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Empireâs Garden: Assam and the Making of India
Author(s): Jayeeta Sharma (Author)
- Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
- Publication Date: 1 Jan. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 348 pages
- ISBN-10: 8178243431
- ISBN-13: 9788178243436
Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century the british created a landscape of tea plantations in the north-eastern 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 labour from central india in the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods in empires garden, jayeeta sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in assam irrevocably changed the regions social landscape she argues that the racialized construction of the tea labourer catalyzed a process by which assams gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined indo-aryan community and a modern indian political space various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness
