Table of Contents

Preface xi
Note on Orthography and Usage xiv
Introduction 1
Part I. Making a Garden 23
1. Nature's Jungle, Empire's Garden 25
2. Borderlands, Rice Eaters, and Tea Growers 49
3. Migrants in the Garden: Expanding the Frontier 79
Part II. Improving Assam, Making India 117
4. Old Lords and "Improving" Regimes 119
5. Bringing Progress, Restoring Culture 147
6. Language and Literature: Framing Identity 177
7. Contesting Publics: Raced Communities and Gendered History 205
Conclusion 234
Notes 243
Glossary 273
Bibliography 277
Index 311

Promotional Information

Explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region's social landscape

About the Author

Jayeeta Sharma is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto.

Reviews

"Empire's Garden is a new departure for the historical study of Assam, extraordinarily wide-ranging, with important things to say not only about Assam but about India, South Asia, and themes ranging from colonialism, nationalism, and regionalism to ethnicity, elite formation, migration, and economic development. It will anchor histories of Assam for years to come." David Ludden, editor of Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia "This rich history of Assam fills a void in scholarship. Assam is an area of South Asia that has received little attention from serious historians of the subcontinent, except those working on the tea industry. Jayeeta Sharma provides us with fascinating details of Assam's history. More importantly, she relates local themes to larger issues of South Asian history: colonial ideologies of race and the importance of these ideologies to the political economy, the structure of colonial rule, the development of the public sphere, and the reformulation of identities under colonial circumstances. Empire's Garden also helps us to understand the historical dimensions of contemporary conflicts in the region, without making the conflicts seem predetermined by what happened in the colonial period." Douglas Haynes, author of Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928