Introduction
Writing about labour relations in the tea plantations of Assam during the indenture era, Sir Percival Griffiths, the official historian of the Indian tea industry, argued that benevolent paternalism characterised the planters’ attitude towards their labour force in the nineteenth century. Griffiths rationalised the coercive indenture labour regime within the context of the completely dependent labour relationship that was a feature of the indenture system.Footnote 2 Since Assam was an alien place for the migrant labourer, who came from a great distance to work on the plantations, he was placed in a relation of complete dependency vis-à-vis the manager:
Every aspect of garden life had the manager as its focal point. He built the coolies’ houses, he established the market and regulated prices, he supplied rice when necessary . . . . Such a system developed a sense of responsibility and brought out the best in any naturally humane manager . . . . Their methods were rough and ready and sometimes included personal chastisement, but there is little doubt that the lot of a tea garden coolie was a lot better than that of the ordinary Indian labourer at that time.Footnote 3
Interestingly, Griffith acknowledges that this relationship of total dependency could lead to managerial excesses, as occurred during the early phase of the industry during the ‘tea mania’ of the 1860s:
The manager, was clad in the authority of the ruling race during the heyday of British power . . . . If the unscrupulous European adventurers who flocked to the tea industry during the boom of the sixties had continued to form an important element in the managerial personnel, circumstances would indeed have led to a reign of tyranny. Fortunately, tea-garden managers in the last few decades of the last century were drawn from a better class of society and so the system which grew up was as a rule not tyranny, but paternalism.Footnote 4
Obviously Griffith located the coeval development of paternalism and rationalisation of the tea industry in direct opposition to the managerial tyranny of the irrational phase of ‘tea mania’.
Contemporary colonial officials, though fully supportive of the British capitalist venture in Assam, were less sanguine in their assessment of the indenture system. J.B. Fuller, a senior Government of India official, and later the Chief Commissioner of Assam, observed in 1901:
The truth is of course that serious abuses must occur under a labour system which is something of the nature of slavery, for an employee who can be arrested and forcibly detained by his master is more of a slave than a servant and that these abuses are the price which has to be paid for the great advantages which has resulted from the establishment and growth of the tea industry in Assam.Footnote 5
While participating in the 1901 debate on the Assam Labour and Emigration Bill in the Central Legislative Council, Viceroy Lord Curzon was equally emphatic:
It is an arbitrary system, an abnormal system . . . . But it has been devised not in the main in our interests but in the interests of an enterprise with which the Government of India could not but sympathise, namely, the effort to open up by capital and industry the resources of a distant and backward province.Footnote 6
Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, was quite candid in a private communication to Lord Curzon:
I agree with you that the present labour system is a modified version of slavery, and reacts prejudicially upon the masters. It is only justifiable on the plea that without it the tea plantations could not be worked, as outside the half savage tribes from whom the coolies now come, it would be difficult to induce the ordinary Hindu to volunteer.Footnote 7
The contemporary non-official critics of the labour system in the Assam tea plantations also characterised it as a system of slavery. Dwarkanath Ganguli, an important Brahmo Samaj activist and Joint Secretary of the Indian Association in Calcutta, wrote a series of critical articles on the labour system in the Assam tea plantations in the Calcutta newspaper Bengalee. Footnote 8 Another powerful contemporary critic, the English missionary Reverend Charles Dowding, described the indenture labour system in Assam tea plantations as ‘thinly disguised slavery’.Footnote 9 Both the contemporary supporters and the critics of the Assam tea plantations were unanimous, from their differing perspectives, in their assessment that the indenture labour regime established there during the ninteenth century was not very different from slavery.
This paper argues that the indenture labour regime in Assam tea plantations was formally based on the modern industrial notion of wage-labour. It was far from ‘paternalistic’ as described by Griffith. Labour relations under the indenture regime in Assam tea plantations, as reflected in the actions and attitudes of tea planters, displayed features akin to Atlantic slave plantations. The other similarity between the two plantation systems lay in the export-orientation and industrial organisation of agricultural production. However, unlike the older southern American and Caribbean plantations, Assam did not have a history of slave-based production. And unlike Caribbean planters, who transited from managing slavery to indenture-based plantation production, the European tea planters in Assam had no prior experience of managing slave-based production. Contrary to Griffiths’ assertion, it is argued that the early pioneers were transfomed into coolie drivers precisely during the period when the tea industry grew into a corporate business organisation producing for the world market. Here was a case of co-existence of an ‘irrational’ and inhuman labour regime producing for a modern ‘rational’ corporate world.
This paper will also show that the colonial state was fully aware and supportive of both these features of the indenture regime in Assam tea plantions. While the colonial state sought to ‘protect’ the interests of the labour force it also legitimised the exercise of extra-legal authority by the planters. This balancing act was performed through various legislative interventions. A penal contract system, introduced in Act VI of the Bengal Council in 1865 and modified in 1882, stipulated minimum monthly wages (Rs 5 for men and Rs 4 for women), a three-year contract (extended to five years later on), a nine-hour working day, and a government inspector of labour empowered to cancel the contract of labourers on complaints of ill treatment. The significant provision of the Act lay in the sanctions for breach of contract by labourers: planters were given powers to arrest, without warrant, labourers who ‘absconded’, and imprisonment was the penalty for refusal to work.Footnote 10
Evolution of the Indenture Labour System
The British planters (the pioneers) arrived in the province from the early 1840s as employees of tea companies. Their main task was to cut down and open out those parts of the jungle in which indigenous tea plant grew most thickly. The historical accounts of the early years of tea plantations lay a fair amount of stress on the hardships of planters’ lives there. The more productive tea tracks and tea clearings in upper Assam were often situated at considerable distances from each other, and the early planters spent much of their time travelling from one patch of tea to another to supervise the work. The only means of travel was by country boats, by dugout canoe along the numerous tributary rivers or on the backs of elephants. Life was hazardous and hard for those involved in the early years of clearing tropical forests for planting tea in Assam. Hostile neighbourhood tribal and hill communities, wild animals and poisonous snakes, an unhealthy climate and disease and a lack of medical facilities often took a heavy toll of lives of the early planting pioneers.Footnote 11 Social isolation and seclusion added to the miseries brought on by physical hardships: ‘White women were as scarce as white elephants during early years. A few managers were married, but rarely an assistant.’Footnote 12
The opening up and expansion of plantations generated demand for labour. From the beginning, given the nature of its production process which was highly labour intensive, the tea industry's major preoccupation was acquiring labour, especially since the Assam valley was very sparsely populated when the Assam Company commenced its operations. The initial experiment of importing Chinese labour for planting proved a fiasco.Footnote 13 Serious efforts to procure labour locally were also not very successful. In scantily populated Assam the offer of very low wages and growing competition for labour from government infrastructure projects rendered plantation employment unattractive.Footnote 14
Failure to procure labour locally necessitated the search for labour from neighbouring Bengal. These efforts constantly ran into trouble, with recruited workers deserting after arrival on the plantations, or not reaching their destination after being dispatched by boats from the recruiting areas, thereby incurring a loss of the advances.Footnote 15 Thus, maintaining the supply of labour remained a problem during the first two decades of plantation set-up (1840–1860). However, the use of physical coercion or other forms of extra-legal means to control and tame the workforce (characteristic features of the later indenture system), did not appear to be in practice during this period. The concern over jeopardising production of its enterprise during this early stage of development made the Assam Company's management cautious. Even though they did not offer higher wages as an inducement to prevent workers deserting, the Company's Directors instructed the Superintendent of its plantations in Upper Assam, that:
they positively forbid any violence on the part of the assistants to the natives of the country or to the coolies of the Association and on any such case being formally reported immediate dismissal will most assuredly be the penalty.Footnote 16
All this was to change with the dramatic events of first half of the 1860s.
From the 1860s Assam tea plantations experienced spectacular growth and expansion. Viceroy Lord Canning's generous offer of land for tea production at throwaway prices under the ‘Fee Simple’ rules triggered off a massive speculation boom in the tea industry, known as ‘tea mania’.Footnote 17 From only six registered companies and 51 tea gardens in operation by 1860, ‘tea mania’—marked by the doubling of tea prices and soaring profits—caused the number of tea-producing companies to rise to 86 by the end of the boom in 1865.Footnote 18
The industry survived the collapse of the ‘tea mania’ boom and, through rationalisation, was quickly transformed into a well-organised corporate structure. This took the form of transfer of the management of tea gardens to British managing agencies, a process initiated by the Assam Company placing its gardens under the management of Schoene, Kilburn and Company. A number of smaller gardens were amalgamated into large-scale enterprises under managing agents, and by the end of the century, the seven top managing agency houses controlled nearly 61 per cent of all tea gardens.Footnote 19 By the end of the century, plantations in Assam had acquired just under half-a-million acres of land: the area under tea cultivation increased from 26,853 acres in 1872 to 204,285 acres in 1900, and production increased from 6,150,764 lbs in 1872 to 75,125,176 lbs in 1900.Footnote 20 The experience of the ‘tea mania’ years had shown that while the availability of land and capital had presented no difficulty, labour had been a critical problem. The planters needed a cheap and pliant labour force that could work under a strict production regime. Between 1871 and 1900, an intensified search outside the province led to the importation of 750,000 migrant labourers from distant places in Bihar, Orissa and Bengal.Footnote 21
ElsewhereFootnote 22 I have argued that the structure of power hierarchy based on coercion and extra-legal authority which dominated production relations in tea plantations for so long, evolved during the 1860s with the introduction of the indenture system at the height of the speculative boom. This was also the period that shaped the attitude of European planters, both as individuals and as a class, towards their labour. Their isolation and secluded existence in the plantations was now exacerbated by the huge demographic gap between themselves and their migrant labourers. By the end of the nineteenth century approximately 1,000 European planters were living among a population of over half-a-million labourers. To preserve their authority, the planters devised the indenture regime to keep their workforce docile, disciplined and intimidated, enforced by legislation from the colonial state—thus providing the stamp of legitimacy.Footnote 23
Under this regime, the planters were not merely employers of wage labour, they occupied a pivotal position around which revolved the lives of the entire plantation community of assistants, supervisory staff and labourers. Behind the assertion of authority over their labourers was the assumption of an inherent inferiority of the labouring classes. Therefore, terms like ‘coolie’, ‘primitive’, ‘jungly’, ‘slothful’, ‘scoundrel’ and ‘absconder’ emerged in planters’ vocabulary when referring to labourers. Such perceptions evolved among European planters sometimes at the very outset of their journey to take up their post in Assam plantations. Describing the woes of steamer travel en route to Assam, John Carnegie, a young British arrival, bitterly complained of ‘mosquitoes . . . and worse than all we have 500 coolies on board the dirtiest brutes in creation swarming with lice and one had cholera last night, what with coolies, mosquitoes and lice I shan't be sorry when this is at an end . . .’.Footnote 24 His brother Alexander, too, did not take long to assume the attributes of authority and power of the master, writing soon after becoming Assistant Manager in a tea garden in Tezpur:
I am now in a jungle, a sort of small king among the niggers. Counting women and children I have charge of about 450 people, an awful queer lot the most of them are. They are always getting ill and I am doctor . . . . I have splendid recipe for spleen and have cured a lot of chaps and dysentery too, two of them are dead but they die here very easily so they don't think much of that . . . . They not only died, they absconded in a tiresome way.Footnote 25
For the newly-employed migrant labour the sudden upsurge of tea plantation expansion brought only immense suffering and sometimes death. As the 1868 report of the Commissioners, appointed by the Government of Bengal to enquire into the affairs of the tea industry in Assam, put it:
In the mad race of speculation, when fresh clearances were made, and acre upon acre covered with tea, to meet the terms of contract entered into with the promoters of new, or to satisfy the shareholders in old companies, no one has suffered more than the unfortunate labourer, for the opening out of new Tea Cultivation has been too often synonymous with disease and death.Footnote 26
Shortage of food compounded the problem. There was very little surplus food produced in the tea districts and the poor means of communication did not help. One official report summed up the consequences of such a situation:
. . . when large number of coolies were imported to meet the demand caused by the excessive extensions of the era of speculation, the importation of food did not keep pace with the increase of mouths and the machinery for the distribution of available food was quite insufficient. The consequence was that tens of thousands of the imported labourers died from disease which I firmly believe was brought on or aggravated by want of proper food, while the others were so enfeebled that their labour quite failed to repay the employer the cost of importing them.Footnote 27
The figures of mortality and desertion during those years bear ample testimony to the abominable conditions of the labourers depicted in contemporary accounts. Between May 1863 and May 1866, about 84,915 labourers were imported into the Assam tea gardens. But the returns for 1866 showed only 49,750 as working on the gardens. The remaining 35,165 either died or deserted. A larger number of deserters also seemed to have died of hunger or exhaustion in the jungles.Footnote 28 In the tea gardens inspected by the Commissioners in 1868, the average rate of mortality ranged from 137.6 per thousand to 556.6 per thousand.Footnote 29
Added to these miseries were the growing physical coercion and economic exploitation exercised by the planters. The practice of flogging as a form of physical coercion to control labour appeared as an assertion of extra-legal authority of planters. To them it seemed quite natural that labourers who deserted or disobeyed should be flogged. After all, the company had invested so much money in bringing them to the gardens. In a letter to the Government in 1872, W.A. Stoddard, Manager of the Maphock Tea Estate in Sibsagar district, demanded that:
. . . all agreement labourers after punishment for default be returned to their employers to complete their contracts with the terms of absence added on . . . ; and that on a second offence of any once convicted labour should be whipped.
He added that flogging was useful, ‘especially without hurting the man much, the quiet, firm systematic way the government floggings are conducted’.Footnote 30 Often there were cases of tying up and flogging of labourers who were really physically unfit to work. Flogging as a weapon of control and disciplining labour, was becoming a common practice in the Assam tea gardens.Footnote 31
That such ‘tyranny’ was not confined only to ‘unscrupulous European adventurers’ of the 1860s, as Griffiths asserted, is clear from the observations and comments of later British officials. At the turn of the twentieth century Henry Cotton, the Chief Commissioner of Assam, reported the case of a woman labourer who was flogged for trying to escape from the garden. Another woman was flogged on suspicion of helping the others to escape. He also came across a case in which labourers were confined for a number of days in a ‘prison-house’ in the tea garden and were mercilessly beaten up, with the result that three of the labourers had their arms broken.Footnote 32 As late as the 1920s a British trade union delegate reported that ‘we witnessed a group of men, women and children working away together, while five yards away was a planters’ young assistant proudly hugging the whip’.Footnote 33
Flogging was not the only means used to deter desertions, defiance of authority or ‘shirking’ of work by withdrawing labour. In day-to-day plantation life, at the workplace and the Sahib's bungalow, physical beatings and showering abusive language became a ‘natural’ routine for the planter to enforce discipline as well as punishment for absconding. George Barker, a planter in Assam, recalled his recipe for dealing with ‘shirking’ labourers in his garden during the 1880s: ‘Various forms of punishment—from a good thrashing to making him do two or three times the amount [of work] over again—are inflicted . . . .’Footnote 34 In the case of malingering labourers, ‘the judicious application of the cane quickly convinces the coolie that he has made a mistake in imagining that there could be anything the matter with him’.Footnote 35 Planter W.M. Fraser recollected his experiences during the 1890s of a senior manager chastising women labourers for faulty leaf plucking: ‘The ground become strewn with bad leaf, while from one woman to the other went the admonishing Thomson, his tongue and hands fully employed.’Footnote 36
Other strategies involved immobilising migrant labour within the confines of the plantations.Footnote 37 The private right of planters to arrest labourers under the penal system became an important tool in controlling their workforce. This practice, passed to legitimise the indenture regime in the Assam plantations, originated under section 33 of the Act of 1865 and remained in force under Act I of 1882 as well as under Act VI of 1901.Footnote 38 Under these Acts, captured runaways and recalcitrant labour could be arrested and held within the plantation-erected phatak, or private ‘prison’. F.A. Hetherington, a young assistant manager, recorded in his diary on 23 January 1903 that one of his garden coolies ‘Gora returned from Tezpur, having been flogged by Brown and kept in futtock on the garden for a week’.Footnote 39 For the workers, the phatak symbolised the indenture regime based on the penal system.
The Assam Chief Commissioner, J.B. Fuller, was convinced that amongst the coolies the whole plantation system was commonly regarded as a phatak.Footnote 40 To prevent desertions, the labourers were made to live in closely guarded areas. The labour force of a large garden was divided into some half-a-dozen or so villages called ‘coolie lines’, containing a maximum of 1000 or 1200 labourers. Each village was put under the charge of a couple of ‘line chowkidars’ or watchmen, who were responsible for everyone turning out at the proper time in the morning, and for the ‘orderly’ behaviour of the coolies in the lines.Footnote 41 Edgar reported that hill men were specially employed to track down ‘absconders’ with the promise of a reward of Rs 5 per head. Dogs also seemed to have been specially trained for this purpose, practices reminiscent of those employed in British-owned plantations in Jamaica during the seventeenth century.Footnote 42 If an absconder was caught he was tied up and flogged, and the reward paid to his capturer was deducted by way of fine from the absconder's future earnings. But severe flogging often meant no future earnings. ‘[O]ften runaways enfeebled by their sufferings in the jungles, died under or from the effect of the floggings they received when caught.’Footnote 43 Despite the threat of severe physical coercion and restrictions in mobility placed on labourers, desertions remained a major source of worry for the planters. Reverend Dowding, using figures published in the official immigration reports, arrived at the conclusion that the rate of desertion was ‘60.8 per mille’ of tea gardens.Footnote 44
The other possible escape available to workers was to decline renewal of their contract at the end of five years. However, most often they were coerced or tricked into renewing it. Planters devised extra-legal mechanisms to prolong the period of indenture servitude. Barker recounted the difficulty of ‘persuad[ing] them to renew their contracts (Assamese bundibus)’.Footnote 45 Crole's observations reveal the nature of such ‘persuasion’ adopted by the planter:
I have known cases where the planter has cunningly arranged so that the wife's original four years’ agreement expires before the husband's new agreement is fully served, and then the wife is told she must also take a new contract for two years or else leave the garden, and of course she has to submit to the former. Then when husband's contract is worked out he is again forced to renew it, owing to his wife's term not yet being expired. And so the business is worked on the principle of a ‘little more bread for my cheese and a little more cheese for my bread’.Footnote 46
In 1888, a Bengal Government official was shocked to find a planter organising a polyandrous marital union between five time-expired coolies and a single woman brought in under the Act; in return each man had agreed to re-engage in the same garden for a five-year period. ‘The disposal in marriage of all imported female coolies,’ the official noted, ‘is regarded as a matter entirely within the jurisdiction of the manager.’Footnote 47 Such exercise of power by the planters without explicit legal sanction was regularly condoned by the colonial authority on the ground that the ‘tea planter as master of a large and irregular labour staff must enforce discipline by occasionally severe measures which need not be looked into too closely, because they are substantially just and for the good of the general body of coolies’.Footnote 48
To Western liberal critics of the plantation the rationale for the use of extra-legal methods, unacceptable in the ‘civilised’ West, was well articulated by Barker: ‘. . . lengthy personal acquaintance with their idiosyncrasies is the only means of getting to understand their management . . . . There is no similarity on any one point in the two modes of looking after European and Eastern labour . . . .’Footnote 49 Barker was asserting a view shared by the highest in the colonial hierarchy. Lord Lansdowne, the Viceroy, in his farewell dinner speech delivered at Royal Exchange, Calcutta, protested strongly against the practice of pouring ‘inordinately strong doses of Western nostrums’ down Indian throats: ‘There is a tendency to apply British standards to such questions as the employment of labour in mines, in factories, and the tea gardens.’Footnote 50
Harsh treatment of labour and prevalence of extra-legal practices on the plantations were justified on the grounds that the existing penal laws were wholly inadequate for maintaining ‘order’ and ‘contentment’ among the labourers. Even the power of private arrest bestowed by legislation in the person of the plantation manager was not considered enough.Footnote 51 The ‘tardiness’ and the ‘inefficiency’ of the police and the distance of the magistrate from the gardens were cited as reasons for the ineffectiveness of existing laws.
The tea industry experienced phenomenal growth between 1880 and 1900: acreage under tea increased by 120 per cent, while production of tea quadrupled. Indian tea acquired a leading position in the world market, outstripping China tea in 1888 for the first time, and its share of the British market increased from 27 per cent in 1880 to 54 per cent in 1901.Footnote 52 This impressive growth took place in the face of two important developments in the world market: first, the need to acquire the pre-eminent position in exporting tea for the British market, where the main rival was China, and second, the steady yet fluctuating decline of tea prices from 1878 onwards.Footnote 53
The planters’ twofold response was to expand production at an unprecedented scale while simultaneously attempting to cut costs of production, a strategy described in the Indian Tea Association Report of 1884 as the reduction of expenditure ‘by a more economic use of the labour available and by getting better work from the coolies’.Footnote 54 In the phase of a downward drift of prices, such growth was made possible by importing no less than one million persons into Assam.Footnote 55 By keeping wages below even the statutory minimum level, the strengthened penal contract system aided the intensification of labour that contributed towards the reduction in production costs but caused high mortality among the labour force. The annual death rate among adult labour recruited under Act I of 1882 in Assam plantations was 5.4 per cent, while during the same period the figures for non-tea-garden population of a comparable age group was only 2.7 per cent.Footnote 56 In 1892, as Dowding's estimates based on Immigration Reports show, ‘57,000 people, or more than one-eighth of the whole garden population of Assam, were dying at the rate of 7 per cent per annum’. He attributed the high death rate largely to increased numbers of new and unacclimatised coolies, in consequence of the larger importation.Footnote 57
Planters were constantly under pressure from tea companies to increase production. Monetary incentives, such as bonuses and commissions on profits, as well as, on failure, the fear of being rendered unemployed, fuelled the drive for the intensification of the labour process, for expansion of acreage by jungle clearings, and to keep up with higher production targets. Hetherington mentions that his senior manager Dunlop received £7,700 as profits and £400 as commission from his employer, The Imperial Tea Company.Footnote 58 While financial gains functioned as an incentive, ‘non performance’ could lead to unemployment for the planters.Footnote 59 For the managers the security of their jobs, personal financial gains and further promotions became synonymous with ensuring uninterrupted production and steady growth of profits for tea companies—mainly through the extraction of maximum work from labourers and by paying low wages.
From 1890 onwards, cases of the use of physical violence against labourers were being recorded on a regular basis in the annual Labour Reports. These included cases of flogging, assaults on women labourers, severe beatings and confinements. Sometimes the severity of beatings or floggings resulted in the death of labourers. For example, in 1890 a case was reported when a coolie died of excessive beating by the manager in Lakhimpur. The latter faced trial and was fined only Rs 100. Similarly, in 1899 in Rangliting tea garden of Lakhimpur district, a coolie boy was severely beaten and whipped to death by the manager. Police cases were filed but most of the guilty planters were awarded small fines of Rs 5 up to a maximum of Rs 100.Footnote 60
That this could go on unchecked for nearly more than three decades, despite the explicit provisions of the labour legislation, reflected poorly on the colonial state's resolve to ‘protect’ the interest of the labourers. Was it because the colonial bureaucracy shared the planters’ perceptions and attitudes towards the labour, or were there other forces at work? These questions are discussed in the next section.
The Colonial State's Approach
How did the colonial state and its bureaucracy respond to these developments? The question is relevant in the context of state intervention in the form of the penal contract system through labour control and labour legislation during the 1860s and 1880s. This legislation laid the foundations of the indenture labour system in the Assam tea plantations.Footnote 61 The overall perception, and official justification for labour legislation and the penal contract, was put forward by a senior official of the Assam Government in the following terms: Labour legislation in the case of immigrants to Assam tea gardens was as important as in the case of labour immigration to overseas colonies. Since these immigrants were ‘extremely ignorant’ and they were to travel a long distance, government interference and supervision was necessary in order to prevent ‘overcrowding, disease and consequent mortality’. Because of the climate and unfamiliar food in the new country the immigrants were liable to serious sickness. Therefore labour legislation was necessary which would force the employer to provide ‘requisite comforts, medical attendance and other appliances for his well-being’. At the same time some regulations were required to effectively enforce the provisions of contract between labour and capital as it is ‘demanded by Justice’. It was argued that the employers had spent a lot of money to import the ‘coolies’ and provided them ‘comfort’ as required by the law.
The employer is compelled by law to guarantee the coolie a minimum wage; and it is only equitable that the law should provide him with the means of obtaining the due fulfillment of the contract by the coolie, whose only capital is his labour, and who ought not to be allowed capriciously to withdraw himself from the service of the employer . . . . A penal labour law and government protection to the labour are thus correlative terms.Footnote 62
As to the brutalities and the ill treatment of labour as a feature of labour relations in Assam plantations, the official perception and attitude was summed up in 1888 by the Chief Commissioner of Assam, Sir Dennis Fitzpatrick:
With about nine hundred gardens employing upwards of 323,000 hands, there must, of course, be a certain proportion of bad men, perhaps even of thoroughly depraved men, both among planters and coolies. There must be a certain amount of harshness and oppression, at times possibly even of downright cruelty, on the one side, and of turbulence, conspiracies, and maliciously concocted charges on the other; this, unfortunately, is human nature as displayed among all classes of men, and happily we have criminal courts strong enough to deal with it; but speaking generally, the relations between the employers and labourers seem to be fairly good.Footnote 63
This was to become the general refrain of most official reporting by Assam civil servants. It became a standard practice in official reportage to mention cases of violence, physical coercion, and blatant use of extra-legal authority by planters and at the same time to rationalise it as aberrations or deny it altogether when confronted with non-official criticism. J.A. Craven, Deputy Collector, and the Head of the Santhali Deputation,Footnote 64 when confronted with highly unfavourable reporting by the Santhal tribal heads, his fellow members, dismissed their findings in his version of the report: ‘It is a fallacy to suppose that the Assam coolie is hard-worked and [an] uncared for serf, earning a mere monthly pittance scarcely sufficient for the bare necessities of life. He is far better off on a tea garden than in his own country.’Footnote 65
Equally interesting were the official observations on the contents of the Santhali Deputation findings: ‘The govt has received the non-official view—not a pleasant one . . . it is a view of a free, high spirited and comparatively wild race, who cannot bear the thought of compulsion, or physical restraint or corporal punishment.’ However, even while deriding the ‘natural tendency’ of the deputation to ‘to revel in gruesome stories’, it went on grudgingly to concede that:
No one denies that there is a residuum of truth in these stories: instances have existed and have come to light of harsh treatment of sick coolies and of child bearing women, of corporal punishment inflicted for short work or want of discipline, of heavy fines or by heavy tasks and by the impossibility of getting overtime pay, of difficulties placed in the way of the return of time-expired coolies, and so on.Footnote 66
There were, however, others among the colonial bureaucracy with different perceptions and attitudes towards the indenture regime. The Bengal civil servant J. Ware Edgar, and other members of the 1868 Commission appointed by the Bengal Government, reported with candour and disapproval the incidence of high mortality, and the brutal and inhumane treatment of migrant labourers on the plantation. Many civil servants posted in the recruiting districts were extremely critical of the coercive system of recruitment for Assam plantations and held low wages as the main cause of the unpopularity of the plantations as an employment venue. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Lt. Governor of Bengal, accepted the findings of the Bengal Labour Enquiry Commission without hesitation and recommended the abolition of the ‘so-called free recruitment’ for Assam from the recruitment districts as well as a raise in the minimum wage to Rs 6 and Rs 5 from the then prevailing Rs 5 and Rs 4 for men and women respectively. The Enquiry Commission found that the wages ‘are kept too low in Assam’.Footnote 67 However, these recommendations did not invoke any positive response from the Governments of India and Assam.
The sharpest critique was the Chief Commissioner Henry Cotton's Annual Labour Report in 1900 on immigrant labour in the Assam tea plantations. This provoked a major controversy between him and the planters. The general impression which most previous reports gave about labour in Assam can be summarised as follows: labourers were well-fed and living in comfort; they were provided with proper medical and sanitary facilities and with subsidised rations; labourers earned enough wages; and finally, there was generally no tension between the employer and the labourers. Cotton's report of 1900, based on the inspections carried out by local officials, presented an altogether different picture. It showed that mortality rate among Assam tea garden labourers in that year had been much higher than the previous two years. This was attributed to the scarcity of resources because of low wages among immigrants, as a result of which they became vulnerable to disease.Footnote 68 The report showed that wages paid to the labourers were below the statutory minimum rates of Rs 5 and Rs 4 for men and women respectively.Footnote 69 The Chief Commissioner had come across numerous cases in which labourers in the fourth year of their agreement had not been paid the higher wage to which they were entitled. He also noted cases in which rice had not been provided at the statutory rate, and subsistence allowances had not been paid to sick labourers.Footnote 70 His report depicted the relations between the employer and the labourer as being far from cordial; in fact ill-feeling was clearly growing. Ten cases of ‘riots’ had been reported in that year alone.Footnote 71
Cotton's report received a hostile reception from the planters. They accused him of distortion and exaggeration. A number of extracts from previous reports concerning wages, and labour relations were cited by the Indian Tea Association to show that Cotton's report was completely biased and ‘fallacious’.Footnote 72 Cotton conceded that his report was different from the previous ones but denied any bias, pointing out that it was based on inspections carried out by local officials.Footnote 73
Cotton proposed an increase of minimum statutory wages for labourers through the Assam Labour and Emigration Bill in the Central Legislative Assembly, giving reasons for this recommendation.Footnote 74 But the hostility of the planters was not allayed by his reasoned argument. The Indian Tea Association (which wielded much political clout in the province), the Centre, and London,Footnote 75 organized protest meetings and mounted pressure on colonial and home governments through memorials and deputations to the Secretary of State for India and the Viceroy.Footnote 76 The Anglo-Indian press in India, and The Times in London, launched blistering attacks on Cotton,Footnote 77 one that acquired a personalised tone when the nationalist press came out in support of Cotton.
The organized campaign against Cotton, both in England and in India, succeeded in putting pressure on the Government of India. Cotton's report was dubbed by his seniors in Calcutta as an ‘anti-planter manifesto which would do more harm than good’. J.B. Fuller was critical of Cotton's public criticism of the planters over the labour question because ‘by exciting class feelings they alienate from us the leaders of the community whose assistance is of inestimable value in maintaining a proper standard of morality’.Footnote 78 Fuller in fact wanted the position of the managers to be protected and further strengthened. He noted that ‘instances of organized rebellion and of attack on the managers are sufficiently numerous to indicate that the managers’ authority is none too secure’.Footnote 79 It is interesting that the same Fuller considered Cotton's reports of labour-employer tension as highly exaggerated. It summed up the state's dilemma. The state was committed to serve the interests of the planters; it also had to appear as the ‘protector’ of the labourers.Footnote 80
However, the most interesting aspect of the Cotton episode was the attitude and actions of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, whose official communications through bureaucratic channels and his private correspondence with Cotton and Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, on this subject are very instructive. These show that both Curzon and Hamilton were aware of the labour relations that prevailed in the Assam tea plantations and of the attitude of the state bureaucracy. Curzon informed Hamilton on 24 July,1901 that he had come across cases in which English magistrates,
. . . who are entirely in the hands of the tea-planters, [and] have given the most partial and unjust sentences in cases between the planters or managers of the tea gardens and their coolies. If a coolie threatens or commits a technical assault upon an Englishman, he is given a year's rigorous imprisonment. The Englishman may thrash a coolie almost to death, or may criminally assault his daughter or wife, and he only gets a fine of Rs. 50.Footnote 81
On another occasion Curzon enlightened Hamilton that such practices were not confined to the District and Session courts but were equally true of cases ‘even before the High Court, [where] there is one scale of justice for the planter and another for the coolie’.Footnote 82 Hamilton in turn concurred with the Viceroy and admitted: ‘The miscarriage of justice in India in the High Courts, and the conduct of Magistrates, where coolies and Europeans come in collision, cause me great concern. It seems to me a very serious reflection upon the whole basis of our rule in India, which is to secure justice between man and man.’Footnote 83
To Cotton, Curzon expressed grave concern on several aspects of the indenture regime on the plantations. Cotton found the tone of Curzon's early official and private pronouncements very supportive and encouraging. ‘The utterances of Lord Curzon on this subject have been far stronger than my own.’Footnote 84 In his private letter of 22 July, 1901, Curzon expressed to Cotton his ‘distress’ on cases of ‘miscarriage of justice’ that had come to his notice: ‘The sentence of 9 months upon the man Gajhadar who assaulted or threatened Mr Oliver was a savage & inequitable sentence and is in violent contrast to the grotesque & inadequate fine of 60 Rs upon Mr. Black.’Footnote 85 Curzon wanted Cotton to warn the judiciary, ‘. . . if this reign of unjust and partial sentences is to continue—light measure for the white manager, cruel measure for the coolie—the Gov of India will most certainly intervene in some form . . . .’ And in the matter of Cotton initiating action against gardens on account of reported low wages Curzon wrote, ‘I quite agree with your action in the case of a very bad garden where you detected a most scandalous shortage of wages.’Footnote 86
Cotton hinted at the planters’ reactions to his labour report stating that:
I have gone at some length into particular cases of the year. I say nothing about the attitude of the planters themselves & I am sure you realise it as well as I do. Many a rotten garden will collapse but that the abolition of a penal contract will ultimately be to the benefit of the province and of the industry generally I have little doubt.Footnote 87
In reply Curzon assured Cotton that ‘planters will behave all right at the proposed decision and that any conflicting sections will be kept under proper restraint’.Footnote 88
However, in the face of mounting pressure of the powerful tea lobby, through an organised and sustained campaign and supported by the colonial bureaucracy, Lord Curzon changed his tune. He informed the Secretary of State that the ‘conflict between Cotton and the Assam Planters has reached a point at which the whole of Province seems to be up in Arms against the CC, while the Calcutta Press, which is largely inspired by the planters, is clamouring for his recall’.Footnote 89 The huge public support from nationalist quarters for Cotton on this issue further hardened Curzon's stance. He now informed Cotton that his labour report was ‘interpreted’ as a ‘declaration of war against planters’, and accused him of being biased against planters.Footnote 90 To the Secretary of State Curzon admitted the truth of Cotton's report: ‘I believe it to be true that on many plantations harsh and cruel and abominable things go on, and that the coolies get nothing like the wage which is stipulated for by the law.’ He also confessed that ‘in his endeavour to remedy both these scandals, I have earnestly backed up Cotton . . . . But when, to use a vulgar metaphor, he goes bald headed for the planting community at large, and presents them as a lot of inhuman monsters who are capable of any crime, he is going too far . . . .’Footnote 91
Both Curzon and Cotton were aware of the difficulties in persuading the state judicial and civil officers to enforce compliance of labour laws and act impartially in relation to planters vis-à-vis labour. Planters and civil servants had strong community ties and racial affinities through regular socialising. Cotton summed it up well:
I was never oblivious of the peculiar difficulty which besets a Magistrate, a member of a small European community in a distant land, who may be playing polo or bridge or billiards with a planter one month, or who may be serving under him as a trooper in the Light Horse, and who in the next month may be called on to try and punish him for cruelty to a contract labourer.Footnote 92
Hetherington's diary records a very active and vibrant social life amongst the small European community of planters and colonial officials. His entry of 4 June, 1907 recorded that Gordon, the new Deputy Superintendent of Police, came and stayed overnight at his bungalow.Footnote 93 He also gives a graphic account of attending Light Horse Camp at Dibrugarh for a week where he was in the company of other Europeans, civilians, fellow planters and army men.Footnote 94
Cotton was sacked—his ‘crime’ was joining forces with the nationalists against the planters and becoming an ‘agitator’. ‘I do not think that outside the Bengali Press, he has anywhere found an advocate. The fact is that Mr. Cotton is not a man of sound or reliable judgment or temper.’Footnote 95 Cotton felt betrayed by Curzon who ‘saved his own skin but deliberately flung me to the wolves’ when the Anglo-Indian press opened ‘floodgates of abuse’ against him. ‘In the face of [the] rising storm of unpopularity from his own countrymen, Lord Curzon quailed.’Footnote 96
Conclusion
The indenture labour regime that evolved in the Assam tea plantations from the mid-1860s shaped the perceptions and attitudes of its managerial personnel—the planters—towards the migrant labour force. The planters were expected to expand acreage and production for a fast-growing and competitive world market. Equally important was to keep production costs low to ensure profits for the tea companies, in the face of price fluctuations. This was achieved through adoption of labour-intensive production strategies that included extra-economic coercion for mobilising labour and extra-legal methods to immobilise the migrant labour force within the plantations. Since labour was the main component of production costs the emergence of a harsh indenture labour regime can be explained in the context of the cost-conscious tea companies’ unwillingness to offer wage incentives and at the same time pressurising their workers into increasing production. The existence of an ‘irrational’ and inhuman labour regime was not an aberration but very much a characteristic of ‘rational’, modern corporate capitalism.
The colonial state played a very crucial role in the growth of the tea industry in Assam. Apart from providing land at extremely lucrative terms, and building the infrastructure to promote the interests of the tea industry, the colonial state's help was particularly important in the context of mobilisation and control of the labour force. Its legislative interventions were meant to ‘protect’ the ‘ignorant’ and ‘illiterate’ migrants’ interests and at the same time to ensure the compliance of indenture contract by inserting penal provisions. However, the colonial state failed to implement the ‘protective’ aspects of the labour legislation and overlooked and even condoned the extra-legal practices on the part of the planters. But the colonial bureaucracy was after all not a monolith: there were officials, such as Henry Cotton, who raised the issues of inequities suffered by the workers. Ultimately, however, the interests of the industry and its trade were of such importance to the state that the brutalities of the indenture labour regime were completely overlooked.
