Estates: Colonial and Modern

Plantations In Colonial and Contemporary Manifestations The Opium War with China precipitated the need for establishing plantations in India. The British depended on opium sales to pay for their Chinese tea, and in providing opium, for sale in exchange for valuable and expensive Chinese tea, they had to first grow it(Lovell 2011).Plantation economies depended on indentured labour, as Amitav Ghosh (2008) has shown in his The Sea of Poppies and the traffic was an international one, till slavery was abolished. In Assam, an indigenous variety of wild tea was found which was subsequently propagated as has been described in Alastair and Iris Macfarlane’s “Green Gold: The Empire of Tea.” The use of Chinese convicts to plant tea in South India and in Assam was too obscure and difficult, so the labour from Chotta Nagpur became a safety valve for providing for the immense labour requirements in planting tea in nurseries, transplanting and nurturing them, and keeping them free from pests and fungus. The colonial system depended on the early founding of railways to the ports. (Ghosh, Amalendu 2016: 28) A matrix of lines were established to take away first the felled timber in the clearing of forests, and then the dried tea from the factories. The preoccupation from 1836 onwards was to be able to provide England with its brew, and cease the sulphurous dependence on China. The politics of labour was defined in terms of availability from given sources of workers (Amalendu Ghosh (2016), Rana Behal 2014, Prabhu Mahapatra (1992), Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane (2003) Jayeeta Sharma (2012), Virginius Xaxa, Sharat K Bhowmick and M. A Kalam (1996), Abraham Verghese (2023), Arupjyothi Saikia (2011) Shyni Danial (2014)) So political circumstances were varied. In South India IPKF presence in Sri Lanka drove many tamil labourers during the 30 years war to estates in Coonoor and its hinterlands as they were able to provide refuge to their families. In Assam, Chota Nagpur labourers were replaced by the terrible wars of self proclaimed autonomy and tea planter families had to prove their stability by holding their links with the Army, Police and Forest officers together. While there was a symbiotic relationship between these bureaucratic echelons and the multinational communities of shareholders in tea plantation estates, the choice between life and death was never clearly explained to either labourers or the managerial incumbents of the plantations. “Tea is a way of life” the young elite personnel going into the plantations was informed. They already came from families with a military or executive background, where class, status and hierarchy was a form of incipient socialization. On arrival the newly employed initiates were welcomed by the manager and his wife, who right upto the 1970s were often British with a long history of administrative duties for their company in the colonies. The novitiates were taught their duties through conversation and social intermingling. House and garden were the responsibility of the chotta membsahib, as the assistant’s wife was known. As a partner, she was an essential member of the community, and at all times had to accept the formal hierarchical system of the estate. She was in charge of the domestic staff, and learned to cook the bada khana or big feasts that was so much part of their life. Food, interaction and business dealing all went together. In this sense much work went into learning or preparing the food, as supervising cooks and asserting authority was a necessary part of ruling the kitchen and being responsible for household keys and the home economy of management of resources. In the same way, the gardens were an essential prerequisite for representing the bungalow and gardens as essentially paired. Quite often the garden would be in disrepair and the house would be liveable or it would be the other way around as gardens could turn decrepit in the absence of a managerial class tenant. So given that transfers between estates was part of the promotional attributes of climbing the occupational ladder, the wife of the manager would have to be in charge of the transfer of material goods and the the relocation to a new place. Getting to know the cook and gardeners and the household help required self confidence and emotional dexterity, gaining which was a very laborious process. The master of the house was out of the house at 5 a.m with his dogs, to supervise the plucking. He returned for a brief while to have breakfast with his wife, and then returned to office affairs and management of financial aspects. He returned home for lunch and a short nap before returning to the gardens to supervise the weighing of the leaves, and at midnight he returned to over see the drying and curing process in the factory. Returning in the early hours of morning, the assistant manager would sleep on the ground floor, instead of the master bedroom as he had to be up early to supervise the pluckers once more. Chotta memsahibs and wives of the managers had a hierarchy among themselves and were not permitted to mix with the workers in the lines. These strict rules allowed the managers to carry out their work in a way which made supervisory capacities efficient. However, the wives of the managers had a very important role in managing the estate hospital and consulting with the doctors over the condition of the patients. They also had a free run over the corporate social responsibilities enjoined in the conjugal responsibilities of the couple to the estate. Women showed rare abilities in organizing , teaching and weaving, jam making, baking, dyeing and tailoring, art and boutique extensions of the Estate. They were truly committed to these parallel structures, as it was a necessary survival strategy to their basic responsibility to managing home and garden. On having to learn these new skills, as they may have arrived with none of them, they saw it as a necessary way of providing their husbands with the wherewithal of presenting themselves as an efficient managerial couple. As Claude Levi Strauss argued for the Amazonians in South America, a bachelor was an embarrassment, and it was only through coupledom that legitimacy of work and survival could be strategized. So too, the couple here represented the powerful aspect of conjugal complementarity. The woman had to communicate that she was strong and healthy as the master of the house, and run alongside. It was this physical and mental ability to understand the significance of her husband’s work and contribute to the stability of its presentation through the symbols of a perfectly managed home and garden which was her lot. The cry that usually accompanied this call to occupational perfectionism was, “We had to send our children away. We were not permitted to have them with us. They had to go to boarding school at the age of five, and were allowed to come home for the holidays”, is a very important aspect of understanding the emotional costs of bourgeoisie lives. The normalcy of this did not lead necessarily to the alienation of children from their parents, as life on the estate was extremely hard, and given the isolation, surrounding forests, and the prevalence of raging rivers and nocturnal animals it was a fact of nature that childhood and adolescence and young adult hood was better managed in an institutional framework. The fact that tea estates were often adjacent to Reserves brings forward the juxtaposition of certain aspects of tourism which includes hunting, tourism and animal protectionism. Every estate would have dogs, cats, poultry, donkeys, horses, goats and cattle. The presence of these animals were the responsibility of the chotta memsahib who had to protect her domestic staff from snakes, wolfs, elephants and wild boars. Clearly the household staff were alert to these dangers, as the master was often away from the house. Animals like the pet dogs, were trained to provide an antenna of warning protecting the life of all those who lived in the bungalow. As the sports and athletic aspect of their conjoined life was a given, the chotta memsahib had to turn up very well dressed to the club. She was expected to play tennis or badminton, dance, provide or contribute to excellent dinners, and be hostess in whatever capacity that the Senior Managers’ wives expected. To be asked to cook 25 chickens at short notice meant that no questions were asked, chicken curry that the guests would eat would just have to be perfect. Baking was an additional skill. The head cook would usually be elderly and well versed in the art. Often the Manager’s wife would leave behind some paper trail of recipes and accurate oven heating parametres to the novice Chotta Memsahib. Bird watching, embroidery, crochet, painting, reading novels, decorating and re-decorating the house were some of the attainments expected of her. Setting the table perfectly could not be left to the domestic staff, flower arrangements for the table, and setting out the cutlery in the exact grammar of use were her responsibilities. Official guests were those who were buyers, tea tasters, or executives of the multinational company who had numerous estates in India and abroad, where parity had to be maintained. As the standardization principle was paramount, neither climate change not unseasonal rain or defective factory machine could ever be an excuse. The work was hard, and international trade being what it was limits of pesticide use had to be monitored. As one tea estate manager said “ We pay the labourers little so that tea is affordable. If we raised the labour costs we cannot keep tea prices low, and consumers get angry if they have to pay more. As for organic tea, it does not exist, since tea pestilence and fungus are common.” Labourers in tea plantations contribute to the tourism industry as much as to their allocated tasks in plucking and gathering leaves together and weighing their morning productivity according to a time schedule. Quite often, spice gardens which grow pepper, cinnamon, star anise, cloves and cardamom are in contiguity. The agent visits from the nearby town and collects the produce against a given and mutually acceptable rate. Where tea plantations are individually owned against a small acreage, new innovations in Munnar estates include an airconditioned, or fan operated van which brings the tea in a cool atmosphere, thus avoiding damage. The collation of small estates together and the rights of workers have been an interesting aspect of the Tata estate which is owned co-operatively and by the workers. It means that they have union rights, can voice their discontent, and hope for better circumstances of work. The foreman is their leader, and he gets to boss over them over the speed of plucking leaves and the quantity which is accumulated over the morning. Ofcourse, there are bonuses for increased productivity, but clearly this comes at a cost. Muscles can become stiff, neck and hands can be affected from concentrated and aggressive plucking. The mechanical scissors used to trim the three leaves required for drying, roasting and curling are a great boon, but they still require hours of labour in the early morning sun right up to mid day. Each worker is under the gaze of the foreman, who also promises commissions to the super successful and eggs them on. Other workers look at this with caution as it is understood that super efficiency can affect the body. As one worker whose responsibility is taking tourists around the plantation said, “Who will look after us in our old age?”. Since he had mobility, drove a jeep around the plantation and could speak English, Tamil and Malayalam he felt privileged to share the real conditions of work and life on the Estate. He wanted to bring his son home from boarding school, but the supervisor was not giving him any guarantee that he would be relieved from his duties to bring back the boy. “I’ll let you know what the situation is, I cannot just give you leave without looking at the roster”. The aggrieved father said that he faced the same problem when he had to get married, and till the last moment did not know whether he would be allowed to go and stand next to his wife in the village where the marriage was to be held. For three generations, as Tamil workers in Munnar, Kerala, they had consistently worked in the Estate, but for his sons he wanted a different life, and was intent on educating them. His wife was a tea plucker on the Estate, his mother was a cook in the residence that was kept as a relic of colonial days. He was guard and driver to tourists at the bungalow which was rented out to different people on a daily bases, and always booked. Friendly by nature, he takes visitors to the Lines, and shows them the variety of temples, churches, mosques which dot the landscape, as the different cults have their places of worship. He also drives them to the Boutiques and the associated workshops for dyeing and tailoring, and the bakery with its allied gardens where strawberries are grown for jam. All the workers here are children of tea pluckers, who wanted to learn different skills. The bakery in fact is well known all over the town with its residents and constant stream of visitors as the personnel were trained in Mumbai by the Taj Hotel. The children of the pluckers who were sent for training were spastics or had Down Syndrome, and after training they came back very able as astute bakers making cakes, pastries and breads of various kinds. Outside each line tenement are small manageable kitchen gardens where workers can grow their yams and papayas. While wages are low, the workers are represented through the advertising and media efforts as ever friendly and smiling, as tourists visit in a parallel economic venture to keep the tea gardens afloat. Shobhita Jain’s essay Plantation Labour in South and South East Asia (2001) is an alarming essay on the hardships of workers’ lives, and the exact description of what they own is a description of poverty and hardship. On the other hand, managers try to keep workers happy by being involved in their personal lives, and giving them a sense of belonging. One of the indexes of these is how workers may indeed save the master’s life. In one particular instance in Assam when Bodo agitation was at its highest and plantation managers were being killed by terrorists, one of the women weavers in the Corporate Social Responsibility project run by the Memsahib whispered to her to tell her husband not to take certain routes, as there was rumour that he would be murdered by hidden assailants. Not just climate change, but the daily terror of being stalked and killed was ever present. Yet, as the Manager of an estate in Assam said, not one work day was lost. So dangerous was life in those years, there was one occasion when he had to herd all the women and children in a room and guard them with the Assistant Manager’s help as the assailants had turned up on the estate and were threatening the families of the Managers. Abraham Verghese’s novel The Covenant of Water looks at the juxtaposition of a family run estate (500 acres of gravelly, near-barren land) which has to be brought to life with the help of traditionally enslaved artisanal labour. The author’s mother left a hundred page account of their family history. Verghese then fictionalizes it, but in doing so he gives us archetypical figures who over a hundred years replay the great catastrophes which beset Kerala, or rather Travancore from 1930s. Tragedy upon tragedy beset the protagonists as they deal with flood, famine and the prevalent diseases of that time. The central figure is a 12 year old girl who is given in marriage to a 40 year old man, who is left widowed with a young son, at the start of the story. He is aghast on sighting her at the church, and tries to run away, but his sister who has arranged the match brings him back and persuades him that it is for the family’s good. To the credit of this widower, he consummates the marriage only when the child is 17 years old. Accompanying them in this period of slow familiarizing with the house and environment is the presence of the ghost of the 1st wife who occupies the cellar and is also a poltergeist dropping and breaking things. The estate owner is a rugged man, silent and preoccupied, who is intent on domesticating his property, and eating his food silently when served by his child bride. The son from the first marriage who is an infant, when his step mother is 12 years old, adores his new mother, and sleeps close to her and is her constant companion. Alas the family has a history of accidental drowning, and the young bride discovers this through a short hand insignia of names with a symbol of a cross which opens up at the top like a palm leaf frond. These deaths are so frequent that her husband refuses to travel by boat walking miles to a destination rather than cross by bridge or boat. What is the cause of these frequent accidental drownings? She discovers that those who are afflicted with the curse cannot bear water falling on them, even baths frighten them. In her darkest fears she never imagines that her step son will die of drowning in a puddle, but that happens and her husband can not recover from this second loss, so his silence becomes even more deafening, and the ghost in the cellar becomes even more demanding. So given her belief in Christ (they are all biographically as a family close to a Christian Saint in Mannar) she edges past year after year, and calamity after calamity. Given the monsoon, floods, and the proximity of rivers these drownings are endemic, but the physican Abraham Verghese locates a genetic connection, a family blip in the nerves which leads to both deafness and lack of co ordination in water, as the ears are affected and motor neuron functions are blurred regarding concepts of space and boundaries. In contrast to this simple family with its 500 acres which are also parceled out to relatives to help work the land, are the fictionalized tea estate owners who come into proximity. The Estate owners are enormously wealthy and own large cars, bungalows and they too are marked by death and tragedy. As Verghese is handling questions of three generations, and the stolidity of tradition, in the face of what are endemic, the question of how children who are ‘special’ or ‘challenged’ are treated, becomes central to the analyses. The child born to the protagonists is a girl who is spastic but loved and cheerful, able to speak and laugh and dance, but never grows beyond 4 years of age mentally. Her brother is intelligent but he must die of the family illness. His wife is the survivor of a great family tragedy, which is the death of her mother at an early age. She is a gifted artist, but alas, contracts leprosy, unknown to her family. Her husband dies after impregnating her and life does go on parallel tracks but not as any of us can imagine it. These stories of such great and intense sorrow, presented as fictionalized family history is a testament to the way in which the St Thomas Christians in Kerala present themselves in terms of an ethos of survival, philanthrophy, and subject to the tropics, and all the illness associated with it which affect the body including drownings, snake bite, diphtheria, tuberculosis, cereberal stroke, cancer… the list is endless. Philanthrophy leads to the ultimate infection of leprosy, and Abraham Verghese must give the occupational details of doctors’ lives from descriptions of diphtheria, hydrocele, leprosy and stroke. People care, they deal with disease and death, they don’t push it away, they accept their fate. The Estates are remote places, and the people who live in them must eke out their life emotionally. Death is a frequent and haunting presence, the loss of children the hardest to experience and describe vicariously. How to reach the Doctor remains the perennial trouble. As a planter from Attapadi who was looking after the family legacy said to me, “My father would say that he was Doctor, Tea Planter, Police Man, Lawyer, Forest Officer, Post Man all in one, and yet, he would drive down to Kottayam to meet us at our boarding school every week end.” Babies who were sick were driven down at night through forests with elephants and leopards and monkeys and snakes. Life was always dangerous, and there was also the problem of alcoholism. When the son of the protagonists, who was slated to be a Medial Doctor, meets his wife to be, a gifted artist, he explains that he wants to be a reader of classical literature and there is a death mask which appears in their family because of frequent drownings, she says casually, words to the affect that in plantation families, it is alcoholism, her father drinks, and now her brother drinks too. Abraham Verghese takes individual lives, with individual attributes, separate contexts and life chances then weaves them in a historical skein which gives us a history of plantations which is simultaneously stereotypical and exaggerated, filling even Oprah with dread, as the tv interview with her communicates. The solution to the possibility of famine, flood and contiguity to raging rivers is migration to foreign lands. Diaspora Malayalis are haunted by the fact that they could not keep their ancestral lands, and their tiled bungalows, with their artisanal slaves. The latter, with a practiced etiquette communicate the significance of childhood friendships with the Master and their consent to bondage. This intimacy and its corresponding social distance is the stuff of everyday relations of hierarchy which continue even today. For those who could not get away from their flooded homes, or from the impact of all that Verghese describes, the tropics remains their home as statistics of death from chicanguniya, dengue, batfever, and affliction from filarisis and cereberal malaria show. The floods leave a trail of death and loss, as has been shown in the disaster footage for Kerala in 2018, 2019 and 2024. Tea stations are particularly vulnerable as their altitude and proximity to water sources makes them prey to flash floods and crumbling mountains. Seasonal variation, where there is no fixed months when monsoon appears makes growing tea. Baldeep Singh, President of the Tea Association in India, and also later in Uganda, where he managed Khaitan tea plantations, said that the problem is so acute, that he had asked for researchers’ help in the Geography department to find new areas for establishing plantations where geology and climate could coincide for growing tea. The thing about climate change is that there are no rules, the el nina and el nona effect influences climate in terms of extreme heat and drought, or extreme rain fall. In the 1960s, Loren Eiseley communicated that all events were, in Nature, arbitrary. There had to be a promise of stability, but the entrance of human beings changed everything( Eiseley 1999:123). He argues on behalf of James Hutton in the 18th century who believed that whatever erosion or change happened through geological events gathered itself elsewhere. The memory of these events are inscribed in rock (ibid 26). In his observation that land was being created while land was being worn away, that there was continental elevation as well as erosion, Hutton shows a great grasp of the earth’s interior powers. Eiseley writes, “Time and accompanying geological change are two of the necessary properties without which evolution would be unable to operate. And those two properties bring death as a third factor in their wake.” (ibid 35). Climate change as a result of human activity results in the rising of the seas from the melting of glaciers, but the earth independently has a body of its own, where changes occur, revitalize while destroying. Acknowledgements: Alka and Baldeep Singh, Susan and Anish Mathai, Zubin and Rachel Varghese, Jiju and Jeanette James, Susan and George K John, Ben and Rana P Behal, Anita Varghese, Sunetra Amarasuriya, Radhika Singha and Sucheta Mahajan and extended families and friends for conversations. References Eiseley. Loren: 1957 The Immense Journey, New York, Random House. 1999 The Firmament of Time Nebraska: Bison Books Rana P Behal and Prabhu P. Mohapatra: 2007 Tea and Money vs Human Life: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840-1908 in E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass (eds) Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, London: Frank Cass pp. 142-143 Behal, Rana P: 2014 One Hundred Years of Servitude, New Delhi: Tulika Books Berger, John: 1992 Pig Earth. New York: Vintage Bhowmik, Sharit, Virginius Xaxa and M. A Kalam: 1996 Tea Plantation Labour in India. New Delhi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung , Ghosh, Amitav: Sea of Poppies New Delhi Penguin. . Guha, Amalendu: 2016 Planter Raj to Swaraj, Guwahati: Anwesha Publications Jain, Shobhita: 2001 Plantation Labour in South and South East Asia, in Susan Visvanathan ed. Structure and Transformation. Delhi: Oxford University Press Lovell, Julia: 2011 The Opium War, London: Picador Saberwal, Vasant and Mahesh Rangarajan Ed: 2003 Battles Over Nature, Ranikhet: Permanent Black Saikia, Arupjyoti: 2011 Forests and Ecological History of Assam, New Delhi: Oxford University Press Sharma, Jayeeta: 2012 Empire’s Garden, Ranikhet: Permanent Black Verghese, Abraham: 2023 The Covenant of Water, London: Grove Press Unpublished Phd Thesis submitted (2012) to JNU, New Delhi, Shyni Danial Chapter 3 Rehabilitation as Nation Building in State and Statelessnes: The Politics of Repatriation in India and Sri Lanka 1920s to 1970s.