The Tea Labourers of North East India

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The impressive collection of twenty two research articles accommodated in this volume offer discrete descriptions on the history and migration of the workers in tea plantations in North East India and their settlements there. The articles included in this volume exhaustively cover the demographic characteristics; food habits of the populations; nutritional status; health and hygiene and morbidity scenario; economy, polity, social organisation; impact of Christian missionaries; status of women; socio-economic and political problems; trade union movement; their identity consciousness, etc. The volume will be of great use for wide ranging specialists administrators, policy makers, planners and decision making bodies at different levels, development agencies, researchers in the field of social sciences and others concerned with migrant population groups.

SARTHAK SENGUPTA (b. 1955) received his M.Sc. (1977) and Ph.D. (1983) degrees in Anthropology from Dibrugarh University and Gauhati University respectively. He also worked with the Anthropological Survey of India, Government of India and North Eastern Hill University, Shillong for quite some time and conducted intensive field studies among diverse tribes and castes in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Uttar Pradesh. He has had to his own credit nine well-knitted books on North East Indian tribes, and more than 180 original research papers published in various reputed national and international professional journals besides several chapters in edited volumes. He is an active life and executive member of several professional anthropological bodies and members of the editorial boards of Journal of Human Ecology, New Delhi (1998-2003) and Bulletin of the Department of Anthropology, Dibrugarh University (since 1989), Dibrugarh.

He is presently a Professor in the Department of Anthropolog, Dibrugarh University, Assam. His current research interest are genetical demography, globin gene distribution. population genetics, biosocial studies. diet and nutrition, indigenous health practices in tribal population of North East India.

In the world tea market, the place of India is still now unquestionably very high. The leading States in respect of tea industry in India are Assam and West Bengal. The State of Assam alone produces around 55 per cent of country's total production of tea. Unfortunately detailed literature discussing the origin and stages of development of tea plantations in Assam is conspicuous by its absence. In Assam the use of tea as medicine in cold and fever was in practice since a long time, because tea plants grew wildly in the hills and forests of Assam since time immemorial. People belonging to Singpho tribe had been making use of tea (falap /fanpe) since long. As early as 1815 A.D., Colonel Latter, a British Army Officer reported that 'the Singpho hill tribes of Assam gathered a species of wild tea, ate with oil and garlic, after the Burmese manner, and also made a drink from it. But, taking advantage of the absence of any recorded history of tea in Assam, the East India Company claimed all the credit of discovering tea in Assam. It was Colonel Sergeant C.A. Bruce, who after getting information from Dewan Maniram Dutta Bhandar Barua, struck up friendship with Beesa Gam, a Singpho Chief, who gave him some indigenous tea plants and seeds in 1823 A.D. This incident is thought as the discovery of tea in India, for which Bruce was awarded medal of the English Society of Arts for his effort in the discovery of tea in Assam.

The recorded history of tea industry in North East India is nearly 170 years old and can be traced as back as to 1837 A.D, when the first experimental tea estate was established in Chabua (Cha-tea, bua- to grow) in Dibrugarh district of Assam in 1837. In 1839, the first tea company, namely the Assam Tea Company started production of tea on a commercial basis in Assam followed by Jorhat Tea Company in 1858. Tea cultivation in Barak Valley (Cachar district). Assam was started in 1855-1856.

Initially, attempts were made to recruit labour from within Assam that would have entailed much lower costs of recruitment of labour. The Singpho Chief along with Matak Chief, Matibar Bar Senapati, volunteered to supply man power for tea cultivation.

**Contents and Sample Pages**