T he T ea P lantations We have already seen how industrialisation and urbanisation did not happen in India quite the way it did in Britain. More importantly, this is not because we began industrialisation late, but because our early industrialisation and urbanisation in the modern period were governed by colonial interests. We cannot go into details about different industries here. We simply take the case of the tea industry in India as an example.
Official reports show how the colonial government often used unfair means to hire and forcibly keep labourers. And clearly acted on behalf of the British planters. From fictional and other accounts we get a glimpse of what life was for planters in this industry. Significantly the colonial adminis- trators were clear that harsh measures were taken against the labourers to make sure they benefited the planters.
They were also fully aware that the laws of a colonised country did not have to stick to the democratic norms that the British back home had to follow in Britain. You have a sense of the lives of the labourers. Let us see how the planters lived. Tea garden A woman plucking tea leaves How were labourers recruited?
Tea industry began in India in . Most of the tea gardens were situated in Assam. In , the industry employed , , permanent and , temporary employees. Since Assam was sparsely populated and the tea plantations were often located on uninhabited hillsides, bulk of the sorely needed labour had to be imported from other provinces.
But to bring thousands of people every year from their far-off homes into strange lands, possessing an unhealthy climate and infected with strange fevers, required the provision of financial and other incentives, which the tea-planters of Assam were unwilling to offer. Instead, they had recourse to fraud and coercion; and they persuaded the government to aid and abet them in this unholy task by passing penal laws. …The recruitment of labourers for tea gardens of Assam was carried on for years mostly by contractors under the provisions of the Transport of Native Labourers Act (No. III) of of Bengal as amended in , and .