Of planters, ecology, and labor: Plantation worlds, human history and nonhuman actors in Eastern India (Assam), 1840--1910

Situated in the intersection of environmental and labor history, my project looks at the tea plantations in Assam between 1840 and 1910 as a dynamic site where plantation practice, everyday lives, plant biology and environmental concerns intersected in complex and indeterminate ways. In effect, I am interested in understanding how this ubiquitous form of imperial commerce was lived and shaped, in other words 'embodied'. I take a comparative approach in my first three chapters to analyze aspects of this embodiment: vernacular literature (in Bengali and Assamese), labor relations, the planter press and unpublished memoirs, and the legal form of the 'contract' in the Assam gardens in the mid nineteenth century. The economic importance of the 'discovery' of Assam tea in the backdrop of British imperial rivalry with China is discussed with reference to more immediate concerns like tribal frontiers, communication bottlenecks, disease susceptibility and labor acclimatization. More importantly, I argue that this history of tea in India cannot be understood by limiting ourselves to human actors alone; as agents and price indices, climate, soil quality, rainfall, microbes and pest bionomics provide parallel historical insights of an imperial commodity that depended more on quality than quantity. My concluding chapters investigate this techno-scientific and social interface between biota, weather, entomology and plantation practice by looking at planter correspondences, field reports, institutional manuals and the overall scientific character of this tea experiment. In my estimation, these plantations were as much an ecological and cultural challenge as an economic one; in fact, they were closely related. Using this paradigm, I also examine the limits to the historiography of "improvement" associated with the Assam tea enterprise in colonial India, to make an "empire's garden [out of] nature's jungle" as it were. I argue that this historiography, drawing on the tradition of Victorian botanical knowledge and progress, does not make clear the innumerable challenges, variables and actants associated with the 'science' of tea making for people on the ground, especially the planters and laborers. Using entomological practices and debates around climate here, I suggest that this story of nature within Victorian imperial botany is one of struggle and unpredictability rather than the mere transposition and transfer of plants and ideas. If knowledge was power in the botanical museumization of and experimentation with exotic flora, there was much in the natural world that was protean and unmanageable. More importantly, I argue that the destiny of this Victorian enterprise was shaped not by the seamless hegemony of metropolitan actors like Sir Joseph Banks, Thiselton-Dyer, Robert Kyd, Kew or the Calcutta Botanical Gardens alone but more fundamentally by the work of itinerant planters, laborers, resident agri-botanists and insects in her many colonies. Indeed, human expertise and power was socially restricted and materially conditioned by factors beyond his immediate purview as have been indicated. The aim of this project is therefore to draw into one analytic field the importance of the biological and the environmental in social histories of the tea enterprise in colonial eastern India. It also critically reassesses the imputed and uncontested hegemony of the 'human' in histories of imperial plant transfer and colonialism and the Assam tea enterprise in particular.;Overall, I suggest that neither the explanatory framework of 'progress' nor histories of labor struggle (though relevant) fully exhaust or illuminate the operational complexity of these estates especially in the nineteenth century. Discursive planning and attempts at structural order in matters of labor recruitment, wages and legislation had to go hand-in-hand with matters of practical cultivation that regularly encountered the unknown. The plantation world embodied human frailties, violence and resistance as much as crop variants, pest occurrence, damaging rain and price fluctuation. We need to account for them as two sides of the same coin and as equal participants in its historical destiny. My project is not a romantic apology of the difficulties involved in the establishment of the tea industry, nor is it historically blinkered to the social and bodily excesses it involved. But I do not use these plantations as a springboard to explain immanent Marxist theories of capitalism nor are they historical foundations to understand social processes of Assamese nationalism and ideas of ethnic homelands. I examine these plantations (and especially in what I call its first phase of expansion in the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth) qua plantations and the manifest human and nonhuman histories they spawned. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).