Along the Brahmaputra: The terrors of the colonial ‘Planter Raj’ in Assam’s tea plantations

The river was broad, its water level high, and it flowed perilously close to the road leading to Dibrugarh, the tea capital of Assam and India’s tea city.

A few score metres from the Brahmaputra’s water line, past the anchored boats, across a dusty path where dumpers, cycles, motorcycles and e-rickshaws ply and people walk to the city, the mainland emerges and a flow of green bushes stretches into the distance, interspersed with high trees for shade. A thin road with vehicles scurrying over it snakes through the shining carpet of green. This is, to use the title of scholar Jayeeta Sharma’s book, Empire’s Garden, one of the most enduring legacies of the British Raj.

Commercialised by their mercantile class, built on a century of exploitation and oppression of nearly a million imported labour from the highlands of central India, tea has outlasted the colonialists and is key to India’s domestic and international economy. Till today, tea is controlled by a handful of Indian business families and large corporations with trade networks reaching the heart of the former colonial rulers in London and beyond. Companies with British origins, pedigrees and names like Williamson Magor, Goodricke, Finlays and Duncan have Indian owners.

Although the days and years of the Plantation Raj are a whiff of the past, the large wooden mansions and bungalows in the heart of sprawling estates with manicured lawns, colourful flower beds and a steadily diminishing platoon of bearers, cooks and servants remain.

Over dinner at his bungalow of elegant timber, surrounded by photos, paintings and mementoes – not of family or tea memorabilia but his passion for horses – Manoj Jalan, third-generation scion of one of the founders of the tea industry in Dibrugarh and Assam pondered the challenges to the industry.

“You see, Sanjoy, tea is becoming not just less profitable but there’s also a leadership and management crisis,” Manoj said, as we sipped our drinks. That room and the burra bungalow next to it, where his late father Mahadeo Jalan would hold court, have seen chief ministers and other political leaders, high civil, police and army officials, as well as creative artists such as filmmakers share a diverse range of stories, experiences and ideas.

The squeeze on the national economy, growing inflation and the economic damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have had substantial adverse impacts: “Our companies have lower sales and profits, the overhead costs with labour, wages etc aren’t going down, they’re still the same or higher. So, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage.” But there was another challenge, Manoj said. “The next generation may not be interested in being part of the family business; they want to do their own thing. So we have to think carefully about the future of businesses like ours.”

For over 150 years, tea and tea plantations have flourished in Assam. But conditions among the workers who live in what are called “lines” in plantation or bagan (garden) parlance, remain poor if not dire.

No description of the river and its people is complete without the settlers brought by the British, many of whom came unwillingly in the 19th century and who make up one of the more ethnically diverse and large communities in the state. They are the “tea tribes” and I have always found the history of how they came to be in Assam poignant and painful.

A staggering 120 tribes from central and eastern India comprise the tea tribes and today they are nearly a fifth of Assam’s population. Their members are from larger groups such as the Santhal, Munda, Khond, Kharia, Ho, Gond, Bhumij and Kurukh. Yet, in their adoptive state, they are not classified under the bracket of Scheduled Tribes, although in their ancestral lands of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh, their relatives and clans have access to and protection from special privileges under the Constitution’s Fifth Schedule.

The river has a story about how these groups, with their rich heritage from central India, were literally shipped to Assam.

In initial colonial reports, explorers such as Colonel Latter and then Major Robert Bruce learnt of tribes drinking tea. They met a Singpho chief, Bessa Gam, whose people cultivated and used the plant (later scientifically named Camellia Assamica). Robert Bruce died early, so his brother Charles A. Bruce followed in his footsteps. The Assamese noble Maniram Dutta Baruah or Maniram Dewan, who was to eventually rise in revolt against the British, made the introductions to Bessa Gam near Margherita in Upper Assam. The initial results were good.

The first consignment of a small quantity of tea made in Assam was sent to Calcutta for testing. Calcutta Courier reported on November 21, 1836, that “a small quantity of tea (of green species, from indigenous seed) prepared at Suddya in Assam by the Chinese tea planters brought around by Mr Gordon has arrived in Calcutta” and was “pronounced good”. Another specimen sent two months later prepared by the Chinese out of season were “considered passable”.

P Baruah details how the tea made its way from distant and isolated parts of Assam to Calcutta and then to London, where the East India Company put the product up for auction. He points out how it was that the Chinese tea makers, who had been specially brought in for the purpose, seasoned and manufactured the tea leaves: “A large sample of indigenous Assam tea made from Muttock (area between Brahmaputra and Burhi Dihing rivers south of Sadiya) made by the Chinese was sent to the Government of India on December, 1837, and the governor-general was pleased and considered sending a few chests on trial to London. Twelve chests of tea made in Assam which arrived in Calcutta in March 1838, were shipped on board the Calcutta in May 1838, to the Court of Directors in London which reached there in November 1838. The Court of Directors distributed samples extensively and received favourable reports from brokers, dealers, individuals and scientific bodies.”

Later in the 19th century, as the British sought to clear (actually destroy) vast tracts of forests for commercial plantations, they faced a formidable challenge: they did not have the manpower. They hit upon an ingenious and ruthless method.

Taking advantage of a series of natural calamities, the tea companies authorised local recruiters, contractors and sardars to literally shanghai desperate tribals from central India, recruit them under false pretences and allurements, provide them alcohol, get them drunk and haul them off to holding areas where they were kept like cattle before being herded on board vessels and trains. It was ugly and brutal; many died en route. Cholera swept away many lives; in the tropical valley of Assam, malaria, kala azar and dysentery killed many more. It was a dreadful existence with poor diet, little medicine, few clothes, scant shelter and pitiless, hard labour.

The scholar JC Jha noted that “…recurrent floods, epidemics and scarcity conditions in the Gangetic plains compelled them to escape as emigrants. The social oppression of the lower castes at the hands of the higher castes also led to emigration.”

River steamers were specially introduced to transport labour and the journey on the fierce Brahmaputra during times of high water was not just arduous but took a long time – as much as four to five weeks to reach different disembarkation points in Assam.

Pooja Kotoky and Paresh Borah write: “The Assam Tea Company began to bring in labour from outside the state. The labourers were brought to Assam from Bihar (and) Jharkhand (Ranchi, Hazaribagh, Chaibasa and Dumka); Bengal (Santhal Parganas, Bankura, Birbhum and Midnapur); Orissa (Sambalpur, Balasore, Cuttack and Koraput); Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (Raipur, Balghat, Bhandara, Bundelkhand, Ghazipur and Gorakhpur). And a small number were brought in from South India and Maharashtra.”

A century later, this company, under new owners, were still facing sharp criticism in the media for harmful labour practices and neglecting the poor living conditions of its workforce.

For decades, the world of tea owners and labour existed in a cocoon, completely insulated and disconnected from the outside. Rights were violated with impunity. Workers were beaten, detained and denied regular wages.

Both male and female workers, and even the children, were often physically tortured. Flogging and caning by the garden authorities had become a common phenomenon. Dipankar Banerjee rightly says, “Abduction of married women, unlawful engagement of children of even five years of age, fraud, wrongful confinement, intimidation – all these become an integral part of the Planter Raj and had its spiral effect – many died in the very first year of their arrival in Assam.”

It was only when the freedom movement against British colonial rule grew that the rights of tea workers, and their protection under law and representation by unions began to take place. Things have moved forward from the time in 1930 when an outraged socialist leader wrote to the great freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan, “No protective laws give them protection. Economically, they are half serf of the Middle Ages and half wage earner of our modern epoch.”

Today, conditions are far better and different; wages have improved, as have living standards. Labour is organised and vocal. Education, once rare, is “normal”, younger people are moving out of the plantations and into different occupations. A community radio station in Dibrugarh, on the banks of the river, broadcasts in Shadri, the tea garden language that is a patois of the local tribal dialect mixed with Assamese and Hindi. Jingles, songs, discussions and programmes of the world of tea gardens and their people flow out of FM 90.5.

Excerpted with permission from River Traveller: Journeys on the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal, Sanjoy Hazarika, Speaking Tiger Books.