TY  - BOOK
AU  - Sharma, Jayeeta
AB  - 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.
DO  - 10.1215/9780822394396
ID  - OAPEN ID: 648153
ID  - OAPEN ID: OCN: 753324139
KW  - History
KW  - Ahom kingdom
KW  - Assam
KW  - Assamese language
KW  - Bengal
KW  - Bengali language
KW  - India
KW  - Kolkata
KW  - Opium
KW  - Tea
L1  - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/b11ba477-73c0-4a92-b158-043a50ef88e5/648153.pdf
LA  - English
LK  - http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30264
PB  - Duke University Press
PP  - Durham, NC
PY  - 2011-07-13
SN  - 9780822394396
TI  - Empire's Garden : Assam and the Making of India
ER  - 
