This month, PERMANENT BLACK is publishing Jayeeta Sharma's long awaited monograph on Assam, Empire's Garden.
To coincide with its publication, we requested Professor Sumit Sarkar to ask his former student a few key questions about her book and professional interests. Their conversation is given below.
SUMIT SARKAR: How far was
your choice of Assam as research area conditioned by your affiliation to the
place? Apart from the personal involvement, what else shaped your choice of
Assam and its plantations -- especially as you are not a tea drinker yourself,
if I remember correctly.
JAYEETA
SHARMA: As a young bookworm in Guwahati, I read all the history books that I
could find, whether Gibbons or Gait. But I couldn’t stand the dates-and-events
history the provincial Assam Board forced on students. Then I learnt that at
Delhi University I could study social, cultural, and economic history. The next
few years were a revelation, especially in my MA courses. When I began to do
research, I did want to write about Assam someday. However, I wasn’t ready to
do so for my M.Phil degree. Finding source materials for Assam was a problem,
especially with little funding. Also, the Mandal-Masjid events impelled me
towards looking at caste-class issues among Delhi’s Balmiki sweepers. Later, I
learnt of the rich trove of vernacular sources at the British Library and
applied for scholarships to do a PhD on Assam. Tea plantations were not yet on
my mind, since I envisaged a history of vernacular cultures and regional
identity at that point. Incidentally, I could not escape altogether from
tea-drinking at Delhi University addas but I gave it up for more interesting
beverages once I got to Cambridge, ironically, just as I brought tea into my
academic frame of reference!
SUMIT SARKAR: Do you
consider your book to be primarily a contribution to labour history or is it more
a contribution to studies of regional identities and nationalism? How do the
two concerns inflect each other?
JAYEETA
SHARMA: I see the book as both, and again, this is shaped by the way it came
about. As I began reading for my PhD, I often came across an unsatisfying
dichotomy in historical scholarship: between literary-and-nation-centred works,
and ‘labour and migration’-wallahs. I found it frustrating that so many works
on ‘vernacularization’ or ‘public sphere’ had little to say about the mixed
vernacular realities that labour migration and imperial policies created.
Plantation studies and labour history in turn, often took little account of
vernacular sources and differing regional cultures. Gradually, I conceptualized
my study of Assam as a cultural history inflected by the study of labour, as
well as a history of vernacular regions that would focus on empire’s workings.
I started to view the colonial economy and plantation sector as economic and
cultural actors that shaped the making of Assam and of India, as did the ideas
and artifacts of the printing press and of associational bodies, and that both
sets of processes impinged upon, interacted, and influenced each other, albeit
to differing degree.
SUMIT SARKAR: What is the
significance of the sequence of terms, 'jungle', 'garden', and 'plantation'?
JAYEETA
SHARMA: Terms such as 'jungle' and 'jungli' have referred to Assam and its
denizens all the way from Sanskrit texts to Gandhi (he eventually apologized).
I got interested in the way 'garden' was strategically deployed to replace 'jungle'
by so many actors with differing agendas, from Assam Company employees to
American missionaries to pioneering Assamese intellectuals. At a wider level,
of course, 'garden' has a long historical and literary lineage. I found a
variety of scholarly works, on botanical gardens or food studies or on
plantation labour, helpful to think through how tea became a metaphor for so
many different improving projects.
Today, in
Assam, the English word 'garden' is often used to refer to 'plantation' whether
one speaks in English or in Assamese. Yet, as in the other 'garden' of South
Asian history, that of Kashmir, it is the people who live and work on the
plantations who are often elided when their picturesque surroundings come into
view. My book’s title “Empire’s Garden” I hoped would bring to mind not just
how the term Assam itself became a signifier via the imperial tea economy, but
all these larger historical and political connections that it acquired.
SUMIT SARKAR: Do you intend
to work further in this area? If so, where would you want to take it? If you
plan on something else, how has this first study prepared you for the new
theme?
JAYEETA
SHARMA: I certainly continue to be interested in labour and culture, and the
circulatory flows between elite and subaltern histories. My next project is
already well underway, and focuses on a region adjacent to Assam, the Eastern
Himalayas. The chronological frame is late-19th century to late-20th
century. There are two main connections to my first book. One arises from a
connection to tea planters since I write about mixed-race children who were
born of relationships between British tea planters and local women, and then
educated in Himalayan schools. These were illicit relationships and
conventional sources are virtually silent, so it is quite a challenge. Another
connection is a focus on labouring and migrant groups: Darjeeling tea workers,
as well as load-bearing coolies from Nepal and Tibet. I examine the cultural
worlds and colliding spaces of various Himalayan groups, including of course, elite
and middle-class hill residents. In terms of vernacular histories, I venture
out beyond Assamese and Bengali sources to incorporate sources in Nepali,
Hindi, and Tibetan. I believe that South Asian history needs more studies that
speak across regions and specific language groups, and this project is a
partial attempt in that direction.
SUMIT SARKAR: Can you
discuss some books or events unconnected with your discipline that have been
important to you?
JAYEETA
SHARMA: I think I’ll talk about events if that is all right.
The initial
set of events I’ve already mentioned: the mobilizations to oppose the Babri
Mosque destruction and the caste prejudices exposed by the anti-Mandal
movement. Till then, I had not really made the connection between my studies
and the world, but the realization of these religious-caste-class fissures made
me wish to go deeper into history in order to better understand present
realities.
Another set
of events is the mass mobilizations to express dissent with the Iraq war and
the prevailing ‘new imperialism’ in the early 2000s. Those movements and the
introduction they provided for a fledgling ‘diasporic intellectual’ to groups
similar to those who had inspired me to become a historian, served as my
personal and political lifelines at that time and still do so.
And lastly,
an event that has altogether changed life and and work is the birth of my
child. It is somewhat of a cliché to say parenthood changes a person, but
having heard this all my life, I now constantly realize its truth. The world
looks a different place when one brings a living sentient being into it. So do
the study and writing of history, when one sees the vulnerabilities of human
childhood at firsthand, not to mention the impact on one’s routines and plans,
especially as regards archival and library travel.
Comments