Introduction
1. According to Fair Trade Labeling Organization International, organizations like SKS are called Small Producer Organizations or SPOs.
2. I detail the nuances of what Fair Trade and organic stipulations are in chapter 3. Generally when a food or beverage product is Fair Trade certified it indicates that it was produced under the international standards of organic farming as stipulated by the certifying institution. Fair Trade certification is an ethical stamp of assurance, which tells consumers that their food or beverage was produced under sound labor and humanitarian conditions. Certified products are premium priced, where the premium is routed back to producer communities for capacity building projects of which women’s empowerment is a key emphasis area. In Darjeeling’s certified tea plantations Fair Trade and Organic certification went hand in hand.
3. Plantation workers commonly referred to non-wage plantation monetary resources as “fund.”
4. Informal revolving support and money saving groups found among women in Darjeeling’s plantations. I detail them in chapter 5, 6, and 7.
Chapter 1
1. Another term for Nepalis popularized by the British Colonizers. Also spelled as Gorkha.
2. Both plantation and cooperative names, as well as participants of research participants are pseudonyms unless they are public figures.
Chapter 2
1. A spacious car made by the Indian multinational TATA popular in Darjeeling as privately run shared-rides vans.
2. Lepchas are popularly known as the original inhabitants of Darjeeling before the Nepalis migrated to work in plantations.
3. The intention of this book is not to provide a comprehensive historical account of Darjeeling and Indian tea production. Other scholars such as Sharit Bhowmick (1981) and K. Ravi Raman (2010) have written in detail about the political economy of tea production in North Bengal and South India, respectively. Piya Chatterjee’s feminist historical and ethnographic work in North Bengal lays the groundwork for understanding these gendered political economies and I build on her contributions to demonstrate the specificity of Darjeeling’s gendered landscape of tea production within and outside plantations (Chatterjee 1995, 2001).
4. Early scholarship on the “politics of recognition” concentrated on the efforts of marginalized groups or citizens within a nation to gain public recognition and prominence (Taylor 1992, 34). The formulation was used to highlight the limitations of liberal justice systems, under which people belonging to specific cultural groups were not respected or represented in public institutions. Fraser (1997), through a discussion of the “recognition-redistribution” dilemma, challenged the contours of the liberal democratic models of justice. For her “politics of recognition” was expressed in the “New Social Movements,” which made identity politics the centerpiece of struggles.
5. By “subnationalism” I refer to the political and cultural struggles of Nepalis in India who face cultural marginalization within the Indian nation. Nepali workers migrated to Darjeeling and adjoining areas in the early 1800s to work in the tea plantations of the East India Company and they have lived there ever since. They have been fighting since the 1980s to demand their homeland—Gorkhaland—a separate state for them within India. The movement was spearheaded by the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), a local political party, devoted to the ethnic cause of Nepalis in India. This struggle has taken various forms, but recently it has centered on the preoccupation among Nepali leaders with creating a unified Nepali identity, which I refer to in this book as the “cultural politics of subnationalism” and frame it as a form of “politics of recognition” using Nancy Fraser’s (1997) terminology. The first Gorkhaland movement began in the 1980s culminating in the formation of Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, a semi-autonomous administrative unit within the state of West Bengal. This was also a time when many subgroups within Nepalis sought scheduled tribe status and also found ways for Dajreeling to be under the sixth schedule. Since 2007 a new movement began to revive the cause for statehood for Indian Nepalis living in Darjeeling, India, which led to the formation of Gorkhaland Territorial Adminstration (GTA) under the new party Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM). These successive subnational movements have also resulted in the formation of political outfits such as the Democratic Front and the Darjeeling wing of the TMC and the BJP are also gaining hold along with the formation of “development boards” for “tribals” like the Lepcha Development Board and many others trying to gain in the oppression olympics as demonstrated in Darjeeling’s regional context.
6. I use the word cooperative to talk about the institutions representing non-plantation smallholder tea producers in Darjeeling. Fair Trade organizations refer to these as Small Producer Organizations (SPO). My use of the word cooperative also reflects the struggle of Sānu Krishak Sansthā (SKS) to become a formally recognized cooperative. They later settled for “Society Registration” and replaced the word cooperative with the word sanstha, which in Nepali means an organization.
7. The Nepali word pāhāDi means people belonging to the hill areas. It denotes a particular kind of place-based identity distinguishing Nepalis from people in the plains.
8. Henchmen of the plantation owner, supposedly his favorite Nepali male supervisors.
9. Partybazi implies working for the local political party. At the time of this interview the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) was fighting for greater cultural and political recognition for Nepalis of Indian descent living in Darjeeling and other places in India.
10. It is another name for the plantation owner. It is also spelled as Sāhib, but in Darjeeling it is pronounced differently and hence I use “sahib.”
11. It means people of the hills. People in Darjeeling tend to think that they are not as cunning and opportunistic as plains people.
12. Nepali migrants came to Darjeeling almost 180 years ago, and through their stay have acquired citizenship rights. Barring new migrants, most Nepalis in Darjeeling now have voting rights and ration cards. Ration cards entitle them to subsidized the purchase of food items from government-run grocery stores. In India, ration cards are used as proof of Indian citizenship.
13. This talent contest is very similar to “American Idol.”
14. Momo is a Nepali style dumpling very popular in India, and primarily considered as a Nepali delicacy. Momo is originally a Tibetan delicacy.
15. GNLF stands for Gorkha National Liberation Front the dominant political party based in Darjeeling. The reason why the word “Gorkha” is used to designate Nepali people in India has a very complicated history. For this chapter, I use Gorkha and Nepali as synonymous. When I was doing my book fieldwork this was the dominant political party in the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) and also in the plantation labor unions. Before GNLF was formed, in the pre-Gorkhaland Agitation days, CPIM (Communist Part of India, Marxist) and ABGL (affiliated to the Congress party) were the dominant political parties influencing the labor unions. After the Agitation, this party lost all its political teeth in Darjeeling. The Communists in India are parliamentary communists, more like social democrats.
16. The majority of the population of India’s North Eastern States, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and parts of Assam have different physical features. In common parlance they are said to have “mongoloid” features. They have much lighter skin, straight hair, and smaller eyes. Dietary practices also differ. These differences are used as markers of racial difference, which then are used to culturally marginalize people from India’s North East. In my own experience of having many close friends from Nagaland and Manipur, they would jokingly call me Indian. They would complain to me that other girls from “India” think that women from India’s North East were sexually promiscuous. States in India’s North East are also under-developed, perpetuating existing feelings of marginality among people from the North East, including Darjeeling.
17. A recent newspaper article discusses the deliberate strategy of the 2nd Gorkhaland Movement and its solidarity with women from all walks of life, which was not the case in 1986. In fact, the first martyr of the new movement was a woman who died in a recent police shooting. The 2nd Gorkhaland Movement started in October 2007.
Chapter 3
1. When I began this research the tea farmers in this study were struggling to get cooperative registration. Over the years they decided that cooperative registration was not the most fruitful bureaucratic means to formalize their existence within the Darjeeling tea trade as it would jeopardize their access to Fair Trade resources (as detailed later in this chapter and the book). Instead they went for society’s registration and replaced the word Cooperative with Sanstha. I have used a pseudonym of their original name retaining the word Sanstha to reflect this transformation. However in common conversation people in the area still call it a cooperative.
2. From my interviews with Darjeeling Tea Association officers, I understand that there are no official statistics about the exact number of organic gardens, but I was given a rough estimate that thirty plantations were certified organic and the number was growing.
3. When I returned for fourteen months of fieldwork in 2006, the DPA was renamed as Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA).
4. Hand-rolled tea made by the farmers and their families.
5. Like the plantation, I have not used the name of the cooperative; I just refer to it as a tea cooperative or by its pseudonym, Sānu Krishak Sansthā. Translated from Nepali it means Small Farmer’s Organization.
6. I have found out from my life history interviews with older plantation workers that the British planters did not use any pesticides. They used cow dung. Chemical-intensive methods of tea cultivation were introduced in the 1960s when India adopted the green revolution.
7. The italicized words indicate the various Nepali caste groups present in the co-op area.
8. The plantation where I did my fieldwork was not buying tea from this particular cooperative.
9. It is not my purpose in this book to write the history of Fair Trade. There have been numerous interventions by scholars to chart its history (see Raynolds et al. 2007 for a very detailed history, also Jaffee 2007).
Chapter 4
1. One the voluntourists in this ethnography Kate Curnow made a documentary called “My Life With Fair Trade” which was recently available on YouTube and is now removed. I possess the full version of it because Kate shared it with me when we met in the U.S.
2. When we met in the U.S. many years after the original encounter in Darjeeling in 2007 she gave me a copy of the uncut footage with my interview in it. I appreciated that, but the fact remained that the public (who chose to watch her five-minute video) only got to see her celebration of the “cooperation” which according to the documentary was due to Fair Trade. This student was one of the most conscientious I met and yet her documentary was full of essentialisms.
3. To protect the identity of my informants I have abstained from citing the websites where they wrote their accounts or using their real names. If my informant’s comments or activities are made available by them to the general public I have used their real names instead of pseudonyms to document their acts of “witnessing Fair Trade”—a central theoretical and empirical claim of this chapter.
Chapter 5
1. Leela Fernandes (1997) and Amrita Basu (1992) also write in detail about the union and political party nexus in India. In Darjeeling the alliance has a specific history with consequences for labor politics.
2. This treaty allowed Nepalis and Indians to settle, work, and trade in each country without the right to vote, as I have described in chapter 2.
3. From October 2007, Darjeeling is under the sway of the second Gorkhaland Agitation, this time lead by Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM), a break-away party from the GNLF.
4. Chhāyā’s views about the coercive politics of GNLF are shared by many informants (both male and female), some of whom are not as articulate as Chhāyā and do not share her leadership qualities. Women who were not explicitly critical of GNLF also complained about nepotism and the uselessness of unions in raising wages and upholding their concerns.
5. Criticizing the leaders of the 2nd Gorkhaland Movement, an opposition party leader in Darjeeling expressed concern over the anti-democratic means of this movement for social justice in an English newspaper. The GJM (Gorkha Janamukti Morcha) is being accused of diverting attention away from many other problems in Darjeeling by promoting this single issue movement.
6. Phone interview with Chintamani Rai in December, 2007.
7. The Joint Body is a recent phenomenon in many Fair Trade−certified plantations in Darjeeling. It is supposed to be a group of workers representative of different interests within the plantation community. The group was supposed to be drawing up plans on how to spend money coming from Fair Trade product sales in the West.
8. Ghumāuri is the informal saving group popular among women plantation workers. I detail it later.
9. When I was in Darjeeling in 2005, and then again for a year in 2006−7, the second Gorkhaland Agitation had not started. The members of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council were preoccupied with their efforts to get the 6th schedule for Darjeeling district. The latter was thought to be a panacea for the under-development of the region. It would prevent people outside Darjeeling from buying land and also have special job reservations for “backward” people in Darjeeling in government jobs all over India. Ghising spearheaded this drive of the Hill Council. Ghising invented new tribal traditions and people objected to them. He banned the worship of certain Hindu gods, which upset a large section of the “Nepali Community” who were staunch Hindus and did not identify as tribal. Local youth were used as vigilantes to ensure that no Nepali person observed the favorite Hindu festivals, so that the community could prove that it was tribal and should have their own land. While this was just a proxy for an actual state, it gave GNLF party workers a new preoccupation. Like many people, Devilal was frustrated with their efforts to “tribalize” Nepalis and the invention of new religious traditions. Hence he said that people were more into religion.
10. In the early 1980s the GNLF was born out of the collective desire of Nepali people in India to have their own state within India, which would be called “Gorkhaland.” Whenever I refer to Agitation, it means Gorkhaland Agitation of 1986−88. Darjeeling was under the grips of a 2nd Gorkhaland Agitation because the first Gorkhaland Agitation ended without a separate state being formed. In 1988 the DGHC or Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council was formed, which just led to more decentralized administrative power for the DGHC whose chairman was Subhash Ghising. Ghising was seen as a dictator by many locals, and twenty-two years after his rule his closest allies ousted him from power by forming a new party, Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM). The new party, GJM, has similar viewpoints to those of the GNLF lead by Ghising, but the new movement promises to be less violent, more Gandhian in its approach and tactics. It still wants a separate Gorkha state. From my content analysis of newspapers and personal interviews with people, I gather that this new party, GJM, and its tactics were being questioned by minority political groups in Darjeeling as being non-democratic and coercive, just like the first Gorkhaland Agitation.
11. The question of community is not only significant for anthropologists but has been important for scholars of South Asia to understand the consciousness and practices of people in this region. Scholars studying the region have debated the significance of community in explaining dominance, hegemony, and cross-cutting loyalties of subjects. The question of community gained significance in studies of working-class consciousness. Particularly notable is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (1989) discussion of the importance of community in determining how the working class experience domination and resist powerful forces. More recent work has focused on the production of class and community (Fernandes 1997) with special emphasis on gendered exclusions. Scholars studying environmental conservation have also focused on the contested nature of communities in South Asia and its significance for resource managements (Agrawal 1999; Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2000).
12. Ghumāuri originates from the Nepali verb Ghumaono (to move something in circles). Workers explained that they move money in a circle “like a ring.” It is named so because money, food, stories, and emotions are circulated between groups of workers by their own volition.
13. Although I was asked by some women to not reveal the existence of ghumāuri groups on the plantation, I have since conferred with some members, and they qualified their request. They agreed that it was alright for me to talk about the groups, since the plantation management did indeed know about their existence. But they asked me to try to protect their identities, since management does not know which individuals are involved. I have therefore done everything I can to protect their identities, including the use of pseudonyms, masking/changing of details, and delinking critical quotations from individuals.
14. “Bonus” is a payment made to workers during the Nepali Hindu festival of “Dashai.” The money for the bonus comes from a section of a worker’s salary and the management also puts in a proportion depending on the harvest year.
15. Plantation workers, both men and women, sometimes refer to themselves sarcastically as coolies, a Hindi word for day laborers who made their living by carrying heavy loads. It is a derogatory term for unskilled laborers.
16. Information used from http://www.mercycorps.org/countries/india/2108, accessed on December 12, 2008.
17. For further evidence of the influence of party politics on national and local-level labor organizing, see Leela Fernandes (1997) and Piya Chatterjee (2001).
Chapter 7
1. Since the organic and Fair Trade inspectors rarely used the Nepali translation of organic, jaivik, in training programs, men and women used the English—organic. I would also like to note that I have witnessed an increase in the use of the words organic and Fair Trade over the last eleven years. With the declaration that the neighboring state of Sikkim (which also has a sizeable population of Nepalis) would be an organic-certified state the intensity and envy has affected the use of organic as metaphor in Darjeeling.
2. Bihari, Bengali, and Punjabi are other regional groups within India.
3. Madeshi is another Nepali term for designating people from the plains.
4. This work involves cleaning the weeds between the tea bushes.
5. One of the earliest gender and development programs that women in Sānu Krishak Sansthā took part in was the Government of India’s Integrated Child Development Program (ICDS), also called ānganwādi in other places in India.
6. The Women’s Wing had decided that the person who took the milk to town would get a share of the profits from the milk sales as her daily salary. The same person would not take the milk to town for more than three months in a row to ensure that everyone, depending on their need, would be able to earn from the Women’s Wing’s collective business.
7. Nepali derogatory terms for implying that women were street smart and had sharp tongues.
Chapter 8
1. The majority of NGOs in Darjeeling were run by Nepali educated middle- and upper-class men and women. This NGO worker was a Nepali upper-caste male.
2. Basti when literally translated from Nepali means an area of human settlement. Kaman is another local word for plantations. In Darjeeling, people talked about localities through the basti/kaman dichotomy.
3. Plantations in Darjeeling are very secretive about the percentage of workers whom they hire as temporary workers during the high season—the plucking season. Newspaper reports and conversation with NGO members reveal that at times plantations can keep the majority of the workforce as seasonal labor. In the plantation where I did most of my ethnography I was unable to find out the exact number of seasonal labor employed from the plantation management.
4. Personal interview with author May 15, 2007.
5. While plantation workers get a daily wage, they can earn some extra money between the months of March and October when tea leaves grow in abundance. In the plantation where I did this research, they were paid Rs. 3 for every extra kilo of tea they plucked beyond their minimum daily plucking requirement of eight kilos a day.
6. If the Women’s Wing secretary was illiterate, then literate members helped in keeping meeting minutes.
7. The tea cooperative where I did my fieldwork was not registered with the state government until 2006. The reason for it being unregistered is outlined in chapter 3.
8. The Women’s Wing had monthly meetings on the 8th day of every month. The 8th day of the month was originally selected in 1999 by the NGO working with women tea farmers to spread awareness about International Women’s Day and women’s issues and every year on March 8. The Women’s Wing celebrates women’s day in their own style.
9. Equating him as the “board,” meaning Cooperative Board, was a way for women to show respect and at the same time make the president aware of the severe implications of his smallest actions.
10. The dispensary provided basic services and medicines, with no provision for surgery, for which plantation workers had to be taken to town. Often plantation workers would not have money to afford town doctors. It was largely the owner’s discretion to whom he would pay for the doctor’s expenses in town. You had to be in his good books for this service.
1. In India state-level CSR intervention is enshrined in the recent legislation which states that all Joint Stock Companies have to invest 2 percent of their share of profit toward CSR projects. According to the UK daily, The Guardian, India is the first nation to stipulate such a law (http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/india-csr-law-debate-business-ngo).
2. http://theladiesfinger.com/why-do-we-tend-to-think-farmer-man/.
3. I am referring to the sensational documentary “India’s Daughter” (directed by a white British woman, Leslie Udwin) whose reception in India brought out a deep divide among Indian feminists. In my opinion the documentary uses every trope of representing the poor as violent and India’s educated lower-class women as voiceless. My critique of this documentary also reflects Nepali women’s reaction to the massive protests against rape in New Delhi as I have indicated in a previous chapter.