Narrativisation and Hybridization as Methodological Techniques for Understanding Metanoia

Narrativisation and Hybridisation Narrativisation is what we all do as part of our discipline as academics. Discursive Sociology or Anthropology presumes that the oral tradition is crucial for our understanding of tradition, and accepts the hold it has over us. Therefore, the presence of God, Gods and Godess’ is never in question for us, as we accept liturgy, dogma, belief, rituals as part of the paraphernalia of the ‘believing subject’. What is important, however, is the authenticity with which we accept the faith of others as real, or true. It’s not what they say, or feel, or think, it’s about how intensely they carry the traditions which they have inherited. The existence of the believing subject is not to be doubted, how ever much we may doubt his/ her/ their representational form of faith. In cultures of segmentalisation, we know that there can be a huge divide between the stances of worship and the statistics for child abuse, rape, or the prevalence of AIDs as a statistical reminder that celibacy has its index of deviation. To make progress, Durkheim argues that individual originality must be able to express itself. Crime is thought to be the lowest order, while visionary thought the highest. Crime is considered ‘normal’ in society, as it occurs everywhere, and is therefore not pathological. When there is an increase in crime rates or a decrease due to ideological reasons, how can we understand what is punishment? For instance, Socrates was a criminal. Freedom today is the consequence of many such ruptures. (Durkheim 1964) Through the intellectual generosity of a Jesuit pope, we see so many new ideas which grow in collaboration with interchurch symbiosis. This is one of the most dynamic moments of theological transformation and ecumenicism. So, it is not moral codes or ethics, that we are here to discuss, as these will vary from society to society. What we are concerned with is how people feel about the consequences of belonging to one faith or another, or to none at all, and how they work with questions of metanoia or transformation by the essential work of experiencing the divine (Visvanathan 2007, 2010). While much of the Sociology of Religion drew from the atheist representations of Emile Durkheim, which are very persuasive, we know that the nature of the accident of birth involves belonging to one faith or another, or some ideology which communicates that its ideas are sacred, and religious faith does not play a part necessarily (Durkheim, 1968, Ambedkar 2013). There are however questions of contiguity (where people absorb the faith of neighbours or friends, and start reading their holy books), or it may be chance encounters with those who have found a path. This path is so dramatic that it reveals itself as the way forward. This is then communicated to others through poetry, music or theatre, including dance forms. Clearly then, much of the beauty of religious expression is through art forms, which could include competitions, memorization and mastery over texts, in the form of poetry, prose or drama, or all night performances on holy days. What draws people together then is not birth membership, but the acceptance that this is the way by which they can excel. Remaining with in the enclosed and protective spaces of family, neighbourhood, state and the educational and institutional forms endorsed by them, the child is socialized to belong and act as a member of an association of believers (Durkheim). There is no question of refusal to belong, the strictures and conventions are many. As a result, they accept the expenditures involved in church festivals and life cycle rituals, and even if the family goes into debt, it is understood that membership is the most important thing in life. Without it, neither marriages, births or deaths can be registered. There is no place, in such a structure, for a floating population of believers. Everything is circumscribed, and written in stone, metaphorically speaking, or in canonical text. The ten commandments of Moses became an essential part of Church doctrine but as the genocide in Palestine showed neither the prime minister of Palestine, nor the President of America saw the memorized code “ Thou shalt not kill” as significant. However, with migration to other countries, the Kerala Christians are faced with new questions and problems. People fall in love across denominations, some join groups that their parents know nothing about, some join the groups which are free wheeling and spontaneous (Pentecostal groups for instance) but even if it is to join another religious association, tradition demands that they maintain the identity given to them by birth. They can never move away from this identity. Hybridisation is the primary aspect of conforming to traditional identities and yet affirming the need to belong to a completely different set of values. Once this hybridization is accepted, people feel more comfortable, and they understand that they are part of these osmotic structures which understand their needs. What is significant is that border crossing is hard to do, while belonging to the group that one was originally born in is overtly prescribed by family and associational pressure. This is because socialization during childhood, and the idea that free will operates in anonymity means that people don’t necessarily talk about deviation. Pierre Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice wrote about strategies and white lies. People conform, but as every adolescent knows error, negligence and destructive tendencies brought about by gluttony and boredom are rife. As a result, whether in democracy or dictatorship negligence is sometimes an attribute that is permitted or for those in authority it is permitted to ‘turn a blind eye.’ This is certainly the reason why the passivity of communities which are seen to be tradition bound, but not tyrannical allow for children to grow up in cultures of freedom and play. As children they play with one another, aware that there are differences, but they do not yet have a vocabulary of contempt, hate and hierarchy. Once they go to educational institutions, there is a difference in the way minorities are treated, or if the institutions are run by minorities, the reverse. This leads to interesting possibilities for hybridization to extend and flourish. During the Nehruvian era, which lasted from 1947 to 2000, a certain atmosphere prevailed where education was seen to be a ladder towards mobility and freedom. However, with the logo “Garv se Kaho Hum Hindu Hai” and the destruction of the Babri Masjid which has been documented extensively, Indians began to feel the emphases on caste, hierarchy, and the milieux associated with the texts which were representative of mythological and legendary accounts of a 5000 year old past. These legends were represented earlier with great artistic license, as a shared cultural space made possible by the dominant culture of Hinduism. For instance, people enjoyed the scripting of the Mahabharat and Ramayana in a way that proved that subcontinental identity depended on the ability to share a common symbolic idiom. Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger suggested that where cultural adaptation is recognized between oppositional communities, it is because some frame of mutuality exists. When there is enmity, this dialogue disappears, whether in language or in performative spaces of theatre, dance, music and painting and allied arts. Hybridisation becomes threatening, purism is foregrounded and eclectism begins to dwindle. When there is no longer the possibility of translation between these hostile groups who were once dyadic and enjoyed their traditional interchanges, there is silence and segregation. Blasphemy, lies, heresy, pollution , are all terms that are identified with disrespect to individuals, collectivites and practices. Ofcourse, people have strong feelings about that which is set apart or holy and they respond with great intensity when something which is felt very deeply is disrupted, disobeyed or reviled. The danger lies in the ritual paraphernalia which has no respect for human rights, or in other ways denigrate the freedom and sensibilities of those who are seen to be lesser. Women, the poor and those who have no influence in society, such as the young, or the very old become the target for the contempt that society imposes on them. The sacred texts in all religions oddly represent women as lesser beings, and so also those who are born in poor or low status families. This is true for all the world religions as well as the cults associated regionally with them. The disruption of this representation of women and slaves is to treat them as beasts of burden, who may not have a say in the functioning of institutions (Arendt 1958). For many decades, after the 2nd World War, women were treated as professional equals (atleast in abstract), and had access to work and occupations, outside the home. With the contemporary shift, world over, to ancient theologies which take away what was fought for and practically won in the 20th century, women feel once again that their chances for freedom and rights have been curtailed. In traditional hegemonic culture, women are seen to be the backbone of the family. Their role is to sustain and support the ambitions and work regimes of the men in the family. Today, we are at that cusp, where industrialization has brought a decline in fertility rates world over. On the other hand, young people claim that the economic situations they are trapped in do not permit them to marry and bear children. This is as old as career trajectories in the 1970s, and the proof of this is Sylvia Hewlett’s book A Lesser Life (1986) which showed that university systems in America did not provide the stability required for women to hold jobs, or to carry pregnancies to full term. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a consolidated attempt by feminists to communicate the need for institutions to be supportive to women in matters of biological functions such as menstruation, pregnancy, birth and child rearing (Illich 1980. Mies, 1986. Merchant 1980). It is because of the severe constraints faced by young people because of migrations, ‘push- pull’ factors, the difficulty of finding jobs or keeping them, and the expenses involved in maintaining the standard of life that they aspire to that many palliative systems of care abound. Yoga, meditation and prayer become routine in this search for mental stability. Here, the Church has a part to play, because it allows young people to come together regardless of religious affiliation. This very buoyant move towards syncretism, and the osmotic nature of boundaries between different denominations is a very inspiring moment. One of the interesting moments of Keralites documenting life, is Arundhati Roy depicting her life through an autobiography of her mother Mary Roy, a former tea planter’s wife, whose domesticity was disrupted by the India-China War in 1962, and her husband’s alcoholism. She needed to get her children to safety, and send them to school. She, who was a very valued member of Mar Thoma Sabha or Society, told me in an interview in 1981, that she was descended from the Pakallomattam family. These details are all part of family lore, however far one may meander from the family tree. That lady, as a successful educationist, had gone to the courts and wrested rights to ownership of property, and the right of daughters to equal share with brothers. Ofcourse, the courts decreed that would be possible if the father had died without writing a will. Immediately after the Supreme Court Judgement (1986), it is well known that men started writing wills disinheriting daughters, and the church was complicit because it had benefitted from record keeping and tithes, and the patriarchal motivation to keep property with the male line. The promotion of patriarchy in St Thomas Christian families is promoted through the social and patronage functions of the kudumayogam, where daughters in law are generally preferred over daughters, when it comes to mandatory attendance. While Roy’s earlier fictionalized biography The God of Small Things (1977) was extolled, because it was picturesque and beautiful, its real force lay in the understanding of adultery and incest being the behaviour most demeaning to the St Thomas Christians. She hoisted both on a petard, and was feted for her courage. The same ennervating space is explored with regard to herself, in relationship to her mother. Nothing is concealed, the bitterness, the fear, the acridity: underlying it all is the sense of love which is so great, so mutually forgiving, that we understand that Roy’s two novels which are connected like the moon and earth galactically, are reminiscent of shamanism as interpreted by Mircea Eliade (1964). She throws herself in a space where the rituals of renunciation, of loss, of deep seated longing are catapulted by her onto a cosmopolitan platform. The truth is that the narratives exhort us to recognize that this is her pain, not ours. She does not prescribe her behaviour, her emotions, her reactions. It happened to her, not to us. It is this which made her say that she may have written books which are a literary success, but she herself is a failure, and being friends with failure means that she can hope to achieve results which she did not, in earlier contexts. (www. Books-cinema-poetry). How valiantly she fought as a young woman to get the infallibility rule applying to judges revoked! ( see Arundhati Roy argues for fallibility of judges in supreme court, Frontline 2002 ). In the Human Rights discourse there is a clarity of listing what crime and what evil is. In religious vocabularies there is so much variation that it is hard to distinguish what is culturally legitimate as custom, and what modern human rights based judiciary, set within constitutional imperatives, sees as crime, or more importantly evil. Wendy Doniger O’ Flaherty puts it succinctly. Sin or Paap is the result of moham (delusion) or maya (deception) in the RigVeda. So, people are freed from the sense of having committed sin while they may have done evil (O’Flaherty 1976:9). Fate, free will and grace are to be found in different locations, at different times, differently interpreted (ibid 59) . She quotes Mircea Eliade to suggest that what is true of eternity is not true in time (ibid 59). Demons have good qualities, and gods might employ trickery or be unjust. Thus the conflict between gods and demons in Hinduism does not represent a conflict. Much has been said about the segmentalizing and oppositional force of good and evil in Judaism and Christianity, or of sacred and profane; but the continuum of the sacred across good and evil in Hinduism is described as malevolent or benevolent sacred (Das 1977). Hybridity or hybridization, like fiction, extolls the virtue of difference. It is not just about being different, it is about the consquences of mutation. It is long lasting, it may continue, it may crystallise. It may follow from this, that women who have been conditioned to serve and toil, to hide their pain, to live out in secluded spaces have had boundaries which were easier to cross between 1947 and 2000. Ambedkar makes a distinction between Division of Labour, and Division of Labourers, (Ambedkar 2013: 3). According to him selection is not based on spontaneousness and aptitude but caste forces occupations on individuals based on the parents’ social status (ibid 37) Women of course are the lowest in the hierarchy regardless of occupation or caste. “By not permitting readjustment of occupations caste did not permit livelihood chances”( Ambedkar 2013:37). Further, Ambedkar says the memory of feuding is preserved by caste histories(ibid 44). For him, “indifferentism” is the greatest scourge of the caste system. Association and mutual solidarity are not possible where servitude and cruelty exist (ibid 48). There is very little, he says, to choose between excommunication and death. By opening up the doors of churches in a hospitable and non-judgemental way, many young people will survive the solitude/solitary circumstances of the 21st century ( ibid 49). Ambedkar argues that there should be social endosmosis, people should be free to collaborate on many issues, to convene, and to share interests. “Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence for fellow humans” (ibid 50). Here, he says that selection based on the category of “privilege as excellence” is to demean the rest. “Selection under such circumstances would not be a selection of the able. It would be a selection of the privileged (ibid 51).” Roland Barthes insists on making a distinction between the general, individual and particular. The juxtaposition of the individual and the particular must be foregrounded. This brings us to the distinction between fiction and the literary genre of biography, autobiography and hagiography. How can we discern the truth, and what is evaded or lost in selective memory? How does the skillful fabrication of the past impede our understanding of the relation between experience and reason? (Barthes 1986: 230) The 21st century has had problems very similar to the 1930s, where women’s roles had been identified as predominantly important in kitchen, church and kindergarten. War, capitalism and conquest have currently been the main emblems of democratically elected governments. It is frightening for many young people, and either they are assimilated so that they can be part of communities and religious configurations; or they can look to join new associations, breaking free of tradition. This is just such a time. In both of these cases, the vocabulary has not stabilized. Evangelicalism has been identified along the pivot of charismatic leaders, money, and belongingness (in transcendence and miracle cures.) It is not necessarily Pentecostalism, but revivalism that follows from this interaction between different subsects. How then do religious leaders deal with this flow of people into their churches, temples, mosques, animistic sacred groves or what Durkheim (1969) called “Association of Believers”? It is all left to chance. While the responsibility is upon the practitioners (called ecclessiastical bureaucracy by Max Weber) and their parishes, the real test lies in legal issues, and strategic action, given the fact that the State may be coercive regarding “more than three people” gathering in any forum. How can young people provide protection for their families, themselves and those in adjacent relationship to them, such as clan members, neighbours and friends? It is important that the issues concerning them individually and in collectives should be addressed promptly when they rise. The earlier forms of sociability were youth groups and senior citizen meetings. Now the Mar Thoma Church is experiencing what Zygmunt Bauman calls Liquid Modernity. Here, institutions (like electoral principles, citizen identity cards, education, medical care) have all been problematized. Nothing resembles the past with regard to constitutional structures of law and decree. Party politics has divided up people into forceful ethnic and religious groups which are stridently opposed, and yet the young are signing up digitally to say they want to live, and help others to endure the crises of the state when things are openly crumbling and moving towards greater and greater normlessness. (www. CJP). What is the role of the Church? I am reminded of the interviews I held between 2006 and 2022 in Tiruvannamalai at a welfare centre called Quo Vadis. It was initiated by Joshua Peter ( an anointed Bishop of the Arcot Lutheran Church) where he and his friends opened up an emotionally non intrusive centre where young people of any religion, any denomination, any ethnic group, any country could meet at the café, sit and chat, use the Library, speak with staff who also were counsellors, and also learn various languages in order to engage in translation of sacred books to promote religious dialogue (Visvanathan 2022). Workshops involving questions of immediacy of spiritual experience, and techniques of promoting calm and effervescence were equally significant. The Church (in its variety) promotes a certain transparency through its committees, and where ever there is corruption there is widespread noting of losses. Penance follows, checks and balances are confirmed, and rights are restored. This is the way the Church returns to order. Forgiveness is also enjoined. Just as there are holy men so also there are scions of large organisations who wish to contribute to the Church through corporate social responsibility. They feel that the long history of Christian presence in India from 52 A.D must be preserved. This too brings up the line of thought that involves shared histories, as the Evangelical Movement understands only too well. Without being polemic, we can look at how the concept of hierarchy is so instilled in the St Thomas Christians that they can only speak of survival because those in power (authoritarian figures in state craft) “permit” them to exist. We are two thousand years away from the time of the Herods, but we still have to prove that we are indeed citizens, because we are Christians, and our Hindu friends and/or family members share our fate because of their sympathy for us. Rekha Raj in a pointed remark at Manganam, in a conference on Gender and Justice October 2022, said “ Dalits are free: they can marry who they choose, so in the same family there may be Hindus or Christians”. However, one of my respondents in Tiruvannamalai, a very young woman in her early twenties, said if Dalits marry outside of their caste, they may get killed (Visvanathan in Ed. Wallenhorst and Wulf 2026). One of the things we have to understand in post Covid times is that birth is dangerous and manageable, only if there is institutional and family support. Much of life is about instinctive responses, and if men are away at work, the woman has to return to her natal family to manage the different months of vulnerability and expenses involved in relation to diet and rest and visits for pre-natal and post-natal care. With the large migration of St Thomas Christian nurses to America, Gulf, UK and New Zealand, the cost of training for young men and women has gone up substantially. They are left to themselves to handle their personal ambitions, and their family’s aspirations. These are the church’s concerns now, the dwindling attendance in local parishes, as families accompany the main bread winner (often women) and old people are left alone in the care of equally fragile or decimated households in the neighbourhood. Men and women are striving to lead normal lives, and bring up children, and yet occupational stress for educated communities are immense. They can be sent home from abroad, if they succumb to age, stress or ill health, making it difficult for children who have become used to the physical comforts of living in the West, Australia or the Gulf. Tithes are an important part of status aspirations, so the ‘envelope’ to give money for education of tribal children, or to build and renovate new churches is seen as mandatory responsibility of rapidly emptying church members, as old people die, and young are not economically self sufficient. The children or grandchildren who cannot meet the aspirations of local priests just don’t turn up. They may not even have a common linguistic frame with which to learn prayers, or follow the creed. So what we see is a rapidly dissolving church structure, and paradoxically the presence of a clergy (with their wives) who understand the relevance of memorization, music, and innate intellectual grasp of complex rites and liturgies. Many of the women who become wives of priests in the Mar Thoma Sabha are able to provide total support to their husbands, by accompanying them when they go on parish duties. This is an important part of the Mar Thoma priest’s weekly duties. When serving in America for instance, glamorous though it may sound, they have to physically appear in two distant parishes on the same morning to celeberate Eucharist. It is not income, or salaried jobs, it is the spontaneous love for Christ that makes them work the way they do, recognized for their vocation by family and parishes they serve. So, in Kerala, their parishes are spread across the subcontinent, and they have to face the rigours of travelling on motorcycles with Kochamma (respectful term for priest’s wife) sitting precariously, riding pillion, in dangerous traffic. Children have to be accommodated in different schools every time they are transferred. Industrial towns, small hinterland agricultural towns, big metropolis at home and abroad; they must arrive at their work place, and at the homes of parishioners when in need, with the emotional gestures and abiding love that the priest must give to his people. The theological colleges give priests their cultural capital and the will to share complex ideas in simple ways so that parishioners feel energized and actively involved. It is important to notice that when there is a ferment in the Church, and new ways of thinking about past and present and future, the acceptance of social change becomes a dynamic perspective, a tool to draw in the youth, their parents, their parish priests with families, and the prelates who provide benediction to all. It is an exercise requiring caution, and yet excitement. It is the Tower of Babel re - organizing itself in new vocabularies of love, mutual conceptualization and translation. To accept danger as the subtext of such transformation is metanoia. The actions are known, but the consequences are not known. J. S Austin talks of mis-application and infelicity in the use of words. How can acts be unilateral? Similarly, the question here arises as to whether when the speech act is at end, it counts as its completion? (Austen 1965:37). His example is, “I am including you!” which sometimes has the response, “I don’t want to play” What is the place of consent? Why must one belong to be included? He suggests the “infelicity” of hypocrisy, or insincerity, “I congratulate you!” when you actually don’t want to wish someone, or don’t mean it. ‘Mistake’ may not make an act void, according to him, though it might make it excusable.( ibid 42). How can we, as members/well wishers/witnesses of churches, unite across many borders world over, hope to undo the mistakes of centuries? Young people want a test of authenticity. How can we accept the favours of murderous warriors, however urbane and cosmopolitan they may be? How can we continually accept and apologise for the cruelty of our forbears to others? How can we be guiltless in the counting of our blessings? Time will tell. We cannot refuse our responsibility to future generations, when war zones spell annihilation for all, equally. As Mary Douglas states, there is anamoly and there is ambiguity. Anamoly is when something does not fit in . Ambiguity is when a statement can be read in different ways (Douglas 1966:50). She asserts that a private person may change his/her/their mind, but cultural customs are more fixed. They have fixed, and sometimes immutable patterns; orthodoxy can be very rigid about conventions( ibid 49). Laughter, revelation and shock can disturb structures at various levels, but cultural categories are not private matters. Therefore, the place of symbols in social movements showing the tension between religious/ideological systems and the rise of crystallized structures responding to them ( like the current ‘Cockroach Social Movement’ in India, inviting a Kafkaesque surreal space on the young and unemployed transcending caste, class, ethnicity, race, religion, ideology, occupation ) is as important in understanding social change as the momentum to rebellion, which does not necessarily conclude in revolution. For young Mar Thoma evangelists looking for a way to understand the context of spiritual revelation, there is the work of the Gandhian, E.Stanley Jones whose ashram work and ecumenical work in Sat Tal (where he established a Christian ashram) became world famous resulting in its arrival in Manganam, Kottayam as Christava Ashram in 1938. Sometimes, only pacifists can find a way to control the zealots. References Ambedkar, B.R. 2013. Annihilation of Caste. Samyak Prakashan: Delhi Austin, J.L . 1965.How To Do Things With Words, Oxford University Press: New York Arendt, Hannah: 1958. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press:Chicago Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Rustle of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt : 2000 .Liquid Modernity .Cambridge: Polity Press Bourdieu,Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press Das, Veena. 1977. Structure and Cognition. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. Pelican Books: London. Durkheim Emile. 1968. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. 1969. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press 1973. Moral Education. New York: Free Press Eliade, Mircea.1972. Shamanism Princeton: Princeton University Press Hewlett, Sylvia Ann.1986. A Lesser Life. Virginia: William Moriss. Jones, E. Stanley. 1967. The Way. Lucknow Publishing House: Lucknow Illich, Ivan. 1982. Gender. Pantheon: New York. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature. Harper and Row: New York. Mies, Maria. 1980. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Zed Books: London. O’Flaherty Wendy Doniger.1980. The Origins of Evil In Indian Mythology. University of California Press: California Visvanathan, Susan. 1989. Marriage, Birth and Death: Property Rights and Domestic Relationships of the Orthodox Jacobite Syrian Christians of Kerala. Vol 24. Issue No 24. 17th June. 2007. Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism:Essays in Dialogue. Hyderabad. Orient Longman 2022. The Wisdom of Community. Bloomsbury India: Delhi 2022. Work, Word and The World. Bloomsbury India: Delhi 2026. Negotiating Dalit Christian Identity In A Historical Perspective in the Anthropocene in Ed. Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf. Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene: Planetary and Plural Perspectives. Springer Nature: Berlin. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. Indiaink and Penguin:Delhi. 2025. Mother Mary Comes to Me. Penguin Random House: New Delhi.

The Aesthetics of Religion

Religion as An Aspect of Aesthetics, Imagination and Experience. The interesting aspect of religious beliefs has been represented in Durkheimian Sociology as a web of institutional expectation or codes of behaviour, or as modes of thought. In this are integrated questions of ritual and liturgy, which are performative and artistic in energy. It compels believers to come together and to worship, where questions of alertness to transformation of feelings or emotions are underlined. Effervescence becomes the spiritual space of a continuing incandescence. Identification with the sentiments of an association of believers allows people to communicate how essential it is to live and share an ideology pertaining to faith and the after life. The spirit roams free in sleep and in dreaming, so what then in death and the after life? It is this pre-occupation with the after life that give religion its pre-dominance. People must prepare for death, for which there is no explanation, as the dead do not return to tell a story, unless the mind of the perceiver is disturbed, as in the case of Hamlet after his father’s death. What the stories tell us is that is there is mortification, purging and revival ((Vickery 1973:63). Along with this, is the reintegration of time, seasons and calendar rituals. If a comparative exercise is to be utilized then the key themes of the animal world (as in totemism) the vegetative aspect of Nature ( where plants, flowers and fruits give us sustenance) and fire rituals define the ever present splendour of the sun through imitative and symbolic ways. Not surprisingly, literature, art forms and theatre become the point of departure, where the manifestation of the spirit is externalized or represented as the production of the tangible. What is felt or experienced can now be touched, seen, smelt and tasted. This is an extremely important aspect of that which cannot be explained or understood is suddenly through the magical aspect of the religious brought into the radius of the collective. The uniqueness of individual perception can be crystallised into a collective phenomenon, historically recorded. The authorship of those who create narratives describing the origin of the world, the existence of superior powers who define our normative ideals in culturally specific ways are sometimes lost in time. We do not know their names, and yet, tradition inscribes how these are transmitted across time, in writing, symbolic motifs or oral histories. That authorship is denied makes its collective value even more precious, there might even be deification of the source, or atleast the defining of it as “sacred”. This attribution of sacred might be given by the society concerned to even those aspects which are not religious. This is the moment when values are given high credibility, and identified with lineages of thought and knowledge. Masculinist values promote the notion of power, authority, sacredness and immutability to men. Religious hegemonies then describe women as polluting, not worthy of priestly performative power, or even in secular sense the right to vote. Being a woman then becomes a hazard, though some women who promote a particular cause are capable of being deified because of their closeness to men in power. The stability of ideological systems rests on the aquiescence of women, and they are then represented as having power because they are consorts, or pliant. Not surprisingly Hitler and Pol Pot, tyrants to the extreme always had women who agreed to be their companions or bear their children. This aspect of malevolence which dictatorship presumes as a natural right, then allows predators in the system to use religious functions and ceremonies to legitimize their right to violence or subjugation of the majority in order to legitimize their oligarchic rule. Once this is acknowledged by the people as well as the master race, a wedge is put into the system. However, people become used to subterfuge, and accept the controlling mechanism of the master race to impose their will imposed on them. They do not need to think, they only have to follow instructions. This is the final moment of conquering passive people. The latter enjoy the redistribution of food or money, among them as anonymous receivers in food queues, with the substantial role of the conquering caste in over seeing the display of this ability as access to “bread and circus”. ``In seeking to understand crises, war, death societal disintegration, Mumford takes the insights of the 1930s to argue that work is an anodyne. Human beings have a fear of an unknown future, but by seeking to control this innate anxiety, they produce worlds which are diverse, cultural universes where thought if represented through material forms. The search for order is paramount. Religion provides the axis of those metaphors which allow people to legitimize their course of action. In Lewis Mumford: The Condition of Man (1944) Mumford suggests that the idolam is an abstraction, a web of ideas, representations and symbols which through its aesthetic motifs allows for generative and comprehensive possibilities of mutual understanding and exchange across a variety of genres. Language and aesthetic symbols, through art, music, theatre, sculpture, stone carvings and inscriptions transcend time and place (Mumford pg 8). Through translation the spiritual and the mental are made available to others, there is a “unification of the human mind” as Levi Strauss described it. Do hierarchies disappear? It is that which we are concerned with, how unification into one system may actually involve questions of assimilation and transcendence not necessarily invoking peaceful social relations. Mumford suggests that through inscription, cultures leave behind a trail which then can be analysed in terms of continuities (ibid pg 9). How then can we understand architectural vandalism in pursuit of a cohesive interest in planning for the future where efficiency is prioritized and one world (the conqueror’s view) is implemented? The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford and The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt have to be understood together. We know from Arendt’s work that servile human labour and the conditions of women and animal are usually lumped together. With the acceptance of religious domination by any single cult (Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, each vying with Judaism for world conquest, collaboration or in antagonism with Communism). The boats are ready, extinction is at hand. Can experience of annihilation in any of these ideologies be mitigated by ceremony or verse? Mumford writes, “Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion, are accordingly all as essential to humans as his daily bread: man’s true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations. There is no poverty worse than that of being excluded, by ignorance, by insensibility, by a failure to master language, from the meaningful symbols of one’s culture; those forms of social deafness or blindness are truly death to the human personality. For it is through the effort to achieve meaning, form and value that the potentialities of man are realized, and his actual life in turn is raised to a higher potential (9,10)” Mumford sees communication, communion and co operation as the three essential functions of human society. Symbols generate the possibility of interpreting reality, and by leaving them open for interpretation human choices are infinitely varied, which is the meaning of culture itself. Through the dissemination of symbols cultures are transformed, meanings made experiential and more varied. Rock music and the Hare Rama cult permeating secretly into USSR in the 1980s brought the Soviet Republic down to its present form, leading to the revival of Orthodox Christianity. Currently, the search for oil leads Trump and Putin to similar excursions globally, and the matter cannot be resolved, as Palestine is also about hegemony over natural resources. The support Europe gives to Ukraine and to Israel, compounded by their fear over American suzerainity leads India onwards to complicity with Russia and Israel simultaneously. These contradictions over our relations with our neighbours is compounded by the fact that our markets are flooded with Chinese goods, while they are our enemies; and that the UN supports Pakistan is an embarrasment to us, as India sees the latter as a terrorist country. How can we get past this complex map of social and political relations all deeply imbued with religious inflexions? Let us now look at law and order as the specific concentration of modalities whose aesthetics are so complex that we see no symmetry in its functioning when law becomes synchronized with religious bias. Law and Order provides for freedom, because there is regulation of conduct and honour. Where these are missing, there is anarchy, and no possibility of justice. If freedom is absent, and tradition endorses it over the historical roots of legal systems and human rights, then everyone is in danger, because enemies are ideologically pivoted against one another. Wisdom, courage, temperance and justice brought all the ideal aspects of human life together (Mumford, 29,30). Could women be included? Niko Slade shows us in his biography of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya that the Freedom Movement which took almost hundred years, allowed women to participate only in the 1920s and 1930s, and the salt satyagraha was the catalytic moment. Chattopadhyaya was an eminent theatre personality, and also set up craft councils and was a freedom fighter who went to jail, vehemently arguing for the participation of women in the freedom struggle. She was involved in the empowerment of women in independent India and the struggle for justice through the work of the AIWC (All India Women’s Congress (Slate 2025). For those of us who are trained to be sitters on the fence, let us return to Mumford, who asks did not Christ say Render unto Ceaser what is Ceasers? For Mumford this is problematic, because it takes away the possibility of revolutionary activism. And here, we may turn to the text of Epictetus, a Roman slave who had been sold into the household of one of the bureaucratic administrators of Nero. When he, the slave, was exiled, he started an academy, where he had many loyal students, one of whom transcribed his lectures, which were then translated by Sharon Lebell (1994). Here Epictetus argues that to live in the world, we must accept that there is only so much we can do. We must remain true to ourselves. We must accept with grace the suffering that we are dealt. We must have the etiquette by which we understand from where tyranny originates. Was this compassion a sign of slave mentality? The passivity enjoined upon those who have no alternative in order to exist? Some of the most interesting ideas on this subject come from P.Sanal Mohan, whose books on artisanal slavery in Kerala became a focussed analyses of cathartic music among the suppressed in the hierarchichal structure of dominanant castes, where power and inequality worked in a consensual fashion, where the downtrodden could only reflect upon their condition in lamentations to a God who understood their plight. References Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition University of Chicago Press, Chicago:1958 Das, Veena, Structure and Cognition, OUP Delhi: 1977 Lebell, Sharon, The Art of Living: The Classic Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness Harper Collins and India Today, Delhi:1994 Mohan, Sanal P. The Modernity of Slavery, OUP:Delhi 2015 Mumford, Lewis, The Condition of Man, Martin Secker and Warburg, London:1944 Singh, Ravi Nandan Death in Benaras Phd Thesis Submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University 2010. Slate, Nico Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya Fourth Estate: New Delhi 2024 Tarabout, Gilles. Magical Violence and NonViolence: Witchcraft in Kerala, in Ed. Vidal, Denis, Gilles Tarabout, Eric Mayer, Violence Non-Violence, Manohar and Centre De Sciences Humaines, New Delhi: 2003. Thulaseedharan, Sindhu. Inheritance Practices of Syrian Christians of Kerala in in ed. Susan Visvanathan and Vineetha Menon Chronology and Event, Winshield Press: Delhi 2019 Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1973 Visvanathan, Susan. Marriage, Birth and Death: Property Rights and Domestic Relations among the Orthodox/Jacobite Syrian Christians of Kerala, Volume 24, No 24, June 17th 1989, pp 1341-1346 (accessed on 6.10.15, jstor) Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1973

The New Locations of Extreme Poverty

In an important collation of essays dedicated to Jayati Ghosh, Development, Transformation and The Human Condition Gerry Rodgers suggests that with regard to access to Health, Culture and Food Security, 10 percent of the population at the top level receives 40 percent of the total income, 10 percent of the population at the bottom receive 2 percent. Poverty is defined in terms of not having access to land or assets which are productive. Further to this argument, Surajit Majumdar suggests that industrialization does not happen because the lowest income group provides a huge population which can be hired as cheap labour. Caste rules, tradition and authoritarianism makes people tied to commerce as viable for mobility. The vested interests in family firms allows industry to support niche cultures of mining and manufacture. Questions of hierarchy and labour go back to an understanding of plantation economies, and colonialism. As the questions of slavery and linguistic monopoly of oligarchies are involved, local communities of farming, mining, and industrial economies emphasise the ineptitude of. The working class. Following the work of Ngugi wa Thiong O in his book “Decolonizing the Mind”, the authors De Groot and Maya Sharma et al, quote him, in the section of Historical Theory and Practice in their collaborative work, “Race, Genetics and History” (2025:8) “The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves, for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces that would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral righteousness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish” Modernity is thus juxtaposed in relation to continuing traditional practises and norms, which are ensconsed within embodied notions of hierarchy and exploitation. To refuse people education by limiting their life chances and denying them access to educational opportunities linked with upward mobility, is the first step in fixing people within their received ascriptive status. Ofcourse, people who are landless, unemployed and hungry with no visible avenue for progress, are mandatorily provided doles or low wages to have a passive ready made populace who will agree to dictatorship without creating obstacles. Freedom of speech or literacy mean little to those who are constantly under surveillance and only earn enough to keep breath and body together. Contempt for labour, and substitution of every dying or dead labourer is what this means in real terms. It can mean the substitutability of women either in the work force or in the debt ridden cycles of the family, where women have least worth. Silence is what accompanies this form of civilisational tyranny, no one speaks either against the oppression of women, or of the absence of right to life as a basic human right amongst the poorest of the poor. By rendering them invisible, their voice is taken away, and whether they live or die is immaterial. Maya Sharma, speaking on behalf of ethnic minorities in UK suggests that it is important that the ghetto imagination is replaced with dialogue and the possibility for hidden or neglected communities, for entering public spaces such as museums and exhibition spaces. Unless material culture in the context of colonialism is represented back in terms of working class identities, it would not be possible to imagine (or manage) the past. The very act of record keeping comes with enforced biases, and thus communities have the task of engaging with memory in a different way. Museums tend to overlook their role in the construction of modernity, working class struggles of plantation histories or factory work are not pictorially or materially represented. Narratives are a very important way in constructing this history, and ethnic communities need to enter this ground very actively. They have to tell their stories, directly to the listeners, and must have ways of representing themselves in collaboration with those who hold power in the institutions they seek to enter, or independently of them. Sharma seems to believe that genetic memory as in dna, recording genealogies biologically through a process of time travel (migrations and the classification of similar cultures), or what is material culture carrying its own symbols of work and reproduction have certain connections. It is important to note that human transmission is therefore a way of passing on knowledge, not just biological reproduction, but social reproduction. The idea that nations have cultural DNA embodied in their institutions in terms of ideas passed on from one generation to another is untenable in times of rapid social change catalyzed by revolution or the standardization brought on by revolution. For this reason, we know that dna provides us trajectories outlining the unique, and yet, the transmission of diseases or ideas, go through the same processes. It brings us back to the old Durkheimian problem, which is how do we understand the statistic. Is the individual statistic significant, and how do we understand the unique, as in the problem of Anthropos. To this question we must apply ourselves. We know that the statistics for suicide in the 19th century were available because social change was so dramatic and compelling that the governments of different European countries compiled the numbers of suicides, and Durkheim then categorised it by social distinctions: anomic, egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic. Today, we encounter the ways in which political ideologies can be repressive and demand a certain compliance. There is no solution, and because people feel there is no answer to the problem of ill health after Covid, and the demands of family and occupational obligations, they commit suicide. The suicide of teachers and farmers in India who were occupied as electoral officers communicates the inability of the right wing political party, currently at the Centre, to understand the distinction between wage labour and compulsorily assigned assistance for bureaucratic work. The fact that Prime Minister Modi posted the individual pictures of teachers receiving awards for their excellence outside lavatories was not met with anything but surprise. Why did he do that? It clearly meant that since only men used those public lavatories they would be inspired to respect men and women teachers when they went into these concrete urea pits to urinate. The further devaluation as school teachers came with the running down of the Aap party whose political representative Manish Sisodia and his team were accused with Kejriwal of corruption, and government schools were as a consequence brought hurtling down. Many of the questions of upliftment depend on schooling and education. By downgrading Government schools, the task of educationists to provide the possibilities of upward mobility was restricted. These measures are in place, to reinstate caste as the ideology of the believing subject, and works to ensure that the master race (defined by Hindutva as citizens of a religious order from which Muslims, Christians, tribal communities and lower caste communities have to constantly prove their citizenship through identity cards) is able to dominate with presumptions of power which may not be constitutionally permitted. Slavery as religiously enjoined in the Dharmashastras, where shudras and Dalits are promoted as hierarchically lower, and assimilated by their consent to their hierarchical placement as a cheap labour force is thus emphasised. Rene Girard’s classic work on the scapegoat is an interesting analyses of how individuals or communities may take on the role of the sacrificial victim. In an interview with interlocutors, he mentions that both kingship and servitude have to be understood in terms of the existence of hierarchy and the menacing quality of what is expected of them. Ritual reaffirms the repetitiveness of the giving up of a life in order to protect solidarity. Whether its voluntary (sacrifice) or an act of murder, the representative form is both recollection, and an impetus to repeat, and also to re-appear. Thus, the very basis of the assimilation of the working class into types of known slavery is the act of forcing recognition of the King who demands the sacrifice of the hierarchically lower working class communities. The reification of the caste system made by invoking the Dharmashastras as ascriptive duty, and enforcing it either by ritual sanctions, or by the authority of the gun and state violence, bureaucratically imposed by legal contract is the way by which cheap labour is organised. Through the process of treating the commons as land which can be sold to mercenary capitalists as invoking profit as the ultimate good, the state then enforces this saleability of forest and agricultural land as property of the state which can be utilised for commerce. The loss of people’s rights is then inadmissible in court, as the very bases of private property once legally endorsed in the name of development is that it is inalienable. The scapegoat then becomes the holder of virtue, and his/her sublimation is endorsed by the absorption into the very axis of a rapidly moving industrialisation which is the ideological spine of the development thesis. Against this is a policy of wastefulness, and the very aggrandisement of an oligarchy. As it is their profits then which became operationalised as the collective index for a nation’s development, the seeming prosperity is translated into a potlatch of very obvious wasteful extravagance. This is the visible commercial index that is presented as urban hedonism (malls, supermarkets, luxury items, cars and roadways, tourism, and endless exhibitionism). In contrast is the life of the poor, where economic indexes are absent. Sure enough, the effect of climate change is to bring about entropy and its consequences such as droughts, floods, famine and death. The statistics of these are not compiled, though mass media provides documentary evidence. The most evident cause of global warming is war. Conflict begins to be coded in terms of the terrain, and the political linkages of those who see themselves to be the ‘master race’. Because hierarchy is premised, the very terms of the discourse is located around the concepts of higher and lower, powerful and the lesser. Human rights are seen to be redundant, and the motive is essentially to promote capitalist development and profit. Competitiveness, rivalry and assimilation are the key words. (Girard 2016: 89).The impact on the environment is deadly,and people see themselves as gun fodder, with psychological costs for both the victims and the predators. It is with this moral lacunae, where violence is the suppressed grammar and the search for the scapegoat continual, that the aspect of building up war torn landscapes for the victors, that India’s work force is compulsorily requisitioned. They thus become mercenaries employed by the states who have colluded in genocide, and support the ostentatious way in which land is utilised for purposes of tourism and an economy sustained by the denial of the rights of local communities who are forced to flee. Poverty is a form of enforced slavery.The idea of good government entails both the notion of freedom and human rights. To deny these on the bases of racism or endorsement of caste ideology is unacceptable in terms of the freedom rights and citizenship rights movements of the 20th century. Cultures of war produce sequential losses of all that was held to be precious.The master race presumes that the accident of birth creates rights which are preordained or the loss of these is by virtue of one’s fate having been born a woman, lower caste, tribal community or transgender. This becomes unresolvable in the legitimation of hierarchy as a common good. To carry out the dictates of the oligarchy who is invested in tradition, becomes implicit in habit. Acceptance becomes a form of etiquette, assimilation a lull in the nature of the striving for equality and freedom. The tacit assumption that one has accepted the hegemony of the oppressor’s institutional arrangement becomes the reason for silence and compliance. One has no rights, one must not try to escape the structures of such slavery, one becomes a slave. It is easier to take orders than break superimposed rules. The slave drivers receive respect from their closeness to the master race, the passive subjects are accepting of their fate and can say nothing. The pleasures of belonging are replayed through the very production and reproduction of the etiquette, cultural customs including ritual, aesthetics and musical and poetic traditions. It has taken millennia to produce these, and in no time at all the taking away of food or employment returns people to the drudgery of their subsistence existence, with festivity and cheer substituting for days of hunger and loss. One of the important inflexions of the caste-class-race debate is the unanimity of the genus as representative across these categories.While hierarchy seeks to discriminate for the convenience of the master race, those who cannot fall into relations of subjugation clearly understand that substitutability and replacement are the logic by which long standing hierarchies are sustained. Evading this only leads to the loss of identity and the priviliges associated with identity fixation. If one accepts ascription as the criteria of location and selfhood, then war climate change,displacement, disasters and death all lead to the loss of certitude. The new conditions may be entirely different from that which one is accustomed to. How does one fit into the new spaces demarcated as belonging to the fluid occupational identity of those who survive a disaster? Webs of influence and affluence suddenly vanish. Migrants who reach new lands then must figure out ways to learn new languages, and recover their sense of the wholeness of personality.Here, then, nostalgia becomes a deterrent, and all that was most valuable become lost in space and time and the memory of a habitat that is no longer accessible. The tension that exists between quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses is caught in the word “anecdotal” accounts, which is disparagingly used by theorists. However, while quantitative data is essential for understanding trends and social change, it is individual data which makes the statistic. It is only now that suicide is not a capital crime, but abetment to suicide is viewed very seriously. If biography is such a dynamic reservoir of subjectivities, choices and memories, how do we analyse the generalising principle when reading them? What are the selective uses of subjectivity in the very choice of topics that we highlight when gleaning data in the reading of biographies. Toward this end, it is essential that biographies and autobiographies which are collated with the intention of showing the linking between tradition, post modernity, and the alleged preoccupation with the very distant, prehistorical past that allies itself with the telling of time and event. The entry of dna materials in the collation of community history has been outlined as fulfilling individual curiosity but attending to classification and categorisation with ideological emphases on purity. Race then becomes an operative symbol of being set apart, or being assimilated, as has happened with the Judaic seed in Kerala, Mumbai and now Manipur. This need to be categorised with a dominant other who might numerically be a minority is one of the puzzles of how classification and biology have catapulted into the arena of global stratification. References Alberda, Alexandra P, Njabulo Chipangura, Lara Choksey, Jerome De Groot, Maya Sharma: 2025. Race, Genetics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Damodaran, Sumangla, Smita Gupta, Sona Gupta, Dipa Sinha. 2024. Development, Transformation and The Human Condition: Essays in Honour of Jayati Ghosh. New Delhi: Routledge India Girard, Rene. 1979. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press ..............2016. Things Hidden From the Foundations of the Universe. London: Bloomsbury Gupta, Smita. 2025. Does India’s Postcolonial Land Acquisitons Act Safeguard Farmer Interests in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge Mazumdar, Surajit. 2025. The Underdevelopment Trap of Indian Capitalism in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge Rodgers, Gerry. 2025. A Time of Darkness: The Pursuit of Collective Well-being in an Unequal World in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Delhi: Harper Collins Thampi, Anan. 2025. School Meals and Child Undernutrition in India in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge.

Tea Plantations, Oral Histories and literary and Historical References: A Collage

Tea for all: The Global Propensity for Consumption and Trade. In the mid 17th century, tea appeared in the written record, as Charles the Second, King of England who received Bombay as dowry, was presented with a tub of tea by the East India Company in 1664. The East India Company’s trade had been in pepper, but when tea was sold in a café it was much appreciated. The tea was shipped by Chinese merchants, and small orders were being placed by 1673(Goodwin 1993:60). Thomas Garroway, the proprietor who first sold tea in his café, had listed 24 disabilities that tea was expected to cure, in 1658. He had described it as useful in all seasons, at all times, and its virtues evident even up to the old age of the consumer (ibid). The production and transport of tea was very much a handicraft and household industry, and its route was complex and difficult, as it travelled to the ports where it was disbursed. Seeing that the Chinese guarded tea very carefully, the East India Company was hard pressed to find a way to export tea bushes to India, where the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks suggested in 1778, that it could be grown in Bihar, Rungpor and Cooch Behar (Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004:100) In 1792, Banks in the company of Lord Macartney brought back tea seeds and plants for the Calcutta Botanical gardens. In 1816, the plants procured by the representatives of Lord Amherst were lost in transit (ibid 101). Seeing that the Chinese method of curing tea was cumbersome ( dried in the sun, curled by stamping on it like grapes, dried in the sun once more, and then fired in the tea merchants’ furnaces) the British believed that rather than household production variably suited to individual expertise, tea should be produced in plantations, and its preparation mechanized (ibid 105). The production of tea in individual homes in China was cumbersome, but the transportation from tea growing mountains to the Coast was even harder, requiring upto six weeks or two months from Bohea where it was grown to Canton where it was shipped (ibid 106). The labourers were carrying a load of over 150 kgs which was twice their body weight, over mountains, and across rivers, their lives threatened at every point. Millions of households were involved in the production of tea, and there was no possibility of standardization, check over quality and protection from pests. While the labourers transporting it over Tibet were poorly paid and risked their lives, the middlemen charged huge prices and made profits. (ibid 107-108). Silver had been the currency which paid for the tea, but in 1776, America’s independence from Britain meant that the supply of silver from Mexico was cut off, and British agents could not pay for the tea. In 1773, the British snatched away the illegal opium trade to China from the Portuguese, and monopolized the production of opium in India to pay for tea, which latter had increased demand in Britain. The East India Company sold opium to British merchants in India. These traders took it to China, where corrupt officials handled it. The silver that the traders received was sold back to the East India Company which then bought tea. The Opium War devastated China, and the link between Britain feeding the desire for opium and trading in tea was well established (ibid 110, 111). Moving tea production from China to India was the most crucial requirement, as the British saw tea as useful not for themselves alone, but also for their captive populations in India (116). Philip Lutgendorf suggests that it was only in the 1930s that tea was made available to Indians, first to the Bengali bhadralok in Calcutta, who had access to long leaf, and much later to the larger populations who began drinking tea in small vending shops where tea was boiled with milk, sugar and cardamom. In the 1930s, tea prices dropped because of the great depression and 350 million people in British India were to be initiated into drinking tea, as tonnes of tea were now surplus and could not be exported. The advertising campaign began in 1935 and has been described as the largest advertising campaign in Indian history, though Lipton’s Tea had been showcasing their tea as early as 1911 (Lutgendorf 2012:16) Discovery of tea bushes in Assam In Assam, in the early decades of the 19th century, the brothers had married local women, and as traders were on the search for tea. They had discovered wild tea, but the discovery was not followed up by the British government for up to a decade, as Assam was wild forested country and the local communities and borders were rife with conflicts. (Mcfarlane and Mcfarlane 2004: 130). Robert Bruce died, but Charles Bruce continued to look for wild tea in Assam, and in August 1837, more than ten years after the first forays, the Tea Committee was informed by him that the local Guam tribal chief informant had led him to tea bushes, and when the leaves were boiled up, they compared well with Chinese tea (ibid 134). Bruce’s ability to communicate with tribes people was sufficient to persuade them that he would be able to get money to them, if they cleared the jungles, grew tea bushes and prepared the tea for trade purposes. Bruce told the British agents that if he could get the Singhpos to make tea, all of Assam would become a tea garden, and ofcourse the tribal community with their Rajah would clear land at their own expense. In October of 1836, six ‘Chinamen’ had arrived, of whom two were tea men, and six chests of tea were prepared successfully and sent to Calcutta. The Singhpos were ready to clear land at their own pace, but they were too indolent to work at the orders of others, and so also with the Nagas (ibid 136). As a result the Tea Committee representatives suggested that labourers from Chotta Nagpur should be sent in, and once the gardens were set up, capitalists could move in and decide the administration of the gardens (ibid 137). Alan Macfarlane writes, “Stuck in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by jungles full of herds of wild elephants, tigers so plentiful they were referred to as pests like the leeches and rats, far from their families, without women or recreation, with only Singhphos for company, Charles Bruce did well to keep his Chinamen from absconding or collapsing under the strain” (Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004:137) Creating the experimental tea garden was not easy. In Bruce’s Report of the Agricultural and Historical Society, India Office tracts, no 320 (cited in Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004: 136) he describes how hardy they are in being transplanted, “I may mention that they were in the first instance plucked out by the roots by the village people who were sent to bring them from their native jungles, put upright into baskets without any earth, brought two days’ journey on men’s backs, put upright into canoes, a little common earth only being thrown among their roots, and were from seven to twenty days before they reached me, and then had to be carried half a day’s journey to the intended new plantation, and were four or five days with only a little moist earth at their roots before they were finally put into the ground; and yet these plants are doing well, at least the greater part of them (ibid 136).” The Chinese method recorded by Charles Bruce was cumbersome. It involved picking the leaves, spreading them in the sun, collecting them, clapping them in gloved hands for ten minutes, leaving them in the sun again, and the whole process repeated three times, till the leaves felt like leather. They were then heated on hot fire, taken out and spread, turned by hand and then back on the fire, and this process repeated three or four times. The leaves were then gathered into small piles and rolled into balls by hand, and then separated by hand. They were not allowed to fall into the fire or on the ground. Then they were left to dry on shelves until they were collected into baskets and placed on fires till they reached the right crispness. Then wearing clean stockings, they packed them into boxes. This was the method the planters used for many years not knowing any other, and learned by Bruce’s men from the ‘Chinamen’ he had gathered together. Still the British felt that the China bushes were better, and it was only in 1839 that the Assam bush was preferred, as the hybrid teas were quite disastrous (ibid 138). And the Assamese simply refused to be exploited, as wages were low, the work long and exhausting, and the seasons with its heat and moistness extreme. As a result, Europeans, Bengalis, tribal communities from Chotta Nagpur, Marwaris, Sikhs came in and this became the composition of the tea gardens. Consequently, the British thought it imperative to initiate factory production of tea in India, and technology was thus introduced for drying, rolling and crushing. Natasha Nongbri suggests that tea plantations were both part of the agricultural complex as well as the industrial system of social relations, and every tea plantation had a tea factory in its compound (Nongbri 2018:9). The Ripple tea factory in Munnar for instance serves its co-operative tea gardeners by sending a Tata van which includes an aircooling system ( a simple rotation fan) that allows the tea from different gardens to be collected without damage so it can reach the factory without bruising the leaf in tropical heat. This is the innovation of Dr Zubin Varghese, who is an innovator with international airconditioning systems. Simple though it is, it helps the tea gardens to optimize the delivery of intact leaves to the factory. In Coonoor, a tea planter told me that since his grandfather was a prominent planter who could not reach the factory in time and was shut out from the curing process of a multinational company which offered its services he started his own factory on his estate, to which tea from even smaller gardens would arrive. Baldeep Singh believes that ‘bought tea’, or tea bought from individual planters with small holdings might be the answer to climate change and obsolete machinery, so that tea factories would (personal communication 19th July 2025). Since tea was an important source of foreign exchange, plantations had been exempted from land redistribution, in the 1950s. The Tea Board took over, and many British owners quickly sold to native aspirants, who had long been ‘middle level staff’ (Lutgendorf 2012:18). Very often, it was to managers from upper echelons of South Indian communities who were Christians known to them with trading backgrounds, or to Marwaris from Calcutta. The Tea Factory The tea factory was a heavy duty ensemble of machines, and often so serviceable as not to be changed for an entire century, as I saw on my visit to Coonoor. Tourists are shown around a tea station’s gardens, horticulture nursery cum shop, eucalyptus oil factory, restaurant and grocery store for high end and everyday needs, and the tea factory itself. The young boys who are employed as tourist guides have finished school have come from Kerala, and are hoping to collect wages to pay college fees after the summer. What is interesting is how boundary crossing and hybrid Tamil culture weave with Kerala’s tea plantation workers, as one parent may be from Tamil Nadu and the other from Kerala. Conversely, workers from Tamil Nadu in Munnar who have been tied to the estate for three generations may marry their mother’s brother’s daughter whom they have known since childhood. In Kerala Tamil workers predominated, generations of them migrating from Coonoor, Kotagiri, and Ooty. In Coonoor, Badagas a tribal or cultivating caste community became tea pluckers, and Tamil workers repatriated from Sri Lanka were rehabilitated by tea planters as they knew the work, feeding into the Tantea plantations. Because of climate change and unseasonal rainfall, boutique teas in advertisement friendly packaging are preferred. Grading the tea is a responsibility that the tea planter must take into account. Clasically the three leaf programme was to have tea pluckers pick only the top two leaves and the budding leaf. That gave the best tea, and was called Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. If the leaf was older it was called Orange Pekoe. If the tea leaf was broken it was called Broken Orange Pekoe. As the productivity of the tea bush declined, or bulk was required, or there was labour shortage, shears were used, and a coarser tea was produced for the mass market. Orange Pekoe was further divided into ‘Fannings’, as this was the tea that could be winnowed, and ‘Dust’ which was swept off factory floors. (Goodwin 1993:182) After it is dried and curled in the big machines, the tea leaves are taken out and allowed to ferment in cool rooms on stone or marble. Then they are allowed to dry again in ovens and further graded, with women workers clearing it of any twigs or fibres, and then once graded, they are packed into chests, boxes or sacks. Lutgendorf describes the cumbersome machine that crushed and fermented teas as ‘prone to breakdowns’. In 1931, a Scotsman called McKercher had invented a CTC (Cut, Tear, Curl) machine that used stainless steel rollers to crush the leaves and ferment (oxidise green tea leaves turning them into black). This machine was then improved by Indians to create the sliding block machine which was used to mass produce ctc so that 99 percent of Indian tea became rolled out in factories by this method (Lutendorf 2012:22). Boutique teas however continued to have a profitable and niche market using old machines as cultural magnets for tourism and export. The Hierarchy of Officers Managers and Assistant Managers report to their employers through written or oral presentations. Sometimes, Managers are asked to take over plantations which are dying, or beyond hope. Baldeep Singh writes of such a garden in his report to his bosses. Tea planters who took over after the British left after the 1960s were sometimes dealing with complex questions of gardens which had passed through other owners. What were the liabilities? As Baldeep Singh writes, it was questions of how to improve yields, consider pest control as fungus, termites and snails were predominant, to improve the production and value of the product (tea), reduce costs and manage labour. Bhatpara, a garden owned by Calcutta marwaris was almost extinct as a production unit, and the Manager had to deal with innumerable problems, as there was indiscipline and anxiety about its development. I paraphrase Baldeep Singh’s report to the owners of the plantation, as given in a report, Since growth on the bushes was very meager, a four year pruning cycle was set in place, from1997/1998 which would have the entire garden covered by 2001/2002. While chemical pesticides were being used, it was hoped that once the pest control was completed, organic fertilizer could be used for the mature bushes. Upto 15 percent of the tea was lost due to pests. From 2003 uprooting of those tea bushes which were above 50 years old was planned. Replanting will produce results only after 12 to 14 years. Irrigation depended on the amicable relation with other managers. Land was stony in patches, in the monsoon the damages to the drains led to problematic flooding, upto 100 hectares was under the control of illegal settlers who had built homes and cultivated the land. When fully utilized the garden could have 800 hectares and produce 26 lakh tonnes of tea. The pluckers unsupervised had been grabbing tea from the bush rather than being selective. They needed to be divided into manageable groups. And these groups had to be allotted to specific sirdars. There had to be clear definition of plucking programme, and the garden administration needed to connect houses to plucking areas with maximum efficiency. Employment of workers had to be within the specific rules of number that could be employed, and “hardship Labour” or those recruited in parallel groups had to be monitored, as they were brought in or managed by influential union leaders. Problems in factory maintenance involved the laying of lights, the substitution of newer machines, and the need to organize transportation of tea by trucks and dependence on external garages. New machinery could be considered only if the profits were sufficient, but measures could be taken to reduce the expense on oil for furnaces. Labour relations between pluckers and management was dismal, as the garden had been neglected by previous owners, and the outcome was that the pluckers depended on highway robbery, animal husbandry and forest produce to survive. Their problems as squatters were real, and once employed, the administration would have to concern itself with housing and water supply. A tubewell commissioned would be available in 2001/2002. Meanwhile the existing tubewells would require to be pumped for 14 hours per day, with its consecutive costs of energy consumption. Housing was the greatest problem, with 519 standard houses for 1327 families. The others live in shacks built from foraging the forests for timber. At 64 units to be constructed, it would take up to 2012, and the rest completed by 2040. Action by the Labour Departments and Plantation Labour Acts was imminent.The repair of houses was done by those workers who were in lesser power for those who were more dominant. The proposed measures were, major repairs in the cold weather for better supervision, closer control of material issues by maintaining records in building registers, repairs to be carried out by permanent workers rather than on contracts, Block Chart of labour maintenance to be kept. The hospital which had once been the best in the district was now in urgent need of repair, and a new Medical Officer to be recruited. The way forward was greater interactive field staff and management, the provision of good environmental and working conditions, and the socialization into computer efficiency by the administrative staff. The improvements in administration of the gardens is because of the hard work of assistant managers, welfare officers and trainees. The Estate’s executives have the total support of their wives, who faced with hard circumstances of living on a neglected garden have proved their strength with the help of those who are from neighbouring gardens. (authored Baldeep Singh, paraphrase of report to managers 15.2. 2000) The Managers and Assistant Managers were frequently transferred from successful gardens to neglected ones, and had to accept their fate starting from scratch when required. Wages were poor for pluckers, and unions were ever active. As a result humanitarian concerns were emotionally a sign of their commitment to human rights issues, but profit margins depended on keeping the price of tea low and wages concomitant to the ratio between cost of production, workers’ wage and profit motives. Role of Women and Corporate Social Responsibility Projects: Alka Singh and the Bodo Weavers Project Local historians are extremely important to the Sociologist, and their views integral to how a narrative is constructed. The role that women played in tea plantations were always substantial, as in lower strata they were pluckers, sorters and packers, besides contributing to the demographic maintenance of labour lines through child bearing, marriage and nurturing. As spouses of managers or assistant managers, women mediated between the house and the gardens. As the wives of the managers were not permitted to go to the lines, their institutional role was to provide support to the medical staff in the hospital or help out in the school or be involved in Corporate Social Responsibility projects. Since amenities such as water, electricity, houses and medical and educational support were provided by the Company to workers, low wages were considered to be legitimate. Unions worked hard to represent the difficulties and poverty of the workers. Since it was a capitalist endeavor with Marwari traders taking over from the colonial British companies, quite often Calcutta traders preferred their names to be kept out of view. Managers’ wives were consolidated in terms of their support to the plantation through the work that they did in unswerving loyalty to their planter husbands. Very few were known to step out of their jurisdiction, but with the emphasis of Corporate Social Responsibility, the wives began to contribute to the well being of the plantation. Alka Singh ran a weaving unit with great proficiency, the products were made by Bodo women, and the linen thus produced was used in the plantation guest houses and hospital. The quality was so good, that it was even bought in Calcutta by social welfare outlets for handlooms. She writes “It is thought that, among the many things introduced to Assam by the Bodo people, was the technique of weaving and embroidery. Each woman is a weaver and every girl is expected to spend atleast a few hours each day working on the family loom. Having acquired weaving knowledge, the women folk use their consummate skills to make intricate and fine fabrics. Besides the designs and colours that denote their tribal identity, the weavers take particular pleasure in using numerous patterns and colours, and allow their own artistic impulses full play. This has the happy consequence of limitless designs and an innovative, playful approach to a burdensome task. The Bodo Handloom Scheme came into being in September 1995 at Borangajuli Tea Estate and was soon followed by similar schemes at Corramore and Dimakusi Tea Estates. The three estates are located in Darrang district, the furthest being Corramore (approximately a four hour drive from Gauhati). The area is backward, with little development. Communication is poor and other than the tea estates, there is little scope for employment. Furthermore, the problem of insurgency plagues this neglected and deprived part of Assam, with all its attendant difficulties. The Scheme was started with a view to providing opportunity to earn a livelihood, to go beyond the boundary of the tea estates and to raise the standard of living of Bodo women whose weaving skills find little scope commercially. What the women lacked was easy access to cotton yarn, lack of finance to purchase the yard where available, steady year long flow of work, and finally a market beyond the confines of the weekly bazaar where, essentially, it is one poor family selling goods to another equally poor one. A few weaving centres have been set up in the vicinity by local entrepreneurs, but work often depends on the needs of a fluctuating and seasonal market and is, as a consequence, inconsistent in terms of livelihood. BHS stepped in to fill these needs. Yarn is procured locally at wholesale rates, and is then dyed near Borangjuli before distribution among the weavers. An office and store for yarn and finished goods has been provided to the Scheme of Borengajuli Tea Estate, and it is here that the weavers gather, twice every week, to collect yarn. Providing yarn free of cost to weavers, who then guided in design, colour combinations, sizes and finish of the products to ensure consistent quality. The weaver takes the yarn to her home, where among her numerous other duties will be the work of weaving for BHS. She will spend only as much time as she can spare on this work, as flexibility is given and allowances are made for sickness, festivals, marriages. Normally, finished goods are brought back within two weeks, sometimes earlier if the weaver’s need for money is urgent. The weaving charges paid are generous and amount to nearly 40% of the total cost. This in itself is unusual in the Handloom sector. Each weaver has been issued a card which she brings with her. The card serves as a brief record of the weaver’s capabilities, her promptness in bringing back woven fabric and her earnings. On the basis of this card, a core group of especially skilled group has each been formed and their particular skills are called upon when new samples are required to be made or when an order is received that requires special care. All yarn is weighed before it is issued, to ensure that wastage stays within acceptable limits and that women contribute handsomely to the household income, some earning as much as their husbands. She is then given more yarn for weaving and the whole process begins again. When the Scheme started, much time went in organising and administering the Scheme. After three years, the systems modified and devised by BHS are now being re-used by the same NGOS whose help had been solicited at the start of the Scheme. From the bolts of fabric that the weavers deliver, a variety of different items are made by the Scheme; we weave table covers of different sizes, napkins to match, table mats, co-ordinated bed cover and curtain fabrics, single and double bedsheets sets. Since traditional Bodo motifs and designs were little known, a conscious decision was earlier taken to make products that have constant and utilitarian appeal. As the Scheme grew and its products acquired a steady market, more ethnic elements were introduced and these have met with approval in the marketplace. Orders have been executed for well known outlets in Calcutta and Bangalore. Samples sent to Delhi and the U.K have elicited enthusiastic response. The Scheme was privileged, this year, to supply linen for the students’ hostel at the prestigious Assam Valley School. Efforts are made to introduce new designs and products regularly. The relationship between the weavers and the Co-ordinators of the Scheme is friendly and interactive. The result being that many new motifs and designs have been added, on the initiative of the weavers themselves, to the large selection of samples that are already being woven here. In the last three years, a number of sales have been organized in Gauhati, initially with the help of well known bodies such as North Eastern Women’s Entrepreneurs’ Association (NEWEA), the Crafts Council of India and at Aavishkar Gallery, in Calcutta. As the response was encouraging, sales have been held with regularity all over Assam. Many of these have been organized by volunteers among the Tea ladies, who worked readily and whose contribution to the overall sales cannot be underestimated. Mention must be made of the generous personal contributions from the Directors of Williamson Magor. Mr and Mrs RL Rikhye were unsparing in their enthusiastic support in procuring orders for the weavers here must also be put on record. The Scheme supplies the hospital linen requirements for most Williamson Magor tea estates in Assam, Dooars and Darjeeling. The inception to the present day, cannot be over-emphasised. The initial capital or seed money was made available by Williamson Magor, interest free, the orders from within the group have provided continuous, steady work to the weavers for over two years now, while infrastructural support from Borengajuli Tea Estate have been vital to the smooth running and well being of BHS. It is matter of pride and happiness for those of us involved in this welfare project that the sales in this financial year were nearly 10 lakhs rupees. The Scheme is now poised for growth both in terms of larger volume of sales as well as diversification. The process of vegetable dyeing of yarn has almost died out in this part of Assam. We are linking up with NGOs activists in this field and hope to send a few weavers from here to participate in workshops to re-learn this process. This is being done with a view to setting up a subsidiary unit for vegetable dyes, which with their huge export potential, could lead to greater monetary benefits and conseqent empowerment of the women weavers. As waste cotton yarn is generated by the scheme, a unit for manufacturing hand made paper can be set up with nominal investment. Both these spin-offs have an identified market niche and little would be required by way of promotion of these products. The Scheme already employs the services of 7 tailors and this number is expected to go up along with sales. Most of the weavers are illiterate and extremely poor. They have no access to any kind of formal financial institutions and almost all government programmes meant for socio economic uplift of the people in this area have failed. Attempts are now being made to organize the weavers into informal Women’s saving and credit groups. Inspiration has been drawn from the success of micro credit groups in other parts of India and an NGO specialising in this fields. Friends of Women’s World Banking (India) has been contacted. This, we hope, will have a ripple effect into other vital fields of health, hygiene and education. The valuable patronage of the Company would help realize the dream to materialize. It is indeed possible that this scheme could grow into a small scale industry that would provide a handsome livelihood to the weavers in Darrang and in the future their nimble fingered daughters as well. Williamson Magor has played a pivotal role in bringing to the forefront the potential, talent and skill that the Bodo women possess, and which till today was little known or recognized beyond the confines of Darrang district.” ( unpublished mimeo Alka Singh, 14.5. 1999) Wives of managers of plantations were brought up in similar class contexts (military or trading families). They were made to understand that setting a table and putting out cutlery in exactly the manner in which their use was prescribed was part of the crucial etiquette that was required of them when entertaining clients at the manager’s bungalow. Servants were many: cooks, bearers, gardeners, ayahs, chauffeurs, chowkidars and each lived with their families on the plantations and were under the care of the Badda Memsahib who also kept cows, dogs, cats and any number of rescued animals and birds, including snakes. Sociability was a life line, so the Managers being in a hierarchy of command were buttressed by the duties of their spouses to those younger in line, whose bachelordom had to be supported by food and advice. When the Assistant Managers married, their young wives had to be initiated into the hard work of cooking for meals at the Club festive occasions. It was rather like feeding a battalion, and the “pathilas” or large copper vessels brought to the club with 25 kilogrammes of chicken, across rivers and rocky roads were like a cross country race, threatened by the presence of jungle animals. Ofcourse, the Burra Memsahib apportioned duties to Assistant Managers’ wives, but the choreography of cooking, transporting and serving the specific tea garden’s contribution rested on the Burra Memsahib. Garden visibility was most necessary, as the planters had to show success in sports, the commercial viability of their tea, and sales there of, while the women represented the manner in which style and social skills along with domestic managerial skills made them partners in the tea industry to their husbands. This visibility of role was something understood, if not paid for or acknowledged. Corporate Social Responsibility was a drive that brought these nurturing and managerial skills to the fore. In Munnar, the Tata co-operative tea factory brought the children of tea pluckers to skills such as strawberry farming, bread and cake making, dyeing and tailoring of upmarket fabrics for sale at the tea station’s outlet. Interestingly, the children at the Bakery were handicapped, or mentally retarded, and had been sent to The Taj in Mumbai to learn from its bakers, bringing back astounding skills in pastry and cake making. The Local Historian and the Craft of Collaging memories Every tea plantation which saw itself as successful, or struggling to survive required to have a history which could be supportive of its continuities. The local historian again provides us with much information. Alka Singh writes, “Lingia was started around 1865 when two sons of German missionaries brought some 550 acres for 600 rupees. Andrew and Fred Wernicke were in their early twenties and while Fred had assisted Captain Jordan at Soom, Andrew was at the neighbouring estate of Tukvar, close to the mission where his parents had worked in the 1840s, when the family first came to Darjeeling. It was at Tukvar that Andre Wernicke met with an unfortunate gun accident that shattered his left hand and wrist. He was taken to Darjeeling the next day where his arm had to be amputated from the elbow. This did not impinge upon his lifestyle and he continued to work and to enjoy the occasional shoot. The land at Lingia was partly jungle and under native cultivation of maize. Work on tea planting had to begin from scratch. The terracing of the steep slopes to prevent erosion was supervised by the two brothers and planting of new tea was from established nurseries or seed at stake. The first tea was planted out by an ex-sergeant whose name is lost to history, around where the Manager’s Bungalow now stands with Fred riding over from Soom to supervise the work. Among the first things that required their immediate attention was the development of a system of roads and bridle paths to facilitate movement of both labour and leaf with in the estate, as well as communication between the warden and the outside world. They connected the mountain streams from nearby jhoras by channels to carry water to the large tank from which it was then conveyed by pipes to the factory to operate the water wheels and at a later date the turbines. By 1867, Fred had left Soom to personally control the work at Lingia, living in a small roughly built bungalow, he watched over the building of the factory and work on the garden. Ever strapped for money, he could not afford cement, corrugated iron, steel girders and beams for the structure of the factory. In true pioneer spirit, Fred improvised and innovated using materials available on the estate: sun dried bricks, foundations of stone and mud. The floors consisted of “sookri”, a composition of quicklime and sand, wood served to make the roof elements and beams. Fred devoted himself to developing Lingia while his brother Andrew managed Makaibari Tea Estate. However, the need for both brothers to be in closer proximity grew, as the neighbouring spur of Tumsong, acquired a few years earlier, began to produce greater quantities of leaf. So, in 1873, Andrew, his wife and children left Makaibari to join Fred at Lingia. Their first winter was spent in the long upstairs withering trough, which ran the length of the factory, and was divided by light partitions into bedrooms, a bathroom, meals being taken downstairs in a room in the factory. The winter of 1873 was a very busy one, for in addition to pushing on with the extension of the Manager’s bungalow, considerable thought and care had to be given in preparing the Lingia tea. When the factory at Lingia was planned, some estimate of the crop it would have to deal with had been made, but such calculations were at best guesswork, as nobody was sure of the full bearing capacity of tea at high altitudes. The Lingia factory could hardly cope with its own crop and as increasing quantities of leaf began pouring in from Tumsong, the need to build a separate factory at Tumsong became urgent. It had also become evident that running Lingia and Tumsong conjointly was both cumbersome and expensive, with a lot of overlapping of work. By the end of 1877, the Tumsong factory and go-downs were functional and the winter of 1878-79 saw Andrew and his family installed at the Manager’s bungalow in Tumsong. Fred who had in 1874 married a Miss Hannah Lindeman remained to look after Lingia. By 1875 or so, people began to realise that Darjeeling teas possessed some thing which was very rare and this is the intrinsic flavor of teas grown at high altitudes. Planters were also beginning to find out how elusive this flavor could be and how easily it was lost by damage to leaf. Attempts were now made to retain the characteristic flavours recognized by names such as lemon, strawberry, muscatel, which so enhanced the value of Darjeeling tea by simplifying and standardizing the process of manufacture. Experiments were already being made with artificial withering on other gardens and the Wernickes would often meet with fellow planters to exchange ideas of information. From 1870 onward, the comparatively simpler routine of withering, rolling, fermenting, firing and sieving adopted at Lingia and other progressive estates gradually became common practice. The break with the centuries old Chinese methods was certainly a brave step. No doubt the brothers would be delighted to learn of the Lingia Clone, a China hybrid stock possessing both high yield and characteristic Darjeeling flavor. The five grades of Lingia teas, picked in locally made wooden boxes lined with paper, were man handled along with other Darjeeling teas as far as Pankhabari and transported to Calcutta by relays of bullock carts. As dacoity and brigandage were common, all convoys travelled under military escort or armed “chaukidars’. Lingia is now a valued possession: a profitable property that supports a population of over 1600 people. Upon the tea bush and upon the people of Lingia are lavished an equal amount of care and attention. In the crisp mountain air, from 6000 at its highest to the comparatively steamier lower reaches at 2,500 Lingia is beautiful: an eloquent tribute to the men who nurtured the estate from it inception in 1865 to the present day.” (unpublished mimeo Alka Singh 2000) When the tea plantation at the Dooars managed by her husband was sold by the Calcutta Marwaris, they moved to Soom and Lingia plantations which allowed them to carry out their humanitarian works among the tea pluckers. Rules of Propriety and the Planter’s Wife What did women who did not adjust to the isolation and tea plantation life do? There were visits to the club, and that too was tied by etiquette and serious rules of comportment. Needless, to say, women were not expected to hang out with men in the bar, and were expected to discuss embroidery and the behavior of servants in segregated groups. Chanda Singh’s novel The Last Boga Sahib (2019) is a fictionalized ethnography of time during the1960s, when a young Scotsman falls in love inappropriately with a woman who was a gym teacher and a friend of his sister in the home country. His mother is against the marriage as they are a third generation British plantation family, and she says the age difference and his solitary life will be a handicap for the young romantic girl who pursues this bachelor living in India, who is known to be obsessed with every day duties. They marry, however, but on reaching Assam, the young woman finds life in the bungalow insufferable and the company of other memsahibs irritating and profoundly out of keeping with her own sense of valour and ‘coming of age’ in times which were so exciting back home. The Scots were still working in tea gardens in the 1960s since payments made to them were in stirling. They left according to Baldeep Singh because that was stopped, and it was not worth their while to be paid in rupees. But they had initiated the Indian representatives of multinational tea companies into their ‘way of life’ which was lavish entertainment, the courtesies of well trained servants who being migrants to Assam or Tamil Nadu were often keen to keep their jobs, and the general pursuit of occupational perfection as a kind of vocation, as well as the sports which made them hardy and competitive, such as football, riding, shooting and cricket. The British themselves, after Independence, found it cheaper to import from Kenya and Malawi, and since the China war in 1962 brought Assam into the firing line there were hardships for the British planters and their families. After nationalization, British companies could only keep 26 percent of the shares, but were happy to have a large internal market in India which got them their profits (Goodwin 1993:167). G.P Baroowah writes of how Anrew Gilis Bowles returned to a tea plantaion he had inherited from his family, as he had been born in Assam and planted tea bushes there, which were very much in demand in the American market. The first thing he does after getting off the plane is visit the grave of Charles Alexander Bruce to whose memory he offered prayers {Barooah 2006:18). In the Last Boga Sahib when the young memsahib cannot adjust, she runs away, sorry to lose her husband, and grateful for his passion and attention but never the less free to marry again after her divorce. The obsessive planter in the fictionalized account of tea planters’ life, which has its centralized tropes the garden, the house, the club, the forest, the hospital and the network of like mind friends returns to his solitary existence with the alcohol, gargantuan meals which his bearers and cooks serve up for him and his friends, and the fear of malaria and sundry tropical diseases against which immunity is sought. David Mitchell writes of his uncle Stuart who was a tea planter in Assam, and then fought in Singapore and died there in the Second World War, against the Japanese as follows, that he recognized, “that on the one hand he had loved being cocooned in a life with servants and staff waiting on his needs. He knew how he reveled in the exotica of such rare sports as pig sticking and hunting, and how he enjoyed the privileged atmosphere of the planters’ clubs. On the other hand he now had to face the immediacy of his solitary return to the limitations and remoteness of a planter’s existence.” (Mitchell 2012: 72) The Englishman had to balance his obsession with tea, with the solitude enjoined on him, and as a result liasons with tea pluckers was looked down upon, but not infrequent. In the case of Stuart, he genuinely fell in love with a tribal woman, who bore him two daughters, one of them posthumously. He had no idea how his family would receive news of their hybrid grand daughters, but on the other hand, on the boat back home, he fell in love with a woman whom he promised to marry as she was from a social class his mother was from, and while in England on that trip, he also connected to hisprevious girlfriends… promiscuity was not a grave offence in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, though it was secretive. He tried very hard to get a job in England, but to no avail. On being forced to return to the plantation knowing full well that he could not marry by company rules for the next four years, he was pleased to see on his return to Assam, that his lover in the plantations was pregnant with their second child. The tragedy of war years, and the intense emotional life of the protagonists continues, as after Stuart’s untimely death in war, his sister’s husband also dies in the war against fascism, leaving behind a steadfast note of love and longing and mutual liberation. On the embers of these war time deaths, do the two cousins Anna, who is the daughter of Stuart, and David who is the son of Stuart’s sister Mary compile their evocative memories. The detailed accounts drawn from letters and hear-say tell us how recapturing the past of these hidden lives in the colonial period, and following it up with post colonial experiences, give us a window into people’s history through the weaving of discordant and often hidden narratives. Stuart’s intense emotions and his feelings for his lover and her children are always hidden from view. On the other hand he circumscribes their joy together as something remembered by those who survived him. He provided for them, and left them land and a home. Much of this emotional segmentalisation would be hidden from view of his intended English wife. Ofcourse, woven in that narrative of the solitary tea planter’s life anticipating marriage with his hypotherical companionate wife, if permitted to arrive by the Company, would be not just Monglee, the tribal lover, but the shadowy and instantaneous attraction for the lovely Isla Black (Mitchell 2012:69). All these loves are repressed and yet, like molten lava they exist waiting to consume him, should they all meet simultaneously. Before that happens, the Second World War conscripts him in 1940. Mary his older child whom he adores, and has memories of him, and Ann, whom he barely meets as an infant are both sent off to a convent school, where inspite of the good intentions of the nuns, Mary dies. Ann hopes to meet her father’s family, but her cousin Daniel dissuades her, as he was head bearer in a planter’s household and knew their ways, “The planters were out and as a special treat Daniel let me sit on the verandah in the big chair that he said my father had sat in. Daniel was clear that in the eyes of my father’s family I would be seen as an embarrassment. He said that they did not want to know children outside marriage. He went on to say that the English did not see the Indian people as equals, and that I would be seen as inferior. I knew all about castes. My life had been spent as an Anglo Indian, not accepted in our village community as either a European or as a true Indian. I saw the caste system everywhere I went and did not question that some people were born to clean latrines and perform other lowly tasks. Somehow I had not applied that thinking to the Europeans on the tea estates but as Daniel spoke to me my dream of acceptance by my father’s family began to fade. (Mitchell 2012: 291-292) As Barooah says, of tea labourers, “They were given shelter, food and clothing but the wage was minimal. They used to toil in the field and on the factory. Any indiscipline was ruthlessly crushed. Labourers were mortally afraid of their boss. Today’s concept of productive partners of progress was unknown then. Labourers coming from the different states of India developed a new culture of integration. Initially these workers were not acceptable to the local population. There was no intermixing between the native population and the newly created agroindustrial force.” (Baroowah 2006: 67; see also Shobhita Jain in Ed. Visvanathan 2001) Bodo insurgence was a vivid response to the rise of ethnic conflict in Assam, as well as of local communities rising against tea managers in the latter years of the 20th century (Jayeeta Sharma 2011, see also L.Lam Khan Piang in Ed Visvanathan 2018) In Chanda Singh’s fictionalized ethnography of tea plantation life in the hands of a last age set of colonial planters, the bride who is brought to Assam, constantly frets about her husband’s possible dalliance with nautch girls who come in for annual festivities. Her husband is thirty five and is discreet about past physical needs but her jealousy eats up their marriage, and the heat and lassitude become over powering obstacles to her staying on. (Singh 2019:109). In breaking all the rules at the club which are prescribed for memsahibs such as drinking overmuch, smoking with the men, dancing non stop with the bachelors, dropping her bath towel at the pool, being rude to the senior ladies, and generally being loudly argumentative with her husband David, Iris communicates her refusal to conform. So Chanda Singh systematically describes what it takes to belong to plantation life, and how conjugal solidarity was the greatest requirement planning a career in tea. In a charming essay written as an introduction for her anthropologist son Alan Macfarlane, Iris writes about her life as a planter’s wife in 1952, “It was full of fireflies and a canopy of stars, perfumed with moonflowers and lilies. I breathed in the sweetness and thought this is the last hot weather I’ll spend in Assam. When we went home on leave next year Mac would get another job and that would be the end of India. There would be no separations from the children, no terrible club circles waiting for the men to come and collect us, their shirts stuck to their pink stomachs, their fly buttons undone. I went to bed happily unaware that I would actually spend twenty years in tea; it would be 1966 before I was carried out on a stretcher from this beautiful, vibrant, exhausting magical county.” (Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004:9) Iris visits the village school master’s house one afternoon, on her husband’s suggestion, so that she can learn the local language, and is given a delicious lunch by his wife, and returns to the estate glad that she has met Assamese who live a good life outside the tea gardens. “Clutching a bag of guavas I drove home elated. The first scale had fallen from my eyes. Assamese were not the ‘spineless sods’ planters had led me to believe; compared to the labour force in the lines they lived sumptuously. I could visualize retiring to a village shaded by palms, with pumpkins, bananas, coconuts and guavas dropping at my door. Mac, who had pitied me a dreary afternoon of very sweet tea and stilted talk, was surprised at my glowing demeanour. I glowed because I had the key to escape from the club circles, the coffee mornings, the weekend Polo Sprees when the conversation still circled round the paniwallah. In all my years in Assam I never met another woman who wanted to escape. I was considered eccentric, and Mac was pitied. Most of the time I didn’t care. (ibid 12) In the 1950s and 1960s the club in the tea estate didn’t approximate Iris’s view or anticipation of “polished floors, flower arrangements, chintzy sofas, tea trays and iced drinks carried by servants in white coats and cummerbunds... a library, a card room, a children’s playroom…where magistrates, forestry officers, policemen mixed with doctors and colonels and talked of their jobs and hobbies” (ibid 7). So she was horribly disappointed. “When we had disembarked and climbed a muddy bank a company car drove us past some bungalows and deposited us beside one slightly bigger, flanked with tennis courts.. We were to watch tennis, seated on a row of hard chairs, and then the men would retire to play billiards and their own bar. There was nothing for the children to do, no swings or sandpit: in fairness, there were no other children. There were no interesting Empire Builders either, nothing but planters, all of a red-faced, thick legged, sweaty Scottish variety it seemed, a stereotype that remains with me still.” (ibid 7) Iris never told Mac that she had found a holy man on an island. He was a large man wrapped in a white shawl, sitting on a platform, and people had to queue to meet him, as only a few were allowed entry at any given time. “What happened next I have remembered for the rest of my life. A hand rested on my bent head, and through it, onto my clammy forehead, into my dusty scalp, right inside my head and then flowing down my body, sweetness and strength filled me. It was like sunshine pouring into a dark room, like rain filling on dry earth. It was as if the windows of my mind had opened and all the beauty of the world flown in.” (ibid 15) Although she never told Mac about the holy man, or returned in person for another blessing, the first meeting was sufficient for her all her life. The passing down of the culture of tea with its material culture which embodied elegance and bourgeoisie values required a new generation of planters, who had to be drawn from the right back ground. This involved being the sons of military officers, or civil servants or people with wealthy agricultural or trade back grounds, able to marry women from the same class who knew the rules of maintaining beautiful homes and gardens and an overladen table and a large retinue of ‘staff ’, as domestic servants were called. They were anglicised and used to the hardship of service to the nation. The routines were rigourous, and the basic rule was that children had to be sent away to boarding schools so that the couple could serve the nation in the production of tea and foreign exchange. The years of hardship of LTTE refugees from Sri Lanka in Tamil Nadu and Bodo insurgency in Assam were occupational hazards that had to be suitably domesticated. Natasha Nongbri writes “Jayeeta Sharma’s work comes closest to examining the foundation of a plantation economy in the regions and assessing its impact in social and cultural terms in the region. Against the backdrop of the emergence of the tea industry that redefined the region and its people (in positive terms for the British) she further explores the transformation of the former service gentry into an assertive Assamese middle class and their attempts and struggles to forge regional linguistic ethnic and nationalistic identities for themselves and their imagined region.”(Nongbri 2018:7) Courage and visibility went together, and the disciplining of labour force on low wages was understood to be the cost of keeping tea prices low for an ever consuming public. References Barooawah, Gautam Prasad. 2006. Tea - Legend, Life and Livelihood of India. Guwahati: LBS Red River Publications Goodwin, Jason 1993 The Gunpowder Gardens – Travels Through India and China In Search of Tea. London: Vintage Jain, Shobhita. 2001. Plantation Labour in South and South East India in Editor Susan Visvanathan, Structure and Transformation: Theory and Society in India Delhi:Oxford University Press Lutgendorf, Philip 2012. Making Tea in India: Chai, capitalism, culture in Thesis 11 113 (1) 11-31 Sage Macfarlane, Alan and Iris Macfarlane. 2004. Green Gold – The Empire of Tea. London: Ebury Press Mitchell, David. 2012. Tea, Love and War: Searching for English Roots in Assam. Leicestershire: Matador Nongbri, Natasha: 2018 The Making of Assam Tea:The Social and Economic History of a Resource, 1830s-1930s unpublished Phd Dissertation submitted to CHS, JNU Piang, L. Lam Khan. 2018. Understanding Ethno-Nationalism through the Concept of Ethnification: The Case of Zo Political Movements in Indo-Myanmar Borderland in Edited Susan Visvanathan, Structure, Innovation and Adaptation, Concepts and Empirical Puzzles In A Post Modern Milieu Delhi Singh, Chanda. 2019. The Last Boga Sahib. Delhi: Speaking Tiger Sharma, Jayeeta. 2011. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Durham: Duke University Press