Coolies of Capitalism Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour

1 Tea in the Colony   15
1.1 Introduction 15
1.2 Discovery of Tea and the Skills of Chinese Work  16
1.3 Framing Plantations and encounters with the
Lazy Native Worker  21
1.4 Experimental Plantations and the search for
Immobilised Worker  24
1.5 Privatising the discovery and the emergence of the
Assam Company  27
1.6 Early Plantation enterprise and Kachari as the Ideal Worker  31
1.7 Assamese peasant as coolie labour  37
1.8 The Migrant Worker solution  39
2 Contracts, Contractors and Coolies   43
2.1 Introduction  43
2.2 Protection, Exceptionalism and the beginnings of the Assam
Contract  45
2.3 The ‘Protection’ of Private arrest and the construction of managerial
authority  52
2.4 Assam Contract and the ‘Protection’ of the Coolie  66
2.5 Act XIII and the Assam Contract(s) system  71
2.6 Contractors, Sardars and the Assam Contract System  75
2.7 Discourse of reform and the new contract regime  82
2.8 Practice of Free System  90
2.9 Free System in Surma Valley  93
2.10 Conclusions  100
3 Unpopular Assam   105
3.1 Introduction  105
3.2 Assam as a Lost World  108
3.3 Problems of Life and Work on the Tea Gardens  110
3.4 Songs and Oral Traditions of Tea Workers  115
3.5 Deception of Recruiters and the Fear of Assam  119
3.6 The ‘Choice’ of Assam  123
3.7 Conclusions  125

4 Drink and Work   127
4.1 Introduction  127
4.2 Colonial Policy and Taxing the “Coolie Drink.”  128
4.3 Drink as Work Stimulant  129
4.4 Industrial Tea, Intensification of Work and the
Intoxicant Drink  132
4.5 Drink and the Emerging Working Culture  141
4.6 The Controls of Drink and Drinking Workers  145
4.7 Conclusions  148
5 Dustoor of Plantations   149
5.1 Introduction  149
5.2 Dustoor and Assam Tea Gardens in the late
nineteenth century  154
5.3 The Shifting Authority of Manager  158
5.4 The Rice Question  165
5.5 The Occasions of Tea Garden  168
5.6 Coolie Lines  174
5.7 Work Place, Authority Structure and Issues of Tasks and
Wages  177
5.8 Notions of Honour  193
5.9 Violence as Protest, Protest as Violence  196
5.10 A Collective Will to Leave  200
5.11 Conclusions  203
6 Gandhi baba ka Hookum   205
6.1 Introduction  205
6.2 Situating the Episode  208
6.3 Markets and New Networks of Information  211
6.4 Anxieties of Colonial State and Nationalists  212
6.5 The Legitimacy of the Manager  214
6.6 Changing Practices of Work, Life and Control on
Sylhet Plantations  218
6.7 A New Will to Leave  221
7 Epilogue   225
Bibliography   231