one old watch-
man 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 mai-
baap’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 ‘‘ac-
ceptance’’ 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 mainte-
nance 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

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, memo-
ries 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 work-
force, 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 commu-
nity matters also involved calculations of extraction and control. The same
senior planter remembered for sending people home early was also respon-
sible 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) sug-
gested 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 the-
ater 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
pioneering and rule in the colonial hinterlands.

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 legisla-
tion 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 exer-
cise 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. Per-
haps the customary significations of royalty embedded in the open umbrella
mark this action as the ultimate sign of respect for the mai-baap. Certainly,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
in past years, a worker’s unfurled umbrella would signal enough disrespect
Estates of a New Raj 

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 co-
ercion. 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.
 ,  
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.
: 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.
 : (lifting the twig from the stage and shaking it at the Narrator, mock-
ing) 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.
 : (shoving Woman  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?
 : 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.
 : 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 th of May, the
sahib’s bearer, Nasim Ali, asked Hira to accompany him to his master’s
bed. The demand was refused.’’
 : ‘‘Enraged at the refusal, late at  .., the sahib arrived at
the scene armed with a revolver and called out ‘Hira, Hira.’ ’’ 40 Hira’s
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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
 : (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. Imag-
ine 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 Assam-
ese plantations, young women were ‘‘offered’’ by men from their commu-
nities 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 alli-
ances is corroborated by postcolonial sahibs who agreed that the colonial
sahib’s ‘‘absolute’’ authority made these possible. One burra sahib noted:
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

‘‘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 daugh-
ter, 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 every-
one 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 occur-
ring 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 sub-
version. 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 post-
independence period, with its union activity, militates against any overt liai-
sons between planters and women workers.Yet rumors abound, and women
who spoke of these sexual transgressions invoked the terms of izzat as ex-
planation: 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the wider community.

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 trans-
ferred to another garden. I don’t know what happened to her. Her family
must have done something, sent her away—but people will always remem-
ber 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 za-
mana (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.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
This incident of bhinjat (cross-community/caste), cross-class sexual
Estates of a New Raj 

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 resis-
tance. 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) commu-
nity 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 nar-
rative, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
safe. Exhausted sometimes by the alterity of the gaze, I sometimes escape

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 dis-
entanglement 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Estates of a New Raj 

chapter  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 natu-
ral 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 reach-
ing for the child’s face to caress, clenching into a fist, opening the blouse to
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 land-
scape, 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 origi-
nal 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 meta-
phor into a quotidian and often brutal narrative of botanic and bodily mas-
tery. If the untamed forest called for a redemption already scripted within its
own mystery, then the colonizing mission could focus on its necessary cul-
tivation. 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
. Two leaves and a bud.

Drawing from The Tea
Lover’s Treasury, by James
Norwood Prett, .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

and men are disciplined into work, it provides the cultural, political, and
bodily meanings through which social power creates the terms of its vari-
ous 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 predi-
cated 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 land-
scape, 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 su-
periority 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 culti-
vation’’ 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

managerial logic, the reason of its being: profit, productivity, and efficiency.
When those bodies are racialized and gendered within the intricate hierar-
chies 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 illu-
sory 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 de-
nied. Not neutral, not dismembered, not bled of its own skin, the body thinks
through a history of constraint, of possibility, its own alterities.
 ,  
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.
 : This is no natak [theater], memsahib, why do you move your
fingers so?
 : The body makes its own swollen journeys through history, mem-
sahib, the answers are not written in your fingers and the pen which you
hold. The body has no calligraphy to decipher.
 : 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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 planta-
tion 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 cross-
ing 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 ner-
vousness, 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, con-
stantly 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 clam-
bers 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 seed-
lings 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 land-
scape. There is romance and fear, reverence and obeisance, ritual and re-
membrance. 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 land-
scape 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 pre-
pared, carefully protected from extreme weather by a tarpaulin. Careful at-
tention 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 preci-
sion 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 inter-
spersed 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 prun-
ing. 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 dor-
mancy, that is most critical to its maintenance and regeneration. The bush
gets a light pruning in the first winter, leaving  percent untouched. In the
second dormant season it is not pruned, but in the third ‘‘medium skiff’’
pruning takes approximately  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 vari-
ous 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 trunca-
tion creates the flat and linear horizon of a strikingly and mathematically
rationalized landscape.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

Cycles of plucking and pruning are organized by block, each one of ap-
proximately . 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  is (the year) ; number  is , 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 ex-
ample, 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 plan-
tations 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 cer-
tain 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 expan-
sion 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,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

or the naya bagan (new garden) as it is known, is a space not yet fully cap-
tured 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 unem-
ployed 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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. How-
ever, 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 con-
centrated 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 pro-
duction 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 environ-
ment, 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 nineteenth-
century 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 symboli-
cally 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 divi-
sion 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

The factory, set within the locus of managerial power, is a place that ani-
mates 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 sym-
bolic 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 plan-
tation, all the factory workers are men. Indeed, factory work narrates its
own bodily tales. Manufacture is, in this folk history of work, an essen-
tially 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 tem-
poral 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 dur-
ing 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 : in the morning by Indian Standard Time,
the siren would sound the beginning of the : 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 contem-
porary regimes of work.
Unlike a productive process that is entirely dependent on factory manu-
facture, 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 land-
scapes 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

‘‘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 calcula-
tion 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 dic-
tates 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. How-
ever, 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 
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 : .., 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 win-
ter 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 regi-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
mented by the terms of wage labor: of bounded temporal shifts of work,

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 actu-
alized landscape.
Fieldwork
 ,  
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 bun-
galow 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.
: 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 clank-
ing 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 imag-
ine. 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 sug-
gestion of breasts. A body braced against some fierce onslaught of rain,
hunching forward to carry the heavy cloth pouch of leaf. An outline of
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
an umbrella against a tree. See how they bend and carry the umbrella
Discipline and Labor 

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.
T    of the plantation’s pulse at the end of Febru-

ary, 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 re-
main 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 conver-
sation, 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 har-
vest, 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 neces-
sary movement, is implicated.
When I return, seven years to the month of my first winter conversa-
tions 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
not to work as well. Things won’t be said, if you know what I mean.’’

Plucking
In early March, the manager gives the command for the first round of pluck-
ing 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 , eight years after the ethnographic present of this field text, Bha-
girathi’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
: .., though in practice, the chopol is reached (particularly if it is dis-
tant) at around : .. 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 man-
ager and his management staff have met in the preceding days to organize
their strategy of plucking rotations and give their hukum (order) to the gar-
den staff and supervisors earlier in the morning. By :, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
around the factory area. From April onward, in the height of the peak sea-
Discipline and Labor 

son, garden staff and managers park on side roads to discipline tardy women,
either by sending them home or by sharply admonishing them. These rep-
rimands 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 be-
hind the factory. As a community who view themselves as a bara jat (‘‘big’’
community), which distinguishes itself as sadan (general caste) and not adi-
vasi, it is a prominent community within the diversity of the plantation’s
villages.This sense of superiority is enhanced by its relative economic suc-
cess. 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 fac-
tory. 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 de-
ployment 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 lay-
out. 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 conver-
sations 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
such camaraderie possible.

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 mem-
sahib 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 Bha-
girathi’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 irrele-
vant. I follow Bhagirathi’s command and sit in the shade.
At : .., 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 over-
seers. This listing of groups of women is a living artifact of the colonial
period, where sirdars were primarily responsible fororganizing their new re-
cruits into working batches.7 Women recruited from same, or nearby, home
villages in the Chotanagpur were grouped under their kinsman, whose au-
thority 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 postcolo-
nial 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 com-
munity solidarity are historically ‘‘naturalized.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Because the boidar’s small book creates the base of the office ledgers of
Discipline and Labor 

. Attendance log, from an overseer’s Pocket Hazree book.

‘‘Sarah’s Hope’’ Tea Estate, May .
weighment and wage, this sirdari artifact underscores the indelible and sig-
nificant 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 con-
trol. Though these feminized lists appear insignificant in the wider planta-
tion system, they build the foundation of a cultural politics of labor within
which women’s marginality is assumed and naturalized. Indeed, custom-
ary 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 easycama-
raderie between the women, who banter with their overseer: ‘‘Hey, brother,
what is your news?’’
Conversation halts momentarily when the garden staff and assistant man-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ager arrive on their respective motorcycles.They yell loudly: ‘‘Hath chalao,

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 con-
trol. 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 reign-
ing 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 : .., and after pack-
ing 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 over-
whelmed the small and bent-over bodies. Heads bowed, eyes focused on the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ground, the feet shuffling along.The large sacks on their backs, inverted and
Discipline and Labor 

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 as-
sistants 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
 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 assis-
tant, 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 : .., weighment is complete, and the women head home for a
quick lunch. At : .., the siren sounds the second shift, though they
have begun assembling from : .. By : .., work has resumed.
News of the latest scandal in the village, as well as ribald jokes about a par-
ticular 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 pluck-
ing. For now, she is assigned to my bungalow. She speaks again of the alien-
ation 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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 ve-
hicular 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 : .. siren is sounded half an hour earlier
because of the local market held near the factory. Mondays are also, not co-
incidentally, 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 re-
minder 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 ritu-
als 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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 calcula-
tions 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 pre-
paring evening meals. Because the management’s supply of firewood is in-
adequate for the harvest months, women continue to build up their win-
ter 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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 nurs-
ing 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 cultiva-
tion, 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 continu-
ous 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 nar-
ratives 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 har-
vest.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 mo-
ments 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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 morn-
ing 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 over-
seers’ 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 pull-
ing 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 sea-
son, the duration of work is transformed. A large green-wire mesh trailer,
the weighment truck, arrives mid-morning and afternoon and punctuates
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
both shifts of work.The quantity of leaf plucked will be too heavy a load for

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 : .. 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 bur-
den of leaf and come back for it later. In peak season, a plucker will pull 
kilos of leaf at an average,13 though Bhagirathi and Munnu have brought in
over a hundred kilos [see appendix, table A]. Approximately half of the en-
tire 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 A]. 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
approximately  women are rotated through three cycles of work dur-
Discipline and Labor 

ing the peak season. Because labor laws require additional pension and in-
kind 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 selec-
tion 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 man-
ager’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 aes-
thetics 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 per-
manent sisters, and their dols are deployed to areas furthest from the fac-
tory. This is a reprieve for the permanent women. The bigha work begins
at : .., and the first weighment truck enters at : .. This mid-
day weighment occurs later than the permanent women’s field weighment,
because bigha women will not return to the factory for a lunch break. By
: .., 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
: .., but because there is no siren to signal its end, their work often
stretches for an extra fifteen minutes. Once again, because only overseers
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
wear watches, most women are not precise about the clocked synchronicity

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  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 planta-
tions, the manager gives six months bigha work, but here we only get two
months.’’ Economic desperation thus outweighs a conscious sense of injus-
tice 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 care-
ful 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
shadow bends in the background.
Discipline and Labor 

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 meet-
ing 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 im-
perative: 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 in-
ternalization 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 aes-
thetics of profit, which determines managerial disciplines of plucking. It is
the tea bush, and its life, which is threatened by company ‘‘greed.’’ Signifi-
cantly, Munnu redeploys that most potent inscription of wildness (hereto-
fore 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 bam-
boo stick prongs to assist their plucking. This is, however, rare and would
incur severe disciplinary action if discovered. Indeed, accusations of haula-
bina-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.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Prosaic and individuated disciplining of this sort constitutes the bedrock

of mangerial coercions. They are not, as Moniki Mosi’s countercommen-

tary suggests, one-way streets. However, for young managers, these acts of
microdisciplining are cornerstones—and indeed proofs—of proper initia-
tion 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 pay-
ment: ‘‘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 un-
less 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 indi-
vidual 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
colonial planter’s commentary on the work of Chinese tea makers: ‘‘While
Discipline and Labor 

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 chop-
sticks 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 be-
tween the fetishisms of women’s plucking and this premachinery work of
manufacture.
One postcolonial manager defines plucking as an inherited craft. He re-
marks, ‘‘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.
 ,  
The stage is dark. A backlight is turned on slowly, enough to show the silhou-
ettes 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.
: You summoned, memsahib.What for?
: 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.
: Go on, memsahib. I can rest my feet.Go on. Is it a song, this poem?
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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.
: 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.
: Go on, memsahib, I am listening.
: ‘‘The whole / of you prospered, / piercing down / into earth, / green-
ing 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
: (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 black-
ness. 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 in-
equity is a given, appears facile and indulgent. Yet, because of the basic
tenets of ethnographic field research, I must carefully consider the histori-
cally 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 in-
escapable conclusion that I reach about my fieldwork experience: that it is
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

extractive, that my unease in ‘‘taking time’’ both within the laboring field
and in the village is ontologically and politically fraught and cannot be side-
lined within ethnographic translations that make certain kinds of knowl-
edge 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 ab-
straction—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 land-
scape.
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 any-
thing 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 indi-
vidualized products of solitary mind work.Yet when I return to the villages
with these reflections grinding into the pestle of my unease, they are re-
worked through partial, collective, and dialogical encounters. I continue
only for the human surprise that can emerge, glistening, within such a ba-
roque dialectic. I enter the miasma of unease in a hopeful way. I reach cau-
tiously 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 gar-
lic. 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 com-
mentator 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 trans-
lation. I leave it, for now, within that troubled, cloudy space in which in-
tent, 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 con-
strained 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 ex-
tended ties of kinship.The household is not a discrete and autonomous unit,
and children thread familial bonds across the village. A small government-
run primary school (up to class ) 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 sub-
continent, 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  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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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 , 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 house-
hold 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 vege-
tables, 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. Sanni-
charwa, 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 re-
cruitment itself. Family ‘‘settlement’’ of new workers included children, and
from the very beginning children joined their parents in cultivation. Plant-
ing 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 accompa-
nied 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 bam-
boo 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 as-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
certaining the boundaries between child and adol (adolescent), teenagers

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 common-
sense 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
bushes have entered dormancy and turn a uniform dark bottle-green. Be-
Discipline and Labor 

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 im-
perative: ‘‘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 knowl-
edge.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 supervis-
ing 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 be-
cause 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 stom-
ach. No, I think she hears me now when I take her to work.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
The rhythms of winter work are markedly different from the speed, in-

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 in-
centive 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 re-
quirement. 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 strin-
gently clocked, the dol will not arrive in one group. A day can begin as early
as  .., 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 dash-
ing 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 ‘‘’’ 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 colloqui-
ally 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  bushes, an average task, is considerable.
A woman must ensure that every tea bush in her ticca is matched in table-
top 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
This internal economy of sickle making and sanding is controlled by com-
Discipline and Labor 

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, ex-
perienced 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 super-
ficial 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  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 man-
ager 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 ap-
parently 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  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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
these differences are bodily coded, it does not prevent women from prun-

ing. Indeed, women are quick to assert their strengths in pruning, rather
than their lack of physical capacity. Kamzori—or weakness—is not a com-
mon descriptor of differential pruning, because a considerable number of
women continue to wield the sickle. In contrast to the feminized and fe-
tishized 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 pluck-
ing. 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 cul-
tures 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 en-
codes labor organization, the stories of the field have begun to flesh out
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the social meanings given to daily experiences by women who enact this
Discipline and Labor 

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 theoreti-
cal 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 dialec-
tic 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 gen-
dered 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 ex-
perienced women who are considered the most skillful teachers.Within the
fluid definitions of adulthood, which chart the social sanctions of separa-
tion 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 An-
jali, I face them with a probity inflected by a gendered, class, and ethnic
difference that indelibly shapes the contours of their unease. While over-
seers and fieldworkers are used to the supervision of sahibs, it is very rare
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
for a memsahib to walk into the field with questions. Surprise, suspicion,

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 heavy-
handed 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 poli-
tics 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.’’ Sig-
nificantly, 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 mas-
culine ‘‘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. Dis-
ruption is initiated by men, and women react to, or are mere receptacles of,
male sexuality. Most significantly, disruptive flirting hints at a larger prob-
lem. 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 contain-
ment, 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 pas-
sivity 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 person-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ality, though they are cunning.’’
Discipline and Labor 

Men are dangerous with a difference; their hooliganism cannot be under-

estimated. Women, within this garbled but bluntly misogynistic commen-
tary, 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 vil-
lage 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 separa-
tion, 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 in-
creased 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 : .., and the day ends at : ..
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 har-
vest, the supervision of men is muted. The lunch pause at : .. 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 hier-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
archy, and a heightened surveillance only occurs when the senior manager’s

jeep comes into view.Though managers are explicitly wary about a mascu-
line 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 pluck-
ing 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 immedi-
ate and visual arc of planter power. Spatial dispersions not only permeate
the differential supervision of men’s work; they also enable differential mo-
bility. 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 fun-
damentally 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 so-
cially 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 lat-
eral 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 analo-
gous 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 (fertiliz-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ers/pesticides) that are put now make the bush stronger. But it not only
Discipline and Labor 

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, well-
picked, first class, A-, 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 ex-
tended 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, ori-
entalized 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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

. ‘‘First Apparatus Used in the Manufacture of Tea in India.’’ Figures  and 
of Account of the Manufacture of Black Tea in Assam, by C. A. Bruce, .
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, be-
comes a mere sign in this new calculus of control.The relation between ma-
chine 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 () machine,
located in one large corner of the building. One overseer supervises eight
workers through the four phases of the .
In the largest interior space of the  room, cut leaf is spread out in
neat rows by another group of men. Spreading the leaf quickens fermen-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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 trans-
ported 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 eight-
hour shifts run concurrently in the factory. The morning shift begins at
: .. and ends at : .., taken over by another group till : ..
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  ma-
chine, 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 con-
ditions.’’ 32 Such flexibility, particularly in the colonial period, contained its
own coercions. Alcohol, for instance, stretched the workday. One old over-
seer 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
beat ran with absolute military precision into the rolling room and filled

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 fac-
tory 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 cen-
ter 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 fac-
tory 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 ex-
plicit 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 commen-
taries 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
through the s.While they never worked the machines, small groups of
Discipline and Labor 

women sorted leaf by hand, though the advent of sorting machines led to
their displacement.The three women who do work within the factory com-
pound 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 tech-
nological 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 in-
capacity 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 con-
ceptual templates of its labor organization: its formulas of input, output,
and capital costs. Yet within its daily pragmatics, perhaps due to the sea-
son’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 per-
meates 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 grate-
ful and refreshing qualities survive the rough usage that calls them forth.’’ 36
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Unlike cultivation, manufacture enacts a certain violence on the body of the

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-than-
life symbol of lordship. The aura of the colonial mai-baap continues to in-
flect the mythologies of benevolent rule in the field. That women and men
will follow the hukum is a given, not only because of economic compul-
sion, 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 watch-
men 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, how-
ever diffuse, men wield the planter’s hukum. Strategies of order are concep-
tualized 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
villages.The patriarchal cultures of labordisciplines are triply knotted: from
Discipline and Labor 

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 dis-
plays a coercive patriarchal edge.Though he may enact a judicious balance
in village arbitration, it is the coercive and punitive nature of his surveil-
lance 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 ulti-
mate power—to fire a worker, to cut wages—is measured in the quick re-
flexive folding of an umbrella, the eyes suddenly downcast, an alert stillness
when the jeep is sighted. Indeed, their knowledge of the managerial impera-
tive 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 re-
sult in more serious punishment, there is also a sense of arbitrariness about
that exercise of managerial power. Shouting an admonishment at an indi-
vidual 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
need this; that I don’t need to cook for my family.’ ’’ The woman involved

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. Signifi-
cantly, 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 cut-
ting trees and branches. On Sunday, I went to the garden at  .. 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 irriga-
tion 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 vio-
lence of a raised voice, the substance of a threat, defines a manager’s repu-
tation for fairness and balance. Threats of violence are absorbed with tren-
chant 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,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
we all know he is a little crazy. So we laugh, and that gets him angrier. He
Discipline and Labor 

. ‘‘Supremely yours.’’

Advertisement for Brooke Bond
tea. Reproduced in The Calcutta
Tea Trader’s Almanac, .
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 interven-
tion.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 mea-
sured 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 prac-
tice, are not only multiple and layered; they are inextricably linked to the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
colonial and feudal politics that asserted the metaphorical and pragmatic

settlement of a ‘‘family’’ of workers.Within this idealized frame, a coercive

and highly personalized culture of labor emerged. Its moral economy is em-
bedded 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 patri-
archy, enacted through the feudal call of the hukum, demanded not only
the consent of women: men, marked as racially and ethnically inferior be-
cause 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 expres-
sion. 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 at-
tention.
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
agencies dissolve into the empty space of the body’s margins.
Discipline and Labor 

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 man-
ager. 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 psy-
chic, 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 multi-
generational lineages of the plantation villages, the interpretation of a gaze
can rupture kinship. This is a moral economy where all human relation-
ships 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, respon-
sible 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 look-
ing 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’’),
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the codes of gendered honor are threatened. Significantly, the woman is held

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 plant-
ers 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 dis-
tance between women and sahib enacts the vast cleavages of power and
status. Yet the patriarchal command, unspoken and open to its many in-
terpretations, 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 experi-
ence 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. Cul-
tural acts layer such subordination and affect, in the most immediate and
detrimental ways, the quality of a woman’s life.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Women’s daily work flows through several shifts. The time needed for
Discipline and Labor 

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 em-
bedded within the daily experiences of ‘‘productive’’ labor, the ontology of
women’s labor might be best understood as a ‘‘flow,’’ not in the connota-
tions of abstract ease, but as a corporeal recognition of the integral nature of
its practice.39 Within the customary patriarchal norms of the villages, cut-
ting 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 demand-
ing’’ tasks of ditch digging or pesticide spraying. A move vertically up the
chain of command, into the supervisor cadre is extremely rare.Wage calcu-
lations 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 .
rupees ( cents) and . rupees ( cents) per hour of overtime.40 Bha-
girathi will receive her daily haziri of . rupees ( cents) only if she
plucks  kilos of ticca.To earn the equivalent of two hours of factory over-
time, she must pluck an additional  kilos of leaf. Though it is difficult
to calculate with any precision the time it would take to pluck  kilos,
women workers have to work at greater physical intensity to achieve parity
with factory counterparts. A -rupee difference is still maintained between
daily-rated fieldwork and factory work. In addition, till , wages of both
women and men pluckers were kept unequal: a ‘‘symbolic’’ extra rupee was
paid to men.41 [See appendix, tables A–.]
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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
with overseers allows fora masculine bonding that cuts across the labor hier-

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 ma-
norial rule to the potent and equally complex ideologies of zamindari (land-
holding) feudalism. If the colonial planter created his own ideal image of
a hybrid Victorian and colonial lord-of-the-oriental manor, his postcolo-
nial 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 ideolo-
gies of rule inflect work disciplines through the agrarian arrangements of
time and space, which, in turn, reconfigure the clocked and automated effi-
ciencies 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 subterra-
nean. 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 stun-
ning 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 reach-
ing 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
bends a body over a stunted tree. Labor disciplines also enact the rich cul-
Discipline and Labor 

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 vil-
lage 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 at-
tend.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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
rituals can be perceived within the currencies of legitimation for both the

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 mai-
baap. 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 gar-
lands 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 pa-
tronage. 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 cos-
mological 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  rupees, we got  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. Kol-
para, Munnu’s natal plantation, which was never an agency-house British
garden, is owned by a Bengali planting family. Its tolerance for ritual inter-
ruptions 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 contrib-
uted 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
live close to it. An elderly Nepali overseer, supervising the new planting,
Discipline and Labor 

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 inef-
fable 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 man-
ager, planning the new extension, who asserted that the tree should be re-
moved. 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 bull-
dozer 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 in-
finitesimal 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
gift of flora and the pristine quality of leaf create the millenial romance and

discipline of tea plucking. Analogies of the idealized and natural craft of cul-
tivation 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 nurs-
ery 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 compas-
sion 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 la-
ments 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. Cos-
mologies of affective connection that once informed the human acts of the
natural world—the tending of a tea bush—are eroded by a physical cor-
rosion that speaks to moral and bodied depletion. Indeed, this juxtaposi-
tion of nurturance with greed suggests a moral universe of work that, for
the old man, is being challenged by amoral economy, which threatens the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
plantation’s longevity. This sense of longevity and regeneration is linked to
Discipline and Labor 

community survival. In the middle of plucking, Bhagirathi offers a histori-

cal 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 commu-
nity’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. Pres-
sure 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 in-
extricably 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 colo-
nial 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 in-
fant metaphor, the sahib underscores an essential fragility. This suggestion
of infant fragility serves to justify disciplining workers when they are per-
ceived 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the hukum. The overseer who props his foot on a bush is made to genu-

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 con-
nection 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 col-
lapse the distinctions of human and natural worlds in these commentaries
of discipline and consent. Rather, they offer critical and compelling sugges-
tions 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 ma-
chined spaces of the factory.Gendered divisions and women’s ambivalences
chart the cultural topography of manufacture. In contrast to some cosmolo-
gies of connection within the field, the relationship between men and ma-
chines 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 neces-
sary sacrifice. These are colonial and gendered tales because they say that
machines demand the bodies of virgins.This sexualized history of alienation
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
is itself connected to a wider universe of belief in which human sacrifice is
Discipline and Labor 

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 (En-
glish 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 larger-
than-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 ma-
chines, 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 be-
headed one person a year.’’ Mongra’s recollections of shadowy ‘‘turbaned’’
men and planters on horseback were shared by Anjali. We sit in the dark-
ness 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 ku-
mari 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 an-
nually, 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 bor-
rowed them from us.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 abso-
lute 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 com-
pensation 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 ex-
plicitly 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 , 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 anoint-
ing, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

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-year-
old 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 alien-
ation. 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 conscious-
ness 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 introver-
sion 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Pregnancy also makes the body soft.The analogy of conditions of labor-

ing 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 de-
mands. ‘‘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, con-
frontation, and trenchant commentaries—creates a spindle, a top: wound-
up, spinning alterities.
It is August , five days before Indian Independence Day. The women
are assigned to the tukra bagan (piece garden) directly in front of the bunga-
low. 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.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Discipline and Labor 

 ,  
The lights come on slowly, shadowing the stage. A spotlight focuses on the Narra-
tor 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.
: (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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

chapter  Village Politics
Situating Moral Economies
 
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, push-
ing 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 medita-
tions 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’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 vil-
lage. 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 sham-
ing 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 pub-
licly 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 under-
scored 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 con-
nected 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 mai-
baap, are recrafted within the cultures of village authority and power.
Adjudication of alleged assaults, arbitration of marriage conflicts, or de-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
liberations about a job allocation are in the purview of village and union

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 au-
tonomy. Patronage in the village is charted through caste and ethnic differ-
ence, 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 commu-
nity 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 poli-
tics of ritual. Within the narrative, these vectors can be viewed as three-
dimensional planes, angled and meshed together through dialectical link-
ages. 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 iso-
lation. 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 dis-
appear 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
larger scale, these silences are frustrating for me. I recognize with clarity
Village Politics 

that they gesture eloquently toward the connections between ethnographic

method and theoretical/textual production. How could I claim a planta-
tion 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 ques-
tionnaire 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 net-
works, our entry into this family and household survey were through formal
appointments with men who presented themselves as the heads of house-
holds. 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 econ-
omy of his problematically unpaid ‘‘volunteer’’ assistance was coupled with
innuendos of sexual impropriety and information about my own connec-
tions 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 mis-
understanding could not take place; taboo constituted some of its impossi-
bility.
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 re-
mained the most problematic aspect of the ethnographic process. For one, I
recognized the Archimedean frame on which I was constructing my knowl-
edge 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 con-
clusion 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 ter-
ritory 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the partial and situated modalities of ethnographic knowledge-making. To

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 total-
izing 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 his-
torical 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 pres-
ence, in my sojourn. As a result, gender marks the primary fissure within the
research method, and its cleaving tensions mediate the text in fundamen-
tal ways. Radiating from this fissure are the equally significant cleavages of
caste divides, ethnic separations, social status, and class difference.
Space, Power, Claim
 ,  
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.
: 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 jour-
neys of yours. (Pause) But history is a spiral, I think—strange parabolas
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
that loop around to come back again and again to not-quite-but-yet-the-
Village Politics 

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?
: ( 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.
: 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.
S       and consider for a moment the
shadows that lie behind the imposing edifice of the bungalows and thewhite-
washed 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 cate-
gorized 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 distinc-
tively marked by its freshly painted blue gate posts and small church.While
other non-Christian families live inside the wider compass of the Hospi-
tal 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)
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

transforms what I have called the Canteen Field into a space of concentrated
and informal economic exchange: vegetable and fruit vendors, women sell-
ing 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 per-
son’’). 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 won-
dering 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 pos-
sible 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, walk-
ing 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Village Politics 

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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
contest, important historical claims of community solidarity are also made

here. A palpable sense of shared history, through journeys from the Cho-
tanagpur 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 ex-
ample 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 s, 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, in-
scribed 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 pro-
phetic acumen was respected by the English planter. In one story, the an-
cestor 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
He took a black chicken to the field in front of the staff home and told the
Village Politics 

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 his-
tory. In so doing, it hints at subterranean fissures that underlie the cultivated
maps of the emerald field.
Contesting Communities
 ,  
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.
: ‘‘Like the famous line from the Arabian Nights—puriya ke andar pu-
riya, 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.
P,    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 bunga-
low, 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 neigh-
boring 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 assert-
ing 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 ana-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
lytic claims. This discussion of ‘‘community’’ and the politics of difference

through which relatively autonomous histories are made will underscore

dialectical and intricate patterns-in-action rather than fixed categories. Pro-
cess, 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 prac-
tice plots the historical contours of community. Such plottings are predi-
cated 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, struc-
tured 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 concep-
tually 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 collectivi-
ties: 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 his-
torical 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, ‘‘commu-
nity’’ 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 prac-
tice. It does not assume impermeable or static boundaries. It is not used to
connote a primordial or essential residue of some self-evident larger cate-
gory, 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
While the narratives remain close to the ground and detail micropolitics,
Village Politics 

they are embedded in the global histories through which they are dialecti-
cally enabled. The regional politics of West Bengal, the international bor-
ders 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 communi-
ties 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 ‘‘primi-
tive.’’ ‘‘Agricultural castes’’ were favorably contrasted to this ‘‘primitive’’
movement because they were ‘‘settled.’’ Though this work-communityclas-
sification presents one strand in the cosmology of the caste: tribe (civilized-
primitive) 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 madesia-
paharia dichotomy is not expressed frequently in the postcolonial planta-
tion, it indexes a major ethnicized division. Nepalis will distinguish them-
selves 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 them-
selves 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
for understanding community within vernacular mediations. In numerous

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 refer-
ent 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 Bengali-
dominated state politics, her assertion to me of being Nepali is pointed.
The elasticity of the category is most apparent when jat is used along-
side 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 expan-
sion 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 medi-
ated in the first place by the relational status positioning of one commu-
nity 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 encom-
passment 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
this important referent is to diminish the potent and often hegemonic effects
Village Politics 

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 hy-
bridity and flux, this other pedagogy about a superior, national, and unitary
Hindu identity is also threaded through the story. The analysis of ‘‘differ-
ence’’ and the syncretism and hybridity of community-qua-jat politics can-
not 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 An-
jali 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 mo-
bilization.5 A Santhali union leader of the late s 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 his-
tory 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 dialec-
tical interplays between rules (manifest through the transgression in which
a gendered color was thrown in a markedly Hindu festival) and daily prac-
tice (compelled through necessary, hybrid labor arrangements) are enacted
through a politics of difference.
Out of these recognitions of transgression emerges a cultural politics that
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 color-
throwing 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 suc-
cessful 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 hier-
archies 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 indig-
nantly, ‘‘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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Village Politics 

‘‘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 dis-
tinction. 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 cre-
ates 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 Kum-
har respectively, are firm friends. Inscriptions of ‘‘superiority’’ and ‘‘inferi-
ority’’ 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 (gar-
den/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,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
spread a rumor that he had gone to the home country and seen that our jat

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 iden-
tity presents the multiple and contested nature of jat ascriptions. In this in-
stance, 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 cer-
tain Bengaliness by conducting a Kali puja (one of the most important Ben-
gali 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 under-
stood 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, par-
ticularly 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 fur-
ther 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 cen-
ter of a noisy house ritual, following the instructions of the bahman [brah-
min 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
cosmologies of the Chotanagpur: a sacred grove, theworship of a tree, some
Village Politics 

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 am-
bivalences of practice, my analysis does not offer totalizing claims of any
jat identity. Rather than search for some lineage connecting plantation cus-
toms 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 de-
lineated 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 spe-
cific 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 architec-
ture 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 iden-
tity and location within the higher status of the caste structures more ex-
plicitly, 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 sepa-
ration is palpable. Anjali’s neighbors in the Factory Line are Nepali, and
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
though sympathetic assistance is given in crises and creates its own kinship,

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 [move-
ment/‘‘customs’’] is different from these adivasis. It is just like that.’’
Because Anjali, Bhagirathi, and Munnu are the primary triage of my con-
nections in the village, my conversations with Nepali women are not fre-
quent or sustained. Though I accompany Munnu to her natal village, and
am invited by her Nepali friends to various cultural activities, our conversa-
tions 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 power-
ful 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 inter-
nal 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 orches-
trated 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ease that suggests a familiarity with ‘‘outsiders.’’ Peter and two prachers
Village Politics 

[lay catechists] explain that their own Roman Catholic community is the
largest of three denominations in the village.The other two are the German-
Lutherans 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 Pla-
teau 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 s 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 benevo-
lent 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 vari-
ous 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 activi-
ties 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 person-
hood is religious, a person’s relationship to being adivasi (as for example,
Oraon or Munda) is continuously, if not explicitly, negotiated.Cultural prac-
tices that existed before the mission and that are perceived as defining adi-
vasi 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 vernacu-
lar languages.8 Julian, a prominent member of the parish council, remarks
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
that afterVatican II, when attention was given to local practices, ‘‘free think-

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   [member of parliament] who has declared that
Christian adivasis are not really adivasis and they are trying to create an En-
glishsthan (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 com-
ments, 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 pri-
macy of religious practice and connections to adivasi identity wrestle with
these explicit ideologies of authentic Indianness based on notions of uni-
tary 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 citizen-
ship 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 en-
tirely 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 ordi-
nary 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
plantation, formerly owned by a Nawab of Jalpaiguri has a far larger Muslim
Village Politics 

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 re-
serve 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: () subgroup-
ings within the overarching rubric of the wider apellation adivasi negotiate
hierarchy and distinction in intricate ways; () a central dichotomy between
Nepalis and adivasi is discursively maintained, despite shared labor practice;
and () 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 signifi-
cant 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 sanc-
tion, punishment, and negotiations to put ‘‘right’’ the threat of cultural dis-
order. 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 transgres-
sion, 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 dia-
lectic 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  kilos of rice and  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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Village Politics 

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 thou-
sand 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 mar-
riage 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 ulti-
mate 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 re-
member 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  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 be-
cause 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
she leaves for another jat, she ‘breaks.’ Like a broken pot, she falls apart.

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’ tra-
ditional 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 , and , rupees [ and  respectively]. The only re-
striction 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 acknowl-
edge 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 life-
long 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 com-
munity.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 commu-
nity. It is an authority that presents a paradox. On one hand, their wage
labor and marriage value ensure a certain gendered authority and promi-
nence 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 sanc-
tioning 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 com-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
munities. Its ideology presents the basic contours of plural but shared patri-
Village Politics 

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 earn-
ings 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 be-
come 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 con-
flict has broken through the fragile skin of equilibrium. They can start with
seemingly innocuous and minorevents. A young woman from Anjali’s com-
munity goes to watch a film with a Sonar man who is who is from the upper-
caste 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 liai-
son 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 com-
munity, which defines itself in superior relationship to even the Kumhars.
The valences within the caste cluster of the sadan are thus subtly indexed.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 toler-
ance. 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 Kum-
har 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.
 (Lohar): If the man was an upright person, this would not have hap-
pened. 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.
 (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. . . .
 (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.
 (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 in-
volved has demanded , rupees. Ganesh must close down his business.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Village Politics 

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 in-
formed 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 thou-
sand 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 ‘‘char-
acter’’ of the alleged victim and the sexual behaviour of the alleged per-
petrator quickly become the stuff of public currency. Significantly, it is an
outraged mother who repairs her daughter’s collective dishonor with a slip-
pered 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 ten-
sions 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 conversa-
tions.When Anjali and I discuss the leopards that hide in the field and some-
times 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 in-
volved 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 dynam-
ics 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 non-
Hindu 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 reli-
gious practices. Though they lie in the shadow of spectacular and authori-
tative claims to the sacred, they assert other economies of power.When jat
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
hierarchies are asserted through a wide range of ritual protocols, gender is
Village Politics 

implicated. In one case, a Nepali woman claims her incarnation as the God-
dess. 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 per-
mitted.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 gen-
erational hierarchies are significant markers of status. Men of the house-
hold, 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 tex-
tualized 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 prac-
tices. 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the other? Or are they to be placed on a telos of ‘‘Hinduization’’?

It is more productive, perhaps, to consider the ways in which her ritual

praxis suggests un/contradictory encompassments. Munnu crosses the bor-
ders toward ‘‘Hinduness’’ through a negotiation of territorial cultural space
within which she is surrounded by non-Oraon and more Hindu communi-
ties.When she moves to her in-laws’ neighborhood, which is dominated by
Oraons, she joins the social ‘‘place’’ of her natal community.Viewed as adi-
vasi 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 subordina-
tion.Those who are perceived as guilty of beef-eating and excessive drink-
ing, for instance, will be kept at a social distance, even in moments of com-
munitycelebration.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 pan-
community solidarities.These village rituals mesh the terms of colonial pa-
tronage 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 en-
sured 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 
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 ex-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
plains its basic philosophy. ‘‘There is a terrible and dangerous spirit/ghost,
Village Politics 

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 em-
phasize 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.’’ Ex-
panding 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 arti-
facts 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 them-
selves as superior (like the Kumhar and Goala) recognize its ritual lexicon.
Spoken in a different language, and perhaps charting a different commen-
sality, 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Priests and Goddesses

Women participate within the expanding frontiers of house and village ritu-
als 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. Bha-
girathi 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 ges-
tures 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 . 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 vil-
lages 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 den-
tures and asks me for money to pay for their replacement. Confronted by
the spectacular contradictions between his toothless gums and rabid rheto-
ric, 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 dilapi-
dated temple. In the early s, a clash between political parties, which
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Village Politics 

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 im-
portant 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 poli-
tics 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 stom-
ach 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 ac-
cess 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
every Tuesday morning. When she propitiates the Goddess, she speaks in

rapid Nepali, though the anxious women who surround her throw ques-
tions 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 fer-
tility. 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 ques-
tions. 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 posses-
sion. ‘‘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 birth-
day, it is big feasting, and I pay for it through selling my betel nut for around
, rupees []. 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 grow-
ing 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 well-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
known wandering guru from the north, whose public meetings, and grow-
Village Politics 

ing popularity in the area suggest considerable economic power and orga-
nization. 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 me-
diate 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 counternarra-
tive to these spectacles of power. Certainly, they share a basic cosmology,
within which Durga is but one manifestation of the many faces of femi-
nized divinity. Reverence for the Goddess as well as ontological and bodied
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
claims moves within a shared mythography.Yet cosmologies are manifested

in the specificities of historical landscapes. When feudal distinctions be-

tween 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 as-
sertion 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 patron-
izing 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 func-
tional.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 millenar-
ian 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 ini-
tiates 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 com-
mon 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
these fragmentary offerings another narrative of ritual and power.
Village Politics 

Initiation into ritual status and power involves learning some basic disci-
plines 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 mun-
dane 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 cor-
ners. 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 be-
come dains ordainis. If there is a daini in thevicinity, astonishing things hap-
pen, 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-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 re-
spected 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 mat-
ter 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 inheri-
tance 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 encom-
passes 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Village Politics 

 ,  
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.
 : What was that? That earth-shattering wail.

 : 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.
: (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 re-
sponsible, 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 be-

tween 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 di-
versities have shaped the plantation’s political culture in the deepest ways.
Like the lingua franca of the villages, Sadri, which brings together the patois
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of the old country with the hybrid languages of labor, the boundaries of so-

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/consti-
tutes 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 patron-
age 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 au-
tonomous, 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  rupees,
to ‘‘cover the expenses’’ of her ‘‘natal’’ plantation’s recruitment costs.20
Whether or not this payment reflected a consistent policy across the planta-
tion belt is difficult to ascertain. It suggests, however, the inextricable con-
nection 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 hear-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ing of a dispute and then a just and equitable settlement. If complicated, this
Village Politics 

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 be-
nevolence 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
it involves her wage and labor, she will go to the manager.

The planter may rule in favor of the woman and punish the erring hus-
band. Amit Chakravarty, a senior planter, comments, ‘‘You have to under-
stand 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 corrobo-
rated, 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 [ex-
change 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, want-
ing 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 mai-
baap. 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 pan-
chayats, 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,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
participate in giving opinions, but they will ultimately decide. Usually most
Village Politics 

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 partici-
pate 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 nego-
tiation. 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 ce-
ments 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. In-
deed, 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 en-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
compasses both men and women. Within the villages, his power to punish

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 para-
doxical 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 . 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  kilos in two
shifts. Munnu and Bhagirathi, who are highly experienced workers, average
 rupees a day. A high-end weekly income is  rupees. (See appendix,
table A.)
One rupee equaled about  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 field-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
worker or assert her understanding of gendered oppression within the larger
Village Politics 

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 vio-
lence. 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, mem-
sahib, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
her and for us. She does not have a permanent job, so we will have to find

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 ex-
change 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 mar-
ried ‘‘out’’ created considerable tensions with her father, who wanted to sell
her job. Indeed, Munnu, who herself asserts an explicit sense of wage em-
powerment, 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 mar-
riage had been settled further afield, she might not have won this particular
battle. For most women, out-marriage means just that. Patrilocal norms en-
sure territorial estrangement from affective ties in natal villages as well as
employment. Munnu has walked an extra ten miles daily, carrying her in-
fant 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 , 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 ex-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
change takes place: permanently employed men who are fieldworkers will
Village Politics 

attempt to give their ‘‘names’’ to new wives, and search for seasonal employ-
ment. 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 con-
comitant 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. Iso-
lated 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 cer-
tain 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 field-
worker does not move up the chain of labor command, her ‘‘overseer’’ hus-
band 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-to-
wife 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-in-
laws) who come into the village from Bihar.24 They tell me that an ancestor
expanded and strengthened his lineage by refusing to marry his daugh-
ters 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 authori-
tative spokeswomen of community customs and labor politics. As a two-
generation ‘‘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 femi-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
nized wage power that also reinforces patriarchal caste norms. While they

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 cal-
ligraphic 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 calligra-
phies 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
written word. The heresy of silence is this: that it cannot be understood
Village Politics 

through language. But we are human, and our desperation seizes impossi-
bilities.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 gen-
der 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 administra-
tive policies controlled liquor licenses so that government revenue was en-
sured, 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 other-
ness, 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 emascula-
tion, 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 alco-
hol, which have differential effects upon household economies. Daru, dis-
tilled ‘‘raw’’ alcohol, is sold at government stills on both sides of the Indo-
Bhutanese 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
is given.’’ Apart from its presence in rituals, it is offered through the terms

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 vil-
lages, 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  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 trans-
border business, are controlled by men who are not from the working com-
munities. 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 mar-
riages, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
emerged in this plantation belt, there are some significant moments of rup-
Village Politics 

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 Associa-
tion (), the project has focused on contraception and family plan-
ning 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 top-
down organizing, are suggestive on many levels. It gestures to ideological
effects through which maternal roles are assumed, essentialized, and neu-
tralized. Most clearly, the selection of these ‘‘mothers,’’ and the parame-
ters 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 em-
bedded 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 busi-
ness. 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
what the sahib said! He called me Indira Gandhi. But then he actually called

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 con-
frontationally 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 noth-
ing 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 threat-
ened 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.’’
 ,  
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.
: This is a fine moment to introduce Dopdi/Draupadi to you. Maha-

sweta 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)
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
‘‘Then a billion moons pass. A billion lunar years.Opening hereyes aftera
Village Politics 

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, hold-
ing a piece of paper in front of her. Another stops her and speaks directly to the
Narrator.
 : Why so upset, memsahib? Remember the end, memsahib? Re-
member. 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.
 : (holding her paper out in front of her and enunciating slowly) ‘‘Drau-
padi’s black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomi-
table 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 ulula-
tion,What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe
me again?’’
 : ‘‘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?’’
 : (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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

chapter  Protest
Shadow Fields
 ,  
Lights come on, brightly.The Narrator sits at her table, stage right. She is read-
ing a book. She looks up, as if noticing the audience for the first time. She begins
to read from the book. She speaks slowly.
: ‘‘The historian transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge’ is
only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act.With no possi-
bility 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 insur-
gency, 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 domi-
nant 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.
I  , the year is to end soon, and I have yet to talk to women
who were involved in the union battles of the late s. 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.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 (),
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 any-
one 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 , the late monsoon season, I read out this opening passage to
Bhagirathi, Munnu, and Anjali, translating it line by line. Munnu listens in-
tently.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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
some of the ethical concerns around naming and representation, I want to

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 au-
thor, particularly if it circulates in plantation country. In our discussions, we
recognize that given its literate circulations, and its language, it will prob-
ably 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 re-
taliation. 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 con-
cerns.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 per-
mutations, 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 spec-
tacles 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 planta-
tion 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
plantation are an ‘‘open’’ business. I am also aware, in that monsoon of Au-
Protest 
gust  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 chap-
ter 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 consider-
able danger: serpent-like, fathomless, and a primal threat to his fields of cul-
tivation. 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 , was defined as an ‘‘insurrection’’ in the Baikun-
thapur 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 , 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 com-
munities is shared by a postcolonial planter, Joy Sinha, who related one of
the first ‘‘laboroutbursts’’ hewitnessed as a young manager in Assam. Light-
ing 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 sud-
denly 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 ha-
rassment 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 inci-
dent, 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 vio-
lent 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’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
and ‘‘primordial.’’ Fear creates the specter of savagery. Power creates its own
absolution.
 ,  
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 living-
room 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.
: 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 ap-
parition 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 plan-

tation like Sarah’s Hope, will be placed against a sketch of the longue durée.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
I have gestured to powerful fragments already: ritual, corporeal, and oral

discourses that mesh together as colonial and postcolonial narratives. Yet

these are to be viewed in a wider landscape, within which subaltern nar-
ratives 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 spec-
trum 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, charis-
matic, 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’ can-
teen 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 , 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 , I rush in nervously: ‘‘Look,
Mr. Premnath, I am really not interested in union politics. Really. I am inter-
ested 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
entire postcolonial period. I am surprised and disconcerted at the level of
Protest 
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 intelligence-
gathering on his part has perhaps deemed me quite harmless. More impor-
tantly, 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 gar-
den whereyou were fora short while last year. . . . See, I knoweverything. . . .
So he left and came to work here. This was in the s. 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 th August ,
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 chow-
kidars reported things. Because of this, we met in the fairs and local mar-
kets.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 , the Rege Comission reported that no trade union organizing was
permitted in the plantations.13 The lexicon of planters and district adminis-
trators 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 legisla-
tion, such as the punitive emigration acts, the infamous Workmen’s Breach
of Contract Act,16 and surveillance by planter militias such as the North Ben-
gal Rifles, whose records were burned on the eve of Indian independence.17
In isolated plantations, the planter served as both judge and jury of be-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
havior characterized as criminal. This included refusal to exercise the full

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 ex-
plicit nationalist aspirations—asserted a defiant challenge to colonial rule.
In , 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 com-
munist 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 ques-
tion and used the local market as a space to rally workers. He was imprisoned
in .21
In , 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 under-
stand that efforts are being made to give the agitation a religious turn and
that a resurgence of the  trouble is possible.’’ 22
Mahatma Gandhi himself is said to have visited the Dooars in the late
s, 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 Cho-
tanagpur 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
secondary analysis of early trade union politics) is the distance between his
Protest 
actual historical involvement in Dooars politics and interpretations (of this

supposed involvement) that took on a life of its own. For colonial plant-
ers, 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 imagi-
nation and the particular modalities of protest it engendered.26 Certainly, his
naming within the lyrics of plantation women’s songs suggest the power-
ful 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 . We find, for ex-
ample, the case of one worker,Virana Tilanga, tried on August , , and
sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment on August , . The un-
fortunate 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 con-
gress.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
 ,  
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.
 : (as if reciting from memory, staccato tones) ‘‘Erena Telenga.
Charged for trespass. The accused stated that he came here for the pur-
pose of speaking to the workers about desher katha, the story of their
own country. He was caught and held by the chowkidar.’’ 28
 : ‘‘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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

: ‘‘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.  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-s. 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 some-
what 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 one-
time 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 –. . . . [Was
there any party involved, communist, ?] 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 s, 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 , union activity of
the Bengal Dooars Railways included some strategic alliances with planta-
tion workers’ communities. Because railroad gangmen were often adivasis
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
and had kinsfolk working in the plantations, these were connections that
held firm.
The Communist Party of India () began organizing in , and labor
‘‘unrest’’ through strikes accelerated in the last decades of colonial rule. In
September , 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 land-
owners. An armed volunteer force, comprised of villagers and tea planta-
tion 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 inde-
pendence, planters knew that labor legislation permitting open trade union
organizing was inevitable and began to support political parties that op-
posed the radical ideology and mobilization of the Communist Party of
India.The ruling Congress Partyagreed with the planters, and in , when
it constituted the first national government of free India, the  was for-
mally banned.
While union activity was ‘‘legally’’ allowed through the s and s,
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 leader-
ship (often underground, if they were members of the ) and its constitu-
ency 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 geographi-
cal 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-s, the
split in the communist movement sparked one of the most important peasant
rebellions in postcolonial Indian history: the Naxalite movement. Begin-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ning in a village in North Bengal from which it takes its name, Naxalbari,

this was a political movement that first involved villagers and local commu-
nist 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 re-
pression.They were killed, tortured, imprisoned, or went underground. It is
a history that has returned to the subterranean, except in political and theo-
retical 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 s, 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. Interne-
cine 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 remem-
ber 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.’’
 ,  
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.
: Here we sit, smoking and drinking glasses of sweet hot tea.You, incog-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
nito, sitting huddled against the smoke that has betrayed you. You, who
Protest 
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 insurrec-
tion of  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 docu-
ment 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 peas-
ant rebellion of  and the importance of women’s testimonies/oral his-
tories in deepening our understanding of rural social movements.35 Village
women fromTelengana were deeply involved both in thevanguard of politi-
cal upheaval and organizing.They cooked, cleaned, joined guerrilla bands,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
and faced equal hardships as male organizers. Only recently has this history

been rendered visible, along with the insistence that the ‘‘public’’ domain of
political action must be understood through the warp and woof of the ‘‘pri-
vate.’’ Indeed, the economy of political action is simultaneously the econ-
omy 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 assump-
tions 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 s are not mere resuscitative moves. Her fragmentary comments
suggest that our understandings of the history of North Bengal is problem-
atically 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 par-
tial 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 un-
bridgeable 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 perspec-
tives, 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 fram-
ings of power/dialogue, they register oppositional effects.
 ,  
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.
: ( pulling two rumpled pieces of paper from a deep pocket in her robe) Pre-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
tend I am a British sahib and you are Miriam Mussulmani. Here, take
Protest 
this paper. I tore it from one of the old books from the British zamana
[period]. You read Miriam Mussulmani.
: (straightening out the paper) Why? You are crazy.Why?
: Because in making you read, I pull you out. Does this hurt, this yank-
ing? Is this because you, in the context of my production here, are ‘‘more
deeply in shadow’’? 37
: 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.
: ‘‘What do you wish to complain about?’’
: ‘‘I want to get my name cut off the book so that I can go back to
my own country.’’
: ‘‘Were you beaten?’’
: ‘‘Yes, by the babu.’’
: ‘‘What were you beaten with?’’
: ‘‘With a cane.’’
: ‘‘Have you any marks?’’
: ‘‘Yes, on my arm.’’
: ‘‘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 prob-
ably 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 Nar-
rator 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 arti-
ficial 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 whis-
pers, ‘‘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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 de-
clines 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 his-
tory 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 halt-
ing 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
Framing Protest
Women’s narratives of resistance and protest can be situated within a spec-
trum 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 remem-
bered 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 in-
terpretations and the legitimation of measures to regain control are criti-
cal 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 com-
mon 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 ‘‘sponta-
neous’’ 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 criti-
cally, 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 per-
meate 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 conscious-
ness are not located within analytic dichotomies: collective/individual, pri-
vate/public, informal/formal, ‘‘primitive’’/‘‘rational,’’ and women/men.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 mar-
ginalization within unions is constructed by seemingly insignificant inscrip-
tions 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 politi-
cally 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 sup-
portive 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 rami-
fications 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 organiza-
tional 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
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 struc-
ture. I am first intrigued by both the overlap and the distinction made be-
tween 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, ‘‘some-
thing 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 com-
munity, 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 re-
sponds, ‘‘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 nego-
tiation 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 poli-
tics 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 Jaha-
nara/Suneeta, my twilight companion who is neither Hindu nor Muslim.
Like Rita, she is unmarried and, in the customary norms of both commu-
nities, reaching a stage where her unmarried state can be stigmatized.42 Be-
cause she does not have the structural protection of a husband, she is vul-
nerable 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. Every-
thing 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
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 com-
munities, not only because of time spent away from household responsi-
bilities, 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 understand-
ings 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 ex-
plicit 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 sur-
rounded 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 re-
taliating 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 , 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 th 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 eve-
ning, 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  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 , the Indian
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
flag is carried from the chowpatty to the factory, as is the custom in this
village cluster.
Several intersecting themes of community solidarity, collective orga-
nizing, 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. Bha-
girathi 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 struc-
tures 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 reputa-
tion 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, casu-
ally, 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 sig-
nificant 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 hoist-
ings 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

ears of workers in other plantation villages, rival unions, and even the man-
agers. 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 (gov-
ernment) and union: ‘‘Look at the amount of donation/dues they take for
th 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 free-
dom 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 sig-
nificantly, in her triply conflated register of plantation/state/nation, Bha-
girathi recognizes that these are politics that contain a failed reciprocity, the
wider political economy of obligation is not shared by rulers. The union-
sarkar 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 fire-
wood 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 man-
ager. 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 gar-
den. 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 rep-
rimand 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
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 man-
ager’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. Interest-
ingly 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 kilo-
gram. 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
 kilos instead of  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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
would be no need for you to be sitting there.’ ’’

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 col-
lective mobilization against small acts of injustice. Bhagirathi offers an in-
stance 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 com-
motion 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
incident, where ruptural events within the field were taken directly into the
Protest 
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 fire-
works. 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 sev-
eral 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 confron-
tation 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 escala-
tion 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—im-
plements of plantation work, tools of discipline—into suddenly powerful
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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 long-
dead colonial burra sahib but in the memory of a contemporary planter. It is
an invocation of a capricious and ‘‘primitive’’ spirit lurking below the sur-
face 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 construc-
tion 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 legiti-
macy. 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 mal-
leability of the dominant iconography of primordial ‘‘tribal’’ violence.
Budhua Xaxa, an elderly Missionya worker, now retired, had arrived in
the Dooars in the late s, 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
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 in-
habits 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 atten-
dence 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 as-
sistant 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 rela-
tively 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

only draw them into confrontation within his concentrated, administrative

locus, the factory compound.
Event : 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 non-
union 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.
: 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 actu-
ally 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.
: (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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
: (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 con-
centrated disciplining radius of the office, while facing the burra sahib, Ju-
lena 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. How-
ever, 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 ac-
tions. 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 sin-
gularly important in its momentary indexing of a gendered solidarity be-
tween 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 cata-
lyzing 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
the territorial shift from the field landscape into the ambit of planter power,

reduced the import of the cigarette burn and Julena’s response to a mild,
quickly contained (though remembered) tremor within the plantation day.
Event : 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.
 : 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 begin-
ning, 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].
 : 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 com-
pany 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 sig-
nificant 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 orga-
nizing, within a couple of hours the situation has resulted in explicit union
involvement.
Because of the workers’ rapid and extensive mobilization, the senior
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
planter was not only forced to publicly apologize for the incident, but he
Protest 
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 promis-
cuity.Cultural norms about sexual im/propriety filter into this social disap-
proval 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 unam-
bivalent and complete support from plantation communities and various
political unions.What could help us understand the startlingly different re-
sponses to these events? In the first place, the communities of workers per-
ceived 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. Sig-
nificantly, what catalyzed her protest—the assistant manager’s act of vio-
lence—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 panopti-
con that signals focused containment. The field’s vast dispersal is no longer
relevant or dangerous. Conversely, a conflict which begins within the fac-
tory is invested with great significance, because its locus of collective con-
frontation suggests the final and most potent threat to the planter’s center
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of power.

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 seed-
lings 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 com-
munity 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 our-
selves 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Protest 
chapter  A Last Act
 
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.
: (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. Noth-
ing 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 plan-
tation 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Appendix
 . Monthly Rated Salary/Wages for Grade A and B Staff
A.Wage Chart
Total Starting
Category Salary (monthly) Grade
Clerical Grade I Rs. Head clerk

Head factory clerk
Clerk in charge of out-garden
(field staff )
Seniormost garden clerk (field
staff )
Clerical Grade II Rs. nd clerk (office/garden)
nd factory clerk
Senior stores clerk
Clerical Grade III Rs. . Typist
Junior clerk
Stores clerk
Medical Grade I Rs. Doctor
Medical Grade II Rs. Laboratory technician
Theater nurse
Staff nurse
Technician Grade ‘‘A’’ Rs. Special mechanic
Special carpenter
Technical Grade ‘‘B’’ Rs. Head mechanic
Head engine driver
Head electrician
Certified boiler attendant
(st class)
Master carpenter
Latheman
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
B. Authorised Amenities for Clerical, Medical,Technician Grade ‘‘A’’ and ‘‘B’’ Staff
[Excerpts]
. Free Quarters: For each employee and his/her family as defined in the Plan-
tation Labour Act.
. Firewood:  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, up-
rooted 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  ×  × ½ feet. Two quintals
of soft coke equals to one peel of firewood.
. 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  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 consid-
ered an adult dependent provided he is physically handicapped and incapable
of working.
. 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: () his or her spouse and
() 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.
. Maternity Leave: As per Maternity Benefit Act,  ( week =  days)
. Lighting: Where supply of electricity is not available, kerosene oil at the scale
of  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. , September ), –.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

 . Monthly Rated Salary/Wages For Other Monthly Rated

Employees
A.Wage Chart
Total Starting
Category Salary Grade
Grade Rs. Head foreman (factory), Head overseer

(garden)/Head munshi, Overseer (garden)
munshi, Seniormost nurse/midwife without
certificate, Seniormost factory sirdar,
Seniormost boidar, Headwatchman/Head
chowkidar
Grade Rs. . 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
Grade Rs. . 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]

tations Labour Act.
. Firewood:  peels annually per household.
. 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  years, living on the garden,
fully dependent on parents, and not employed.
. Dry tea:  grammes per worker per month.
Source: Excerpted from Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association, Pay, Allowances
and Other Conditions of Service (Circular no. , September ), –.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Appendix 
 . Scales of Pay and Allowances for Daily Rated Garden Workers
Time Period Adult Child
A.Wages: Garden Workers

// to // Rs. . Rs. .
// to // Rs. . Rs. .
// to // Rs. . Rs. .
B.Wages: Factory Workers
// to // Rs. ./. Rs. ./.
// to // Rs. ./. Rs. ./ .
// to // Rs. . /. Rs. ./.
Notes: . 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. . and tea makers
and helpers to fitters will receive Rs. . as ‘‘Additional Compensation’’ as shown
under Factory Workers; . Extra leaf pice  paise per kg.W.e.f //.
B. Authorised Amenities
tations Labour Act.
. Firewood: ½ peels annually per household as per agreement dated //.
Management shall supply coal briquettes in lieu of firewood. One standard
Dooars peel of firewood will be equivalent to  kilos of coal briquettes. A
household of a daily rated workman in receipt of . . . will received coal bri-
quettes amounting to  kgs in Dooars area. A ‘‘chulah’’ is to be supplied free
of cost at time of introduction.
. 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  years, living on the garden,
fully dependent on parents, and not employed.
. Maternity Leave: As per Maternity Benefit Act,  ( week =  days)
. Dry Tea:  grammes per worker per month.
Source: Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association, Pay, Allowances and Other Con-
ditions of Service (Circular no. , September ), –.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

 . Gendered Muster and Field Labor Tasks, Peak Season 
Permanent Casual (Bigha)
Field
Task Men Women Adolescent Children Women Men Children

Weeding * * — — —
Plucking — — —
Manuring — — — — — —
*Only one day worked in the fourteen-day sample.

Weeding — —
Plucking * — — — —
*Only three days worked.

Weeding — * —
Plucking ** — — — —
*Only eleven days worked; ** Only three days worked.

Weeding — * — —
Plucking — — — —
*Only eight days worked.

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 . Monthly averages were calculated from fourteen
days of statistics.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Appendix 
 . Sample Labor Return: Particulars of Numbers Working During

the Week March –,  and Weekly Report of Crop
Total Haziri Total Total Total

(No. of Kilograms Kilograms Kilograms
Date Workers) Plucked Manufactured Packed

Notes: . Estimated crop = ,, kg.; . Average number of field pluckers
(out of total number of workers) = .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Glossary
adivasi: indigenous communities on disparaging term that is used

the lower rungs of the caste system ubiquitously
or who do not participate within it; cha: tea (Bengali); chai (Hindi)
also known as dalit daffadar: first-level garden overseer
angrezi zamana: ‘‘English period’’; the daini: witch
epoch of British rule daru: country liquor
ayah: maid; domestic who cares for didi: elder sister
children; woman who does dol: group; labor gang
housekeeping and washing faltu: of no use; temporary labor
babu: clerical and garden staff on the firanghi: foreigner
plantation, usually Bengali garib log: poor people, often used
bagan: garden self-referentially
bara aadmi: ‘‘big’’ person; person of ghinna: repulsion
higher status gora sahib: white or fair man, often in
basha: house, home; staff cottage on reference to British men
the plantation handia: homebrew rice beer; also
bat: talk, usually informal known as pachwai
bhadra: civil; gentlemanly; describes hat: country and local market
class gentility hukum: order
bhadralog: gentleman, usually Bengali itihas: history
bhagat: ritual master; faith healer; izzat: honor
shaman; doctor jat: community, caste
bigha: unit of land; temporary worker jatra: drama; festival; dance
boidar: timekeeper; person who kam: work
checks attendance on the kala aadmi: black person
plantation kanun: rule, regulation
burra sahib: senior manager; ‘‘big’’ lal cha: red tea; liquor tea consumed
sahib by workers and villagers
burra memsahib: senior manager’s mahila samity: women’s organization
wife or society
chota sahib: assistant manager; of maiji: workers’ term for wife of
several ranks babu/clerk, usually Bengali
chowkidar: watchman mashal: home-made torch with open
coolie: plantation worker; someone flame, used to scare elephants
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
who does heavy manual work; a matal: drunkard; alcoholic

mazdoor: worker of, e.g., British, Planters, as in

missionya: of the ‘‘mission’’; Christian Swaraj
natak: theater, play randi: prostitute; hussy, promiscuous
nazar: attention; gaze samaj: society
neta: leader, usually union or political shakti: power, strength
party chief zamindari: landowning; measure of
panchayat: village council land owned by a landlord
puja: religious ritual, usually Hindu (zamindar)
raj: kingdom; used to describe ‘‘rule’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

Notes
chapter  Alap
 ‘‘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 tun-
ing 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,
nd Indian edition [Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.,
]). Alap in colloquial north Indian usage simply means ‘‘introduction.’’
 (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 Euro-
pean, Briton, or English person. In postcolonial India, sahib (like its femi-
nized counterpart, memsahib) connotes upper-class/caste, urban,Western-
ized 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.
 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Little Ones,’’ in Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi,
trans. Ipsita Chandra (Calcutta: Seagull Books, ), .
 Jatra refers to the folk theater of rural Bengal. My use of it here encom-
passes this meaning as well as the hybrid adivasi (noncaste, non-Hindu) and
non-Bengali dance gatherings in the plantations of north Bengal.
 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.
 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 cen-
trality 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
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 contempo-
rary Hindi film pantheon. Her films, popular Bombay (‘‘Bollywood’’) pro-
ductions, 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 transfor-
mation of this term within Anglo-Indian and imperial discourses, see Jenny
Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.
 I am indebted to Amalendu Guha’s use of this term. See Planter Raj to
Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, – (New
Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, ). I use the term Planter
Raj interchangeably with British Raj in the context of northeast Indian plan-
tation 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,
], ).
 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 . Kabir Mohanty
suggested that the notion of a ‘‘narrative seedbed’’ might be useful forassert-
ing 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 , no.  (August
): . 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, ).
 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle
(London: John Gifford, ), .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 The ‘‘moral economy’’ argument in the context of labor history has been

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  (): –. ‘‘Folklore,
Anthropology and Social History,’’ Indian Historical Review , no.  ().
I am indebted to Sumit Sarkar’s excellent discussion of Thompson’s formu-
lation of class-in-culture consciousness, as well as his assertion of Thomp-
son’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, ), –.
 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 cul-
ture’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 position-
ing 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 plan-
tation subordination.The dialectic of interior/exterior is critical for a sense
of cultural meaning, personhood, and solidarity. The suggestion of a con-
scious and bodied ‘‘posture’’ in the term stance resonates with the grounded
locations of Indian plantation women’s daily commentaries and their resis-
tance. 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 Fran-
cisco: Aunt Lute Books, ), .
 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 in-
clude the Tea District Labour Association’s Handbook of Castes and Tribes
Employed in the Tea Estates of North-East India (Calcutta: , ); and
such magisterial accounts as W. W. Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Ben-
gal: Districts of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri and the State of Kuch Behar, vol. 
(London, ).
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism and
Notes to Chapter One 

the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), .
 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,
); 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, ), –; cf. Lata Mani, ‘‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholar-
ship in the Age of Multinational Reception,’’ Feminist Review , no. 
(summer ): –; Caren Kaplan, ‘‘The Politics of Location as Trans-
national Feminist Practice,’’ in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. I. Grewal and C. Kaplan (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ), –; M. Lazreg, ‘‘Feminism and
Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,’’ Femi-
nist Studies , no.  (spring ): –; Adrienne Rich, ‘‘Notes towards a
Politics of Location,’’ in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, –
(New York: Norton, ).
 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  (): –;
Mary E. John, ‘‘Post-colonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field:
Anthropologists and Native Informants?’’ Inscriptions , no.  (): –;
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, ‘‘ ‘Native’ Anthropologists,’’ American Ethnologist
 (): –. For an excellent critique of the category of postcoloni-
ality within the politics of race/class in the United States and United King-
dom, which is relevant to the circuits of postcolonial feminist ethnogra-
phies, see Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘‘Cross-Currents, Cross-Talk:
Race, ‘‘Postcoloniality’’ and the Politics of Location,’’ Cultural Studies ,
no. : –.
 Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’’ Women and
Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory , no.  (): –; Judith Stacey,
‘‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’’ Women’s Studies International
Forum , no.  (): –; Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist
Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
 In raising these questions, I remain indebted to a growing body of work by
postcolonial scholars, that examines their own institutional location, dis-
placement, hybridity, marginality and privilege as integral to the analy-
sis 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 , no.  ():
–; Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Post-
colonial Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Chandra
Mohanty, ‘‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Dis-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
courses,’’ in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra

Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, ), –; 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, ), –;
Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion: Exoticism
and Decolonization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, ); Banerjee, Hi-
mani. ‘‘Geography Lessons: On Being an Insider/Outsider to the Cana-
dian Nation,’’ in Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality
in Education (New York: Routledge, ), –; Ali Behdad. ‘‘Traveling
to Teach: Postcolonial Critics in the American Academy,’’ in Race Iden-
tity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McArthy and Warren
Crichlow (New York: Routledge, ), –; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman,
Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), ; Aihwa Ong,
‘‘Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Representations of Women in Non-
Western Societies,’’ Inscriptions  and  (): –.
 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), –; Caren Kaplan, ‘‘Deterritorializations:
The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,’’ Cul-
tural Critique  (spring ): –. For an excellent critique of the hege-
monic place of the U.S. nation-state in relation to feminist ethnographic
production, see Deborah Gordon, ‘‘U.S. Feminist Ethnography and the De-
nationalizing of ‘America’: A Retrospective on Women Writing Culture,’’ in
Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights, ed. Rae Bridgeman et al. (Toronto:
Broadview Press, ), –.
 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 Chan-
dra 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,
), –. See also Ali Behdad, ‘‘Traveling to Teach: Postcolonial Critics
in the American Academy,’’ in Race Identity and Representation in Educa-
tion, ed. Cameron McArthy and Warren Crichlow (New York: Routledge,
), –. 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.
 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 Rela-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
tions of Ruling (Routledge: London, ), –; Dorothy E. Smith, The
Notes to Chapter One 

Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern

University Press, ).
 The theories and debates of a gendered stance of ‘‘knowing,’’ or of femi-
nist epistemology, has a vast literature. Gender standpoint theory and femi-
nist 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 Knowl-
edges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Per-
spective,’’ Feminist Studies , no.  (): –; Helen Longino, ‘‘Femi-
nist Standpoint Theory and Problems of Knowledge,’’ Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society , no.  (): –. For some impor-
tant critiques of U.S. feminist theory and gender standpoint theory, see bell
hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press,
); and Cathy O’Leary, ‘‘Counteridentification or Counterhegemony?
Transforming Feminist Standpoint Theory,’’ Women and Politics , no. 
(): –.
 Here, I am suggesting another kind of stance with regards to the self-
reflexivity 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 discus-
sion of this in ‘‘Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of
Ethnography,’’ Cultural Anthropology , no.  (): –; cf. Frances E.
Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen, ‘‘The Post-
Modernist Turn in Anthropology: Caution from a Feminist Perspective,’’
Signs , no.  (): –.
 Dennis Tedlock, ‘‘The Analogical Tradition and the Emergence of a Dia-
logical Anthropology,’’ Journal of Anthropology Research , no.  (winter
): –; Kevin Dwyer, Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Ques-
tion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).
 Antonin Artaud, ‘‘Preface: The Theatre and Culture,’’ in The Theatre and
Its Double (New York: Grove, ), . 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, .
 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: Southend Press,
); hooks, ‘‘Writing from the Darkness,’’ Triquarterly, no.  (spring–
summer ): –.
 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Speak?’’ ().

 Dorothy E. Smith, ‘‘Textually Mediated Social Organization,’’ Texts, Facts

and Femininity (London: Routledge, ), .
 In this recognition of refusal as a certain codification of power, I am inter-
ested 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 care-
less 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,’’ –.
 Bhagirathi Mahato’s commentary begs the question of textual capital and
circulation, and the politics of audience and accountability that are em-
bedded in such critiques.
 See Edward Said’s critique of anthropology’s cartographies and the per-
spectives of required distance in the writing of ethnography, in ‘‘Represent-
ing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocuters,’’ Critical Inquiry , no. 
(): –.
 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ in The Complete Stories
of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, ), .
chapter  Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire

 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ The Complete Stories of
Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, ), –.
 William Ukers, All about Tea (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal,
), :.
 This indelible connection with the Chinese/oriental ‘‘East’’ was noted many
centuries later by G. K. Chesterton who, with explicit and racialized orien-
talism, 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, ), .
 Marshall Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of
‘the World System,’ ’’ Proceedings of the British Academy , no.  ():
–.
 Ukers, All about Tea; Lu Yü, The Classic of Tea, trans. and ed. Francis R.
Carpei (Boston: Little, Brown ), . William Ukers notes that the text
attributed to Shen Nung was not written until the neo-Han dynasty (–
 ..), , years after his imperial claim to its goodness.
 Charulal Mukherjee, ‘‘From Old Files: Tea, Its Magic and Logic,’’ Assam Re-
view and Tea News , no.  (July ): . Japanese Buddhists believe that
this Boddhidharma brought the faith from India to China in the fifth cen-
tury and grew sleepy at the end of seven years.The same story is told of the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
opium poppy, see Jason Goodwin, The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through
Notes to Chapter Two 

India and China in Search of Tea (London: Chatto and Windus, ), .
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 Chi-
nese 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, .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 Robert Gardella, Harvesting Mountains: Fujians and the China Tea Trade,
– (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –.
 Ibid., .
 I am indebted to Robert Gardella’s exhaustive study of the Fujian tea trade
for this summary.
 Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, .
 John C. Evans, Tea in China: The History of China’s National Drink (New
York: Greenwood, ), .
 Ibid., .
 Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, .
 Lu Yü, The Classic of Tea.
 Evans, Tea in China, .
 Scott, The Great Tea Venture, . In some cases, silk gloves were worn, cover-
ing hands and fingers, exposing only fingernails pushing through the open-
ings at the fingertips. All these descriptions are from English accounts of
travels in southern China and from secondary texts. As such, a refetish-
ization in terms of the emphasis given might be already happening in this
rereading.
 John Blofeld, The Chinese Art of Tea (Boston: Shambala Publications, ),
.
 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 (; New York: Garland, ), .
 Blofeld, The Chinese Art of Tea, .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (Boston: Shambala Publications, ),
.
 Goodwin, The Gunpowder Gardens, .
 Blofeld, The Chinese Art of Tea, .
 Lu Yü, The Classic of Tea, .
 Ukers, All about Tea,  (excerpt from the Ch’a Ching).
 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, .
 Okakura, Book of Tea, .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Sen Sohitusu XV, ‘‘Reflections on Chanoyu and Its History,’’ in Tea in Japan:

Essays on the History of the Chanoyu, ed. P. Varley and K. Isao (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, ), .
 Lt.Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations,’’ Assam Review
and Tea News , no.  (April ): .
 Evans, Tea in China, .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 Ibid.; A. Ibbetson, Tea: From Grower to Consumer (London: Pittman and
Sons, ).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 es-
teemed 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, ), .
 Souchong translates ‘‘small’’ or ‘‘scarce.’’
 Fortune, Three Years’ Wanderings, .
 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 Occi-
dent.’’ 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, ), .
 Evans, Tea in China, .
 In a letter dated June , , 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,  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, .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 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 re-
lation between debtors and creditors.’’ Wolf, Europe and the People without
History, –. 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’’ (). See also Marshall Sahlins, ‘‘Cos-
mologies 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.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Ibid., .
Notes to Chapter Two 

 Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, .

 By early s, consumption levels had crossed the  million pound mark.
See Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism,’’ .
 Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, .
 Ibid., .
 Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston-
Upon-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, ), .
 Edward Bramah, Tea and Coffee: A Modern View of  Years of Tradition
(London: Hutchinson, ), .
 Ibid., .
 Carole Shammas, in her extensive study of preindustrial consumerism in
England and the United States, notes that the rise in tea drinking was re-
flected 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, ), –.
 T. H. Breen, ‘‘ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolu-
tions of the Eighteenth Century,’’ Past and Present, no.  (): .
 Ibid., .
 Bramah, Tea and Coffee, .
 The Boston Tea Party, December , illustration by H.W. McVickar (New
York: Dodd Mead, ), –. The poem accompanying this illustration
was written by Josephine Pollard (–), a well-known nineteenth-
century author of children’s books who was also famous as a composer
of hymns.
 Breen, ‘‘ ‘Baubles of Britain,’ ’’ .
 Ibid., .
 Sahlins, ‘‘Cosmologies of Capitalism,’’ . Wolf, Europe and the People
Without History, .
 E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), .
 Om Prakash, ‘‘The Opium Monopoly in India and Indonesia in the Eigh-
teenth Century,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review , no.  ():
.
 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 sym-
bolism was an important commentary about ‘‘outsider’’ mercantile suc-
cess within the heady commerce of eighteenth-century England. See David
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Dabydeen, Hogarth,Walpole and Commercial Britain (London: Hansib Pub-

lishing, ), –, ; 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, ), .
 Denys Forrest, Tea For the British: The Social and Economic History of a
Famous Trade (London: Chatto Windus, ), .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 Bramah, Tea and Coffee, .
 Agnes Reppelier, To Think of Tea! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), .
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., .
 P. G.Woodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves (London: Random House, ), .
 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: ), .
 Reppelier, To Think of Tea! .
 Ibid., .
 Scott, The Great Tea Venture, .
 Mukherjee, ‘‘From Old Files,’’ .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 Hanway, A Journal, .
 Forrest, Tea for the British.
 See Thomas Mayhew, London Labor, London Poor (London, []).
 Quoted in Scott, The Great Tea Venture, –. Italics mine.
 Forrest, Tea for the British, .
 Hanway, A Journal, .
 Forrest, Tea for the British, .
 Ukers, All about Tea, .
 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 interest-
ing 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: Mas-
culinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, ), –. I would like to thank Parama Roy for pointing
this reference out to me.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Reppelier, To Think of Tea! .
Notes to Chapter Two 

 Scott, The Great Tea Venture, .

 William Hogarth’s referencing to that external world is explicit in his other
work. For a comprehensive discussion of this, see Dabydeen, Hogarth,Wal-
pole and Commercial Britain.
 Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ .
chapter  Cultivating the Garden

 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ in The Complete Stories
of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, ), .
 Ibid.
 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle
(London: John Gifford, ), .
 William Nassau Lees, Memorandum Written after a Tour through the Tea Dis-
tricts of Eastern Bengal in – (Calcutta, ), .
 Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—,’’ Assam
Review and Tea News (August ): . I would like to thank Dr. Navinder
(Guddi) Singh for sharing her treasure trove of old tea magazines and jour-
nals with me at Karbala Tea Estate in late . These magazines are part of
her private collection.
 Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—,’’ Assam
Review and Tea News , no.  (December ): –.
 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London,
), .
 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, ). 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 symbol-
ism’’ ().
 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 Oriental-
ism, for which the edenic search was an essential precursor’’ (ibid., ).
 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, ), –.
 Om Prakash, ‘‘The Opium Monopoly in India and Indonesia in the Eigh-
teenth Century,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review , no.  ():
.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 James Scott, The Great Tea Venture (New York: E. P. Dutton, ), . See

also William Ukers, All about Tea, vol.  (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade
Journal, ).
 Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files’’ (August ), .
 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 em-
bark their shrubs, their tools of cultivation, and themselves, and set up busi-
ness in newly established botanic gardens in Calcutta?’’ Quoted in Scott,
The Great Tea Venture, .
 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, :).The few who remained in the Dooars
and Assam worked as carpenters and contractors. During the Indo-China
border conflict of , people who lived in Makum (Assam) who were de-
scendents of these Chinese ‘‘teamen’’ and carpenters were imprisoned by
the Indian government (interview, Bimal Guha-Sircar, Calcutta, July ).
 A Century of Progress: Gurjanjhora Tea and Industries Ltd., Jalpaiguri, –
, Souvenir in commemoration of the Centenary Celebrations, May 
and ,  (Jalpaiguri: n.p., ), .
 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 Obser-
vations on the Culture of the Plant in China and its Growth in Assam (Calcutta,
), –.
 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 technolo-
gies of manufacture, and the hand fused with the leaf created a powerful
image of bodied and crafted value. Ibid., , fig. .
 Samuel Baildon, Tea Industry in India (London, ), .
 Lees, Memorandum, .
 Almost a century after the first cautionary characterization of ‘‘treacher-
ous’’ 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 Navin-
der Singh, Organized Groups in the Tea Industry (unpublished manuscript,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
, personal collection of author), .When referring explicitly to a global
Notes to Chapter Three 

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 As-
sam, – (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, );
For a comprehensive history of tea planters’ involvement on the Assam-
Burma frontier duringWorld War II, see Percival Griffiths, The History of the
Indian Tea Industry (London: Widenfeld and Nicholson, ), –.
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 Cente-
nary Souvenir, – (Jalpaiguri: n.p., ), .
 W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. : Districts of Darjeeling
and Jalpaiguri and the State of Kuch Behar (London, ), .
 Ibid., .
 Ranajit Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri, –
 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, ), .
 Lees, Memorandum, .
 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal, .
 J. A. Milligan, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the
Jalpaiguri District, – (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot,
), .
 A literal translation of dobhasiya is ‘‘of two languages.’’
 J. F.Gruning, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers: Jalpaiguri (Alla-
habad: n.p., ).
 Hunter, A Statistical Account, .
 Ibid.
 For a lively and comprehensive history of Darjeeling, see Fred Pinn’s The
Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters,  (Calcutta: Oxford University Press,
); cf. Jahar Sen, ‘‘Darjeeling—An Entrepot of Central Asian Trade,’’
Calcutta Historical Journal , no.  (January–June ): –; Sunil Mun-
shi, ‘‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Frontier Settlements: A Case Study of
Hill Darjeeling,’’ Occasional Paper ,Center for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta ().
 Abdul Bari, ‘‘The Birth of the District,’’ in Jalpaiguri District Centenary Sou-
venir, .
 Milligan, Final Report, .
 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 ex-
cept by narrow paths known only to dacoits. The collector of Rangpur got
together a force of  barkandars and held all entrances. . . . The rob-
bers were at length starved out, and those who did not escape to Nepal
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
and Bhutan were captured and brought to heel. It is said that within twelve

months,  dacoits were brought to trial in this and other parts of the dis-
trict.’’ Quoted in ibid., .
 This phrase is from a broadsheet on the Boston Tea Party that illustrates the
costumes of the ‘‘Indians:’’ ‘‘with artful Disguise and Grotesque Decora-
tion / Like Sons of the Forest.’’ See The Boston Tea Party, December ,
illustration by H.W. McVickar (New York: Dodd Mead, ), .
 P. Malik, ‘‘The Boundaries of Jalpaiguri,’’ in Jalpaiguri District Centenary
Souvenir, .
 Ibid., .
 Milligan, Final Report, .
 Malik, ‘‘The Boundaries of Jalpaiguri,’’ .
 Hunter, A Statistical Account, .
 Ibid., .
 Asim Chaudhuri, ‘‘Merchant Capital in a Colonial Social Formation: The
Political Economy of Duars Tea Plantations in Jalpaiguri District,’’ North
Bengal University Review , no.  (): .
 For excellent discussions of agrarian politics prior to colonial rule and the
impact of colonial plantation settlement policies, see Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Evo-
lution of Agrarian Structure and Relations in the Jalpaiguri District (West
Bengal): A Case Study in Subsistence Setting,’’ Sociological Bulletin , no. 
(March ): –; Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Colonial Capitalism and Under-
development in North Bengal, Economic and Political Weekly , no. 
(September , ): , and Tapash K. Roy Choudhury, ‘‘Land Control:
Class Struggles and Class Relations in Western Duars (–)’’ Journal
of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh , no.  (June ): –.
 Through the colonial period, both East Bengali immigrants and Marwari
merchants came to dominate the agrarian commerce in the region. Pros-
perous 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 plan-
tocracy in the Dooars. For statistics of demographic impact of this selling
off of land, see Roy Choudhury, ‘‘Land Control,’’ .
 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 st July,  (Calcutta, ), .
 Rana Partap Behal, ‘‘The Emergence of a Plantation Economy: The Assam
Tea Industry in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Occasional Papers on History and
Society  (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, ).
 Government of Bengal, Board of Revenue, The Bengal Wastelands Manual
(Alipore: Superintendent of Government Printing, ).
 Kalyan K. Sircar, ‘‘A Tale of Two Boards: Some Early Management Problems
of the Assam Company Ltd., –,’’ Economic and Political Weekly
, nos.  to  (March –, ): . The process of land grabbing for
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
early experimental plantations, in Bihar and the Kangra Valley (Himachal
Notes to Chapter Three 

Pradesh) was initiated by a mapping of ‘‘barren’’ lands ideally suited for

tea cultivation. Once these ‘‘wastelands’’ were demarcated, military offi-
cers were sent out for ‘‘negotiating the conveyance of wasteland from the
communities to parties wishing to bring them under cultivation,’’ a nego-
tiation necessary because ‘‘communities are generally averse to dispose of
their property right by sale.’’ (See ‘‘Appendix E: Notification. Lahore th
December ,’’ in Alexander MacGowan’s Tea Planting in the Outer Hima-
layah [London, ]). 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 th May ,’’ ibid., .)
 Rai Bijoy Bihari Mukharji Bahadur, Final Report on the Land Revenue Settle-
ment Operations in the District of Jalpaiguri, – (Alipore: Superin-
tendent of Government Printing, ), .
 Dooars Planters Association, Detailed Report of the General Committee of the
Dooars Planters Association [hereafter  Report] for theYear  (Calcutta:
, ), .
  Report, , .
 Hunter, Statistical Account, .
 Ibid., . Hunter also notes, for example, that a yearly revenue of ,
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 (; Colombo: R. C. Johnson, ), .
 Hunter, Statistical Account, .
 Gruning, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers, –. 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 dis-
tinctive 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 , large settlements or khas mahals were formed.’’ See Lt.
Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—,’’ The Assam
Review and Tea News , no.  (August ): .
 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 Jalpai-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
guri and State of Kuch Behar, vol.  [London, ], .); cf. Tanka Baha-

dur Subba, ‘‘Migration and Agrarian Change in Darjeeling,’’ North Bengal

University Review, vol. , no.  (June ): –.
 On the world market, see Gruning, Eastern Bengal and Assam District
Gazetteers, .
 On overseas investment, see Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plan-
tations,’’ Assam Review and Tea News , no.  (April ): .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 Hunter, Statistical Account, .
 ‘‘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 so-
cial 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., .
 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 , nos. – (August–September ): –.
 Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, –,’’ .
 Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Tribal Migration to Plantation Estates in North East-
ern India: Determinants and Consequences,’’ Demography India , no. 
(): .
  Report for , .
 Special Report: The Working of Act I of  in the Province of Assam Dur-
ing the Years – (Alipore: Superintendent of Government Printing,
), .
 Hunter, Statistical Account, . Another planter asked, ‘‘Can anyone rea-
sonable 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, ], .)
 Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations,’’ . Assam Review and
Tea News , no.  (April ): . 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 Man-
agement: First Twenty Years of Assam Company Ltd., –,’’ Economic
and Political Weekly , nos. – (May ): .
 Ranajit Das Gupta, ‘‘From Peasants and Tribesmen to Plantation Workers:
Colonial Capitalism, Reproduction of Labor Power and Proletarianisation
in North East India, –,’’ Economic and Political Weekly ():
PE–; Asoka Bandarage notes that when Sri Lankan villagers ‘‘failed to
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
pay the taxes, the state expropriated paddy fields with the logic that the
Notes to Chapter Three 

pinching of the stomach is ‘morally good’ because it will induce the peasants
to work in the plantation.’’ Bandarage, ‘‘The Establishment and Consolida-
tion of the Plantation Economy in Sri Lanka,’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars , no.  (): .
 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal, .
 That opium cultivated in Bengal and Assam paid for Chinese tea and as-
sisted in creating a thriving business in opium in southern China presents
an unintended historical irony.
 Lees, Memorandum, ; italics mine. For discussions about how such essen-
tialist 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 th to the th Century and its Function in the
Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Cass, ).
 Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (; New Delhi: Arnold, ), .
 MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, .
 Ramkrishna Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspectives of Labour Legislation
in India, –: As Applied toTea Plantations,’’ Ph.D. dissertation,Uni-
versity of Calcutta, , .
 Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Recruitment and Migration Policy in Tea Plantations in
West Bengal,’’ Bulletin of the Cultural Research Institute , no.  (): –
. For further contrast, wages of textile workers increased from . rupees
per month in – to . rupees in .
 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle
(London: Gifford, ), .
 While the label ‘‘tribal’’ is the most commonly used designation for these
varied communities, its colonial/administrative roots remain problemati-
cally homogenizing. I employ the term Jharkhandi, used more widely by
various communities in the Chotanagpur plateau, to designate their ‘‘origi-
nal homeland,’’ the Jharkhand.The term adivasi, which is more encompass-
ing, 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 com-
munities 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 cultiva-
tor. 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, ). For the most comprehensive discus-
sions about the ideologies and staggered policy/implementation of ‘‘private
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
property’’ law in British India see Ranajit Guha, Rule of Property for Bengal:

An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-

versity Press, ); and Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ).
 For a succinct and comprehensive overview of the colonial transformation
of land rights and impact on ‘‘tribal’’ politics, see K. S. Singh’s introduc-
tion, ‘‘History, Anthropology and Colonial Transformation,’’ in his Tribal
Society in India: An Anthropo-Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar
Publications, ), –.
 This was an argument made by a Jharkhandi activist during a discussion on
colonial recruitment in January .
 Xaxa, ‘‘Tribal Migration,’’ .
 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, ), .
 Chattopadhyahya, Social Perspective, .
 Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House ), .
 , Report for , .
 Tea Districts’ Labour Association, Report and Accounts for the Year Ended
st August,  (Calcutta: , ), .
 In one case,  acres were marked off in half-acre plots: ‘‘We give the
coolies a license to cultivate for some months and charge  annas rent per
month so they can’t have conversion to rights’’ (Indian Tea Gazette, Indian
Tea Cyclopaedia (Calcutta, ), .
 Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Poli-
tics in Assam, – (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Re-
search, ), . Government and company debated the issue of allowing
workers whose contracts had expired to settle, coming to the general conclu-
sion 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, .
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 peasant-
villagerand plantation worker, a more fluid arrangement between plantation
and village emerged in what Ann Stoler has called an ‘‘oscillation in rela-
tion to power and production’’ in Stoler, ‘‘Plantation Politics and Protest on
Sumatra’s East Coast,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies , no.  (January ):
. See also Stoler’s Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation
Belt, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), for a compara-
tive and theoretical perspective. For a thorough and excellent discussion
of the dual economy thesis in the context of the Dooars, see Asim Chaud-
huri, ‘‘Enclaves in a Peasant Society: The Political Economy of Dooars Tea
Plantations in the Jalpaiguri District of West Bengal,’’ Special Lecture ,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Centre for Himalayan Studies, mimeograph, University of North Bengal,
Notes to Chapter Three 

Bogdogra, ; cf. Xaxa, ‘‘Colonial Capitalism and Underdevelopment in

North Bengal,’’ .
 Dasgupta, ‘‘From Peasants to Tribesmen,’’ PE-. Colonial coercion will be
discussed in greater detail in chapter .
 Other strategies of constraint and bondage included management’s ad-
vances 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, ),
; Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence: Assam and the
Duars (Parts I & II) (London: , ). 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, ), .
 George Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam (Calcutta, ), .
 This song was collected during field research and translated by Munnu Ku-
joor,Uma Gop, and the author at Sarah’s Hope Tea Estate (November ).
 Special Report: The Working of Act I of  in the Province of Assam Dur-
ing the Year – (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing,
India, ) [hereafter Special Report, ], . 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, 
(Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, ), . For a com-
prehensive 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, –,’’
Journal of Peasant Studies, nos.  and  (): –.
 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 Brahma-
putra in April , so that its members, on their return, might be able to
give a true account of the actual state of affairs’’ (). 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’’ ().
 ‘‘Appendix Q: Proceedings of the Labour Commission and Record of the
Evidence Given before Them: Santhal Pargannas, th December ;
Dumka, th January .’’ Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission, xlvii.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Tea Districts Labour Association, Addendum to Handbook (Season –

): For Use in Season –, part : Dooars, – (Calcutta: ,
). These handbooks of recruitment, used as guides by planters, re-
mained 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,  (Calcutta: Superinten-
dent of Government Printing, ), .
 , Report for , .
 Government of Bengal, Department of Public Health and Local Self-
Government, Annual Report on the Working of the Jalpaiguri Labour Act, for
the Year Ending th June,  (Calcutta: Bengal Government Press, ).
 Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence: Assam and Dooars
(London: , ), .
 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 pro-
posed 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 [here-
after , Report] for the Year  (Calcutta: , ), ). In , the
 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 mis-
sion who have reproached the Fathers, and even occasionally abused the
latter for sending them to Assam. Altogether, spirits are bad’’ (, Report
for , ).
 ‘‘Appendix Q: Proceedings of the Labor Commission and Record of the
Evidence,’’ xlvii.
 Tea Districts Labour Association [hereafter ], Handbook for Season
– (Calcutta: , ), .
 Government of India, Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evi-
dence, vol. , pt. : Assam and the Duars (London: , ), .
 , Handbook for Season – (Calcutta: James Glendye, ), .
 , Report for , . No. , Camp Calcutta,  February . From
the deputy sanitation commissioner, Rajsahi Circle, to the sanitary com-
missioner, Bengal.
 , Handbook for Season –, .
 Special Report, .
 , Report for , .
 Special Report , .
 , Report for , .
 Special Report , .
 Ibid., . Italics mine.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Labour Enquiry Commission, Report of Labour Inquiry Commission, .
Notes to Chapter Three 

 Ibid., . Italics mine.

 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 , Report for , . Evaluation of the ‘‘right’’ castes and commu-
nities 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,
). 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  (Shillong: Assam Government
Press, ), , for another discussion of the same.
 Ibid., .
 See also Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt,
; Rhoda Reddock, ‘‘Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship
inTrinidad and Tobago, –,’’ Economic and Political Weekly , no. 
(October ): WS.
 Special Report, .
 Chattopadhayaya, Social Perspectives, .Within two decades, the surveil-
lance had its intended effect. Statistics show that between  to , emi-
gration of men and women to Assam was in the ratio , men to ,
women. Special Report, .
 Special Report, –.
 Ibid., .
 Special Report, –. However, officials also discovered that some women
actually chose to leave, because of abusive family situations. Between Octo-
ber  and August ,  women passed through Dhurbi, Assam, who
‘‘had either been turned out by their husbands, or left because of ill treat-
ment.’’
 , Addendum to Handbook (Season –). See also Report of the
Labour Enquiry Commission, . 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 mar-
riages’ 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, ), .
 , Report for , .
 Special Report, .
 , Report for , .
 , Report for , ix.
 Rana P. Behal and Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘‘ ‘Tea and Money versus Human
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plan-

tations, –,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies, nos. – (): . The
authors note that between  and , plantation birthrates averaged only
 per , compared with  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 re-
ported that ‘‘on some gardens,  percent of pregnant women do not give
birth to living children’’ ().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 abor-
tions) must be carefully balanced with the high rates of mortality already
existing in the plantations.
 Ibid., –. Another report noted, ‘‘It was a well-known fact that abor-
tion was performed by professional women permanently living in the gar-
dens, 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, Plan-
tation Labour in India, ). 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 , no.  (): –;
Hilary Beckles, Afro-Caribbean Women and Resistance to Slavery in Barbados
(London: Karnak House, ); Marietta Morrisey, Slave Women in the New
World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Kansas City: University Press
of Kansas, ).
 Das, Plantation Labour in India, .
 External pressures for labor protection laws and labor legislation was a sig-
nificant catalyst for these changes, at least at the policy level.
 , Report for , ; Government of India, Written Evidence. The ex-
tent to which maternity and labor welfare bills were translated into practice
needs to be investigated further.
 Ibid., .
 , Report for , ix.
 , Handbook for Season –, .
 Government of India, Written Evidence, .
 , Handbook for Season –, .
chapter  The Raj Baroque

 Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (; New Delhi: Arnold, ),
–.
 Business Today, January –, , .
 Telegraph (Calcutta), November –, .
 If, as one old English planter noted, the French get distinctions for being
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
wine experts, so should Darjeeling planters for tea: ‘‘The Darjeeling Plant-
Notes to Chapter Four 

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—(i),’’ Assam Review and Tea News , no. 
(June ): .
 Business Today (January –, ), .
 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., –,’’ Economic and Political Weekly ,
nos. – (March –, ): .
 Sircar, ‘‘A Tale of Two Boards,’’ . 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, – (Edinburgh: Constable, ).
 Ibid., .
 Amalendu Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, –,’’
Indian Economic and Social History Review , no.  (December ): –
. 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 (–),’’ Indian Economic and Social History
Review , no.  (June ): –; and Amalendu Guha, ‘‘A Big Push
without a Take-Off: A Case Study of Assam, –,’’ Indian Economic
and Social History Review , no.  (September ): –.
 Ibid., .
 Ibid.
 Ibid., ; 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 , no.  (): –. 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, hege-
monic European management’’ in Indian business history. By the eve of
World War II the presence of a considerable number of Marwari entrepre-
neurs 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, ); 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, ).
 Cf. Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Evolution of Agrarian Structure and Relations in Jal-
paiguri District (West Bengal): A Case Study in Subsistence Setting.’’ Socio-
logical Bulletin , no.  (March ): –. See also his later and more
comprehensive discussion of agrarian relations and the construction of a
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
plantation enclave economy: Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Colonial Capitalism and

Underdevelopment In North Bengal,’’ Economic and Political Weekly ,

no.  (September , ): –; Virginius Xaxa, Economic Dualism
and Structure of Class: A Study in Plantation and Peasant Settings in North
Bengal (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, ). Asim Chaudhuri, Enclaves
in a Peasant Society: The Political Economy of Dooars Tea Plantations in the
Jalpaiguri District of North Bengal, special lecture  Center for Himalayan
Studies, University of North Bengal, Bagdogra, ). Rana Partap Behal,
‘‘The Emergence of a Plantation Economy: AssamTea Industry in the Nine-
teenth Century,’’ Occasional Papers on History and Society (New Delhi:
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, ): –.
  Tea Estate, Correspondence Files, Letters to Agents, November ,
.
 Stephanie Jones, ‘‘Merchants of the Raj,’’ Sunday Statesmen Miscellany, Feb-
ruary , , .
 Andrew Yule and Co. Ltd., – (Calcutta: Andrew Yule, ): .
 Ibid.
 The title of this section comes from William Nassau Lees, Memorandum
Written after a Tour through the Tea Districts of Eastern Bengal in –
(Calcutta, ), .
 Dooars Branch of the IndianTea Association, Centenary Souvenir –
(Binnaguri: , ).
 Assam Branch of the IndianTea Association, Centenary Souvenir, –
(Guwahati: , ).
 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 ):
. Hannagan, a former Darjeeling planter, was quick to assert that Kul-
wallah Charlie had ‘‘little of the dialect.’’
 Interview with Mr. Teddy (Edward) Young, Tumsung Tea Estate (Darjee-
ling, November ).
 Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files’’ (June ): .
 Indian Tea Cyclopaedia (London, ), .
 Interview with Teddy (Edward) Young.
 Ibid.
 Jones, ‘‘Merchants of the Raj,’’ .
 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle
(London: John Gifford, ), .
 Ibid., .
 If visions of a noble life of sporting and hunting led many young men of
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
‘‘good families’’ to enter tea planting, there were some planters, at least,
Notes to Chapter Four 

whose romantic sensibilities did not lead to success. Louis Mandelli, for ex-
ample, a descendent of an aristocratic Maltese family, arrived in Darjeeling
in  with a contract to manage a -acre garden. A gifted ornitholo-
gist, 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 , Louis Mandelli committed suicide.
Fred Pinn, L. Mandelli: Darjeeling Tea Planter and Ornithologist (London,
), .
 Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud, –.
 Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London: Weiden-
feld and Nicholson, ), .
 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,’’ ; cf. Report of the International Tea Market Expansion
Board,  January to  December, .
 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,
), .
 International Tea Committee, Report . . . with a Reference to Tea Propa-
ganda, .
 Ibid., . 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 Expan-
sion Board Ltd. (), .
 Ibid., .
 International Tea Committee, Report of the International Tea Market Expan-
sion Board Ltd. (), .
 International Tea Committee, Report of the International Tea Market Expan-
sion Board Ltd. (), .
 Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry, .
 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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
is shown in its simplest form.

 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 (–
)—Carr,Tagore and Co. (–)—which took the first steps in pro-
moting 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 Ispa-
hani. 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, –,’’ Indian Economic and Social History
Review , no.  (December ): –.
 See Krishnadev Goswami’s ‘‘Indian Tea Entrepreneurs in Western Dooars
of Undivided Bengal—I,’’ Assam Review and Tea News , no.  (Decem-
ber ): –. This is an excellent discussion of indigenous business his-
tory though the author does argue against calling this ‘‘entrepreneurship’’
because it did not have ‘‘long-term’’ goals. However, the assertion is de-
bateable, given the sustained proprietary ownership of Indian plantations
into the postcolonial period.
 See Amalendu Guha, ‘‘Colonisation of Assam: Second Phase, –,’’
.
 Sibsankar Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs in Tea Planta-
tions of a Bengal District, –,’’ Indian Economic and Social History
Review  (October–December ): .
 See Bernard S.Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, ).
 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., ; and Ranajit Dasgupta’s Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal:
Jalpaiguri, – (Delhi: Oxford University Press, ). Ranajit Das-
gupta’s comprehensive study of colonial Jalpaiguri is an excellent introduc-
tion to the history of local communities and the immigrants who became
the new ‘‘owners’’ of land in the district.
 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, –. 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.
 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ .
 Dasgupta, Economy, Societyand Politics, ; Krishnadev Goswami, ‘‘Indian
Tea Entrepreneurs,’’ .
 Gurjanjhora Tea Industries Ltd., A Century of Progress: Souvenir in Com-
memoration of the Centenary Celebration, – (Jalpaiguri: Gurjan-
jhora Tea Industries, ), . The page in this small volume reproduces a
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
copy of ‘‘An Honor of Merit Awarded to Gurjanjhora Tea Company for Tea
Notes to Chapter Four 

Exhibit at the World Columbian Exposition, Mexico, in the Year .’’ It

also lists in its  Board of Promoters, Khan Bahadur Rahim Baksh (of the
district commissioner’s office) and ‘‘J. A. Paul, merchant, Jew’’ ().
 B. C. Ghosh, ‘‘The Development of the Tea Industry in the District of Jal-
paiguri,’’ Jalpaiguri District Centenary Souvenir, – (Jalpaiguri: n.p.,
), –.
 Interview with Mr. Bimal Guha-Sircar, then executive director, Tea Divi-
sion, Andrew Yule & Co. (Calcutta,  December ).
 Williamson Magor: Stuck to Tea (Cambridge: Cambridge Business Publish-
ing, ), –.
 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ . During the post-
colonial period, significant transference of shares to non-Bengali (primarily
Marwari) hands occurred.
 IndianTea Planters Association (), ‘‘Chairman’s Address,’’ Detailed Re-
port of the General Committee of the ITPA for the Year  (Jalpaiguri: ,
), vi.
 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, .
 , Detailed Report of the General Committee for the Year  (Jalpaiguri:
, , ): .
 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, .
 Asim Chaudhuri, ‘‘Merchant Capital in a Colonial Social Formation: The
Political Economy of Dooars Tea Plantations in Jalpaiguri District,’’ North
Bengal University Review , no.  (): –.
 Ibid.  gave a petition to the governor of Bengal during a visit to Jalpai-
guri in .
 Ibid., .
 , Detailed Report for , .
 , Report for , annual general meeting of  (reference to grant
no. II -G, Jalpaiguri, June , ), from the chairman, , to the dis-
trict commissioner Jalpaiguri, . In another application case earlier that
year, the district commissioner sent a circular to the  chairman defend-
ing 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 En-
glish manager swayed the district commissioner, the land was bought by
a wealthy Muslim couple. (Letter no. -G, Jalpaiguri, January , ,
from the deputy commissioner, Jalpaiguri, to the chairman, , Conver-
sion of Joteland—Petition filed by Moulvi Waliur Rahman and Bibi Manya
Khutum for conversions of Jotes No.  and .
 , Report for , annual general meeting of January , , Circular
No. -G,Calcutta,  October, , from the assistant secretary, Indian Tea
Association (), to all agency houses with interests in the Dooars; Report
of the Conference Held on th August  between Revenue Officials of the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Govt of Bengal and Representatives of the Tea Industry, .

 , Report for , annual general meeting of January , . No. ,
Jalpaiguri, the th November. From the Secretary, , to the Chairman,
, .
 , Report for , annual general meeting of January , , . Circu-
lar No. -G, Calcutta, October , , from the assistant secretary, ,
to all agency houses with interests in the Dooars. Report of the Conference
Held on th August  between Revenue Officials of the Govt of Bengal and
Representatives of the Tea Industry.
 , Report for , annual general meeting of January , .
 , Report of the General Committee for the Year Ending st December 
(Calcutta: Criterion Press, ), .
 Ibid., .
 Maurice Hanley, Tales and Songs from an Assam Tea Garden (Calcutta:
Thacker, Spink, ), .
 Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (, Delhi: Arnold, ), .
 Ibid., .
 Sanat Kumar Banerjee, ‘‘Bold Steps towards th Year of Service,’’ ,
Platinum Jubilee Souvenir of the ITPA, –, . Banerjee, then chair-
man of the , notes that in the post–World War I period, Indian planters
began to be ‘‘intimately associated’’ with the Indian independence move-
ment.
 . Assam Branch of the Indian Tea Association, –: Centenary
Souvenir (Guwahati: , ).
 Mukherjee, ‘‘Emergence of Bengali Entrepreneurs,’’ .
 Dasgupta, Economy, Society and Politics, –. Dasgupta argues that the
characteristics of north Bengali entrepreneurship puts ‘‘a hitch in the popu-
lar 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.
 ‘‘Rupiyah’’ companies contrasted to the ‘‘sterling’’ companies of British
Agency houses—whose capital investments were, ostensibly, in pounds
sterling, held in London and Calcutta.
 Sanat Kumar Banerjee, ‘‘Bold Steps towards th Year of Service,’’ in ,
Platinum Jubilee Souvenir, .
 , Detailed Report for , .
 , Detailed Report for , .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 , Detailed Report for , .
 Nonviolent mass meetings that followed the Gandhian philosophy; literally
‘‘truth-force.’’
 , ‘‘Proceedings of a Conference Held on th September  at 
to Consider the Threatened Direct Action of the West Bengal Cha Shra-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
mik Union,’’ in Detailed Report of the Indian Tea Planters Association for
Notes to Chapter Four 

the Year : Annual General Meeting Held on th April,  (Jalpaiguri:
, ).
 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, –.
 Debates about the implementation of  on foreign-stock holding com-
panies continued through the s. See , Report for , –, for
a discussion of income tax and profit-sharing allowances within the law.
 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 bever-
age to the educated and semi-educated Indians, both male and female, who
exercise control the home and community life of the nation.’’ , Report
for , xxii.
chapter  Estates of a New Raj

 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 bour-
geois ‘‘private’’ places of non-Muslim women. I understand it within such
a hybrid and historical matrix.
 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle
(London: John Gifford, ), .
 Maurice Hanley, Tales and Songs from an Assam Tea Garden (Calcutta;
Thacker, Spink, ), .
 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London,
), .
 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, ),  (on the agreeability of the planter’s occupa-
tion); MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah,  (on the planter
as an outdoors man).
 It would be interesting to compare the emergence of this hybrid post/
colonial domesticity and its Victorian threads with the construction of Vic-
torian 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, ).
The manner in which this hybrid, feudal and postcolonial ambit of plan-
tation 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 interi-
orized 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 th-Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, ).
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46

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  (autumn ): –.
 Lewis Carroll, ‘‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ in The Complete Stories
of Lewis Carroll (London: Magpie Books, ), .
 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, ), . 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. –,’’ Proceed-
ings of the Conference on Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam:
Center for Asian Studies, ), ; 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 det-
rimentally affect ‘‘the health, prosperity and working habits of labourers.’’
See also Dooars Planters Association (), Detailed Report of the General
Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the Year , .
 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, ).
 Government of India, Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evi-
dence: Assam and the Dooars, parts  and , . 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 Ben-
gali’’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, ).
 Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, .
 See Rudyard Kipling, ‘‘The Head of the District,’’ Selected Prose and Poetry
of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Garden City Publishing ), –.
 I will continue to use the term babu interchangeably with ‘‘staff’’ because
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Notes to Chapter Five 

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 Ben-
gali planters and obscures the fact that although Bengalis represent a domi-
nant 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, ), .
 In brief, four planters and twenty-six clerical staff who, together, admin-
ister and manage a community of over ,. Of this number, approxi-
mately , workers are employed on a permanent basis throughout the
year, though casual workers increase the actual labor force to , workers.
 Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, .
 Ibid., .
 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, ; italics mine). This would open up considerable scope for cor-
ruption in payments of actual wages; the Rege Report of  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.  for every new recruit who stays for a minimum period of  to 
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, ), .
 , Report for , .
 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.  (Bombay: All-India Trade Union Congress, ; Sharit Bhowmik,
Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing
House, ); S. Chakravarty, ‘‘Working Class and the State: A Study of the
Dooars Plantation System (Ph.D. dissertation, Calcutta University, );
R. Sarkar and P. P. Rai, ‘‘Trade Unions: Origin and Early Development,’’
in Tea Plantation Workers in the Eastern Himalayas: A Study of Wages, Em-
ployment and Living Standards ed. R. C. Sarkar and M. P. Lama (Delhi:
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Atma Ram and Sons, ), –; Manas Das Gupta, ‘‘Trade Union Move-

ment in Tea Plantations and Problems of Increasing Productivity,’’ unpub-

lished manuscript, Department of Economics, North Bengal University,
; Manas Das Gupta, Asoke Ganguly, and Paritosh Chakladar, ‘‘Labour
and Trade Union Movement in the Tea Plantation of Terai (–):
Problems of Class Formation,’’ University Grants Commission Paper, pre-
sented at the All India Seminar, North Bengal University, Bagdogra, Dar-
jeeling,West Bengal, January –, ); All India Plantation Workers Fed-
eration (), Fifth Conference, April –,  (New Delhi: Ranadive,
). 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, .
 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 , no.  ():
–.
 Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, .
 Notes on Tea in Darjeeling by a Planter (Darjeeling, ), .
 On daffadars in plantations: Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written
Evidence, . On daffadars in reserve forests: W. W. Hunter. A Statistical
Account of Bengal, vol. : Districts of Hazaribagh and Lohurrdaga (London,
), .
 Labour Enquiry Commission, Report of the Labour Enquiry Commission,
 (Calcutta: , ), .
 Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (; New Delhi: Arnold, ),
.
 Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, .
 Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, .
 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: Interna-
tional, ), .
 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.
 , Report for , ; , Report for , v.
 Dewan Chamanlal. ‘‘The Khoreal Case,’’ Coolie: The Storyof Laborand Capi-
tal in India (Lahore: n.p., ), .
 Ibid.
 I am working here with dramatic licence, intertextuality, and the ‘‘fictions’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
of history through which Mulk Raj Anand creates the most important and
Notes to Chapter Five 

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 confron-
tation, 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, .
 See Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation
Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ).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 planta-
tions, 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 con-
sidered 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, ), .
chapter  Discipline and Labor

 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London, );
; Lt. Col. Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—,’’ Assam
Review and Tea News , no.  (July ): –.
 In chapter , where I discuss colonial settlement of the plantations, I have
demonstrated how this mind-over-body split is understood within the con-
structions 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.
 Edward P. Thompson, ‘‘Time,Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,’’
Past and Present  (December ): –.
 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. , ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, ),
–.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 Consider the strange synchronicity between my narrative about the over-

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, ), .
 While I respect the reasons that have compelled other anthropologists to
join in their subjects’ labor, my own location and the contradictions of pa-
tronage did not permit this. I also had some political/epistemological prob-
lems 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 ‘‘au-
thenticity through experience.’’ Yet, if such a bodily pedagogy leads to col-
laborative 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 com-
mentary: ‘‘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 () Detailed Report of the
General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the Year , .
 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 perspec-
tives, ‘‘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 . peels per household for daily-rated work
per annum. One peel of standard firewood is equivalent to  kilograms of
coal briquettes. A peel is a stack of firewood  foot high. See Dooars Branch
of the Indian Tea Association (), Pay, Allowances and Other Conditions
of Service, Circular No.  (September , ), .
 Cattle pounds are called kuhars. Government-run kuhars are free, but plan-
tation chowkidars are paid a commission of between  and  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
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Chakravarty Spivak’s meditations on the location of a ‘‘woman’s body’’ in
Notes to Chapter Six 

marxist-feminist discussions of reproduction, production, exchange value,

and so forth. She does so by reading these debates through the ‘‘protago-
nist subaltern,’’ Jashoda, in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘‘Stanadayini.’’ Spivak’s dis-
cussion 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 in-
stance. 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, ), –.
 This average amount is calculated from number of fieldworkers in a given
eight-day period March –, , and total quantity of leaf brought in for
manufacturing. See Labour Return: Particulars of Numbers Working During
the Week and Weekly Report of Crop, –st March .
 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 ac-
count 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 perma-
nent workforce during the peak plucking season. ‘‘Ghost’’ bigha workers
(also employed on a daily casual basis) have an important economic func-
tion in the plantation’s larger calculus of profit. According to the Plantation
Labour Act of , 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, .
 A. R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle
(London: John Gifford, ) .
 E. Valentine Daniel presented an interesting analysis of the languages of
plantation work in Sri Lanka in ‘‘Tea Talk: Measures of Labor in the Dis-
course of Sri Lanka’s EstateTamils,’’ at the Conference on Plantation Labour
in Colonial Asia, September –, , Center for Asian Studies Amster-
dam, Netherlands.
 Leonard Smith, ‘‘Field-Report Notebook.’’ Unpublished manuscript, .
 Notes on Tea in Darjeeling by a Planter (Darjeeling, ), .
 H. A. Antrobus, A History of the Jorehaut Tea Company Ltd., –
(London: Tea and Rubber Mail, ), .
 MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah,  (my italics).
 Pablo Neruda, ‘‘Girl Gardening,’’ in Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda, trans.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Ben Bellit (New York: Grove Press, ), –.

 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:  and Ministry of Labor
and Social Welfare, ). See also Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Plantation Labour Act
and Child Labour,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, (October ): –
; J. John, S. Lahiri and A. Nanda, ‘‘The Plight of ‘Unfree’ Tea Workers,’’
Labour File: A Monthly Journal of Labor and Economic Affairs , nos. –
(July–September ): –.
 This song was translated from tapes, to Sadri and Hindi and then into En-
glish, by Uma Gop, Bhagirathi Mahato, Nirmala Pandey (of Calcutta), and
myself. Uma Gop, in particular, spent one entire day on the initial transcrip-
tion into textual form.The song forms part of a collection of forty women’s
songs collected during initial field research.
 Notes on Tea in Darjeeling by a Planter, .
 Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, .
 Alexander MacGowan, Tea-Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London,
), .
 Ibid., .
 Indian Tea Cyclopaedia, –; , fig. .
 Antrobus, A History of the Jorehaut Tea Company, .
 Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, part  and : Assam
and the Dooars, .
 Ramsden, Assam Planter, .
 Hannagan, ‘‘From Old Files: Darjeeling Plantations—,’’ Assam Reviewand
Tea News , no.  (January ): .
 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, ); and Maria
Mies, Indian Women in Subsistence and Agricultural Labour, Women, Work
and Development Series, no.  (Geneva: Sage/Vistaar, ).
 MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, .
 Ibid.
 For an interesting comparative perspective on the politics of ‘‘desire’’ in the
colonial plantation systems of Fiji, see John Kelly, ‘‘Gaze and Grasp: Plan-
tations, 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), –
.
 Here, I am working through a certain assertion of a ‘‘uterine economy’’
within Spivak’s discussion of production, reproduction and labor value. Be-
cause mothering in this instance is embedded within the realms of ‘‘produc-
tive’’ 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,’’ –. I would like to thank Parama Roy for re-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
ferring me to this essay.
Notes to Chapter Six 

 These were the wage rates (April ,  to March , ). See , Pay,
Allowances and Other Conditions of Service, .
 Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi:
Peoples’ Publishing House, ), .
 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, ).
 Indian Tea Cyclopaedia, .
 Two well-known ethnographies of Colombian and Bolivian workers dem-
onstrate that such narratives about machines, alienation, and laboring anni-
hilation 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, ); and Michael Taussig, The
Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, ).
 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 asser-
tions 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,’’ –.
chapter  Village Politics

 My understanding of the ‘‘dialectical’’ comes from Sumit Sarkar’s interpre-
tation of E. P. Thompson’s discussion: ‘‘as an openness to the possibilities
of tensions and contradictions in the heart of all processes.’’ See Sumit Sar-
kar, ‘‘The Relevance of E. P. Thompson,’’ in Writing Social History (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, ), . This sense of dialectic as work-
ing through antinomies (as described by William Blake) breaks it out of the
reductive binaries of dialectic found in more conventional Hegelian and
Marxist formulations.
 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘The Witch,’’ Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi (Cal-
cutta: Seagull, ), –.
 I am indebted to Marta Savigliano’s powerful metaphor of power’s ‘‘vis-
cosity’’ in myown descriptive deployment of this rendering of bodied power
in the plantation. See her Tango and the Political Economy of Passion: Exoti-
cism and Decolonization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, ).
 Further scrutiny of the important ways in which upper-caste, and Brah-
minical texts, underwrote this colonial taxonomy is required. For instance,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
we need to reexamine colonial documents as ethnographies which gathered

information (often from local elites) through which Victorian social evo-
lutionisms could be ‘‘proved.’’ In so doing, we also need to explore the
ways in which upper-caste knowledges (and interpretation of these) me-
diated the construction of ‘‘primitive-ness’’ and its British Indian cate-
gory 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 excava-
tions, 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, ), –. Such an examina-
tion 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 reach-
ing. See Virginius Xaxa, ‘‘Tribes as Indigenous People in India,’’ Economic
and Political Weekly, , no.  (December , ): –; Maha-
sweta Devi, Dust on the Road: Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. and
trans. M. Ghatak (Calcutta: Seagull Books, ); K. S. Singh, ‘‘History,
Anthropology and Colonial Transformation,’’ in Tribal Society in India: An
Anthropo-historical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, ),
–.
 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, ).
 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 plan-
tation, 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 in-
clude 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 liturgi-
cal 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 plan-
tation 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.’’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
 The Bharitya Janata Party is the national party which, as this book goes to
Notes to Chapter Seven 

press, runs the central government with a coalition-based politics. The lit-
erature on the history of ‘‘communalism’’ and the emergence of religiously
based nationalist politics and the , is vast. See Gyanendra Pandey, The
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, ); Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Batalia, eds., Women and
the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays (New Delhi: Kali for Women, );
and Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu, eds., Appropriating Gender: Women’s
Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (New York: Routledge, ).
 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 planta-
tions, 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 con-
descension 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-in-
law, 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’’ prac-
tices of either orthodox priests or heterodox goddesses, and these cosmolo-
gies, I highlight the gendered modalities of their practice. I do so because the
arguments around alignments to the village communities and ‘‘Great Tradi-
tions’’ 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 politi-
cal economy of the plantation. See McKim Marriot, ‘‘Little Communities in
an Indigenous Civilization,’’ in Village India: Studies in the Little Commu-
nity, ed. McKim Marriot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –
; Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological
Approach to Indian Civilization (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, ).
 The involvement of ritual masters in anticolonial/antiplantation protest
was carefully tracked by planters from . See Dooars Planters As-
sociation (), Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars
Planters Association for the Year  (Calcutta: , ), and the Assam
Labour Enquiry Committee, Report – (Shillong: Assam Govern-
ment Press, ), .
 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘TheWitch,’’ Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans.
Ipsita Chandra (Calcutta: Seagull Books, ), .
 I am indebted here to a growing literature on witchcraft as a patriarchal
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
strategy of controlling women in the Chotanagpur and elsewhere.The mesh

of both economic and ritual catalysts for witchcraft accusations are com-
plicated 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, ); Govind Kelkar and
Dev Nathan, Gender and Tribe: Women, Land and Forests in Jharkhand (New
Delhi: Kali for Women Press, ); 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 Confer-
ence, New Delhi, December –, .
 Devi, ‘‘The Witch,’’ .
 Ibid., .
 Ram Krishna Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspective of Labour Legislation
in India: –, as Applied to Tea Plantations,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Uni-
versity of Calcutta, , .
 Alexander MacGowan, Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (London,
), .
 Ibid.
 In using the term ‘‘household,’’ I understand that diverse kinds of family
structures are embedded within the family unit in the villages.These house-
holds 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 rela-
tives come to visit for periods of time) and are frequently multigenerational.
An accurate representation of household composition would require care-
ful demographic sampling over time. This statistical sampling and survey
is necessary for policy analysis around food budgets, nutrition, wage dis-
tribution, and so on. My own methodological constraints, and eventually
epistemological problems, with implementing such a survey have been dis-
cussed earlier. For more details on wages and how they are computed, see
chapter and appendix table .
 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. Eco-
nomic 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.Cer-
tainly, the economic pressures—and the fact of women’s primary wage—
appears to be the most important catalyst in this partial reversal of mar-
riage norms.
 Fora positive assessment of the mothers’ club program, see Maitreya Ghatak
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
and Lipi Chakrabarty, The Dooars Story: Empowerment of Women and Com-
Notes to Chapter Seven 

munity Participation in Health and Family Welfare (Calcutta: Indian Tea As-
sociation, ).
 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Draupadi,’’ in Bashai Tudu, trans. Gayatri Chakravarty
Spivak (Calcutta: Thema, ), –.
chapter  Protest
 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, ), .
 Communist Partyof India (Marxist). As this book went to press, it continues
as the ruling party in west Bengal for a record sixth term.
 J. A. Milligan, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the
Jalpaiguri District, – (Calcutta: ), .
 The history of colonial forest settlements and reserves has significant eco-
logical and social ramifications. The complex weave of subaltern histories
within the ecocommercial impetus of such policyenactments has a consider-
able literature. See Ramachandra Guha and Mahdav Gagdil’s ‘‘State Forest
and Social Conflict in British India,’’ Past and Present, no.  (May ),
–. 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 As-
pects of Migration in a Forest Village of Jalpaiguri,’’ North Bengal University
Review , no.  (June ): –.
 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 suggest-
ing 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 quota-
tion is from Dooars Planters Association (), Detailed Report of the Gen-
eral Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for the year  (Calcutta:
, ), .
 Ibid.
 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.  (Bombay: All-India Trade Union Con-
gress, ); D. Chamanlal, Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
(Lahore: n.p., ); Rana Partap Behal, ‘‘Forms of Labour Protest in the

Assam Valley Tea Plantations, –,’’ Bengal Capital History Journal 

(July–December ): –. For literature on contemporary conditions
and political organizing, see Sharit Bhowmik, Class Formation in the Plan-
tation System (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, ); R. L. Sarkar
and P. P. Rai, ‘‘Trade Unions: Origin and Early Development,’’ in Tea Plan-
tation Workers in the Eastern Himalayas: A Study on Wages, Employment and
Living Standards, ed. R. L. Sarkar and M. P. Lama (Delhi: Atma Ram, );
Virginius Xaxa and Sharit Bhowmik, Manual on Rights of Tea Plantation
Workers, vol.  (New Delhi: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, ); Sharit Bhow-
mik, ‘‘Labour Welfare in Tea Plantations: An Assessment of the Plantation
Labour Act,’’ in Tea Garden Labour in North Eastern India, ed. S. Karo-
temprel and B. Datta Ray (Shillong: Vendrame Institute, ), –;
S.Chakrabarty, Working Class and the State: A Study of the Dooars Plantation
System (Ph.D. dissertation,Calcutta University, ); J. John, S. Lahiri and
A. Nanda, ‘‘The Plight of ‘Unfree’ Tea Workers,’’ Labour File: A Monthly
Journal of Labor and Economic Affairs , nos. – (July–September ):
–.
 The  Chargola Exodus in Assam was the most famous of these politics
of flight. See Chamanlal, Coolie, –; Government of India, Royal Com-
mission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, vol. , parts  and : Assam
and the Dooars,  (London: , ); Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to
Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, – (New
Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, ), ; Bose, Capital and
Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, . 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, ; Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj; Ranajit Das Gupta, ‘‘Peas-
ants,Workers and Freedom Struggle: Jalpaiguri, –,’’ Economic and
Political Weekly , no.  (July , ): PE –; Sharit Bhowmik, ‘‘Teb-
haga Movement in Dooars: Some Issues Regarding Ethnicity and Class For-
mation,’’ Economic and Political Weekly , no.  (May , ): –.
 Colonial planters argue for a direct connection between a bhagat-led move-
ment in Dooars in  with millenarian protest in Chotanagpur. See the As-
sam Labour Enquiry Committee, Report of the Assam Labour Enquiry Com-
mittee, – (Shillong: Assam Government Press, ), ; Ranajit Das
Gupta, ‘‘The Oraon Labour Agitation: Dooars in Jalpaiguri District, –
,’’ Economic and Political Weekly , no.  (September , ): –
. 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, ); and S. P. Sinha, Life
and Times of Birsa Bhagwan (Ranchi: Tribal Research Institute, ).
 See Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘Notes on Italian History,’’ in Selections from the
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, ), –.
Notes to Chapter Eight 

 Colonial administrators remained alert to what they defined as sedition in

these local markets. In , a planter’s journal remarked that large markets
were unwise in view of ‘‘recent disturbances.’’ , Report for , ; ,
Report for , ; One particular market, the Satalli haat, was suspected
to be a center of ‘‘noncooperation agitation’’ and was closed down in ,
though this remained a controversial decision. , Report for , .
 Government of India Labour Investigation Committee, Report on an In-
quiry into Conditions of Labour in Plantations in India, by D. V. Rege (Delhi:
Manager of Publications, Government of India, ).
 Rules under the Assam Labourand Emigration Act VI of , Court of Assam,
 (Shilling: Assam Secretariat Printing Office, ). Yet ‘‘illegal assem-
bly’’ occurred from the very beginning. Between  and , eighty-two
workers in one Assamese plantation were imprisoned for illegal assembly,
including rioting.
 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Colonial Insurgency in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, ).
 For a detailed discussion of the Workman’s Breach of Contract Act, see
Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj, ; 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, –,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies, nos.
– (): –. For the most detailed and comprehensive critique of
colonial legal policy in the plantations, see Ramkrishna Chattopadhyaya,
‘‘Social Perspectives of Labour Legislation in India, –, as Applied
to Tea Plantations’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Calcutta, ), .
For a colonial analysis of labor legislation see the Assam Labour Enquiry
Committee, Report for .
 Occasional references in official planter reports indicate the importance of
these auxiliary military forces. Consider the following statement by an offi-
cercommanding the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles in : ‘‘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, De-
tailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for
 (Calcutta: , ), ; see also Manas Das Gupta, Asoke Ganguly,
and Paritosh Chakladar, ‘‘Labour and Trade Union Movement in the Tea
Plantation of Terai (–): Problems of Class Formation,’’ University
Grant Commission Paper, presented at the All-India Seminar, North Bengal
University, Bagdogra, Darjeeling,West Bengal, January –, .
 Das, Plantation Labour in India, . Technically, Dooars workers were con-
sidered ‘‘free’’ labor, while Assameseworkers were controlled within a penal
system (See Bhowmik, ).
 Chattopadhyaya, ‘‘Social Perspectives,’’ . Desertions were met with a
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
series of labor laws to punish and limit an activity that had a serious detri-

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 , no.  (): –.
 , Report for  (annual general meeting of January ), . An ex-
ample of the on-going communications between colonial planters and ad-
ministrators 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 noncoopera-
tion 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 (–), . This
may have been a certain Seo Mangal Singh who the authors describe as a ‘‘Be-
hari 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’’ (, Report for ), quoting an article from the Times,
June , ; Gandhi and noncooperation activists also made statements
that workers’ and noncooperation movements were incommensurable. See
Bose, ‘‘Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry,’’ .
 , Report for , .
 The lingua franca of plantation communities, derived from Sadhani, a lan-
guage 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 Cho-
tanagpuri 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 popu-
lar imagination’’ and how this influenced a range of political activity and
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
discourse in eastern Uttar Pradesh during –. What I have not done
Notes to Chapter Eight 

is extend my discussion into a wider consideration of the relationship be-

tween Gandhi, trade union activity, and the indices of peasant conscious-
ness and protest in colonial Dooars plantations. See Shahid Amin, ‘‘Gandhi
as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern , –,’’ in Subaltern Studies,
vol. : Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi:
Oxford University Press), –.
 Government of India, Royal Commission of Labour in India, Written Evi-
dence, vol. , parts  and : Assam and the Dooars (London: , ).
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 M. R. Anand, Coolie, .
 Royal Commission of Labour, Written Evidence, ; and Bose, Capital and
Labour in the Indian Tea Industry, .
 Dasgupta, ‘‘Trade Union Movements,’’ . 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, .
 See S. Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Move-
ment in India (Calcutta: Subarnekha, ); A. K. Ray, Spring Thunder and
After: A Survey of the Maoist and Ultraleft Movements in India, -
(Calcutta: Minerva Associates, ).
 Stree Shakti Sanghathana Editorial Collective, We Were Making History:
Women of the Telengana Movement (New Delhi: Kali for Women, ).
 I am mindful again, of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s careful warning about
postcolonial intellectual representations of the subaltern voice. See ‘‘Can
the Subaltern Speak?,’’ .
 Ibid., p. .
 Royal Commission on Labour, Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in
India (Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, ), –.
 Gramsci, ‘‘Notes on Italian History,’’ –.
 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, contem-
porary activism and the communist state apparatus in West Bengal, see Am-
rita Basu, Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women’s Activism in
India (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
 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 elec-
tion as secretary, however, it appears she is referring only to her union’s
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
constituency.

 In the summer of , 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.
 The term gherao translates into ‘‘surrounding’’; it connotes literally ‘‘to sur-
round.’’ 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.
 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, ), –.
 Luddu is a large, round sweet sold in dhabas (tea stalls), and offered at wed-
dings 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.’’
 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 clus-
ters of lines.
 Jhagrain can be loosely translated into a woman who likes to fight, or picks
a fight. She is characterized as waspish, a troublemaker.
chapter  A Last Act

 Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Witchbath at Singbhum,’’ in Dust on the Road: The Activ-
ist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. Maitreya Ghatak (Calcutta: Seagull
Press, ), .
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Notes to Chapter Eight 


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
Index
Adivasi, –, , –, , physical capacity for labor, –,
,  n.,  n. , –; purity and women’s
Advertisements for tea, , , bodies, –, , –; skin
–, – color, , , –. See also Gen-
Agency houses, – der; Izzat (honor); Sexuality;
Alcoholism, –, –, – Women
, –, ,  n.,  Britain: American colonies and,
n. –; British land policies and
Authority: of ethnographer, –, plantations, –; East India
–,  n.; labor organizing Company, , , –, –;
as threat to, –,  n.; of Indian tea interests and, –,
mahlia samity (women’s society), –, –,  n.; land an-
, –, ,  n.; of pan- nexation by, for tea cultivation,
chayat (village council), –, –, –, –; Marwari
–, –, –, – business community and, –,
; and planter as mai-baap, –, –,  n.,  n.
–, , –, –, , Buddhism, –, –
, –; of planter militia
Castes: adivasi, –, , –
(North Bengal Rifles), , ,
, , ,  n.,  n.;
 n.; of priests, –; of
Bengalis, –, –, –
women on marriage customs,
, –, –,  n., 
–, –, –; workers’
n.; bhinjat (cross-community)
discipline, –, –, –
alliances, , –, –,
, –, –, –. See
–; ghinna (pollution), –
also Labor unions; Plantation
, ; jat distinctions, , –
management
, ,  n.; labor recruitment
Bengalis, –, –, –, and, –, –, , , 
–, –,  n.,  n. n.; marriage and, , –,
Body and body parts: and the disci- –, ; Nepali agricultural,
pline of labor, , –, –, –, , ; and Oraon iden-
, ; gazes, , , , , tity, –; religion and, –,
, –; ghinna (pollution), –,  n.; Santhalis, ,
–, ; images of hands –, 
and fingers, –, –, – Children, , –, , ,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
, , –, ,  n.; 

China, –, –, , –,  Dance, , , 

n. Demonstrations and protests, ,
Christian communities (missionya), –, –,  nn., ,
, , –,  n.,  n.  n.
Civilization: discipline and, –, Discipline, –, –, –,
–, –, –, –, –, –, –
–; and image of the gentle- Dols (work groups), –, ,
man planter, , , –, –, –, –
 n.; and the imperial frontier, Domesticity, –, , , –,
, , , –; jungles and, –, –
, –, ; land cultivation
East India Company, , , –
and, –,  n.; leisure and,
Education and literacy, , , ,
, , –, , –, –,
, 
–,  n.; primitivism and,
Entrepreneurship, –, –,
–, –, , , –,
–, –,  n.,  n.,
,  n.,  n.
 n.
Class: babus (plantation staff ), –
Ethnographer: authority of, –,
; caste distinctions and women,
–, –,  n.; and
–, , –; entrepreneur-
class boundaries, , –, –
ship and, –, –, –,
, , , –, –, 
–,  n.,  n., 
n.; kinship of, with women plan-
n.; the gentleman planter and,
tation workers, –, –,
, , –,  n.; tea con-
–
sumption and, , –, , ,
–, , –, – Factories: machinery in, –,
Coffee, , ,  n. –; men in, , –, ;
Communist Party of India (), time management in, –,
–, – –; wages in, , ; women
Community: adivasi, –, , in, –, –
–, , ,  n.,  Food, , , ,  n.,  n.
n.; bhinjat (cross-community) Forests and logging, , , , ,
alliances, , –, –  n.
, –; bhinjat (cross-
Gandhi, Mahatma, –,  n.
community) marriages, –,
Gardens: as ideal, , –, ;
–, ; and food produc-
jungles compared to, , –,
tion, ,  n.; jat distinctions
; primitive landscape, –,
and, –, –,  n.;
 n.; for tea drinking, ; tea
land annexation for tea culti-
plantations as, , –, 
vation, –, –, –;
Gender: boundaries in field labor,
mapping lines of, –, –,
–; dols (work groups), –
–; Marwari business com-
, , –, –; feminiza-
munity, –, –,  n.,
tion of tea drinking, , , –
 n.; missionya (Christian
, –, , –,  n.;
communities), , , –,
izzat (honor) and sexual conduct,
 n.,  n.; taxation of, ,
–, –, –, –,
 n.,  n.
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
–; and physical capacity for

labor, –, , –; purity ; jungli, –, –, , –
and women’s bodies, –, , , –,  n.,  n.;
–; rituals and, , –; labor organizing, –, 
social space and, –, – n.; machinery, –, –;
, , –, , –,  migration of, –, , , –
n.; violence against women, , , –,  n.,  nn.,
–, , –; women’s ,  n.; opposition to tea
labor value and, –, –, drinking, –; tea plucking, ,
–, , –,  n.,  , –, –, , –, ;
n.,  nn.,  wages, , , , –, ,
Gramsci, Antonio,  –, , , ,  n.,
Greed, , , –  n.,  n.; women’s labor
Grove, Richard,  nn.,  value and, –, –, –,
, –,  n.,  n.,
Hinduism, –, , –, 
 nn., 
Hogarth,William, –, , –,
Labor recruitment: family recruit-
 n.,  n.
ment, –; migration and,
Honor. See Izzat (honor).
–, , , –, –, 
Izzat (honor): bhinjat (cross- n.,  nn., ,  n.;
community) marriages and, – missionaries and, ,  n.;
, –, ; caste distinc- sirdars and, –, –, ,
tions and women, , –,  nn., ,  n.,  n.
; sexual conduct and, –, Labor unions: casual worker (bigha,
–, –, –; status faltu) employment, , –,
and, –, , , –, ,  nn., ; control of plan-
–, – tations space, –; labor orga-
nizing and, –,  n.;
Jungli, –, –, , –,
panchayat (village council) and,
–,  n.,  n.
; paternalism, –, –
Labor: alcoholism, –, –, , ; rituals and, –, ;
,  n.,  n.; badli (job and social reform, –; women
exchanges), –; birthrate in, , –, –, –
among workers, –, ,  ,  n.. See also Plantation
n.,  n.; casual worker management
(bigha, faltu) employment, , Land: jotedars, ; land annexation
–, ,  nn., ; child for tea cultivation, –, –,
labor, , –, , ; dem- –; wasteland policy in India,
onstrations and protests, , –, –, ,  n.
–, –,  n., , Leisure, , , –, , –,
 n.; dols (work groups), – –, –,  n.
, , –, –; gender
Machinery, –, –
boundaries in field labor, –;
Mahlia samity (women’s society),
importation of laborers, , –
, –, ,  n.
,  n.; indentureship within
Mai-baap (father and mother), –,
plantations, ,  n.,  n.;
–, , –, –, ,
indolence in labor force, –,
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
, –
Index 
Marriage: bhinjat (cross-community) Names and identity, , , , ,

alliances, –, –, ; –,  n.,  n.
ghar jamais (house son-in-laws), Narratives, women’s, –, –
, , ; woman’s izzat Nationalism, –, –, , ,
(honor) and, ; women and  nn., ,  n.
marriage customs, –, – Naxalite movement, –
, –; women’s labor value Nepalis: as agricultural castes, –
and, –, –, , –, , , ; in plantation hier-
 n.,  n.,  nn.,  archy, , –, –, 
Marwari business community, – North Bengal Rifles (planter militia),
, –,  n.,  n. , ,  n.
Men: and alcoholism, –, –
Okakura, Kakuzo, 
, ,  n.,  n.; bhinjat
Opium, , , –,  n., 
(cross-community) marriages,
n.
–, –, ; in factories,
–, ; gender boundaries Panchayat (village council), –,
in field labor, –; ghar jamais –, –, –, –
(house son-in-laws), , , ; Paternalism: labor unions and, –
image of the gentleman planter, , –, ; in plantation
, , –,  n.; mobility management, ; planter as mai-
of, , ; overseers and, – baap, –, –, , –,
, –, –; in panchayat –, –, , –;
(village council), ; and pes- planters’ sexual liaisons with
ticide use, –, ; physical women workers, –, ,
capacity of, for labor, –, , –; women and marriage
–; priests, –, ; customs, –
rituals and status, ; sirdars, Plantation management: babus
–, –, ,  nn., (plantation staff ), –; Ben-
,  n.,  n.; social galis in, –,  n.; coercion
space of, –, , , – by, –, , , –, ,
; and tea drinking, , –;  n.,  n.; daffadars (field
wage scale for, –, , ; overseers), ,  n.; greed,
women’s labor value and, –, , , –; labor unions
–, , –,  n.,  and, –, –,  n.;
n.,  n.,  nn., . See and male plantation workers,
also Planters –, –; Nepalis in, ,
Migration of labor, , , , –, –, –, ; overseers’
–,  n.,  nn., , hierarchy, –, –, ,
 n. ; paternalism in, ; planter
Missionary work, , ,  n. militia (North Bengal Rifles), ,
Missionya (Christian communities), ,  n.; sirdari system of,
, , –,  n.,  n. –, –, ,  nn.,
Mythology: Garden of Eden, –, ,  n.,  n.; and women
,  n.; of the gentleman workers, –, –, –,
planter, –; human sacrifice –, –, –, –,
and machinery, –; of tea, –,  nn., ; and workers’
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
–

discipline, –, –, – –, ; Indian identity and,

, –, –, – –; missionya (Christian
Plantations: British land policies communities), , , –,
and, –; capital investments  n.,  n.
in, –, –, –, –, Rituals: bhagat (faith healer), ,
 n.,  n.,  n.,  , –, –; of con-
n.; demonstrations and protests sumption, , , –; daini
on, –, –; as gardens, (witch), –,  n.; Durga
, –, ; greed, , , Mata (shamaness), , –,
–; indentureship within, ,  n.; Holi, , ; men’s
 n.,  n.; inherited jobs status and, ; panchayat (village
on, , –, , , ; council) and, –; planters
labor recruitment, , , , – and, –, –; priests, –
, –,  n.,  n.; , –; ritual space, , ,
mapping lines of, –, – , , ; of tea drinking,
, –; Marwari business –, , ; trees and plants as
community and, –, –, sacred objects, –, –;
 n.,  n.; pesticide use, union leaders and, –, ;
–, . See also Labor; Tea village ritual, ; women and,
and tea drinking; Tea cultivation; , , –, –, 
Women n.
Planters: class and, , , –, 
Sahlins, Marshall, ,  n.
n.; as father figure (mai-baap),
Sexuality: izzat (honor) and sexual
–, –, , –, –
conduct, –, –, –,
, , , –; image of
–; planters’ sexual liaisons
gentleman planter, , , –,
with women workers, –,
–,  n.; planter’s wife,
, –
–, –,  n.; and re-
Sirdars, –, –, , , 
lations with Indian elites, –;
nn., ,  n.,  n.
reputation of, , –, ,
Social space, –, , , –,
–, –, –; ritu-
, –, , –
als and, –, –; sexual
Songs, , , , , , –,
liaisons with women workers,
 n.
–, , –
Status: bhinjat (cross-community)
Political activism: labor organizing,
marriages, –, –, ;
–,  n.; of Mahatma
of domestic workers, –; jat
Gandhi, –,  n.; Naxal-
distinctions and, –, –
ite movement, –; women
, –,  n.; names and,
and, , , –, –, –
, , ,  n.,  n.; over-
, –
seers’ hierarchy and, –, ,
Primitivism, –, –, , ,
; planters’ reputation, ,
–, ,  nn., ,  n.
–, , –, –,
Religion: Buddhism, –, – –; woman’s izzat (honor)
; castes and, –, –, and, –, , , –,
 n.; Hinduism, –, , –, –; women’s labor
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Index 
Status (continued) United States, –, –, , 

value and, –, –, , n.
–,  n.,  n., 
Villages: bhinjat (cross-community)
n.,  nn., 
marriages, –, –, ;
‘‘Sterling companies,’’ –
family ties within, ; panchayat
Stoler, Ann,  n.
(village council), –, –,
Taxation, –, , ,  n., –, –, –; village
 n. rituals, 
Tea and tea drinking: advertisements Violence: against women, ,
for, , , –, –, ; –, , –; tools as
Bengalis and, –, –, – weapons, –, –
, –, –,  n., 
Wages: in factories, , ; tea har-
n.; capital investments in, –
vest quotas and, , , –,
, –, –, –, 
–, –, ,  n., 
n.,  n.,  n.,  n.;
n.; women plantation workers,
China and, –, –, , –
–, ,  nn., 
,  n.; entrepreneurship in
Wasteland Rules, –, –, ,
tea production, –, –,
 n.
–, –,  n.,  n.,
Women: birthrate among, –,
 n.; equipment for, , , ,
,  n.,  n.; casual
,  n.; gendering of, , ,
worker (bigha, faltu) employ-
–, –, –, –, 
ment, , –, ,  nn.,
n.; and health, –, ; and
; dols (work groups), –,
leisure, , –; and opium,
, –, –; domestic work
, , –,  n.,  n.;
of, –, , –, –;
rituals of, –, , –; tea
gender boundaries in field labor,
trade associations, , , –,
–; hands and fingers, images
; trade in tea, –, –, 
of, –, –, –, ,
Tea cultivation: cycles of tea culti-
–,  n.; images of, –,
vation, –, –, –;
, –, , , , , ; in-
greed, , , –; impact
herited plantation jobs, , –
on local communities, , ,
, , , ; izzat (honor),
–; machinery’s impact on,
–, , , –, –,
–; pesticide use, –,
–, –; jat distinctions
; pruning, –, –; tea
and, –, –,  n.;
harvest quotas and, , , –
kinship and, –, , –,
, –, –, ,  n.;
–; labor migration and,
tea plucking, , , –, –,
–; mahlia samity (women’s
, –, 
society), , –, , 
Time and timekeeping: cycles of tea
n.; and marriage, –, –
cultivation, –, –, –
, –, –; names and
; and surveillance of workers,
identity of, , , , , –
–, –, ; time man-
,  n.,  n.; narratives of,
agement in factories, –,
–, –; pesticide use and,
–
–, ; plantation manage-
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Tools as weapons, –, –

ment and, –, –, –, –; tea harvest quotas and,
–, –, –, –, , , –, –, –,
 nn., ; planter’s wife, – ,  n.; tea plucking and, ,
, –,  n.; and political , –, –, , –, ;
activism, , , –, – union activism and, , –,
, –, –; pregnancy and –, –,  n.; value
child-rearing, –, , , of women’s labor, –, –
; and rituals, , , –, , –, , –,  n.,
–,  nn., ; sexual liai-  n.,  nn., ; violence
sons with planters, –, , against, , –, , –
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
Index 
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.
 --- (cloth : alk. paper)
 --- (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Tea plantation workers–India–History–th century.
. Tea trade–India–History–th century. . Women tea
plantation–India–History–th century. I. Title: Women
and post/colonial labor on an Indian plantation. II. Title.
.  
Tseng 2001.9.19 19:46
.''–dc 

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Tseng 2001.9.

19 19:46 6457 Chatterjee / A TIME FOR TEA / sheet 1 of 434

A Time for Tea

A John Hope Franklin Center book

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A Time for Tea

    

Duke University Press Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page

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

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. A box of Brooke Bond tea 

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Or Another Kind of Introduction

not made simply. (Imagine, for a moment, an intricate movement of hand

measurably easier during my Calcutta sojourns. I am aware that my father’s

when her own commitments were burdensome. Her labor as my research

this journey possible.Their substantial commentaries, their close reading of

A Time for Tea: The Play

Dramatis personae: She/Narrator; Alice, of Wonderland fame, and compan-

. and . ‘‘Choicest Blend,’’ from the outer packaging

Patronage, Patriarchy, Power:

Fathers and Families of Labor

The feminization of labor and commodity is produced through a culture

sahib remains distant in the villages, it resonates within the immediacy of

community-rooted and customary norms of village patriarchy. Patriarchies

tions. It indexes the construction of an essentialist ontologyof primitiveness

Woman/Body: Displacement and Excess

aesthetic foregrounds another coporeal and feminized story, a postcolonial

another rendition of fallen status, marked by the ﬁction of my ‘‘ﬁeldwork’’

and my suddenly explicitly racialized and gendered position. Patriarchal

De/Colonization and Textual Strategies

text, through text, I am seeking a language of interruptions: one that be-

Grinding against the sieve of authorship are commentaries, interrogations,

As a postcolonial ethnographer navigating the cartographies of new em-

scenes that were like photographs in my mind. Still pictures.

cups.Who is the Mad Hatter, and where to begin?

. ‘‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,’’ from Alice’s Adventures in

horizon of my party is not a line, but shimmers possible circles. Disorder

chapter  Travels of Tea,

T    juxtaposes images of imperial reﬁnement and im-

a singular commodity player in the theater of early modern maritime trade.

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

Cultures of consumption, fed by the very wealth of trade expansion, now

A Liquid Trade: Tea and Asian Mercantilism

. ‘‘Spice and Flowers,’’ from the outer packaging of a box

tivation became widespread in China. Villagers in Sichuan were known to

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

The ‘‘Dignity of Government’’

of labor organization that anticipated the vast plantation systems of colo-

Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 

Rituals of Consumption: Women, Labor, and Imperial Teas

Pure Labor, Innocent Value