‘Everyone wants to leave but they can’t’: The lives of the Bagania, tea plantation workers in Assam

The state of Assam is arguably the most diverse of places in the already uber-diverse region of North-east India. Over hundreds of years, people of Dravidian, Mongoloid, or Caucasian origins have migrated here, creating an entangled history that has turned Assam into a battlefield for every possible – if competing – human claim.

In the early 19th century, the British colonists brought in to Assam, workers from the tribal belts of eastern, southern and central India in large numbers for the commercial cultivation of the famed Assam tea. Today, the six million Bagania – tea plantation workers and their families – constitute more than a fifth of Assam’s population.

The workers were housed by the British in settlements called Lines, rows of shacks alongside the tea garden, with shared communal facilities. With its system of exploitative recruitment agents and middlemen, brutal working and living conditions characterised by frequent physical assaults, and an inability to escape from this form of indentured labour, the situation of the tea tribes bore stark resemblance to that of the slaves deployed in cotton plantations in the American South. Life has barely changed for the better in the Lines of Assam since then.

At one such Line at Baxung near Jorhat, the beauty of the tamed nature can be mesmerising. The tea plantations present a horizon flooded with a frozen sea of green, held back in time by tall shade trees piercing through them. There, we met a group of eight female workers. Half of them were perhaps in their thirties; the rest could have been teenagers. Their skin was dark, their bodies lean. Their faces were bony and the tallest among them was perhaps less than five feet. All wore brightly coloured sarees. One of them spoke to us about life in Baxung. She spoke in Bagania language that was translated for us by Rao.

Lai (name changed), perhaps in her thirties: Babu! What’s there to know about our lives? Every day, we work from seven in the morning till four in the evening. I have been working like this for 15 years or 20, I don’t remember. I was not born here, but in another tea estate. I came here after I got married. I live in that house, you see. Our houses are in the same cluster. My husband also works here, but he is with other people. Men do different things like cutting, grafting, and spraying chemicals. Their job is much harder. We women do the plucking of the tea leaves. They pay us 200 rupees for a day but during peak plucking season in August or September, they pay us by weight. Now, during winter, we can only pluck 4 or 5 kg a day. During the plucking season, we can pick around twenty to 25 kg. There is an old lady in our Line who can pick 80 kg a day. My husband goes back to his village in Andhra Pradesh every three to five years. His ancestors left that place 150 years ago. He has nothing left there. But he still goes. All of us are like that, the men I mean. We like to still have that link. Many still get married to people from their original village.

This one is my daughter. She started working here only last year. Nowadays, they don’t allow anyone below 18 to work here. But what can we do? The money is not enough. My son has managed to get a job in the police. He is lucky but still it is not enough. The work is always tough, but especially so in summer. Oh yes, it is hot here when it’s summer. It feels like the skin has caught fire. There is no wind also. There are many snakes inside these tea trees. Earlier many died from snake bites. Now we have the medicine in our Line. But there is no medicine for mosquito bites. These mosquitoes know our hands are always busy. They know that any time we spend killing them makes us lose money. They know that the Sardar is always watching if we are wasting time. These mosquitoes know how each one of us tastes. They bite us all day. Maybe they have names for us. These are fat, and lazy also. Some don’t even bother to fly anymore. They just crawl from one of us to the next one. We are so easy food for them. But when you work in a group and you sing and talk with others, it is bearable.

The women hurried inside the fields once lunch hour was over. With quick wrist movements, they denuded a tea bush of its leaves before one could even finish a breath. They broke into a song and giggled, a common practice while plucking. Jhumur, the songs of the tea-tribes of Assam, are songs of romantic love, the joy of life, or the pain of being a tea worker.

One of the songs goes like this:

“I put my name in the books (contract)
Oh nasty Shyam (Lord Krishna)
You deceived us to Assam
Sardar says work work
Babu says catch that one
Sahib threatens to peel the skin of my back
Oh Jaduram (wizard God)
You deceived us to Assam.”  

Rao, 28, a son of tea-plantation workers, is a migrant worker himself. He worked as a driver in Sri Lanka and was visiting home near Baxung. He took us to the Line in Baxung where he grew up. The Line there was made up of rows of houses in pastel blue. The earth was barren and beige, the air dusty, and the whole place seemed like a ghost town.

Rao: That one was my house. Looks like the same. I haven’t come here for six years, ever since I moved out. My mother now lives in the house I bought for her in Jorhat. My father has died. Living here was tough. They say there is a hospital but where is the doctor? Where are the medicines? Life was hardest during the rains. I remember water dripping from the entire roof, as if the roof is the cloud. Many people died from diseases then. I wish I could have shown you the toilets. They are never cleaned or repaired. They are so bad that no one uses them. My mother had to defecate in the open. A young bride comes here and she has to go and defecate in the open. So when we moved away, everyone was very happy. My father was so proud.

You can see there is no one now in this Line. The whole Line feels like a cemetery. Because everyone is out working. Entire families work in the tea estates. Some are maybe in school now, the younger ones. But they all have to do some work too. I used to make brooms that we sold to shops. They say that the children don’t work here anymore and ask the workers to say the same thing. Even those young ones who go to school, they leave school in a few years and start working in the estates, especially the girls. There is no choice. The money is just not enough.

Everyone wants to leave but they can’t. The pay is low but we don’t have a good education so even if we go outside, we don’t get anything better. Many try to work as construction workers. But then they don’t get the house or the rations we get here. So we are all locked in. It is very hard to escape. It is too complicated.

I was lucky. I left for Mauritius and then to Sri Lanka to work in hotels. But even for me, I had to come back from Mauritius after just a few months because I had to take care of my mother when my father died. I was lucky that I found a job in Sri Lanka later. Others who had managed to escape also have a lot of trouble. Like many young girls from here are stolen by agents and child traffickers. They promise that the girl will work as an airhostess or in a hotel, that the money will be good, but then these girls end up as prostitutes or are forced to marry some old man in faraway Delhi, Punjab, or Mumbai. Sometimes, the family knows but they also lie to the girl, they just want to have one less mouth to feed.

Sometimes, the girl knows but still goes because she thinks it is more glamorous outside. Some girls just run away. Some boys also. During the ULFA days, they were killing us Bagania people. They called us outsiders then. We were so scared. Any moment, their people could suddenly come into a Line and shoot all the men. But nowadays, everyone loves baganiya people. Politicians from all parties come and say baganiya people are their brothers and sisters. They play our songs and dances and call it local Assamese culture. Now we are not outsiders anymore. Because now, there is a new common enemy, the Bangladeshi. Some Bangladeshis came and tried to find work in the plantations. But last year, they were all driven out. Don’t ask me by whom. Yes, now everybody loves us Baganias. But has anything really changed for my people? Nothing ever changes.

Excerpted with permission from “Everyone Wants to Leave but There is Nothing Better Outside: Tea Plantation Workers (Baganias) in Assam, India” in The Visible Invisibles: Stories of Migrant Workers in Asia, Shivaji Das and Yolanda Yu, Penguin South East Asia.