Labor: Gender Divides

        Single men were considered an unreliable labor source, and they 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.”^[1] Planters saw women as integral to their workforce and they 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.^[2] 

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.”^[3] 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.^[4]

This cyclical and generational labor source 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 more broadly, 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%.^[5] 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.”^[6] This neglect in the research is where Dutta’s work fills the gap, creating a feminist historiography.