SummaryThis story focuses on an ordinary working day on a tea plantation in Assam from the perspective of Jiya—a tea plucker on Dolani Tea Estate. It illustrates how Jiya navigates fundamental deprivations in her everyday life structured by the company's relentless siren without losing track of the scope for confident action. The photos, the plantation, the protagonist, and the incidents described in the story are based on real places, persons, and observations I encountered during thirteen months of fieldwork on Assam tea plantations between 2014 and 2017. However, the compilation of multiple observations into one day is a work of fiction. All names of persons and places in the story are pseudonyms. Quotations in the text are my own translations from Hindi into English.

Labor mobility to and from tea plantations in India has been treated as an exception. Plantations continue to be imagined as unaltered enclaves with an immobile, bonded, or fixed labor force as their key feature. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in India, this article investigates forms of labor mobility to and from Assam tea plantations. While tea labor is not spatially immobile, I argue that spatial mobility does not necessarily lead to upward social mobility. Based on this observation, I reconsider the plantation in the twenty-first century in two ways: first, plantations are permeable and transforming spaces, due to ongoing labor mobility and evolving changes in the political economy of Assam tea production; second, certain forms of inequality and injustice attributed to plantation economies need to be located beyond the Plantationocene.