Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India by Jayeeta Sharma (review)

Turbulent Assam, an Indian state famed for its tea and discontents, is underrepresented in the historical literature of South Asia, and on that score alone the present volume is welcome. We are all the more fortunate that Jayeeta Sharma's new contribution is richly informative and theoretically sophisticated. Focusing on Assam's encounter with colonial modernity under the aegis of the British, the book traces the growth of the region's tea industry and its social and cultural consequences. The end result, as Sharma shows, was a nearly total transformation of the region's physical and social landscapes.

When the British annexed Assam in 1826, it was a mostly jungle-clad backwater, hard to get to and inhabited by peoples seen by the British as backward and much in need of "improvement." Subsistence agriculture was the region's economic foundation, but the British East India Company's need to find a sources of tea other than China led to the creation of a system of highly profitable tea plantations. Having begun tea cultivation in the region's heavily forested hills, the Company ousted the Raja of the Ahom kingdom in 1838, thus opening the rich alluvial heartland of upper Assam to tea plantations. In the end, this heartland was almost totally converted to the cultivation of tea and the rice needed to feed those who labored on the plantations.

Sharma's detailed account of the region's economic history, however, is but a framework for a drama of social and cultural change. She describes how groups and communities of the most varied background reacted against each other and the political and economic realities of colonial rule, and how in the process they struggled to develop new concepts of who they were in regional and ultimately national contexts. Serving as a background for these developments were competing ideas of "progress," the shifting sands of British racial "science," and the Euro-British concept of the garden (as opposed to disorderly and unsubdued forest) as a metaphor for agrarian improvement: hence, "Empire's Garden."

The most crucial problem confronting the British was that of finding a reliably industrious and docile labor force for the plantations. Although there was a brief flirtation with the use of local tribals, the British, having stereotyped the indigenous peoples as hopelessly lethargic and opium besotted, turned to migrant labor for the plantations. The migrants, deemed to be more industrious than locals, were mainly drawn from Chotanagpur and other impoverished areas of northern India, and ultimately numbered over a million. They are the orphans of the story; they become an appallingly mistreated "coolie" class at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and they, together with indigenous tribal groups, served as an anvil against which other, better favored groups forged their identities. Their plight is largely ignored by the region's other communities to this very day.

Other groups in the regional mix included the old aristocracy, the indigenous peasantry and hill-dwelling tribals, the British managerial class, the mostly high-caste and literate Hindu service elite, the heads of the Vaishnava (the Vishnu-worshiping branch of Hinduism) monasteries, American missionaries, "Marwari" traders from Rajasthan, Nepali graziers, and, by the early twentieth century, large numbers of Muslim peasant migrants from East Bengal. The old aristocracy did not fare well after the advent of the British; as was the case with similar martial aristocracies elsewhere in India, they were slow to see the advantages of education in the new order. The old spiritual elite—the heads of the Vaishnava monasteries—lost their position as ritual legitimizers of political authority. The group that truly mattered, and the focus of most of the book, did very well indeed. This was the service elite, the gentry class of clerks and officials of the old aristocracy, who migrated easily into similar niches in the...