Papers presented at the Seminar on Anthropo-Historical Perspectives of the Tea Labourers with Special Reference to North East India, held at Dibrugarh during 7-8 January 2005.

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

As the Indian economy integrates into global circuits of production, exchange and accumulation, the burdens of adjustment are shared unequally by different sectors, classes and regions. This study unravels the livelihood strategies and living conditions of labour in the tea gardens of Assam. The tea sector has been undergoing a crisis since the 1990s, with stagnant production, decline in exports, and closures of many tea gardens leading to large-scale retrenchments in the labour force. Based on a detailed analysis of secondary data and primary field research, the study examines the extent, types and implications of inter-generational occupational mobility (or immobility) among tea garden labourers in Assam. In the process, it reflects on how even a sector that had brought capital and labour from outside and contributed significantly to the country’s export earnings failed to create dynamic growth linkages within the local economy. The experience of the labour force in the Assam tea sector, the authors argue, is important for making sense not only of the development dynamics of the region, but of the contradictory ways in which forces of globalisation and neo-liberal reforms have been reshaping the worlds of labourers in the margins. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, development studies, management studies, and studies of north-east India, as well as to policy-makers and those in the tea industry.

Papers of a 1985 seminar jointly sponsored by the North-East India Council for Social Science Research and Sacred Heart Theological College, Shillong, India.

Globalization and Plantation Workers in North-East India is a piece of research study regarding the impacts of globalization among the workers. The impacts have been analysed thoroughly in regard to the case of Darjeeling tea industry along with the industry in relation to other regions of West Bengal and Assam of North-East India. Since this is the first Sociological study on the impacts of globalization among plantation workers, it will elucidate the positive and negative sides of present globalization process in the industry. It has also incorporated a whole lot of the assessment of changes taking place since 1991 of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalization of Indian economy in tea frontiers of North-East India. The work will be a very essential reference book for the researchers who are going to contribute more for the literature on plantation study in Indian in near future.

A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.