In both Euro-American and Indian cosmopolitan lexicons, “Darjeeling” evokes romantic images of misty hills and delicate, Champagne-grade tea picked by smiling hill women. Rooted in colonial histories, these images have recently received a new lease on life through the Fair Trade and Geographical Indication (GI) movements. Sarah Besky's insightful ethnography The Darjeeling Distinction disrupts such fantasies about the primordial relationships between geography, commodity, and labor embedded in Darjeeling tea by demonstrating how, in fact, its production relies upon a deeply exploitative plantation system. Despite the active presence of regional, national, and global movements for justice over the last several decades in the shape of Gorkhaland, GI, and Fair Trade respectively, Besky argues that the fundamental inequalities embedded in the tea production system remain unchallenged.
This is not because the laborers at the heart of the system do not understand the injustices to which they are subject, but rather because they are personally invested in the reproduction of what Besky calls a “tripartite moral economy.” In other words, for women who have inherited plantation jobs (through the nearly unchanged colonial system of employment and facilities that are passed down from one generation to another), their own sense of agency is deeply entangled with commitments to the care of both tea bushes and the land out of which they grow. These commitments emerge not from any primordial connection, but rather from a set of specific historical contingencies that locate these contemporary women in the “imperial ruins” of Darjeeling as Indians of Nepali heritage whose livelihood relies on the relic of the plantation system in today's globalized neoliberal world.
Besky presents these arguments in five chapters, each with a one-word title: “Darjeeling,” “Plantation,” “Property,” “Fairness,” and “Sovereignty.” These are framed by a substantive introduction and a clearly written conclusion that makes explicit the book's relevance for policy debates over the implementation of designations like GI and Fair Trade. Here, Besky is clear that although well-intended, neither of these designations, nor the Gorkhaland movement, has adequately engaged with plantation workers’ own understandings of justice.
Rather, Besky demonstrates that GI and Fair Trade are movements designed to assuage cosmopolitan, liberal senses of injustice, but are in reality at odds with key features of plantation life. In the case of GI, Besky eloquently explains how the concept of terroir codifies the boundaries of taste by linking it to a clearly demarcated territory—but this is ironic because both the tea plant found in Darjeeling (brought by colonial administrators from China) and the laborers who produce its final product (descended from Nepali migrants) are imports. Fair Trade certification, meanwhile, seeks to “empower” individual “small farmers” through financial incentives, but in the Darjeeling tea plantation context it effectively undercuts state-mandated provisions for worker welfare by misrecognizing tea pluckers as “hired labor” instead of acknowledging the more expansive set of commitments to their care legally embedded in the plantation structure.
The second coming of the Gorkhaland movement for a sovereign Nepali-speaking state within India that Besky observed between 2007 and 2010 similarly falls short of the mark. While it originally gained traction by promising to alleviate economic woes through localized governance, Besky shows how a shift in focus towards cultural politics that emphasized linguistic and cultural agendas at the expense of any detailed plan for economic restructuring alienated the core plantation constituency.
What is most interesting about Besky's three intertwined narratives is that all of the mobilizations she describes—Gorkhaland, GI, and Fair Trade—to some extent invoke nostalgia for colonial pasts to make their case for better futures. On the bygone colonial plantation, or so the stories go, paternalistic planters took care of their workers, who lived in undisturbed harmony with nature, using their traditional knowledge to cultivate perfect tea.
Although left implicit, an important contribution of the book as a whole is its critique of now canonical postcolonial scholarly approaches. The Darjeeling Distinction argues instead that while the roots of today's woes may indeed be found in the intersection of colonialism and capitalism that built Darjeeling, it is in fact the postcolonial Indian state and the global liberal order that bear the lion's share of responsibility for exacerbating inequalities. The ever-increasing precarity that tea plantation workers face—both literally in terms of the eroding hillsides on which they live and figuratively in terms of their ever-decreasing income—cannot be fixed simply by any of the schemes that various actors in this ethnography propose. Rather, Besky seems to suggest, what is needed are systemic, structural shifts that recognize the deep-seated relationships between people, places, and plants at the edges of the Indian nation-state, and yet do not reify or commodify these relationships to benefit the privileged few.
Grounded in rich ethnographic description that takes readers up and down Darjeeling's steep slopes in the company of female tea workers, as well as plantation managers, government officials, and political activists, Besky's account is engaging and readable. It makes important contributions to South Asian studies as well as environmental anthropology, and should be of interest to a wide range of students and scholars. For anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Darjeeling—especially in these tumultuous days as the Gorkhaland movement once again gains traction—The Darjeeling Distinction is a welcome contribution.
