Before the 1920s, tea was a brew enjoyed only by Anglicised Indians, even though some indigenous communities from the Northeast had been infusing tea long before the British inhabited the subcontinent. More than a hundred tea tribes or Adivasis in Assam are the descendants of the indentured labourers enrolled by the colonial masters from impoverished regions of India, mostly from poor tribal belts of the Chotanagpur plateau.
In the 20th century, these migrants were amalgamated with others who came voluntarily to seek a livelihood. The historian, Jayeeta Sharma, underlines in Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India, how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. Sociologists also hold that the racial morphology of the tea drudge catalysed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community. As per the 2015 National Commission for Backward Classes, 96 ethnicities are listed under tea garden labourers, tea tribes and tea estate workhands — a significant number of them, particularly the Santhal, Munda, Oraon, Ho and Kharia, count themselves as Adivasis. Large tracts of land belonging to marginalised communities were anointed as tea estates, with locals being reduced to plantation labour. Indentured servitude was frequently exploitative, with harsh working conditions and severe punishments. They were oppressed not only by the British but also by the native zamindars and moneylenders.
The tea workers who were shifted to Assam, often forcefully, contributed to the state’s economy. Yet, due to the isolationist policy of British administration, the process of assimilation of tea tribes with mainstream Assamese society is still incomplete. Although they constitute a sizeable number, for mainstream Assamese society, they are still not considered an integral part. The overall stature of these tea tribes is nearly the same as it was during the planter raj.
The metamorphosis of the multi-ethnic tea tribes into a single social group in Assam has given them an identity different from their counterparts elsewhere in India. These multi-ethnic groups have been absorbed in Assam but are unable to secure constitutional safeguards for themselves. In their adoptive state, they are not classified as scheduled tribes, even though their ancestors from Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh and their kin at present in other states have access to privileges under the Constitution’s Fifth Schedule.
The socio-economic conditions, education and political awareness of tea tribes have remained stagnant for years. Describing the colonial terrors in Assam’s tea plantations, Sanjoy Hazarika laments in his book, River Traveller, “Taking advantage of a series of natural calamities, the tea companies authorised local recruiters, contractors to literally shanghai desperate tribals from central India, recruit them under false pretences and allurements, provide them alcohol, get them drunk and haul them off to holding areas where they were kept like cattle before being herded on board vessels and trains.”
Their socio-economic status notwithstanding, the tea garden communities are considered crucial in Assamese politics. The political mobilisation of the tea community has clearly led to political cohesiveness among them. The emergence of an educated planter elite, economic exploitation and political deprivation have only given a fillip to this awareness. Proactive roles played by regional bodies, such as the Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangh, Assam Tea Tribes Students’ Association and All Adivasi Students’ Association Of Assam, have reinforced political mobilisation of the tea garden community. All have harped on the uplift of the socio-economic status of these tribes and their inclusion in the ST list.