Infraestructuras básicas de saneamiento

As early as 1834 a Tea Committee was appointed by the Governor General William Bentinck to ‘inquire into and report on the possibility o f introducing the cultivation

1 1

o f tea into India’. After a few aborted experiments, a tea garden, as it was termed, was established in Sibsagar in Assam, which was later sold to the Assam tea company in 1840.14 Jayeeta Sharma has argued in the case o f Assam that, the

11 Das Gupta, Econom y, so c ie ty a n d p o litic s , p. 68.

12 J.C. Arbuthnott, R ep o rt on the C on ditions o f Tea G arden L abou r in the D u ars o f Bengal, in M adras, a n d in C eylon, Shilling, 1904, p. 9.

I3. W .W . Hunter, A S ta tistica l A ccou nt o f Bengal, Vol.X., D istricts o f D a rjilin g a n d Jalpaiguri,

& S tate o f Kuch Behar, London 1861, p. 164.

14 Ibid, p .165.

nomenclature ‘garden’ implied an ordering and claiming o f the land from forest, an articulation o f the dichotomy between civilization and the wild, uncivilized.15 I have found it more useful to stay with their formal nomenclature o f tea estate, which reflects on the social relations of production within the plantations.

There were a few attempts to establish tea gardens in Darjeeling ‘sometime previously to 1853’, but according to W. W. Hunter, the ‘real date of commencement o f the industry may be taken at 1856-67’.16 As shown in the previous chapter, with some initiatives from the Superintendent o f Darjeeling Campbell, who nurtured tea seeds and plants in Darjeeling and distributed them to anyone who wished to cultivate them, and with the policy o f grant o f lease o f land for tea at nominal costs (a feature o f tea industry in Assam and Duars and Terai as well) the commercial manufacture of tea in Darjeeling took off in the mid­

nineteenth century. The gradual conversion o f land to tea cultivation, occurred through European enterprise, comprising to a great extent o f retired officials- civil, medical and military personnel as well as entrepreneurs such as Johanne Wernicke17 The tea industry in Darjeeling attracted diverse entrepreneurs; but they were all Europeans. The availability o f land at nominal prices attracted European entrepreneurs. The first leases in 1858 were given out as ‘farming leases’ for a period of fifty years, at a rent of eight annas per acre after five years.18 The first Waste Land Rules in Darjeeling district were formulated in 1859 when large tracts o f land was sold by government at auction as ‘waste-land’ at the nominal price o f Rs

15 Jayeeta Sharma, ‘An European tea ‘garden’ and an Indian ‘frontier’: the d iscovery o f A ssa m ’, O ccasional paper no 6, U niversity o f Cambridge, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge, 2002.

16 Hunter, A S ta tistic a l A ccou n t o f B en gal, p. 165.

17 E.C. D ozey, A C on cise H isto ry o f The D a rje elin g D istric t w ith a C o m p lete Itin erary o f Tours In Sikkim a n d the D istrict, (Secon d Edition), Calcutta, 1922, A C o n cise H isto ry o f The D a rje elin g D istrict, pp. 196-7.

i8L.S.S. O ’M alley, D arjeelin g, Calcutta 1907, pp. 189-90.

10/- per acre, as free-hold.19 Between 1859-61 some 9000 acres o f waste-land was sold. In 1861, the ‘fee-simple’ was introduced, whereby waste -lands were regarded in perpetuity as ‘heritable and transferable’ property, subject to no enhancement of land revenue; and there was no condition ‘obliging the grantee to cultivate or clear any specific portion within any specific time’. Ofl The Waste Land Rules permitted large -scale speculation because only fifteen per cent o f the lease had to be under tea. Land was claimed and staked out but often not cultivated. In the 1860s, speculations, partially laid out tea gardens, and the prospect o f huge profits and quick money without going through the process o f actually growing and manufacturing the tea were common, and a contemporary planter remarked that:

At Darjeeling, where Tea cultivation, ... walks forth with giant strides across the hills, you will find generally that there are two utterly distinct systems carried out; one for those plantations which, like the peddler’s razors, are intended for sale; and one for those which are intended, if possible, to pay; these latter are somewhat in the style o f the Assam Gardens; 21

Planters’ memoirs from Darjeeling give some idea o f the individuals who formed the planters’ community in Darjeeling, Terai and the Duars. The Werner -Stolke family, ex-missionaries and contractors in the first generation, were planters in the second generation. Both the Wernicke brothers joined as assistant managers in the Tukvar and the Makaibari tea gardens in 1865-67. Soon they leased plantations of their own, with land offered at ‘quite a nominal figure’; at Lingia, 550 acres were obtained for Rs 60 (£40), which had comprised partly o f ‘native cultivation, chiefly o f maize, and partly jungle’.

19 Ibid, p. 190.

20 Ibid.pp. 190-1.

21 E.F. Bamber, A n A ccou n t o f the C u ltivation a n d M anufacture o f Tea in India, From P erso n a l O bservation , Calcutta, 1866, p. 1.

22 ‘The W ernicke - Stolke Story’, M ss Photo Eur 421, (A PA C ), p. 10.

In 1864 government introduced leases in Darjeeling for tea for a period o f 30 years, the land being rent free for the initial five years, and then an annual rate o f 6 annas per acre on the whole area under lease.23 Despite a slump in the tea industry in India between 1861 and 1866, the acreage in Darjeeling continued to expand and tea plantations expanded to the Terai.24 The Waste Land Rules were further amended in 1882, and finally in 1898 when preliminary leases were given only after the lessee showed that he had enough capital to develop the land, and after five years a 30 year lease was granted in perpetuity on condition o f cultivating tea in at least fifteen per

(Source: W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account o f Bengal, Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri, Vol. X, London and Edinburgh, 1875, p. 165).

cultivation; some parts lay fallow and forested, and its products were used for various purposes from making tea chests to providing firewood for the labourers settled in the estates.27 The labourers needed for the expansion o f the industry were generally Nepalis o f various communities- Mangars, Limbus, Rais, etc. who migrated from eastern Nepal. As discussed in the previous chapter, migration was actively encouraged by the government. From the beginning, the relatively easy access to labour facilitated a system o f free rather than indentured labour. Historians have pointed out that ‘unlike Assam ....Darjeeling from the very beginning had an abundance o f cheap labour’ from Nepal, and the migration was further encouraged by the economic pressures on the poor peasantry in eastern Nepal. This was extremely useful for the tea companies because immigration from Nepal was far simpler than the system o f importing indentured labourers from the tribal areas o f Chota Nagpur and Santhal Parganas that was prevalent in Assam.

As I have indicated above, the pioneering, entrepreneurial years in Darjeeling lent opportunities to Europeans from various classes and backgrounds to find an occupation and settle in Darjeeling and in Terai. This also led often to involvement in tea plantations, either as assistant managers and managers in the Agency Houses or as owner-planters. Later many o f the owner-planters turned to the large agency houses for financial support and some sold their plantations or formed joint stock companies. 90The agency houses recruited European managers to the plantations; the

27 This schem e o f lease o f large tracts o f land o f which on ly a portion would be used for tea, w hile the rest o f the produce o f the land given to tea com panies for the free use o f timber, firew ood, land for their labourers and grazing had also been taken from the A ssam m odel. In Darjeeling, fifteen per cent o f the land leased had to be under tea for the renewal o f the thirty year lease. In A ssam the proportion w as a quarter o f the land to be under tea in the first five years. Guha, P la n ter R aj to S w araj, p. 13.

28 R.L. Sarkar and Mahendra P. Lama (ed.), Tea P lan tation W orkers in th e E astern H im alayas- A S tu dy on Wages, E m ploym en t a n d L ivin g S tan dards 1986, p. 5. See also Subba, The Q uiet Hills, p.

14-15.

29A m iya Bagchi, P riv a te Investm ent in India, 1900-1939, London, 2 0 0 0 (1 9 7 2 ), pp. 161-162.

owners in the Darjeeling plantations too were all European. The established English ambience o f near-by Darjeeling lent a comfortable prospect to work on the tea estates in the surrounding areas.30

The tea planters o f Darjeeling formed an association o f employers in 1873, which was formalised into the Darjeeling Planters’ Association in 1892. The Darjeeling Planters’

Association affiliated itself to the principal body o f tea producers in India, the Indian Tea Association, in 1910.31 However, from 1892 onwards there was a Darjeeling and Dooars sub-committee in the Indian Tea Association, where the concerns o f the Darjeeling, Terai, and Duars tea planters were voiced and represented. From the high slopes o f the Darjeeling mountains, where the first tea bush was planted by Campbell at 7000 feet, the success o f the earliest tea plantations led to the expansion o f the tea plantations to the lower slopes, and later on to the foothills o f the notoriously unhealthy Terai. At the turn of the century the slopes and the drier tracts o f the Terai were cleared for tea gardens as well as the cultivation o f rice and other crops such as maize and potatoes. In the first settlement o f the Darjeeling Terai, made by Campbell in 1853, grants o f land were given out to settling cultivators for ten years.34 Several grants for tea were made out at the same time under Waste Land Rules, as they had been in Darjeeling, and in 1863 they were leased out for tea cultivation, the leases running for thirty years. The Settlement Officer noted in 1929 that ‘at least’ from 1880 onwards, the tea estates had to pay a very low rate o f lease at Re 1 -8 annas per acre of lands actually under tea, which could be as little as fifteen

30 Samuel Baildon, The Tea Industry: A R eview o f F inance a n d Labour, G u ide f o r C a p ita lists a n d A ssistan ts London 1882, pp. 35-39.

31 The D a rje elin g B ranch Tea A sso cia tio n 1873-1973, M ss Eur F /l 7 4 /6 8 5 , (A PA C ).

32 Ibid.

33 Griffiths, The H isto ry o f the Indian Tea Industry, p. 88.

34 J C Mitra, F inal R ep o rt on the S u rvey a n d S ettlem en t O peration s in th e D a rje elin g Terai, 1919-25.

Calcutta 1927, p. 21.

per cent of the area actually leased out to the tea garden.35 The actual numbers o f tea gardens and acreage under tea in the Darjeeling Terai is difficult to estimate because they were enumerated with the tea gardens in the Darjeeling hill area, both being included for administrative purposes, in the district o f Darjeeling. In 1925, though, the acreage under tea was 18,467.55 acres, and formed twenty two per cent o f the total

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area under jotes and grants. The labour in the Terai plantations comprised both Nepali labourers and those hired through contractors from the Chota Nagpur and Santhal parganas areas. The Terai Tea Planters’ Association, the body intended to represent their interests to government, and to facilitate recruitment o f labour from the catchment area o f Chotanagpur, was formed at the turn of the century, 1901-02.37

The western Duars was that part o f the Duars, which after its annexation into British territory was formed into the new district of Jalpaiguri in 1869. A section o f the Jalpaiguri district incorporated older, settled territory, which differed little in topography, cultivation, or in any other way from the neighbouring districts of Rangpur and Dinajpur. The remainder was newly annexed area following the Anglo- Bhutan war o f 1865. Here the agrarian system o f revenue collection was different from the rest o f Bengal; the government chose not to implement the Permanent Settlement that had been implemented in the rest o f Bengal, and instead negotiated directly with the peasants. Thus, in Jalpaiguri and the western Duars, the government was the zamindar (landlord). This, however, did not imply that the peasantry in colonial Duars was undifferentiated. Rather, as large parts o f the lands hitherto cultivated by the local Mechs (who were pushed further east into eastern

35 Ibid, p29.

36 Ibid, p i 3.

37 ‘History o f the Terai Planters’ A ssociation and the Terai Branch Indian Tea A ssociation ’, cyclostyled manuscript, (Terai Branch o f Indian Tea A ssociation O ffice, B e n g d u b i), n.d. p. 1.

38 Das Gupta, Econom y, society, a n d p o litic s , p. 27.

Duars, Goalpara in Assam) were taken over by the jo te d a rsfpeasant-cultivator) in the course o f the nineteenth century the differentiation among the peasantry between the bigger jotedar ( peasant-landholder) and the adhiar (sharecropper) increased . Through the nineteenth century into the first decades o f the twentieth, when the final settlement for the region was made, sub-infeudation o f cultivable lands occurred at several levels leading to a hierarchy o f peasant-landholders between the jotedar and the adhiar such as the chukanidar and the dar-chukanidar. 39 Commercialisation of land occurred at a rapid pace after the annexation into the British territories. The author o f the district gazetteer commented in 1911 that

Few districts in India have developed as rapidly as the Western Duars. The northern tract along the base o f the hills, between the Tista and the Torsha rivers, is now covered by prosperous tea-gardens, separated only by rivers or occasional areas o f reserved forest; east o f the Torsa the chain o f tea gardens continues right up to the Sankos river, but is broken up by larger stretches o f forest. South o f the tea gardens as far east as the Torsha river,... nearly the whole o f the land is under cultivation and grows magnificent crops o f rice, jute, tobacco, and mustard... even in this remote part of the district,

cultivation is increasing fast, and the jungle disappearing rapidly.40

The first tea plantation in western Duars was leased to Dr Brougham, ‘an old hand’, who had planted out one o f the first tea gardens in Darjeeling. His assistant was one Richard Houghton, listed in the district gazetteer as the pioneer o f tea in western Duars.41 The land for the tea gardens in the Duars after 1896 functioned under the Waste Land Rules, similar to the rules in the Darjeeling district. The lessee paid a fee o f Re 1 per acre as the cost for a survey, and then obtained a preliminary five year lease, which was ‘rent-free in the first year, 3 annas per acre in the second year and an additional 3 annas for each successive year up to 12 annas an acre’.42 After five years,

39 Ray, T ransform ations on the B en g a l F rontier, pp. 161-2.

40 John F Grunig, E astern B en gal a n d A ssam D istrict G azettex Allahabad. 1911, p. 3.

41 D as Gupta, Econom y, S o cie ty a n d P olitics, p.56.

42 Grunig, J a lp a ig u ri, p.85.

if it was confirmed on inspection that at least fifteen percent o f the land was under tea cultivation; the lessee was entitled to a thirty -year lease to be renewed in perpetuity.43 The rents for tea lands in the Western Duars were much lower than the rates for revenue rates in the district. 44 Moreover, the lessee was charged land rent for only the portion o f land that was planted with tea, the rest of the leased land being classified as‘waste’ land. Apart from the value o f forest produce, used both for production o f tea and by the tea estate labourers, this left the lessee with the option of extending acreage under tea without paying rent for thirty years after the survey.45

In 1878, within four years o f the first grant of lease, the ‘Dooars Planters Association’, (DPA) a body o f European planters was established.46 Several tea estates in Duars, and Darjeeling were owned by agency houses like Duncan Brothers or Octavius Steele.47 There were however, also, a number o f European-owned smaller tea companies in all the tea districts. Unlike the Darjeeling area, where the tea plantations were, ‘conducted almost entirely by means o f English capital and under skilled European supervision’, from almost the very beginning it involved Indian

J O industries in eastern India under British m anaging agencies, with interlocking directorships, market- sharing, and control o f labour supply. B agchi, P riva te Investm ent in India, pp. 170-181. After 1914

Jalpaiguri formed a joint stock company, the Jalpaiguri Tea Company, and petitioned for a lease for a tea garden.49 In this venture they were encouraged by an Indian official, Bhagaban Chandras Bose, who was at that time a Deputy Magistrate at Jalpaiguri.50 The lease o f the first Indian managed tea garden, the Mogalkata Tea Estate, o f 741 acres, was eventually granted in 1881. Several more Indian companies procured leases and established plantations. However, the acreage under Indian entrepreneurship remained small in comparison to that o f the European managed tea gardens. The Bengali entrepreneurs were often in competition with the European tea companies, and the nature and content o f the conflicts were often articulated in racial terms; the Bengali planters feeling very keenly their lack o f capital and resenting the comparative ease with which the European planters had access to government officials and support.51 The DP A did not have any Indian managers or companies among its members, although from around 1917 it began to invite a few Indian planters as guests to its annual general meetings. The Indian entrepreneurs formed

r 'y

their own organisation, the Indian Tea Planters’ Association. As one Indian planter recounted,

In 1918 the Jalpaiguri Tea Planters felt the need o f an Association exclusively for the purpose o f looking after the interest o f the Indian Tea Planters; for the English Planters....the DPA refused to give equal rights to Indian planters ... .in matters of common interest. In fact an Indian Tea Planter in those days had to get down from his pony or tandem ( a two

49 G hose, The D evelo p m en t o f Tea In dustry, p. 14.

50 Kamakhya Prosad Chakraborty, S h ekaler J a lp a ig u ri Shohor E bon g S am ajik J ib a n er K ichu K a th a , Jalpaiguri, n.d. p. 22.

51 A m iya Kumar B agchi has argued that the agency houses w hich controlled British capital in colonial India set them selves as socia lly and culturally distinct from native entrepreneurs in the twentieth century, and w as supported by sections o f the administration. See B agchi, P riv a te In vestm ent in In dia,p.28. H ow ever, not all the planters join ed the ITPA initially; there w as a Hindu- M uslim divide, with N aw ab M osharraff H ossain, a jo te d a r and planter, staying aw ay from it. He join ed the ITPA at a later stage. See Indian Tea P la n te r s ’ A sso cia tio n G olden J u bilee S ouvenir, Jalpaiguri, 1965, ( ITPA O ffice, Jalpaiguri), p. 10.

52 Indian Tea P la n ters ’ A sso cia tio n G olden J u bilee Souvenir, Jalpaiguri, 1965, pp. 25-30.

-wheeled vehicle driven by a horse) if an English planter came in the same road from the opposite direction.53

The racial indignities suffered by the largely educated and westernised class from which the Bengalis planters were drawn gave an edge to the rivalries between the DPA and the ITPA. There were areas of conflict and direct competition among the two employers’ bodies, especially when it was a question o f the defection of labour from European tea gardens to Indian ones. But the two bodies also co-operated on various issues; especially in negotiations regarding medical policies and sanitation within the estates.

The tea plantations were mostly responsible for populating the Duars from the last decade o f the nineteenth century and changing its demography permanently. The emerging public health and sanitation concerns o f this region were shaped as much by these demographic changes as by the perceived unhealthiness o f the site. The tea plantations in the Duars, unlike those in Assam, did not employ indentured labour.

Like the Terai tea gardens, the Duars tea estates also at first recruited Paharia labourers, but with rapid expansion soon had to recruit from the same areas as the Assam planters: the Chota Nagpur and Santhal parganas.54 The recruitment from specific regions is significant because certain racial typologies regarding the workers’ bodies in terms o f susceptibility to diseases, work and immunity were constructed and sustained throughout the colonial area and even beyond.

The element o f non-contractual labour is important in Duars as well as in the Darjeeling and Terai, because o f the fact that labour in the region was free enabled

The element o f non-contractual labour is important in Duars as well as in the Darjeeling and Terai, because o f the fact that labour in the region was free enabled