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

Description

“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. Content Introduction 1 Tea in the Colony 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Discovery of Tea and the Skills of Chinese Work 1.3 Framing Plantations and encounters with the Lazy Native Worker 1.4 Experimental Plantations and the search for Immobilised Worker 1.5 Privatising the discovery and the emergence of the Assam Company 1.6 Early Plantation enterprise and Kachari as the Ideal Worker 1.7 Assamese peasant as coolie labour 1.8 The Migrant Worker solution 2 Contracts, Contractors and Coolies 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Protection, Exceptionalism and the beginnings of the Assam Contract 2.3 The ‘Protection’ of Private arrest and the construction of managerial authority 2.4 Assam Contract and the ‘Protection’ of the Coolie 2.5 Act XIII and the Assam Contract(s) system 2.6 Contractors, Sardars and the Assam Contract System 2.7 Discourse of reform and the new contract regime 2.8 Practice of Free System 2.9 Free System in Surma Valley 2.10 Conclusions 3 Unpopular Assam 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Assam as a Lost World 3.3 Problems of Life and Work on the Tea Gardens 3.4 Songs and Oral Traditions of Tea Workers 3.5 Deception of Recruiters and the Fear of Assam 3.6 The ‘Choice’ of Assam 3.7 Conclusions 4 Drink and Work 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Colonial Policy and Taxing the “Coolie Drink.” 4.3 Drink as Work Stimulant 4.4 Industrial Tea, Intensification of Work and the Intoxicant Drink 4.5 Drink and the Emerging Working Culture 4.6 The Controls of Drink and Drinking Workers 4.7 Conclusions 5 Dustoor of Plantations 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Dustoor and Assam Tea Gardens in the late nineteenth century 5.3 The Shifting Authority of Manager 5.4 The Rice Question 5.5 The Occasions of Tea Garden 5.6 Coolie Lines 5.7 Work Place, Authority Structure and Issues of Tasks and Wages 5.8 Notions of Honour 5.9 Violence as Protest, Protest as Violence 5.10 A Collective Will to Leave 5.11 Conclusions 6 Gandhi baba ka Hookum 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Situating the Episode 6.3 Markets and New Networks of Information 6.4 Anxieties of Colonial State and Nationalists 6.5 The Legitimacy of the Manager 6.6 Changing Practices of Work, Life and Control on Sylhet Plantations 6.7 A New Will to Leave 7 Epilogue Bibliography