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"This is a finely layered, theoretically astute and informed cultural and historical account of a tea plantation in India. The ethnography is not content to address localized politics and culture; its importance lies in the way in which it reveals the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor."--Inderpal Grewal, author of "Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel"

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A Time for Tea

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations...................................ixAcknowledgments.........................................xi1 Alap..................................................12 Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire.....................203 Cultivating the Garden................................514 The Raj Baroque.......................................845 Estates of a New Raj..................................1156 Discipline and Labor..................................1687 Village Politics......................................2358 Protest...............................................2899 A Last Act............................................325Appendix................................................327Glossary................................................333Notes...................................................335Bibliography............................................383Index...................................................411

Chapter One

A Time for Tea: The Play

Dramatis personae: She/Narrator; Alice, of Wonderland fame, and companions; British burra sahib; British memsahib; Indian sahib; Indian memsahib; four women pluckers as a chorus; "Son of the Forest"; goddess; dancers; and other incidental characters.

ACT 1, SCENE 1

The stage is horseshoe-shaped. It curves, a crescent embrace, around you. On the far stage right, suspended from the ceiling, an empty picture frame. On the stage, at an angle behind the picture frame, an ornate wooden table and chair. On the table, an oil lantern. To one side, a large oval-shaped mirror in a highly baroque bronze gilt frame. Next to the chair, a stool. Next to the stool, a pirhi (small wooden seat). The backdrop is a cream gauze cloth, stretched loosely across the back of center stage. The stage is dark. There are hints of shadows.

Slow drumming begins: dham dham dham. Then a sound of keening, "continuous like the lonely wailing of an old witch ... an unsettling, unsettling" sound. This wailing rises to a crescendo, reaches an unbearable pitch, and then stops suddenly. Absolute silence.

A woman (Narrator) steps out stage right, which curves out like a strange pier, into you (the audience). She wears a long, dark red cloak of some lustrous material. The robe has a cowl; it falls low on her forehead, shadowing her eyes. She wears gloves the same color as her cloak. Her mouth is outlined in red and black. She stands by the desk, in front of the chair. With exaggerated motions, she removes some objects from a deep pocket in the cloak, moving as if she were a magician: slowly, with flair and precision. A quill pen, a bottle of india ink, a silver sickle, a bottle of nail polish, a clutter of false fingernails, a porcelain teapot with a long pouring spout, a porcelain cup, and some tea bags. She turns to you, with an intimate and welcoming smile, as if noticing you for the first time watching her place this strange collection on the table.

SHE: Nomoshkar. Hello. May I sit? (She sits drawing the folds of cloth around her.)

I am weary. My journey here has been long and its tale most peculiar. So strange that as it is told, you may keen, you may sigh, you may not be able to tell the difference between a wail and a whisper.

So piercing its cacophony, you may twist your fingers into your ears.

So unbearably beautiful, the sorrow of a body curved into its shadow, you will forget to breathe.

(She takes a deep breath, exhaling it into a sigh, ending in a wry laugh.)

Oh, let us not be so serious, so serious. This is a jatra, a dance, a shadow play, a sitting-room drama. Such kichdi, such higgledy-piggledy, you will elbow your neighbor and whisper for a crystal ball. You will look under the chair for a flotation device. What is this, what is this? You will fasten your seat belt more tightly and look out into cerulean space. You will find the ball, you will toss it in the air; you will cover your face with your hands and shake your head. "What is this, what is this?" you will say in despair. (Pause.) Let the tale unfold as it will. Don't panic. There are some plots, some roads with milestones, a cartography of words. If it is all too much, and the path disappears into the light thrown by the headlights, and you think you are not moving-then shut your eyes. The illusion of such stillness in the rush of the road underneath your wheels offers such dissonance. (Pause.) Let yourself fall into the rabbit hole. Dream, Dream.

Imagine, within the crucible behind your eyelids, a porcelain cup. Imagine, after a breath, silence resting on its lips.

The lights dim. She leans forward and lights the lantern to a low flame. She pours liquid from the tea pot in her cup. She is barely discernible as she rests back in the chair's shadow. The cup seems to warm her fingers. For a minute, you hear the sound of rain and then again the dham dham dham of the drums, a distant wailing. It fades.

JANUARY 1992

Sarah's Hope Tea Estate, West Bengal, India

There are two packets of Brooke Bond tea I have brought with me from Chicago that I show to Anjali Mirdha and Bhagirathi Mahato, two of three women in the tea plantation who have befriended me in this first month at my bungalow. The packets have on their covers two women, one a photograph /painting, another an etching. They appear "Asian," their heads are covered, the wrists braceleted. The hands are poised over a flutter of leaves. With one hand, they lift a leaf. There is precision in that stilled movement, in that carefully held and bodied point.

Puzzled at my offering of two empty tea packets, and somewhat amused by this two-dimensional rendition of their work, Anjali and Bhagirathi laugh.

It is one of many texts that I offer to them as one way to introduce my research project and uneasy presence in the plantation. My questions run pell-mell: "What do you do? Look where the tea travels. Is there a story here?" We have already had some conversations about their tea plucking: the suggestions of delicacy, their "nimble" fingers.

Their amusement is frank, welcoming, and derisive: "So what do we think about this tea box? ... Didi [older sister]," says Bhagirathi, "this woman looks like a film star. Like Madhuri." We laugh. She continues, "Who makes this box? Hath dekho [Look at(our)hands]. The bushes cut into them, and the tea juice makes them black. Feel how hard they are. Yeh kam [This work] ... yeh natak nahi he, didi [this is no theater, didi]. But what do you memsahibs know anyway? Come to the garden one day and maybe you will see."

Seven years from this initial encounter over tea, I reread our conversations in field diaries and the tea box as feminized texts: the box of tea, first, as fetishized commodity, of woman-as-tea gesturing toward a long story of empire. Women and labor made picturesque lie at the heart of tales about Chinese emperors, Japanese tea ceremonies, the East India Company, and the colonial tea plantations of a British Planter Raj. There are stories of many empires entangled...