Women, Fair Trade Tea, and Everyday Entrepreneurialism in Rural Darjeeling

Abstract

Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Darjeeling’s non-plantation tea producing areas, this chapter highlights the gendered effects of Fair Trade certification of organic non-plantation tea on rural tea cooperatives. Through a focus on rural women’s everyday entrepreneurialism and their run-ins with the transnational Fair Trade bureaucracy, the chapter underscores how Fair Trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen patriarchal/gendered power relations in Fair Trade certified tea cooperatives in Darjeeling. It highlights how women tea farmers also creatively use specific Fair Trade interventions to defend their own entrepreneurial priorities and rupture Fair Trade’s imbrications with local patriarchies. Women tea farmers creatively juxtapose Fair Trade and swaccha vyāpār, a local translation of Fair Trade, to defend their own entrepreneurial ambitions and enact new modalities of women’s collective self-governance. This chapter brings much needed attention to women’s contemporary economic lives and their role in tea production in non-plantation rural locations of Darjeeling.

Power distance in India

“…The term literally means “spoon” and is used colloquially to identify a person who employs sycophancy ( chamchagiri ) to establish a personal relationship with superordinates. Sen (2009, p. 131) defines a chamcha as “someone who is sly and always on the lookout to score points over his co-workers […] by misreporting about work etc”. The chamchas of a workplace have curried the favour or trust of a supervisor, either through ingratiation or a pre-existing relationship and, by extension, enjoy their patronage and some authority through tacit delegation.…”

“…Chamchagiri is a common dynamic of workplace relationships in India (Srivastava and Kulkarni, 2009; Sen, 2009; Gupta and Sharma, 2003). However, issues surrounding favouritism and sycophancy were particularly acute at this joint-venture.…”

Women’s Collectives and Social Transformations in South Asia: Negotiations, Navigations and Self-making

“…Scholars have engaged at length with collectives in development contexts. Within these engagements, microcredit-based collectives have been explored in depth, looking at the ways in which they shape gendered labour within communities and the possibilities these collectives create (or hamper) for social and economic mobility (Kalpana, 2017; Karim, 2011; Rankin, 2002; Sen, 2018). Microcredit programmes have required women to come together to take loans in groups or as individuals to fulfil strategies of Gender and Development (GAD) outlined by states or international development agencies.…”

Women’s Collectives and State-Led Development in West Bengal: Reimagining Selves During Counterinsurgency

“…Women restructure their lives and reimagine their selfhoods around state-led development interventions. In making this argument, I speak to scholarship that pays attention to various kinds of women’s collectives and their role in creating possibilities for gendered social change (Jakimow, 2014; Poma & Gravante, 2017; Rankin, 2002; Sanyal, 2014; Sen, 2018; Sharma, 2008). In a counterinsurgency context, the possibilities of change are greater because the relationship between poor women and the state is being reworked by both sides.…”

“…Paradoxically, in the securitized context of counterinsurgency, women began to reimagine selfhoods through state-directed collectives. This argument builds on feminist scholarship that looks at women’s collectives as offering possibilities for social change, through women’s negotiations with dominant neoliberal ideas and forces of capitalist accumulation (Roy, 2019; Sen, 2018; Sharma, 2008). I show that women might not concur with the agendas of the security state, even find themselves in precarious economic positions, and yet they find spaces to rework their lives and livelihoods through state-directed collectives and development programmes.…”