Raj, Jayaseelan;
(2022)
Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt.
[Book].
UCL Press: London, UK.
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Abstract
What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy. Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India's tea belt.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt |
| ISBN: | 978-1-80008-227-4 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1-80008-227-4 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800082274 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Raj, J. 2022. Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800082274 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | India, tea belt, ethnography, Dalit, economics, capitalism |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10150970 |
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