Alienated Enclaves: Economic Crisis and Neo-bondage in a South Indian Plantation Belt

Abstract

The recent economic crisis in the Indian tea industry has led to the closure of many plantations and to the marginalization of the plantation workers. A critical analysis of the social processes that evolve out of the crisis-ridden plantations reveals otherwise hidden forces that condition continuing marginality of the workers. Accordingly, the major focus of the article is to identify and delineate the social processes that underpin the social reproduction of the plantation workers' alienation in the crisis context. This article suggests that the marginal position of the plantation workforce, both in India and elsewhere, needs to be understood as a phenomenon equally reinforced by the larger social processes of the region as much as by the economic processes specific to the plantation system.

Beyond the unions: The Pembillai Orumai women's strike in the south Indian tea belt

“…Women stayed in the tea estates, also to retain the tenements on the plantations, in what was labelled the workers' lines. Heavy workload, continuous cut‐backs, and the additional burden of housework worsened their lives (Raj, ).…”

“…It will be followed by a discussion on the unions' corruption and their 5 A number of studies in the 1980s focused on trade unions' mass mobilizations and their contribution to improve workers' conditions (for Kerala, see Tharamangalam, 1981;Kannan, 1988;and see Nair, 2006 for the history of trade unions in the plantations within the broader history of trade unions in Kerala). Critical analyses of Indian trade unions since the 1990s focused on many aspects including increasing corruption (Ramaswamy, 1977;Rammohan, 1998;Sanchez, 2016), corruption in Kerala's tea plantations, (Neilson & Pritchard, 2009;Raj, 2013;Raman, 2010), careerism or professionalism within unions (Fernandes, 1997;Rammohan, 1998;Sanchez, 2016), favouring of certain privileged workforce leaving out the rest (Parry, 2013;Rammohan, 1998), their attempts to marginalize alternative unions (Sanchez, 2016), confrontation and divisive politics between trade unions (Parry, 2013;Raj, 2013), unions as instruments of state hegemony and tools of private capital (Fernandes, 1997;Parry, 2009), and criminality and violence (Rammohan, 1998;Sanchez, 2016). 6 However, although, Fernandes' (1997) path breaking study also neglects the importance of caste.…”

Beyond “Enclaves”: Postcolonial Labor Mobility to and from Assam Tea Plantations

“…Today, the state of Assam has approximately 803 tea plantations, which employ altogether 686,000 laborers 6 . Moreover, it is assumed that at least that many or more live on tea plantations as dependents of the workers (Mishra et al 2012, 81–82; Raj 2013, 471) 7 . The common narrative about Assam’s tea plantation laborers is that they were recruited from central India by British planters during the colonial era and remained on the plantations for generations in forced immobility.…”

Categorical oppression: Performance of identity in South India

“…While a few Dalits were promoted intermittently to these positions, the non‐Dalits outnumbered them in most of the tea plantations in Peermade. Thus, aspects of social processes outside the plantation system, such as caste and gender, were transformed to fit into the class order of plantation production (Baak, 1997; Bhowmik, 2011; Jayawardena and Kurian 2015; Raj, 2013). The dominance of class order has helped mitigate explicit caste discrimination in the plantations when compared to practices in workers' native villages in Tamil Nadu.…”

“…In the anthropological literature on plantations, a major understanding of categories of identity is oriented towards how various identity markers like language, assumed racial identity/ethnicity, caste and gender were employed in the reproduction of class order in industrial sites and plantations (Bhowmik, 2011; Bourgois, 1989a; Hollup, 1994; Jayawardena and Kurian, 2015). For example, anthropologists have argued that the traditional values of caste‐ritual status have been appropriated and are symbolically practiced to affirm class position and facilitate the naturalisation of the class order in the plantations (Jayawardena, 1963, 1968; Mayer, 1961; Raj, 2013). Bourgois (1989a) terms this process ‘conjugated oppression’, which has become a popular concept for understanding the use of social identities in capitalist production relations (Lerche and Shah, 2018).…”