Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
1. Alap 1
2. Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 20
3. Cultivating the Garden 51
4. The Raj Baroque 84
5. Estates of a New Raj 115
6. Discipline and Labor 168
7. Village Politics 235
8. Protest 289
9. A Last Act 325
Appendix 327
Glossary 333
Notes 335
Bibliography 383
Index 411

About the Author

Piya Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews

"In this outstanding work Piya Chatterjee presents new material on the ethnography of tea plantation workers, and brings us to new understandings of familiar material on global flows, subaltern history, labour relations, and feminist ethnography. Anthropologists and South Asianists alike will enthusiastically welcome this memorable book." - Kirin Narayan, author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching "This is a finely layered, theoretically astute and informed cultural and historical account of a tea plantation in India. The ethnography is not content to address localised politics and culture; its importance lies in the way in which it reveals the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labour." - Inderpal Grewal, author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel