ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contemporary transformations of labour regimes in the tea plantations in India. The labour relations have been subjected to radical reconstitution due to a series of crises in the neoliberal plantation system over the last three decades. The precarity of plantation labour is reformulated with the suspension of welfare provisions and the increasing casualisation and mechanisation of work. These measures have been accompanied by replacing the previous regular workers with the newly recruited migrant workers exposed to new modes of discipline. These reconstitutions bring forth a new labour regime and expose the migrant workers to extreme forms of discrimination that I refer to as categorical oppression. This chapter situates these processes within a broader system of caste, stigma, and the social reproduction of marginality.
