Start
August 16, 2023 - 3:30 pm
End
August 16, 2023 - 5:00 pm
Counter-plantation imaginaries: Dalit women and autonomy in India’s Tea Belt
By:
Dr. Jayaseelan Raj
Associate Professor, King’s College London.
Chair:
Prof. Praveena Kodoth
Professor, CDS
ABSTRACT
In September 2015, a massive strike was organised by the women tea pluckers in the Munnar tea belt of the south Indian state of Kerala. Pembillai Orumai, as they came to be known, made history by forcing the tea company to increase the daily wages and the bonus. They not only organised outside the unions, but also against them for their corrupt alliance with the company. The strike was noted as a major milestone in the history of labour resistance in the global south. However, the uprising that turned into an alternative labour movement that started with 8000 Dalit women workers collapsed and the membership was reduced to five within a period of one year. What are the transformations triggered by the uprising in the plantation life of the tea belt? How did such an extraordinary uprising collapse in a span of an year? What happened to those who led the uprising? These are the questions raised in the paper to understand the disruptions to the disruptions (Sahlins 1982). Five years after the uprising, the paper revisits the event and the larger transformation it generated, particularly on the ‘agrarian’ change in the tea belt, changes in the labour relations, and in the way unions, the company and the state were related to the workers. This paper argues that the long term sustaining of the workers’ uprising and movement depends on the counter-plantation imaginaries (Casimir 2020), that is the possibilities for the workers to overcome stigmatisation, divisive politics of the company and the union, and resource mobilisation outside the plantation system.
Jayaseelan Raj is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Development at King’s College London, and Fellow in the GRNPP at SOAS, University of London. Until recently, he was a Professor (replacement) at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen, Germany. He was recently awarded the New India Foundation Fellowship to write a book on Dalits and State in Kerala. He is the author of Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022), and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India (Pluto Press, 2017).