Sharma Jayeeta Sharma

Empire's Garden (eBook, PDF)

Assam and the Making of India

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire's Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region's social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam's gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto "non-Aryan" indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 344
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822394396
• Artikelnr.: 54816073

Autorenporträt

Jayeeta Sharma

Inhaltsangabe

Preface xi
Note on Orthography and Usage xiv
Introduction 1
Part I. Making a Garden 23
1. Nature's Jungle, Empire's Garden 25
2. Borderlands, Rice Eaters, and Tea Growers 49
3. Migrants in the Garden: Expanding the Frontier 79
Part II. Improving Assam, Making India 117
4. Old Lords and "Improving" Regimes 119
5. Bringing Progress, Restoring Culture 147
6. Language and Literature: Framing Identity 177
7. Contesting Publics: Raced Communities and Gendered History 205
Conclusion 234
Notes 243
Glossary 273
Bibliography 277
Index 311