Colonial Histories into Feminist Historiographies Today

        Tea production in India began with British colonial rule and the establishment of the first English tea plantation, Assam Company, in 1839.^[1] The effects of British colonialism persist today, even after India’s independence in 1947. During the British’s almost 200 year rule, colonial managers began recruiting adivasi or tribal communities to Assam and North Bengal to work on tea plantations. Today, North Bengal consists of northwestern Bangladesh and the Indian state West Bengal. Assam is a state in northeastern India, south of the Eastern Himalayas. Scholar Chatterjee analyzes the recruitment strategies of English plantation owners that led to a mass migration of Indian workers to Assam and North Bengal, mainly through family recruitment strategies based in force and political-legal mechanisms. This manipulation of the family unit has implications for gendered labor in tea production.

Tea plantation owners in the early 1800s were concerned with a labor shortage, given the high demand from England for tea. Their discriminatory view of Assamese people as unreliable workers compounded this supposed shortage. Colonial tea owners ignored Assamese concerns about low wages and time. Working on tea plantations would take up the majority of time for Assamese who chose to ignore wage concerns. If their time was taken up by waged work, then there would be limited time for other necessary tasks. Assamese people largely grew their own food, and this system would not give them any time to grow food for consumption, abandoning their current subsistence system. Due to these larger concerns, Assamese people were hesitant to join tea plantations, which the British did not understand. Rather than addressing these concerns, the British dismissed Assamese workers as lazy, and looked for workers elsewhere. This led to a recruitment of adivasi workers into a legal indentureship in Assam. Legal indentureship was not legalized in West Bengal, but workers endured the same conditions and lived under strict surveillance, even resorting to desertion to get out of the plantation.

Recruitment manipulation of adivasi workers included dressing in government official garb to gain adivasi community trust, promising better marriage prospects, and even resorting to outright kidnapping and violence, especially towards women.^[2] Chatterjee pulls this information from the colonists themselves via their correspondence and writings in various British archives. As evidenced in these texts, clearly the colonial tea owners' primary goal was total control of the labor force they created based on racialized and gendered notions.^[3] 

These colonial era practices in the Indian tea sector continue to today with legal allowances. The Plantation Labour Act of 1951, still in effect today, legitimized a key feature of colonial plantations. The Act provides housing and social welfare to all of the workers, which in turn keeps wages low. This legally allows the continuation of colonial rule plantation practices, where the plantation owners control all aspects of their workers’ lives for generations without escape. There has been extensive documentation of violations of this act by ____, leaving workers with low wages and without welfare or adequate housing.^[4] 

Labor: Gender Divides

        Single men were considered an unreliable labor source, and the plantation owners turned to women as anchors of families during migration, making it less likely the family would leave the plantation. If there was an unmarried laborer, “both men and women, were forced into the infamous ‘depot marriages’ to encourage procreation and  thereby to have steady source of labour supply in the tea plantations.”^[5] Planters saw women as integral to their workforce and would offer wage incentives for women who became pregnant. Workers in Assam are currently entitled to three months of paid maternity leave after delivery. However, women from Rajbangshi and Nambiar’s research in Assam reported that they never received full payment and had their daily wages cut in half.^[6] 

With an increase in women migrants, women on these plantations became the dominant labor plucking leaves. Chatterjee infers that the “location of plantation women within the perimeter of field cultivation and leaf plucking was connected to practical contingencies of recruitment and the planter's own economic logic of maintaining a cheap and stable work force.”^[7] Women’s role on a tea plantation directly affects the productivity of the plantation. Without women tea workers, leaves would not be plucked, plants would not be tended to or planted, soil would not be prepared, plants would not be fertilized or protected with pesticides.^[8]

This cyclical and generational labor source has trapped generations of families on the same plantation. Researcher Dutta also investigates the history of women tea workers in North Bengal. As Chatterjee focused on the same region, Dutta’s work provides a helpful expansion of this history. Like Chatterjee, Dutta concludes that the current marginalization of tea workers, and in particular women tea workers, has roots in the colonial practices that began this industry. Dutta similarly relies on primary and secondary sources, utilizing government records, census data, planter records, and more. There were less women in the tea industry than male counterparts from 1901-1931. However, there were significantly more women in the tea industry than the coal and jute industry, the two other major modern industries of colonial Bengal. The shift towards a majority of women workers in the tea industry began in 1980 and this continues to increase through 2000 with women at 49.05% of the workforce and men 47.13%.^[9] Dutta criticizes research in 1970 on India’s workforce as it left out women. The subaltern theorists of the 1990s too ignored the question of women, even though they are “the largest, ubiquitous and most obvious ‘subaltern’ group of all.”^[10] This neglect in the research is where Dutta’s work fills the gap, creating a feminist historiography.