iiiiiillii Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/empiresgardenOOshar S'. S' V ''M 1 1 ra i A book in the series Radical Perspectives A RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW BOOK SERIES Series editors: Daniel J Walkomtz, New York University Barbara Weinstein, Nev’ York University History, as radical historians hav'e long observ^ed, cannot be severed from authorial subjectivity, indeed from politics. Political concerns animate the c]uestions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For over thirty^ years the Radical History Rx\ne\v has led in nurturing and advancing politically engaged historical research. Radical Perspec¬ tives seeks to further the journal’s mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-conscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently stmggling with the issue of what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first centuty, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will offer innovatiw ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; comparative, transnational, and global histories that transcend con- \'entional boundaries of region anci nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to “provincialize Eu¬ rope”; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class and sexualitv with an eye to their political implications and complications. Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community' to explore the y'ery' issue of yvhat con¬ stitutes radical history. Within tliis context, some of the books pub¬ lished in the series may privilege alternatiy'e and oppositional politi- cal cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is con¬ stituted, contested, used, and abused. The region known as Assam, much of it now a state in northeast India, is likely to be known even to the academic public either for the type of tea that bears its name or for the ethnic violence that has erupted there in recent decades. In earlier historical and journalistic accounts both the lush tea plantations and the ethnic conflicts tended to be naturalized, to be seen as deeply rooted in the region. But as Jayeeta Sharma demonstrates in Empire’s Garden, both “em¬ blems” of Assamese identity are the result of relatively recent histor¬ ical, not natural, processes. The British colonial venture to cultivate a highly lucrative imperial tea garden in a region previously regarded as wild and remote not only transformed Assam economically and demographically but in a sense reinvented the very notion of what and even where Assam was. To create this garden and make it profit¬ able, the British brought in hundreds of thousands of laborers from otlier regions of India, forming a racialized workforce that became the “other” to an emerging regional identity promoted by local gentty eager to carve out a place for themselves in the booming regional economy, and then in the incipient nationalist movement. Ultimately it is the dynamic and unstable relationship between re¬ gion and nation, further complicated by transnational influences, tliat lies at the heart oiEmpire’s Garden. More than a regional history of Assam, this exhaustively researched and beautifully rendered study seeks to disrupt the Bengal-centered narrative that informs so much of India’s colonial and postcolonial historiography, and in¬ vites us to think in terms of multiple Indian histories rife with the tensions seeded by local and imperial heralds of progress. Empire’s Garden Jayeeta Sharma Empire’s Garden ^ssam and the Making of India DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2011 © 2011 Duke Universit)' Press All rights reser\’ed. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ^ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Carter and Cone GaUiard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library' of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.