A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian PlantationIn this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system. Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion. A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization. |
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acts adivasi Alice Anjali Assam Company Assam Review assistant manager babu bhagat Bhagirathi body British bungalow burra burra sahib Calcutta Chinese colonial Company coolies created cultivation cultural customary Darjeeling Delhi didi disciplines Dooars Dooars Planters economy elite ethnographic factory Feminist feminized fetishisms field fieldwork forest garden gendered gesture Hindu hukum Ibid imperial Indian Tea Association ITPA Jalpaiguri District jungle labor land landscape leaf London Mahasweta Devi mai-baap manager's Marwari masculine memsahib Munnu narrative Narrator Nepali North Bengal North Bengal University Oraon overseer patronage plantation's Planter Raj Planters Association plucking Political Weekly postcolonial pruning puja recruitment Report Review and Tea ritual rupees Santhal Sarah's Hope senior sexual sirdar social staff stage status story suggests symbolic TDLA tea bush Tea Estate Tea Industry Tea Plantations tell theater tion union leaders University Press village wage walk West Bengal woman women workers