ABSTRACT
This essay recounts the author’s meandering journey from an initial desire to write a social history and ethnography of the various “autochthon” groups that made up the ranks of Assam tea labour in northeast India through to his eventual construction of rather distinct pasts of plantation worlds in the region. In the latter, forests, disease environments (for humans and tea plants), and agrarian ideology took centre stage alongside structural features such as labour regulation, legal regimes, and political context. Chakrabarty’s first book Rethinking Working-Class History, with its emphasis on the terms of culture and consciousness in the history of jute-mill workers, played a critical role in this shift. The essay admits that Chakrabarty’s work left both culture and consciousness as inadequately defined and conceptually underdeveloped, such that tendentious readings of the book persist into the present. At the same time, the author equally asserts that Chakrabarty’s critical challenge resided in his insistence that to relegate culture as either exceptional or antecedent to capital betokened the in-egalitarian and illiberal historical logic of Marxist materialism, and labour historians’ use of the same. The ramifications of this latter stance for writing global histories of modernity, rights, and democracy were enormous. Indeed, the author himself took the concept of culture in a distinct direction by using culture as a “heuristic tool” in order to unravel an entire ensemble of relationships of production and reproduction – associations and entanglements, meanings and practices, which were material, affective, and ideational. These extended from the Whig ideology of agrarian “improvement” that underpinned Assam’s tea venture through to the enterprise’s use and abuse of law; and they ranged from the ways in which ecologies were transformed and trashed to make way for tea through to human and nonhuman epidemiologies that the crop created and conditioned. It is in these ways that the author came to write a history of tea’s political economy in Assam that conjoined the material, the ideological, and the environmental.
