Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (review)

Colonial Assam was a product of the British Indian Government’s territorial organization of its conquests in the northeastern parts of the South Asian subcontinent from 1826 onwards. As this new region came under its control, the colonial government concentrated on extracting surpluses from the new province to finance its administrative expenses. The British inherited a province in disarray where economic activities were disrupted owing to Burmese invasions. After much experimentation, the British introduced tea plantation in order to defray its costs of conquests and administration, as well as to generate further wealth for British business houses in India.

In the 19th century tea was an item of pleasure and social consumption and thus was presumed to be a source of super profit. The tea trade, however, depended on the permission of the Chinese government as the plant grew in the interior of China. In Assam after the discovery of local wild tea bushes, the colonial state acquired land and encouraged investment by Calcutta-based British business houses in the province. The colonial state also granted British planters extra-judicial control over their workers who were recruited through an indentured system. Ironically tea, an integral item of global commodity circulation under conditions of imperial capitalism, also signified pre-capitalist forms of extra-economic coercion and inhuman labour regime. For local élites in the Bramhaputra Valley in Assam, tea came to represent economic progress and social improvement, but as time passed it also signified political oppression, demographic upheaval, and colonial exploitation.

Jayeeta Sharma’s recent monograph brilliantly explores how the contradiction inherent in the integration of Assam with global capitalist modernity through the quasi-feudal agency of colonial capitalism transformed social and economic life in Bramhaputra Valley, one of the core regions of colonial Assam’s territories. Though she scrupulously eschews any reference to Surma Valley, where the majority of colonial Assam’s population resided after the formation of the province of Assam in 1874, she has produced a superb analysis of the impact of colonial capitalism and modernity on the social and intellectual life of Bramhaputra Valley and the adjacent hill regions.

The strength of Sharma’s analysis lies in explaining how the encounter with colonial capitalist modernity, and the associated rhetoric of progress, transformed material and intellectual life in Bramhaputra Valley and changed the emergent Asomiya-speaking literati’s self-perception, as well as their relationship with India and the local subaltern classes. Sharma explores the thread of this argument through Empire’s Garden in a systematic fashion. In the first part of her book, Sharma demonstrates how the discovery of tea in Assam led to the colonial state’s massive land-grab and building up of plantation complexes, which in turn unleashed a demographic upheaval in the province. In depicting this transformation, the author develops an original approach, demonstrating that colonial race theories were neither static nor given. According to Sharma these theories also changed in dialogue with capital’s search for labour, and in response to resistance from the subaltern social classes.

For instance, Sharma shows how the resistance of Kachari workers against their forcible incorporation into the harsh labour regimes of tea gardens led to their demotion from “industrious” race to “savages” in the worldview of colonial racial theories. Indeed, it was the resistance of local subaltern classes that led to the introduction of the indentured system in Assam, which recruited workers from the Chotanagpur Plateau. In colonial racial theories the people of this region were presumed to be the non-Aryan, autochthonous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Colonial élites premised their ethnographic theories on discrepancies between the so-called industrious tribes and the indolent Hindu castes, claiming that the former were better suited for the hard work required in tea plantations. Sharma thus traces the relationship between the making of the labour regime of tea plantations – notorious for inhuman treatment of labourers – and shifts within colonial racial theories. She presents it as a dialogue between diverse and shifting intellectual...