Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of IndiaIn the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Making a Garden | 23 |
Improving Assam Making India | 117 |
Conclusion | 234 |
Notes | 243 |
Glossary | 273 |
Bibliography | 277 |
311 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Agarwala Ahom American Baptist Anandaram Dhekial Aryan Asom Asom Sahitya Sabha Asomiya language Assam Buranji Assam Company Assam tea Assamese Language Auniati became Bengal Bodo Brahmaputra valley Brahmin British India Buranji Calcutta Cambridge Census Chandra Chinese coolies cultivation cultural Delhi Dhekial Phukan district East Bengali East India Company economic élites frontier Gosains Goswami groups Gunabhiram Barua Guwahati Haliram Harakanta Hemchandra Hemchandra Barua hill Hindu History Ibid imperial inhabitants jati Jaymati Jorhat Kachari Kaibarta Kaya land linguistic literary London Lower Assam Maniram Marwaris migrants mission missionaries modern mother-tongue Muslim Naga nation Nepali nineteenth century officials opium Orunodoi Oxford University Press peasants plantation planters political Province of Assam publicists race racial recruitment region religious Report revenue rice Sahitya Sankardeb Sanskrit Sarma satra Shillong Sibsagar Singpho social society sought South Asia tea enterprise tea garden tea industry tea plant tion trade tribal tribes Upper Assam Vaishnavite vernacular women