Darjeeling as a Partially Excluded Area: Boon or Bane?From a Perspective of a Tea Gardener

SAAKAL ULYSSES DEWAN

In his historic speech on the topic ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies’ delivered at the Oxford Union on 28 Mar 2015, that later transformed into a book titled ‘Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India’, the noted parliamentarian Mr Shashi Tharoor had spoken about the reparation that Britain owed to India for exploitation of her natural resources over its 200 years of colonial rule. In the book, the author has given sufficient arguments to support his claim.

On a similar note, I see some reparation is also due to our Darjeeling Hills by the Great Britainas this region has suffered a lot and continues to suffer due to the colonial legacy that it has yet to shrug off. In every political speech, the chequered historical background of this region is ranted by the political leaders of every hue and colour without failing to mention that Darjeeling was never a part of Bengal as Britishers had governed this region differently as a Non-Regulated Area, Scheduled District, Backward Tract and Partially Excluded Area over the years till independence.

Now the million dollar question is what has this region achieved by being a specially governed territory or in the words of anthropologist Sarah Besky, “territory of exceptionality”? Whose interests were served by being unaffected by the rule that was applicable in whole of Bengal presidency? Was the special governance status in favour of the natives or the tea planters? The AV Thakkar Committee that was tasked to study the partially excluded areas and recommend their inclusion into Fifth Schedule of Indian Constitution took the wind out of the sail in case of Darjeeling when it observed that the reason for partial excluded area status of Darjeeling was a handiwork of powerful tea planters lobby to serve their interest more than the natives’. The report did not recommend Darjeeling, Sambalpur and Angul and certain areas in Bombay for inclusion into the Fifth Schedule of Indian Constitution thereby depriving the region of the special governance that scheduled areas were entitled to.

Now, how did we, the native tea community suffer from the status of partially excluded area? It is mentioned that tea planters had owned and managed the vast tea estates like their fiefdom and avoided government regulations by carrying out government functions like building roads,hospitals, schools and quarter lines for tea workers in their respective tea estates. They were the de facto district collector and magistrate in their estates having total control over the lives of tea workers. They fed them through rationing, gave agricultural lands to cultivate, provided housing in quarter lines, educated them in primary schools provided they continued to produce more and more green gold in the form of a bud and two leaves- they provided cradle-to-grave security virtually to all of the workers, as claimed by the Indian Tea Association. The tea workers were totally at the mercy of the tea planters with no government regulation to cover them. At least in case of Assam, regulations in the form of Bengal Act III of 1863 and Bengal Act VI of 1865 were in force to protect the tea workers, prescribing minimum wages, limiting working hours and appointing government protector and inspector of labourers. However, such regulation was detested by the planters in Darjeeling hills and at the most Sardari system was followed in place of regular contract system.

Later on, there was also tussle between the sardars and the tea planters since sardars too commanded respect and wielded influence over coolies.From the time of auction of vast swathe of wastelands required for tea cultivation, the Darjeeling planters defended their unregulated territory from recruitment and regulatory creep. One instance of their dislike for regulation is that shortly after the ITA was founded in 1881, Darjeeling tea planters came together to ?ght the extension onto plantations of the Bengal presidency’s Village Chowkidar Act of 1870. The Chowkidar Act mandated that every village in Bengal must have a government appointed chowkidar (guard) to report vital statistics such as births and deaths, as well as criminal activity, to the government. Application of the act to Darjeeling would have forced planters to classify labour lines as “villages.” But as tea planter G. C. Paul wrote to the ITA on July 16, 1888, Tea Estates do not come within the scope of the Act.  . . . Coolie lines . . . are in no sense villages; they are part of the Tea Gardens or plantations. The coolies who occupy these barracks . . . have no property therein of any description, they are merely temporary occupants…

In the end, the Village Chowkidar Act was not extended to the plantations. Organizing resistance to the act required planters to more clearly de?ne labourers’ relationships to the plantation and to the domestic space contained therein. Efforts to do this reached peak intensity in discussions about the extension of the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. The Tenancy Act granted “occupancy rights” to any individual who had continuously lived on a piece of land for 12 years. A letter from a Darjeeling planter in the 1900 ITA bulletin read “ There are now undoubtedly numerous natives residing upon tea estate lands, who, if they knew the law, could successfully claim the land they have resided upon for a number of years, and if the new Act without modi?cations as proposed be introduced [could they] claim for undisputed residence? This point is of great importance, as there are great numbers who are in a position to claim, if suggested to them”… And this legal problem of ?xity came to a head in the case of Gybeer, a Darjeeling sardar in Gielle Tea Estate who attempted to claim land on behalf of himself and the “gang” of labourers he had recruited. In an opinion written in 1896, J. T. Woodroffe, the owner of Gielle, explained that rent isnot paid for houses or khet by either sardar or labourers. At Gielle, to hedge against workers’ long-term use of land, management also moved workers from plot to plot, assigning the vacated plot to another worker or letting it go fallow. But sometimes they missed someone, and that family held the land for more than 12 years. We can only blame our ignorance, given our poor literacy then, for not being able to claim occupancy rights of our land.

In another case, at the 1913 Annual General Meeting of the Darjeeling Planters Association, one planter told the audience that it had a choice: “whether to allow the coolies to cultivate the lands free as a perquisite attached to the work as a cooly, or to take rents and allow the people to acquire tenancy rights”. He suggested the former, which would make it possible for the owners of tea estates to give freely to their workers the use of all lands which can be spared for their cultivation in their spare time, without the very serious bogey of occupancy rights coming between them.

And what is more startling is the continued effort of the tea planters to keep the plantations off the influence of government regulations like the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 even after country’s independence in 1947. They had succeeded in establishing a separate labour code in the form of Plantation Labour Act, 1951 for the tea industry that enshrined colonial labour regulations within the post-independence Indian constitution. In particular, the code established once and for all that plantation houses were a form of infrastructure, or capital expenditure, extending and expanding the compensation system to foreclose the possibility of possession. And how is that the definition of tea garden found its place in the West Bengal Land Reforms Act, 1955 only in 1981?

To date, this colonial albatross hangs around the neck of free Indian citizens residing in the tea gardens of Darjeeling and Duars whining that we have houses in tea gardens not homes, and these houses form part of tea companies’ assets which they often mortgage without our consent, how incredible? The agony of living in a partially excluded area was that our ancestors in tea gardens were never recruited under government regulations, they were never protected by the Protector of Immigrants, responsible for overseeing the well-being of coolies migrating within India, as well as to other parts of the British Empireand they were disenfranchised with regard to the land rights they were supposedly entitled to by the Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885. Sadly, today we neither found ourselves in the Fifth Schedule of our constitution as other partially excluded areas in the country have nor we could remove the colonial vestiges in the form of continual land alienation. Little wonder then, our great community poet Agamsingh Giri once bemoaned about the fate of Indian Gorkhas with regard to struggle for identity and dignity.  So won’t the question of reparation by Britishers due to us arise? Let the deprived tea garden coolies add to Tharoor’s arguments.

(Views are personal. The author expresses his gratitude to Prof. Sarah Besky, Cornell University, USA for some valuable information.Email:  saakaldewan@rediffmail.com)