Empire's Garden : Assam and the Making of India
Sharma, Jayeeta
Empire's Garden : Assam and the Making of India - Durham, NC Duke University Press 20110713
Open Access
In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space.
Creative Commons
English
9780822394396 9780822394396
10.1215/9780822394396 doi
History Ahom kingdom Assam Assamese language Bengal Bengali language India Kolkata Opium Tea
Empire's Garden : Assam and the Making of India - Durham, NC Duke University Press 20110713
Open Access
In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space.
Creative Commons
English
9780822394396 9780822394396
10.1215/9780822394396 doi
History Ahom kingdom Assam Assamese language Bengal Bengali language India Kolkata Opium Tea