The Lesser Inhabitants of Green Paradise
Sprawling across miles and miles on both sides of National Highway 37, swaying with wind, painting the land with the soothing hue of green, are the tea gardens of Assam. Beautiful and lush. As soothing to the eyes as the brew extracted from the tea leaves is to the spirit. But all the time, they whisper all the many secrets of this Green Paradise. For those who care to know, simply watching and listening to the whispers of the wind over the tea gardens will take you to an unusual journey of strange discoveries and shocking truths in this land of unparalleled beauty.
To cut a long story short
This is a short account, of the children of smaller gods conventionally called tea-tribes, not in much depth, but with only some selected milestones. The desire is to tell the story through the eyes of a young observer who notices that even in Paradise (the Green Paradise, as they call it) there are gods of big men who rule over gods of lesser men.
The Exodus
Exodus 3:17- And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery .….. into the land of……………… — a land flowing with milk and honey. It was sometime in 1839.
The god of poverty had danced in their homelands. Barren land, no perennial rivers, and a myopic eye had perhaps made them believe in the words of the “coolie catchers”. What they promised was definitely not a land flowing with milk and honey but they certainly showed them dreams of light work and high pay, housing and medical care. In a number of cases the “sardars” or agents obtained thumb impressions of drunken villagers on contracts and forced them to make the journey. And across the black waters of Brahmaputra, in some dense blue nights packed into trains and boats, they had travelled, men and women and children, hustled “just like cattle”, hungry and sick, killed by malaria and cholera; with just some dim stars of hope to brighten the day (night). By the time they reached the “Promised Land” the stars of hope had extinguished. They realized they had become “the wretched and downtrodden slave population” from where there was no scope to return.
Silence of the lambs (1865-1900)
The tea gardens flourished. The lambs watered and nourished the tea industry with their sweat and blood and bodies (often literally). For the impoverished and humiliating conditions under which they lived, was like living under the threat of butcher’s knife. And many did die. Of the 84915 workers who landed in Assam between May1863 and May 1866, 30,000 had died by June 1866.
The working hours remained more than 9 hours, “laziness” was punishable, and the runaway coolies were flogged publicly, to teach them and others a lesson. The runaway was not handed over to the police because the “labour was too precious to be sent out of gardens to police and jail custody”. The wages remained stagnant and below the market rate and on the contrary the price of the concessional rice supplied was enhanced.
The labourers had no free movement and were forced to live an alienated / cocooned life. The planters often took their women as concubines.
“The coolie-catching, their transit to the tea gardens under the conditions of high mortality, the selling of the recruits at market price, the hunt for runaway coolies… all this remind one of the slave-running in the Africa and the global slave trade.”
But the fear of the mai-baap-sarkar (the lord of these labourers), cialis review their ignorance and mainly because of the contract which prohibited them to strike work, made them nothing but silent lambs of a slaughterhouse.
Genesis
As the drums sound and the reeds strum to his hum, this man from the tea-tribe sings to me the story of the genesis: the beginning of everything, the beginning of tea, the beginning of the immigration of the tribals from the Chotanagpur Plateau, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. The story of cha to tea to chaaya.
The women dance in white saris with red border, wild flowers in their hair. Anklets tinkle. Arms wind together. Bodies move in rhythm. A dog howls.
“In the beginning there was nothing,” says he. “No one knew about tea.”
The chinese cha -
As the myth says, no one knew about tea till the Chinese king Shen Nong discovered it by accident. He was resting under the shade of a tree boiling water to drink, when a light breeze blew some leaves of the tree into the pot – like god sent nectar. This hot brew was refreshing to drink. Invigorating. The king recommended it to all his subjects as cha- that gives vigor to the body and contentment to the mind.
The English Tea-
But tea as the English called this plant of Camellia family was found in this part of India by Robert Bruce in 1823 in Sadiya, in upper Assam with an important role of Maniram Dutta Barua and Singpho Chief Bessa Gaum in this discovery. After the death of Robert Bruce, his younger brother C A Bruce entered the scene and after some drama, some confusion, some shortsightedness and mistaken identities, The Assam Company, credited to be the world’s first company trading in tea was formed in 1839.
When the tea cultivation spread, the problem of sufficient labour rose. The local Assamese people were not necessarily lazy but had an easygoing attitude and enough pride to do manual labour for the invading aliens. At the same time poverty was never a synonym of hunger for the Assamese who were more or less self-sufficient with rice, fish and some vegetables and hence they never felt the compulsion to do such tedious and demanding work.
The shortage of labour forced the beginning of the EXODUS.
The Chaaya in Hindi
The sahib was the sole arbitrator, the king of the tea estate comprising of the thousands of workers and lived in palatial bungalow with dozens and more servants to serve him. A fleet of cars, horserace, sophisticated parties and golfs and a buy rx drugs without prescription lot of pride and prejudice against the labourers and locals too filled his life style.
But when the “Gora sahibs” were replaced by the “Brown sahibs” and “tea in the evening” with “shaam ki chaaya (chai)”, things did not change much. It’s only beauty, which is skin deep. The change in the colour of skin did not herald any other change, for the new lots of “brown sahibs” were too eager to imitate not just the lifestyle but the very attitude of the Europeans.
Cup of gold
A cup of tea is not just a beverage or not just the most preferred beverage. The latest research shows it to be a health drink, which stimulates the body and mind, regulates the body temperature and is the storehouse of numerous minerals, enzymes, phenols, and acids, which maintain health.
Tea at the same time continues to be one of India’s biggest foreign exchange earners.
One hundred years of solitude
The tea-tribe (as the immigrant labourers are called) may look beautiful in a photograph or a painting, plucking the “two leaves and a bud in between” in the lush green gardens, dressed in colourful clothes, with the basket dangling at the back (some may even give a shy smile when photographed) but a walk in the “labour lines” shows a more real and a lot pathetic picture.
Though their huts are close to the bungalows of the owners and managers, somehow their plight falls on the blind spot. Never considered a threat either culturally or politically or economically, for the mere reasons that there has been no confrontation on any sensitive issue (till late), Life flows around them, never stopping to peep in their lives.
These people have been living a life of solitude and loneliness for more than a hundred years, some with no knowledge of their origin, some with a fading memory, working in the plantation from sunrise to sunset.
The chai-bagaan workers, with no interest in seizing land and with the tendency to assimilate linguistically and involved in a job, which no one seeks to do, are left, left in their misery, in their isolation.
Hope floats
And though changes have taken place in the recent years, like some housing facility, school or better wage, they are not in pace with the time. But hope floats in the gardens that some day god of equal men will rule the Paradise.
The people are gradually developing into an organized community, which is about above four millions. An attempt to preserve their culture and identity has been noticed. Some, though, still a handful have come out of the cocoon and received education and tried to seek jobs outside the gardens. Some are becoming aware of their rights and are making attempts to let their voices be heard.
And there are their representatives in the parliament and the state legislature and even in the state cabinet.
Metamorphosis is painful. It always has been. Most give up. Many even die. But some do become a butterfly and soar in the sky.
Ref.
1. Planter-Raj to Swaraj – A Guha
2. Sons of the Soil – Myron Weiner
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