"Transforming Agrarian Communities of Tribals, Aboriginals and Peasants into Coolies: Assam Tea Plantations during colonial rule" a talk by Dr. Rana Behal at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 3rd September 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar on ‘Transforming Agrarian Communities of Tribals, Aboriginals and Peasants into Coolies: Assam Tea Plantations during colonial rule’ by Dr. Rana Behal, Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi, Delhi

Abstract : The tea plantations were the earliest commercial enterprise established by private British capital in the heavily forested and tropical Assam during the 1830 and 1840s. These plantations employed a large number of wage labour for the production of tea for export to the West during the colonial rule. The frenetic pace of growth of tea plantations between 1860s and 1900 with the opening up of new plantations and further expansion of the older ones generated a huge demand for labour. The absence and the inability of the planters to attract adequate local supply necessitated import of migrant labour from other parts of British India.  Thus began the process of large-scale recruitment and transportation of migrant labour into Assam, which came to be known in official and non-official parlour as ‘coolie trade.’ This coolie trade, starting during 1860s, initiated the process that transformed the lives of over two million tribal and peasant communities of Chotanagpur, Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and Upper India into tea plantation coolies in the course three quarters of a century. The transformation process began from the very day they were recruited and pushed on their journey towards Assam. During the course of this transformation the persona and individual identities of these communities were subsumed into anonymous ‘gangs’ and ‘muster rolls’ to be confined in the ‘depots’ (during the journey) and the ‘coolie lines’ on arrival in the plantations for the rest of their lives. Like many of their counterparts they have been consigned to the category of ‘people without history’. They were described and treated as a ‘mass’ or ‘mob’ of nameless multitudes. The indenture regime began to identify labour only by numbers and cancelled their names. Their individual identities disappeared from the plantation and the colonial records and instead they were reduced to being mere numbers. The individual identities and details of daily lives of labouring communities remained confined within the social, cultural, but totally insulated, world of coolie lines of which they themselves left no records. Denied even a semblance of any education for generations and, as a result, remaining unlettered the labour produced no written records of their own.  The colonial state, which facilitated the mobilization of tens of thousands of them annually to become coolies in the Assam tea plantations, simply enumerated them every year under very elaborate administrative norms and rules framed for this purpose. It took nearly three quarters of a century since the organized system of recruitment and employment for Assam plantation was put in place that a Government constituted Royal Commission on Labour in India in 1930 felt obliged to hold personal interviews with some of the labourers. These interviews, however, were of perfunctory nature of one liner question answers. The small conversation the labourers had with the members of the Royal Commission hardly made any impact on latter’s general perception of them. Instead the Royal Commission on Labour in India in 1931 reinforced and ariticulated a steriotyapical perception of emigrant labour in Assam tea plantation which acquired a ‘folklorists’ tradition among the colonial bureaucracy.  Given the nature and severe limitation of colonial documentary sources how does one recovers the ‘voice’ of the labour and construct the stories of their social, cultural and personal lives while working and living in the isolated enclave tea plantations of Assam. In this paper we will make an effort to construct the story of coolie life in the plantations.  This paper will make an attempt to tell the story of their lives based on the snippets of information gleaned from the same colonial documents from which we are trying to tell rest of the story of planters and plantations. 

Speaker : Dr. Rana Behal is a Ph.D. in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and has been a Visiting Professor, Cornell University, USA, Syracuse University, USA, Oberlin College, Ohio, USA.  His publications include Forms of Labour Protest in the Assam Valley Tea Plantations 1900-1947, The Calcutta Historical Journal, Vol. IX, No.1, July-December 1984, Forms of Labour Protest in the Assam Valley Tea Plantations, 1900-1930, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XX, No.4, Review of Political Economy, January, 1985, ‘Changing Paradigms of South Asian Labour Historiography’ in Marcel van der Linden (ed.), Labour History Beyond Borders: Concepts and Explorations, ITH Conference Proceedings, Vol. 44, 2010, ‘Coolies, Recruiters and Planters: Migration of Indian Labour to the Southeast Asian and Assam Plantations during Colonial Rule’ Crossroads Asia Working Paper Series, Bonn, Germany, No. 9, 2013. He was Fellow, Crossroad Asia Program, Centre for  Development Studies, Geographic Sciences, Free University, Berlin, Germany, from January to July 2013 and currently teaches at Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi.

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