Book Series: Radical Perspectives

Open access for this publication was provided by the following grant: Knowledge Unlatched - 100992

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space.

1 online resource (xiii, 324 pages) :

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

Includes bibliographical references and index

Nature's jungle, empire's garden -- Borderlands, rice eaters, and tea growers -- Migrants in the garden : expanding the frontier -- Old lords and "improving" regimes -- Bringing progress, restoring culture -- Language and literature : framing identity -- Contesting publics : raced communities and gendered history

Print version record

Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified]: HathiTrust Digital Library

Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002

digitized 2021

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