From the Tea Gardens to the Clinic: Adivasi Malnutrition and Medical Care in Assam’s Plantations

Assam, both during the British Raj and within the post-colonial condition, has constituted a resource frontier. A biodiverse regional state in the north-eastern parts of India, itself a larger resource frontier, Assam’s economy has been one of exporting valuable commodities to the rest of the country, and across national borders. Tea is one such prized commodity circulating across the globe, beginning in the colonial era. But what gets invisibilized in these global circulations are the bodies, Indigenous Adivasi bodies, of the workers of the plantations, who make the global valuation of a prized commodity possible. At times manipulated, at other times abducted, the Adivasi communities in the tea plantations of Assam were brought in by the British as indentured workers from eastern and central India. In the postcolonial nation-state, as brown Sirs from dominant castes occupy white managerial aspirations, these displaced Adivasi communities continue to labor for notoriously low wages while living in impoverished conditions. One of the conditions of life in the plantations, often located in distant rural areas, is the near absence of medical care and medical institutions. In this paper, I investigate the social history of health in the tea plantations of Assam. Focusing on experiences of women, I frame the history of malnutrition in the plantations as a central component of extractive capital accumulation at the margins of India. In so doing, I argue that caste-based unequal labor relations in the plantation resulting in Indigenous malnutrition unsettle the local ethnonationalist pride embedded in Assam’s globalized tea industry.