Assam’s tea workers

The Assam government granting land pattas to tea plantation workers is a welcome step. It has provided much-needed security to several thousand families who have lived through at least four generations without any kind of security despite contributing immensely towards the economic and industrial development of Assam. They have also strengthened Assam’s socio-cultural fabric. One thing must always be kept in mind – though several thousand families of people mostly from central India had migrated to Assam from 1859 onwards to work in tea plantations, they have never caused any threat to Assam’s demography and culture. Rather, they have only enriched Assamese life and culture. One must remember that over ten thousand people of various ethnic communities of Assam had worked in the tea plantations in the first three decades of their establishment. Large flocks of people were brought from the Chotanagpur region from 1859 onwards as the industry rapidly expanded. In this context, one must also keep in mind that the myth created by a section of British planters and Bengal-based intellectuals that labourers were brought from outside because the Assamese were lazy is totally false, unfounded, and offensive. History shows that Assam’s population was drastically reduced between 1770 and 1824 due to several reasons, like pestilence, natural disasters, civil war and the Burmese invasion. British documents show that the surviving Assamese people had enough land to till and remain self-sufficient rather than working for a few paise in tea gardens. Colonial reports also show that the British planters had a tough time tackling the Assamese workers, who resorted to strike twice – in 1848 for demanding higher wages and in 1857 when Maniram Dewan was arrested. Anyway, the best thing that has happened to Assam in the past 162 years is the assimilation of thousands of immigrant tea workers into the greater Assamese identity. This is in sharp contrast to another community which began arriving in hordes since the 1905 Partition of Bengal with the sole objective of occupying the land and causing a demographic invasion. It is in this context that granting land pattas to the tea plantation workers is very significant. Prime Minister Narendra Modi embracing a tea plantation worker while handing over the valuable land document to him in Guwahati on Friday evening must be considered a tremendous gesture in his backdrop.