Coolies of Capitalism - Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour (2016)

"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.-- Provided by Publisher Content 5 Introduction 9 1 Tea in the Colony 23 1.1 Introduction 23 1.2 Discovery of Tea and the Skills of Chinese Work 24 1.3 Framing Plantations and encounters with the Lazy Native Worker 28 1.4 Experimental Plantations and the search for Immobilised Worker 31 1.5 Privatising the discovery and the emergence of the Assam Company 34 1.6 Early Plantation enterprise and Kachari as the Ideal Worker 38 1.7 Assamese peasant as coolie labour 45 1.8 The Migrant Worker solution 47 2 Contracts, Contractors and Coolies 51 2.1 Introduction 51 2.2 Protection, Exceptionalism and the beginnings of the Assam Contract 53 2.3 The ‘Protection’ of Private arrest and the construction of managerial authority 60 2.4 Assam Contract and the ‘Protection’ of the Coolie 74 2.5 Act XIII and the Assam Contract(s) system 80 2.6 Contractors, Sardars and the Assam Contract System 83 2.7 Discourse of reform and the new contract regime 90 2.8 Practice of Free System 98 2.9 Free System in Surma Valley 101 2.10 Conclusions 108 3 Unpopular Assam 113 3.1 Introduction 113 3.2 Assam as a Lost World 116 3.3 Problems of Life and Work on the Tea Gardens 118 3.4 Songs and Oral Traditions of Tea Workers 123 3.5 Deception of Recruiters and the Fear of Assam 127 3.6 The ‘Choice’ of Assam 131 3.7 Conclusions -1 4 Drink and Work 135 4.1 Introduction 135 4.2 Colonial Policy and Taxing the “Coolie Drink.” 136 4.3 Drink as Work Stimulant 137 4.4 Industrial Tea, Intensification of Work and the Intoxicant Drink 140 4.5 Drink and the Emerging Working Culture 149 4.6 The Controls of Drink and Drinking Workers 153 4.7 Conclusions 156 5 Dustoor of Plantations 157 5.1 Introduction 157 5.2 Dustoor and Assam Tea Gardens in the late nineteenth century 162 5.3 The Shifting Authority of Manager 166 5.4 The Rice Question 173 5.5 The Occasions of Tea Garden 176 5.6 Coolie Lines 182 5.7 Work Place, Authority Structure and Issues of Tasks and Wages 185 5.8 Notions of Honour 201 5.9 Violence as Protest, Protest as Violence 204 5.10 A Collective Will to Leave 208 5.11 Conclusions 211 6 Gandhi baba ka Hookum 213 6.1 Introduction 213 6.2 Situating the Episode 216 6.3 Markets and New Networks of Information 219 6.4 Anxieties of Colonial State and Nationalists 220 6.5 The Legitimacy of the Manager 222 6.6 Changing Practices of Work, Life and Control on Sylhet Plantations 226 6.7 A New Will to Leave 229 7 Epilogue 233 Bibliography 239