The women were plucking the tea leaves in the sweltering heat, occasionally stopping to wipe the sweat away or have a drink of water. There was no shade in this part of the garden and many of them put a cloth on their head to protect themselves from the scorching sun. The humidity was sapping every ounce of our energy. Suddenly, without warning, the sky turned grey. Torrential rain accompanied by thunderstorms struck and soon turned into a hailstorm. The women put their bags on their heads and ran to the shade of the trees. My responses, in contrast, had frozen and they dragged me to this place of relative safety. As we sat down under the shade trees, I commented on their fast reflexes. Rupal said with a smile, âWhen survival is a struggle, you learn. There is no respite, if it is too hot it becomes impossible to move; in the rain, especially if there are hailstorms like this, it is too dangerous to work. In the winter months, to work in the extreme cold and mist in the morning is not easy. But you learn to survive and make your way through itâ. Ramila added, âAnd we often manage to do that with a smile even. The troubles are many, but you have to keep struggling and above all smilingâ.
Soon the hailstorm subsided but the rain continued unrelentingly. The women as well as their supervisors continued to wait for it to subside slightly. The sight of the managerâs car arriving in the distance seemed to worry them. âSurely in this heavy rain, the manager would not expect you to be working?â I enquired. Shalini replied, âHis expectations have nothing to do with our convenience. If he decides that we need to pluck in this rain, then we will have to pluck. He is all-in-allâ. Sure enough, the managerâs car stopped in the section and he shouted at the women and the supervisors, calling them lazy and deceitful for taking the slightest pretext for not working. The supervisors quickly absolved themselves of the blame by pointing out that the women refused to listen to them. A few of the women objected to this accusation and tried to reason with the manager about the difficulty of working in such torrential downpour. But these timid protests were quickly shot down by him with threats of dismissing the workers or suspending them from work. Once he made sure that the women had gone back to plucking, he got back into his car and made his way to the next section.
The women continued plucking. They mimicked the manager, poking fun at him alternating it with abusing him for his lack of concern. Rather than shaking them the managerâs tirade seemed to have amused them as they kept imitating him and breaking into peals of laughter. Concerned that they were getting drenched I asked them what would happen if they got sick. Pankhuri laughed and said, âWe will not come then tomorrow. We are allowed to take sick leave and he cannot say anything about that. In fact, some of the women will make use of this and just call in sick using the day for other work they have. You mark my wordsâ. Bandini remarked, âIt is actually silly if you ask me. There is just half an hour left, how much can we pluck in this rain? But he is the authority; we can trick him but not oppose him. As you grow older, you will also realise thisâ. Pankhuri continued, âThis is very true. There is always authority at home, at work, everywhere and you have to listen to them. That is the way life is. When you get married and go to someone elseâs house, you will understand this. It happens here, it also happens in your cities. The forms might be different but it operates everywhere especially for us women (aurat jaat). You have to learn to deal with it but you cannot disobey themâ.
(Field-notes, Daahlia, 12.10.09)
Images of women plucking tea leaves adorning the covers of tea packages and in commercials is familiar to most of us. These happy, smiling women doing their work surrounded by the beauty of lush green tea plantations are lasting images associated with tea. However, the extract above, taken from field-notes from Daahlia (a plantation in Dooars where a part of this study was located), tells a somewhat different story. It gives us glimpses of the power hierarchy and the way exchanges are structured around it in the tea plantations. Even a cursory reading of the history of tea plantation labour demonstrates that reality could not be more at odds with these images of women pluckers. The images, in fact, illustrate the complex processes through which constructions are embedded within the way plantation labour was shaped and lies at the very core of any understanding of the tea plantation.
This book is a narrative of people placed within constraints and how they negotiate with and within them. Working with women workers in two tea plantations in Dooars in North Bengal, India â Kaalka and Daahlia â this book illustrates that their struggle for survival is neither simple nor uni-directional; rather it is a complex, often contradictory and multi-layered process. Framed by the recognition that gender identity is complex and fragmented by multiple other identities, this book maps the gendered nature of the space and labour in the tea plantations. It makes an intervention in a post-crisis period in mapping the workersâ narratives about their lived experiences and struggles in the times of economic, political and social tumult in the tea plantations of West Bengal.
Setting the context
The sociological exploration of tea plantations must of necessity begin with a brief exposition of the history of plantations in India. Plantations began as a colonial enterprise of the European powers in subtropical and tropical regions, growing world market staples and accruing profit from the same. The plantation system was characterised by commercial agriculture as the focus of the enterprise specialising in mono-crop production and a capitalist system where the value of labour, land and equipment required large investments of money (Mintz, 1959). Others (e.g. Daniel et al., 1992; Raman, 2010) have pointed out the coincidence of the flourishing of the tea plantations with the development of some features of global capitalism. Indeed, the formation of a world market accelerated the demand on an international scale for sugar, tea, tobacco etc. (Daniel et al., 1992: 4). The movement of these commodities was made possible through the opening of new transport routes and other technical changes.
Labour, even more than land or capital, was a central focus in the development and flourishing of the plantations (Thompson, 1935; Sharma and Das, 2009). The recruitment of labour in all plantations generally took the form of import through various coercive means â slavery, indentured labour, unfree bonded labour (Thompson, 1935). The history of these plantations in many ways is a history of its labour.
The plantation system has historically also been characterised by a rigid social hierarchy and a high degree of centralisation. As Raman (2010) points out, the labouring class was reined in by a patriarchy framed within caste, class and racial hierarchies. The relationship between the planters and the workers operated within a culture of patronage whereby the planter was constructed as the benevolent father figure (Chatterjee, 2003). Behind this mask, however, lay a relation of coercion enforced through social distance, hierarchy of orders and a pyramidal social structure with the planter at the top. The roles of the labouring and employing classes remained sharply distinguished. Indeed, the operation of hierarchy is inherent in every stage of the plantation right from the recruitment process. The plantation hierarchy is divided into four categories: manager, staff, sub-staff and workers. In different locations, these hierarchies mapped on certain social orders, e.g. in India, the labour force hailed not only from the economically lower strata but also socially they were mostly dalits1 and/or tribal.
Plantations in India
The broad history of the plantations in India followed the same trajectory as elsewhere (see Mintz, 1959; Beckford, 1972; Sudama, 1979). They began as a colonial enterprise in the two primary tea-growing belts â in the south and in the north-east. The north-east tea belt consists of Assam, Darjeeling, Dooars and Terai and the south includes the Nilgiris, Anamallai and various parts of Kerala and Karnataka. Vast tracts of forest lands were transferred to the planters as free grants or were given away at nominal prices. Besides accruing the benefits from suitable land policies, the planters were favoured by fiscal policies in the form of tax and duty concessions (Raman, 2010: 45).
Griffiths (1967) traces the steady growth of the tea plantations in eastern India till 1861. This success resulted in tea plantations springing up without any consideration to the suitability of land or availability of labour which then caused many of them to crash, thus leading to a crisis (Griffiths, 1967: 96â108). Some of the companies were successful in riding out the crisis and maintained steady growth till 1899. During this period, tea plantations started developing in South India. Griffiths (1967) identifies some aspects in which the development of the tea industry in South India differed from its north-eastern counterpart. First, the industry in the south was entirely located on the hills unlike in the north-east, where a bulk was grown in the plains. Moreover, while in Assam and Bengal tea was the only plantation crop, in the south it grew as a subsidiary crop to coffee and only began to be cultivated seriously after the coffee industry declined (Griffiths, 1967: 156).
By the close of the nineteenth century monopolistically controlled global capital dominated the plantation sector, with European coastal trading companies becoming involved in the plantation economy as managing agents, bankers, shippers, brokers and distributors (Raman, 2010: 64â65). This was coupled with their growing influence within the various legislative councils and assemblies. The growth of local capital, on the other hand, was inhibited by lack of land resources, shortage of foreign exchange and inadequate shipping facilities. But the period of the Great Depression followed by the Second World War in the 1930s and 1940s provided local capital a transient phase of expansion (Raman, 2010).
In the post-colonial phase up until the 1970s, there was no immediate transfer of ownership. Local capital was sidelined by multinationals. It was a gradual process of increasing joint ownerships and flourishing indigenous owners. After the 1970s pan-Indian capital became prominent (Raman, 2010: 164). In the recent years of neo-liberal globalisation, tea plantations in India have been confronted with major challenges, divergent from though interconnected to the larger world capitalist economy. After a peak in production and profit in 1998 the period from 1999 to the 2000s saw a crisis in the plantations that reached its nadir around 2003â2004 in the entire country (Dasgupta, 2009). Some of the important features of this were the imposition of global and regional trade agreements, the reconstitution of capital, the continuing mis-governance of the estates and transfer of the ensuing crisis in the tea economy onto local labour as a strategy to ride out the crisis (Raman, 2010: 165).
The crisis in the plantations in Dooars needs to be located within the larger crisis of tea in India which was a product of both wider global phenomena and immediate local factors. It was a fallout of âaccumulation by dispossessionâ (Harvey, 2003). This cannot be just attributed to the neo-liberal processes of globalisation but has to be contextualised within the history of its evolution with varying phases of incorporation, accumulation/dispossession and shifting relations of production. Thus to analyse the crisis we need to recognise the local specificities within global relations. Giddens (1990: 64) observed that the intensification of social relations had connected distinct localities such that their local happenings became linked to the global and vice versa. There are many studies concerning how the larger crisis of the capitalist system manifests itself in various micro settings (e.g. Harvey, 2003; Banga, 2014).
The outbreak of the crisis in the tea plantations in India can be traced to a number of issues. In the world market, there was an overproduction of tea along with a slump in demand. In the Indian market, production of tea outstripped its consumption which, on top of a fall in exports, resulted in an accumulated net stock in the market (Raman, 2010). This overproduction was largely due to the encouragement by globalising agencies like the World Bank of the production of tropical crops for what it construes as âcomparative advantageâ (Bernstein and Campling, 2006). This was coupled with the strategies of some of the lead firms in this buyer-driven commodity chain (Raman, 2010). The resultant growth in the world market and the persistent over-supply of tea since the 1990s caused a sharp crash in the price of the commodity in the 2000s. While the domestic consumption of tea had increased, it could not compensate for the fall in exports in terms of tea price. The Indian government and the Tea Board, by subsidising the product by offering huge incentives, also took a policy decision which further exacerbated the crisis (Raman, 2010).
The trade regime in the region was a further factor severely affecting the Indian tea market. South Asian countries including India had agreed to function according to WTO and SAARC agreements. The subsequent dismantling of quantitative restrictions and the introduction of tariffs for local capital meant that the hitherto protected local capital had to face increased competition. Indiaâs import tariff now increased to 100 per cent is still below the 150 per cent tariff imposed on processed agricultural commodities (Raman, 2010). Conversely the Regional Free Trade treaty signed by the SAARC countries has been of advantage to the other countries, leading to higher levels of import penetration into the hitherto protected domestic markets in India (Raman, 2010: 152â153). The influx of tea from Sri Lanka, Vietnam etc. has taken a heavy toll on profits in the Indian tea sector.
The tea companies in Dooars, which mainly cater to the domestic market, could still have coped with this crisis in the industry. But to this fall in tea prices were added specific local causes. Scholars, policy makers and practitioners have blamed various factors from low prices to the rise in competition, ageing plantations, the flourishing of small growers, off season costs and the absence of tax relief for the specific plight of Dooars (Dasgupta, 2009; Raman 2010; Chaudhuri, 2013). The local manifestation of the crisis is described in detail in Chapter 3.
Legal regime
Although the plantation industry provided employment to more than a million workers, there was no comprehensive legislation regulating the conditions of labour in the industry, even in the post-Independence period. The Tea District Emigrant Labour Act, 1932, applying only to Assam, regulated merely the conditions of recruitment of labour for employment in the tea gardens of Assam. The Workmenâs Compensation Act, 1923 which applied to estates growing cinchona, coffee, rubber or tea, did not confer any substantial benefit on plantation labour as there were few accidents in plantations (Raman, 2010). The other Labour Acts, like the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Industrial Employment Standing Orders Act, 1946 and the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, benefitted plantation labour only to a very limited extent. It was only in 1951 that new legislation in the form of the Plantation Labour Act was passed. This became a landmark for plantation workers as it signified the first major attempt to regulate their working and living conditions. The Act was an all-India measure to regulate the conditions of plantation labour. It applied in the first instance to tea, coffee, rubber and cinchona plantations, but the state governments could apply it to any other plantation. The Act made it mandatory for the employers to provide certain welfare measures and imposed restrictions on working hours (Bhowmik, 1992). It prescribed educational facilities for children and crèches for toddlers, hospital facilities for plantations engaging more than 1000 workers, recreational facilities, and drinking water and sanitation in the workersâ houses. The enforcement of these provisions of the Act had the potential to better the conditions of work for the plantation labourers. But a combination of a lack of resources and a lack of will on the part of both state and management meant that some of the ...
