Chapter 1 - Thinking Global Labour Studies.pdf

Labor History Scopus /Web of Science /UGC Journal, 2022

International Review of Social History, 2018

Tea and coffee, undoubtedly the world's most popular beverages, have cruel histories. Jan Breman's Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market and Nitin Varma's Coolies of Capitalism are powerful texts, reminding readers of the savage past these global commodities inherit. The aim of these two booksdespite discussing two different commodities cultivated in two different empires, temporalities, and geographies with two different labour regimesis simple: to make clear that the labour employed to produce these commodities was coerced and bonded. Pointing out the interconnected world of cash-crop production, consumption, and trade, Breman's book explores the regime of unfree labour of coffee production in the Priangan region of colonial Java (under the Dutch rule) during the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. Varma's book focuses on the coolie labour regime developed by Assam tea plantations in colonial India (under the British rule) between the 1830s and 1920s. Coffee and tea, produced at the expense of natural and human resources of colonies, ended up in the European and

2014

In 1999, Darjeeling tea became India's first Geographical Indication (GI). GI has proliferated worldwide as a legal protection for foods with terroir, or ''taste of place,'' a concept most often associated with artisan foods produced by small farmers in specific regions of the Global North. GI gives market protection to terroir in an increasingly homogenous food system. This article asks how Darjeeling tea, grown in an industrial plantation system rooted in British colonialism, has become convincingly associated with artisan GIs such as Champagne, Cognac, and Roquefort. The answer lies in a conceptual dyad that frames how British colonial officials, the Indian state, and international consumers have understood Darjeeling and its signature commodity. Since the colonial era, these actors have conceived Darjeeling as both an idyllic ''garden'' space and an industrial ''plantation'' space. As I show through an analysis of GI marketing materials and interviews with planters, pluckers, and consumers, this dyad maps in surprising ways onto labor relations. While planters' and marketers' discourses tend to emphasize the ''garden,'' laborers' investment in GI lies primarily in an active-if also ambivalent-embrace of the plantation, encapsulated in the Nepali word ''kamān.''

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, 2023

The introduction of tea plantations was a colonial capitalist venture in eastern India. The tea plantations turned into social enclaves and hotspots of labour migration. The tribal labourers had to work in a bondage labour system with low wages, strict surveillance and harsh working conditions. The Chargola Exodus of 1921 was one of the first organized and articulated labour protests against colonial oppression and the bondage labour system in tea plantations. The plantation labourers revolted against the colonial oppression and decided to return to their homeland to quit from bondage system in the tea plantations. This article examines the changes and continuity in the tea plantations in the last hundred years since the Chargola Exodus. It argues the bondage labour system can still be sensed as the colonial structure in the plantations remained unchanged. However, the forms of labour bondage have been changed, and it has become 'unannounced'. Therefore, the servitude of the labourers in the tea plantations has continued since the colonial period, even after the independence of the country. At present, the tribal communities in the tea plantations are living in extreme poverty, chronic hunger, low literacy, unsanitary living conditions and poor health status. The tea plantations have turned into a hotspot of human trafficking, forced out-migration and hunger deaths.

2009

Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, 2016

2019

2014