A time for tea : women, labor, and post/colonial politics on an Indian plantation / Piya Chatterjee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chatterjee, Piya, 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tea plantation workers--India--History--20th century.

Tea plantation workers.

Tea trade--India--History--20th century.

Tea trade.

Women tea plantation workers--India--History--20th century.

Women tea plantation workers.

History.

India.

Physical Description:

xvi, 417 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2001.

Summary:

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements -- picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields -- came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system.

Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own "decolonization" as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation's villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through this discussion.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [383]-410) and index.

ISBN:

0822326795

0822326744

OCLC:

47073289