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Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India

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Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India A book in the series Radical Perspectives a radical history review book series Series editors: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University Barbara Weinstein, New York University History, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from authorial subjectivity, indeed from politics. Political concerns animate the questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For over thirty years the Radical History Review has led in nurturing and advancing politically engaged historical research. Radical Perspec- tives seeks to further the journal’s mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-conscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently struggling with the issue of what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first century, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will o√er innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; comparative, transnational, and global histories that transcend con- ventional boundaries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to ‘‘provincialize Eu- rope’’; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complications. Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community to explore the very issue of what con- stitutes radical history. Within this context, some of the books pub- lished in the series may privilege alternative and oppositional politi- cal cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is con- stituted, contested, used, and abused. The region known as Assam, much of it now a state in northeast India, is likely to be known even to the academic public either for the type of tea that bears its name or for the ethnic violence that has erupted there in recent decades. In earlier historical and journalistic accounts both the lush tea plantations and the ethnic conflicts tended to be naturalized, to be seen as deeply rooted in the region. But as Jayeeta Sharma demonstrates in Empire’s Garden, both ‘‘em- blems’’ of Assamese identity are the result of relatively recent histor- ical, not natural, processes. The British colonial venture to cultivate a highly lucrative imperial tea garden in a region previously regarded as wild and remote not only transformed Assam economically and demographically but in a sense reinvented the very notion of what and even where Assam was. To create this garden and make it profit- able, the British brought in hundreds of thousands of laborers from other regions of India, forming a racialized workforce that became the ‘‘other’’ to an emerging regional identity promoted by local gentry eager to carve out a place for themselves in the booming regional economy, and then in the incipient nationalist movement. Ultimately it is the dynamic and unstable relationship between re- gion and nation, further complicated by transnational influences, that lies at the heart of Empire’s Garden. More than a regional history of Assam, this exhaustively researched and beautifully rendered study seeks to disrupt the Bengal-centered narrative that informs so much of India’s colonial and postcolonial historiography, and in- vites us to think in terms of multiple Indian histories rife with the tensions seeded by local and imperial heralds of progress. Empire’s Garden Jayeeta Sharma Empire’s Garden Assam and the Making of India duke university press durham and london 2011 ∫ 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. In memory of my father, Sachindra Nath Sarma, who bequeathed me his love of books and the best education he could find Contents preface xi illustration acknowledgments xiv note on orthography and usage xv maps xvi Introduction 1 part i Making a Garden 23 1. Nature’s Jungle, Empire’s Garden 25 2. Borderlands, Rice Eaters, and Tea Growers 49 3. Migrants in the Garden: Expanding the Frontier 79 part ii Improving Assam, Making India 117 4. Old Lords and ‘‘Improving’’ Regimes 119 5. Bringing Progress, Restoring Culture 147 6. Language and Literature: Framing Identity 177 7. Contesting Publics: Raced Communities and Gendered History 205 Conclusion 234 notes 243 glossary 273 bibliography 277 index 311 Preface This book has taken many years to write and witnessed major changes and upheavals in my personal and professional lives. At its end, my thoughts are with my Deta (father), who acted as my field assistant through the project’s inception but did not live to see his daughter finish her book. He would disagree with many of its argu- ments even while he took deep pride in it. Growing up in an environ- ment where daughters were often second-class children, I remain deeply grateful for the loving care and first-class educations that my parents Sachindra Nath Sarma and Gita Debi gifted to their chil- dren, at personal and financial sacrifice, throughout their lives in Assam. At the institutional level, I am grateful to the Association of Com- monwealth Universities, the Government of India’s Ministry of Hu- man Resources and Education, St Catharine’s College, and the Uni- versity of Cambridge for facilitating my award of a Commonwealth PhD scholarship from 1998 to 2003. The Smuts Fund, Leche Trust, Mountbatten Memorial Trust, Eric Stokes bursary at St Catharine’s College, and Berkman and Falk Trusts in Pittsburgh provided impor- tant additional funding from 2000 to 2005. In India, Britain, the United States, and Canada, the sta√ of the National Archives of India, New Delhi; National Library, Calcutta; Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Guwahati; Gauhati University Library, Mali- gaon; Assam State Archives, Dispur; District Record O≈ce, Jorhat; Dibrugarh University Library; Northeastern Hill University Library and Sociology Department, Shillong; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; British Library; Cambridge University Library; St Catharine’s College Library, Cambridge; Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies; London Guildhall Library; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Hunt Library at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; University of Pittsburgh Library; Yale University Librar- ies, New Haven; Burke Library at Columbia University, New York; Library of Congress, Washington; University of Western Ontario Li- brary; and the University of Toronto Libraries provided invaluable help throughout my research years. I thank the Yale Agrarian Studies Program for providing me with a year of postdoctoral research, Car- negie Mellon University for research funds and leave, and the univer- sities of Western Ontario and Toronto for their academic and sta√ support. I am grateful to the National Anthropological Archives and their amazing sta√, especially Stephanie and Susie, for the images reproduced in the book, and to Bill Nelson for his maps. A specially warm thanks to Laurel Wheeler and Monica Hretsina, whose cheerful, e≈cient support has made my academic life so much easier, and to my two department chairs, William Bowen and Kenneth Mills. The writing of this book owes a lot to Shahana, Asad, Nalini, Mintz, Bharati C., Ajay, Jinee, Sanjay, Janaki, Sumit, Tanika, Bhochka, Rinku, Saumya, Ravikant, Bharati J., Mukul, Rana, Ben, Prabhu, Suvrita, Anil, and Aparna in Delhi; Subhash babu, Rajat babu, Ian and Ben Zachariah, Amitava and Shaswati Bhattacharya, Sulagna Roy, Selwyn Jussy and family in Calcutta; Nikhilesh, Tarun, Urmila, and M. N. Karna in Shillong; Priya, Christina, Will, Perveez, Rachel, Francesca, Kate, Kevin, and Mustapha in Cambridge; Anitha and Paul in Lon- don; Natalie and Alejandro, Rick and Beth, Franca and Ian, Nida and Suvadip, Li, and Alison in Toronto; Nancy, Donna, Paul, Michal, John, Wendy, Marcus, Kate, Donald, Lara, the Labour and Working- Class History Group, and the Young Pittsburgh Historians in Pitts- burgh; Jim, Kay, Radhika, Ravi, Mridu, Prakash, Sharika, Stefania, and Marco in New Haven; Manju and Vydhy in California; and my two families (Ma, Nimi, Mintu, Lipi, Roni, Chandan, Dibya, Sumi, Rion, Saki, and Mumu in Assam; Carl, Jessie, Michael, Tamara, Ste- phen, Alice, Bob, and Margery in St Louis and New York). My PhD supervisor Chris Bayly and my MPhil supervisor Sumit Sarkar have my deepest gratitude for guidance and unceasing support on all fronts. At various stages of this project I received encouragement and scholarly advice from Bob Frykenberg, Sugata Bose, Tim Harper, Polly O’ Han- lon, Richard Drayton, Nandini Gooptu. John Zavos, Tanika Sarkar, xii preface Sanjib Baruah, Aditya Sarkar, Rohan d’Souza, Vinita Damodaran, Richard Grove, Radhika Singha, James Scott, Donald Sutton, Julie Elkner, Christina Granroth, Rachel Berger, Indrani Chatterjee, Mridu Rai, Prachi Deshpande, Sumit Guha, David O√enhall, Donna Gab- baccia, Steve Rockel, Eli Nathans, Rod Chalmers, Riho Isaka, Fran- cesca Orsini, Sudeshna Purkayastha, Arupjyoti Saikia, Jim Hagan, and the late Raj Chandavarkar. I also thank participants in the World His- tory Workshop at St Catharine’s College; the Commonwealth and Overseas History Seminar and the South Asia Seminar at Cambridge; the Yale Agrarian Studies seminars; my fellow panelists at the South Asia Conference (Madison); the British South Asian Studies Associa- tion meetings, and the American History Association annual meet- ings. I am grateful to the editors of Modern Asian Studies, Indian Eco- nomic and Social History Review, the Occasional Paper Series at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge, and the anthology The British Empire and the Natural World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) for allowing me to use some materials previously pub- lished by them.
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