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

In this path-breaking study, Sharma traces the transformation of Assam during the colonial era from "jungle" to "garden," and from a remote backwater to a lively participant in a modern India. Since Assam is almost never included in the larger histories of India, this careful and thoughtful study is especially welcome. Sharma imaginatively integrates the growth of the plantation economy with the growth of a distinctive modern culture. Indeed, she argues, Assam's distinctive identity cannot be separated from the tea industry; the colonial economy effectively dictated the path of cultural development in the province.

The first three chapters, collectively entitled "Making a Garden," provide the reader with a succinct and compelling account of the rise of tea in Assam from the 1850s, and why it took the shape that it did, on British-owned plantations staffed with Bengali clerks and migrant laborers recruited as "coolies" from distant Central India. Local Assamese elites, initially educated in Calcutta, though reluctant to submit to the regimen of the plantation, nevertheless applauded the industry as "the model for Assam's progress" (48).

At the heart of Sharma's account is the struggle of the province's newly educated class to exclude immigrant "coolies" and local hill people alike from an emergent Assamese identity, as well as to shake off the dominance of Bengalis who saw the Assamese as uncultivated rustics. This concerted effort incorporated late Victorian racial theory to argue that high-caste Assamese were, in fact, ancient Aryan settlers, and, as such, heirs to the larger Hindu culture of northern India. The indigenous hill peoples by contrast were racially "Mongoloid" (198). To bulwark their claims, these elites insisted that because the Asomiya language had emerged directly from Sanskrit, it was not a local dialect of Bengali. As a result, as Sharma points out, much of Assamese cultural activity was directed toward the revitalization of Asomiya as a literary language, with the aim of securing a "higher status" for the language and its speakers (173).

Despite the distinctive path to modernity produced by Assam's isolation, and the overwhelming presence of the tea industry, much of the story that Sharma recounts is a familiar one. As in other regions, including Bengal itself, Christian missionaries played a critical role in sparking the creation of an educated elite. When educated converts were not forthcoming, they shifted their activities to the tribal people of the remote hill areas, where sizable Christian communities exist to the present. Subsequently, a "new Assamese public" gradually took shape; its publicists "wrote and imagined into existence a new Assam." As elsewhere, their instruments were the "voluntary associations, clubs, public meetings, petitions and pamphlets" of the modern print culture (147-148). Over time, into the twentieth century, previously marginalized lower castes and tribal communities began to secure education and set out to contest the predominance of the high castes and their "Hindu narrative of racial preeminence and superior entitlement" (207).

The end result was an Assam of "contesting publics," as Sharma entitles her final chapter, riven, even in the postcolonial era, by enduring tensions. Empire's Garden provides a rich set of reflections on regions, regionalism, and the growth of nationalism in the modern world.