Tea Garden Struggles
Vaskar
Nandy
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this link below to read this article published in Frontier Autumn Number oct 6
– Nov 2, 2013 http://www.frontierweekly.com/articles/vol-46/46-13-16/46-13-16-Tea%20Garden%20Struggles.html
Economic compulsion of the worker and the consequent domination of the
worker by the capitalist is the characterising principle of all capitalist
production yielding surplus value and normal profits by a process of
realisation. But capital, whether in advanced or backward capitalism, has
always attempted to pay wages at below value by various means of extra-economic
compulsion, with or without the backing of the state.
Historically, capital has even created extreme forms of such extra-economic
coercion, as in the brutality of the modern slave system in the Americas, the
West Indies, Cuba, South Africa, etc. Once slavery was finally abolished
through protests, revolts and war (but even before that in the Dutch colonies)
a new form of slavery, the plantation system came into being that mainly
safeguarded super-profits in indigo, sugarcane, rubber, tea, etc. The strongest
survivor of that system is in the tea industry of North East India.
Starting in the 1830s, after the annexation of Assam in 1826, the British
found tea to be growing wild in Assam. Exploration and experiments finally
decided against the local plant variety and it was decided to plant a Chinese
variety suited to the soil in Assam.
Large scale production of tea in Assam was seen as a boon by the East India
Company, both as a very profitable proposition in itself and also as a way to
snatch the monopoly of Chinese tea in a thriving and growing international
market. It would also go a long way towards solving its balance of trade
problems with China.
Long decades of civil war—one of the great peasant wars—and following it, a
series of genocidal wars by the Burmese King forced many of the survivors in
Assam to flee to neighbouring regions. The country lay waste and much of the
land went back to forest. The hills of Darjeeling, the Terai plains (Darjeeling
district) and the sub- montane tracts of the Dooars (Jalpaiguri district) -all
annexed within a few decades—were mainly forest and sparsely populated. The
Company, spurred on by the hope of monopolising the sale of tea world-wide,
started to make large land grants to all would be British planters without
charging any land revenue. British investors, both from among the local
functionaries of the company and from the UK., who did not know anything about
planting and manufacture of tea, could rely on a new corporate entity, the
managing agency. The individual gardens or cluster of them belonging to the
same owners were incorporated in England.
Now the problem was to find the large number of workers needed for the
estates. The local populations in these regions refused to work in the
plantations once they realised that life in the estates was a form of slavery
more onerous that any suffered under the Ahoms or other chiefs. It was then
thought that Chinese labourers from the tea belts in Southern China, generally
impoverished as they were and not averse to migration for work, could be
brought in to work in the North East Indian tea estates. But that attempt
failed when the Chinese labourers that were brought in initially refused to
work in the conditions and demands of the workplace and more or less withdrew.
It was then that recruitment focused on the tribal and semi-tribal
populations of Nepal (mainly for work in the Darjeeling hills) and the hundreds
of thousands of the tribals and semi-tribals from the mainly eastern part of
the central Indian plateau—West Bengal, Jharkhand and Orissa—to work in the
increasingly proliferating number of estates in the Terai, Dooars and Assam.
The overwhelming majority of the latter shared a wide ranging socio-cultural
ethos in their homeland and which can be called the Jharkhandi ethos. But they
spoke various languages belonging to the Mundari subset of the Austro-asiatic
group of languages and also several languages of the Dravidian group. The Nepalese
group also spoke various Tibeto-Burman languages such as Tainang, Gurung,
Magar, Limbu, Newari and Nepali, the last of which was in the process of
standardisation.
The military feudalism in Nepal and aggressive expansionist wars fought by
the chiefs led by the King had immiserated the Nepalese peasantry, especially
the tribals; in the Bengal Presidency, the permanent settlement, rack renting
by the Zamindars and usury had created famine conditions. Enticement,
chicanery, fraud and violence reminiscent of the West African slave trade were
used by agents of the industry known as arkattis to recruit workers. It was not long before that
this system of recruitment proved coun:erproductive. The managing houses then
shifted to the sardari system by which some workers were chosen and nurtured
through privileges and sent off to their native places to lure workers into the
tea estates. On returning from their various forays, these privileged men,
known henceforth as Sardars, soon became the supervisors monitoring work and
every other aspect of the workers' lives for the management.
Plantations are in remote and backward regions. This has played a major
role in the lives of the plantation workers. The first problem was the
transportation of the workers over very long distances by train for a small
part of the journey, on foot and boat. Thousands died on the way. Hundreds of
thousands died after arrival from Malaria, Kalazar, diarrhoea and dysentery.
Sanitation, drinking water, housing and medical care were deplorable.
But once inside a plantation, there was no escaping, not even to a
neighbouring garden. The state gave the managers limited magisterial powers as
Justices of the Peace, allowing them to imprison people for one month and /or
deliver up to 15 lashes of the birch. Being found outside the estate attracted
both punishments. There were also state sponsored cavalries and militias
officered in the main by estate managers. These were meant to search and arrest
the many workers who tried to flee and also to intimidate the workers against
the frequent protests and demonstrations.
One of the more important elements in the mechanism for keeping the workers
confined to the estate was the payment of the meagre wages not in cash but
company tokens. The company sponsored shop on the estate would exchange them
for rations for the family and a few essentials. This meant that shopping was
not tolerated as an excuse for being outside the estate.
This confinement within the estate and the remote location and
inaccessibility of those estates created an enclave economy. This economy had
exceptionally minimal exchanges with the local economy. Local purchases of
grains soon gave way to wholesale purchases by the Calcutta managing agencies
and their designated suppliers and distributors. The boxed tea would travel out
of the estates by bullock carts, lorries where there were roads, country and
steam boats to Calcutta where they would be loaded on to ships for transport to
the London auctions. This is an earlier version of the SEZ.
Work on the plantation was so onerous that an ex-planter and the leader of
planters as the big boss of the Indian Tea Association, could recollect in the
tranquillity of an Oxford college that the heavy physical labour of the women
pluckers in the tea gardens could not be sustained by the strongest British
workmen. In the plantations it was not just able bodied men and women who had
to toil like this. The old and the children, in their hundreds of thousands,
had also to labour to almost beyond their capacities. The token provided
rations for all and so everyone had to work. And work was from a little after
sunrise to a little before sunset except during the lean period of two months
during the winter when there was some relaxation.
There was very little technical division of labour. Carpenters, fitters,
etc were usually people of Chinese origin or were non-tribals brought in from
outside the estate. At first the migrant workers sieved the tea in their
grades, packed them in boxes and helped the technical hands; by the 1920s these
workers began to master the machines. Towards the end of the 1930s, when
motorised transport and some tractor ploughing became general, many had
acquired driving skills and some machining. But of course factory and other
technical work absorbs around 5 percent of the labour force. All women and a
majority of the men have always been assigned to the hazards and toil of field
work.
The less said about the housing of the workers the better. The bamboo and
thatch were provided by management but the workers were obliged to collect
them. Enough of those materials were normally provided to build one hut and a
makeshift kitchen. Three, sometimes four generations were expected to manage
with such housing. Even today, the overwhelming majority of workers do not have
latrines of any sort. Apart from the main drains out of the planted area, there
were no drains and even today the estate drainage systems are deplorable.
There were no hospitals or doctors and nurses. Delivery was by traditional
midwives or experienced neighbours. Frequent epidemics were the norm.
The nineteenth century passed more or less in these conditions. There were
very small incremental changes due to many anti-planter disturbances created
more or less locally. The history of nineteenth century struggles of the tea
workers has not been excavated extensively yet.
One non-violent but very effective protest in the 1920s drew a lot of
comment from Bengali nationalists. Thousands of workers defied the management
in Assam and daring the police apparatus of the government walked out of their
gardens and trekked hundreds of miles to the steamboat jetty in Madarihat in
Bengal wanting to board boats travelling towards western Bengal. They were
surrounded by the armed forces and fired upon, killing a few hundred workers.
The survivors, men, women and children, were force marched back to their
plantations. Sections of the nationalist press in Bengal protested the incident
and described the situation of the tea workers in horror-stricken cadences. The
clandestine participation of tea workers during the preparations for revolt by
the martyr Piyali Phukan in 1857 or the spread of the anti-imperialist Tana
Bhakat movement among tea workers, especially in Jalpaiguri were noted by
British intelligence and prosecutions followed in several cases. But the press
took very little notice of them. But it is clear that the extreme domination of
the planters left room only for the many violent and non-violent protests and
this alarmed the colonial government and metropolitan capital.
By the time of independence, there was a rudimentary healthcare system,
primary schools with mud-floored structures for all classes and one teacher,
improvements in the roads infrastructure (thanks mainly to war preparations),
and railways were constructed mainly for hauling tea and grains, etc.
But the enclave nature of the economy and the extreme domination of the
management remained. The domination was now not in the form of policing the
workers and juridical powers of the management. The sardars referred to above
and a small number of their relatives and friends were slowly elevated to a
layer of people who did the ground level management under orders from the
management, allowing the top layers to retreat from conflict situations. This
layer now has a name—sub-staff. This layer of management, with a wage
difference with the workers and with many special privileges, was/is not
socially very distant from the workers. This was their strength and the measure
of their efficacy while carrying out the unpleasant orders of higher
management. They could/can utilise kin/community/tribe/ caste differences to
divide and rule for the management. But such differences are vanishing fast
under the cudgel of the capitalist work process.
Since 1951, many benign laws have been passed for the benefit of tea
workers and many good laws have been extended to the estates such as on the
payment of wages, compensation for injury at work, pensions and gratuity,
minimum wages etc. These were in the main due to the unionisation process that
began in the late forties and picked up a very strong momentum in the early
fifties. But for the lack of strong inspectorates and the judicial process
remaining out of the reach of the workers due to illiteracy, poverty and the
rapaciousness of most lawyers, none of these laws are as a rule implemented
properly or at all.
Unions could have done something about it. The beginnings of left unions in
the tea estates is a glorious story of sacrifice and resistance by the leading
workers in the face of violent opposition from the combined government forces
of independent India and the colonial planters. A weak left movement in Assam
simply conceded ground to company unions sponsored by V V Giri of the Congress.
The leaders of the monopolistic Congress unions at the garden level were all
sub-staff people nominated by management.
In West Bengal, the left has also evolved to the same reality. Except the
extreme left unions (which have very little influence), all unions are led by
the sub-staff at the ground level. Unions are being run by management's lowest,
but extremely important, tier. All their central, non-garden apparatuses are
more or less manned by extremely corrupt agents of management.
Take two examples. Consider the minimum wage law in the tea industry. This
law has never been implemented in North India in spite of the law's requirement
to do so. One can understand why the reactionaries of the Congress in Assam
were not interested to push for its implementation. But what about the left?
With a left government in power, the government convened a meeting with the
major unions and the apex body of the planters to declare that all sides have
agreed to have the wage negotiated between capital and labour declared as the
minimum wage. Government was no longer obliged to fix the minimum wages in tea
in accordance with the norms established by law. Naturally, the negotiated wage
has remained far below the agricultural minimum wage throughout North Indian
tea gardens.
The second example is even more interesting. Workers and members of their
families were dying in their hundreds in North Bengal tea gardens during 2001
to 2004 and beyond. The cause was illegal abandonment of many gardens by
planters who owed millions to their workers in unpaid wages and other dues. The
biggest trade union was a left union and the government was a left government.
Both denied that any such deaths had taken place. A distinguished panel headed
by a retired High Court judge determined that at least 800 people had died from
hunger-related extreme malnutrition. The biggest union was still in denial and
so was the government.
This raises the question of class formation among the tea workers. Workers
who participate very frequently in violent and militant confrontation with
managements accept nevertheless the union-management collusions that violate
their legal and fundamental rights and deprive them of their entitlements.
During those confrontations, the unity of the participants transcend tribal,
caste and ethnic barriers. There have been only two examples of militant change
covering, first, the whole of the Darjeeling Hills and, second, the whole of
the Terai and Dooars region. Both were ethnic upsurges that toppled the
established unions. In the hills, the various tribes and castes united behind
the slogan of the Gorkha nation. In the plains, all the tribes and castes
united as an independent Adivasi identity. New unions were formed in both
places, but these unions have more or less reverted to the style and functioning
of the old unions. But the feeling of ethnic solidarity remains strong. A very
large working class, perhaps the oldest in India, is coalescing around
ethnicity and not moving towards a class for itself may appear to some as
undesirable.
The main features of the plantation system were the extreme domination of
the workers and its enclave nature. In spite of all the legal and political
changes since independence and the changes in the methods of the planters, both
of these features remain. The domination is exercised not with political and
juridical powers backed by a colonial state but by a coalition of the
management, the unions and the state. One example will suffice. A garden that
had been abandoned a number of times was the focus of tripartite negotiations.
Along with a small extreme left union, all the major unions were there, as was
management. Number two in the labour department hierarchy in a left government
was presiding. The major unions agreed to delay the payment of arrear wages,
pension fund, etc, amounting to several million rupees indefinitely. They also
agreed that the workers will only get the current wages at half rate. Only two
persons did not sign the agreement (which went into effect immediately). The
government official praised the agreement but said that he could not sign it
because it was illegal! The extreme left walked out. It would be hard to
imagine a more blatant example of domination through collusion that has been
spoken about. The workers agreed to work because they were on the verge of
starvation.
Without a minimum wage and the presence of this kind of collusion, the
wages in tea, after some improvement recently, is slill way below the
agricultural minimum wage. The tea workers' wage at present is 90 rupees in
cash in West Bengal (it's lower in Assam) and what is given in kind adds to
hardly 25 rupees. That's 115 rupees, while the agricultural minimum wage is 135
rupees. With such low wages the workers are perpetually on the threshold of
starvation. And if they have been abandoned or locked out, they fall back into
starvation and extreme malnutrition and disease. It is no wonder when the
colluders who ensure such low wages force them to work under such humiliating
condition, they do so.
Why don't they run away? Where will they go? They have hardly any
connexions in the lands they left behind more than 150 years ago. There are no
industries within hundreds of miles of their estates so they could find work
there. Even if there were, they do not have the social and technical skills that
can compete with the outsiders.
More than 90 percent of the workers are functionally illiterate although
there are many primary schools in or near the estates. The reason for this is
simply that the children who go to the pre-primary ICDS centres or the primary
schools do not learn anything on account of instruction being given in
languages (Assamese, Bengali and Hindi) that they do not understand. All
pleadings with the leftist government about this situation have been rejected.
Government and the international experts continue to count success as a
function of attendance without realising that the mid-day meal alone accounts
for attendance by hungry children.
Hungry and illiterate, without the chance to acquire any skills and holed
up in remote places, these workers, separated from the dominant populations of
the states where they reside by prejudice, cultural disdain and caste hatred,
have nowhere to go except to remain in the estates—an isolated population
living in remote economic enclaves.
The recent ethnic upsurge has already provoked a strident and widespread
discussion on the recognition of the Sadri language, a language based on Sadani Hindi of
Jharkhand that has been constructed by the workers from many languages
originally spoken by the tribes and castes that inhabit the estates. The
primary focus of this discussion is education and the need to have ethnic
assertion to get that education. Class struggle in the tea gardens can never
start up in a system-breaking way without an ethnic upsurge that ensures
educational rights without which the masses of workers remain ignorant about
laws, about the obligations of the police and the bureaucrats, about the rights
of workers and about what is being done in their name by the leaders. Besides,
a cultural renaissance among workers will propel class consolidation to new
levels, levels that can construct socialism the workers' way. Revolutionaries
must critique and help this ethnic upsurge that clears the way to more intense
and more thoughtful class struggle.
Frontier, Autumn Number
Vol. 46, No. 13-16, Oct 6 - Nov 2, 2013
