Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour

by Nitin Varma

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110461152
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	12/05/2016
Series:	Work in Global and Historical Perspective , #2
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nitin Varma, Department of Asian and African Studies an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Tea in the Colony 15

1.1 Introduction 15

1.2 Discovery of Tea and the Skills of Chinese Work 16

1.3 Framing Plantations and encounters with the Lazy Native Worker 21

1.4 Experimental Plantations and the search for Immobilised Worker 24

1.5 Privatising the discovery and the emergence of the Assam Company 27

1.6 Early Plantation enterprise and Kachari as the Ideal Worker 31

1.7 Assamese peasant as coolie labour 37

1.8 The Migrant Worker solution 39

2 Contracts, Contractors and Coolies 43

2.1 Introduction 43

2.2 Protection, Exceptionalism and the beginnings of the Assam Contract 45

2.3 The 'Protection' of Private arrest and the construction of managerial authority 52

2.4 Assam Contract and the 'Protection' of the Coolie 66

2.5 Act XIII and the Assam Contract(s) system 71

2.6 Contractors, Sardars and the Assam Contract System 75

2.7 Discourse of reform and the new contract regime 82

2.8 Practice of Free System 90

2.9 Free System in Surma Valley 93

2.10 Conclusions 100

3 Unpopular Assam 105

3.1 Introduction 105

3.2 Assam as a Lost World 108

3.3 Problems of Life and Work on the Tea Gardens 110

3.4 Songs and Oral Traditions of Tea Workers 115

3.5 Deception of Recruiters and the Fear of Assam 119

3.6 The 'Choice' of Assam 123

3.7 Conclusions 125

4 Drink and Work 127

4.1 Introduction 127

4.2 Colonial Policy and Taxing the "Coolie Drink." 128

4.3 Drink as Work Stimulant 129

4.4 Industrial Tea, Intensification of Work and the Intoxicant Drink 132

4.5 Drink and the Emerging Working Culture 141

4.6 The Controls of Drink and Drinking Workers 145

4.7 Conclusions 148

5 Oustoor of Plantations 149

5.1 Introduction 149

5.2 Dusloor and Assam Tea Gardens in the late nineteenth century 154

5.3 The Shifting Authority of Manager 158

5.4 The Rice Question 165

5.5 The Occasions of Tea Garden 168

5.6 Coolie Lines 174

5.7 Work Place, Authority Structure and Issues of Tasks and Wages 177

5.8 Notions of Honour 193

5.9 Violence as Protest, Protest as Violence 196

5.10 A Collective Wilt to Leave 200

5.11 Conclusions 203

6 Gandhi baba ka Hookum 205

6.1 Introduction 205

6.2 Situating the Episode 208

6.3 Markets and New Networks of Information 211

6.4 Anxieties of Colonial State and Nationalists 212

6.5 The Legitimacy of the Manager 214

6.6 Changing Practices of Work, Life and Control on Sylhet Plantations 218

6.7 A New Will to Leave 221

7 Epilogue 225

Bibliography 231