Empire's Garden : Assam and the Making of India / Jayeeta Sharma.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sharma, Jayeeta, author.

Series:

Radical Perspectives

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (346 p.)

Place of Publication:

2011.

Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire's Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region's social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam's gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Illustration: Acknowledgments

Note on Orthography and Usage

Maps

Introduction

I. Making a Garden

1. Nature's Jungle, Empire's Garden

2. Borderlands, Rice Eaters, and Tea Growers

3. Migrants in the Garden: Expanding the Frontier

II. Improving Assam, Making India

4. Old Lords and ''Improving'' Regimes

5. Bringing Progress, Restoring Culture

6. Language and Literature: Framing Identity

7. Contesting Publics Raced Communities and Gendered History

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

CC BY

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781478091509

1478091509

OCLC:

1473267140