Fixity

On tea plantations in Darjeeling, India, a house comes with every job. These domestic spaces constitute a significant portion of workers’ compensation. Jobs—and the houses that come with them—are inherited by successive generations of workers, but houses remain the property of plantations. Archival and ethnographic stories about the provision, inheritance, and upkeep of houses bring attention to the continued importance of “fixity” to capitalist regimes of accumulation. Fixity has three dimensions: a persistent association between ethnicity, place, and work; the fostering of senses of belonging through systems of inheritance; and the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including housing. As a theoretical and descriptive tool, fixity highlights a tension in late capitalism between work and life, and between freedom and bondage. [colonialism, gender, commodities, agriculture, work, Himalayas, West Bengal] िय घरेलु े पाउने ूण अशं हु ् । रोजगारका अवसर र ितनसँगै आउने एक पु पु सछन ्तर ित सध िचयाबगानसँगै । यस र पु ु तथा मम े अिभिलिखत तथा े सचंयनमखूी पँूजीवादी " " को दीघ ण गराउँछन ्। तीन आयाम छन:् जाितयता, तथा अनवरत ; पु ु ु आभाषको ; तथा आवास लगायतका सं मम । सै तथा े चरणको पू ँजीवादमा िहत र जीवनबीचको तनाव तथा ं तथा दासताबीचको तनावमािथ पाछ । , कृिष, , िहमालय, बंगाल, भारत ] , िलगं, O n a sunny October day, I sat with Lal Kumari outside her house, deep in a valley on Dokebari Tea Estate, in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal.1 I watched as she potted small ornamental plants in plastic bags (see Figure 1). Her husband, Girish, had just returned from the bazaar in town with a bucket of paint to touch up their house for the upcoming Hindu festivals. We continued to chat as Lal Kumari moved on to hanging laundry and I picked rocks out of a pile of uncooked rice spread out on a circular bamboo tray. Girish’s rhythmic up-and-down brushing motions kept me mesmerized. I watched as the bright green paint seeped into the crags in the wide wooden planks. With one watery coat, the dark rings of mold, accrued during the five-month monsoon, faded away. Each year during the festival season, Lal Kumari and Girish bought new clothes, painted their house, and awaited visits from children and grandchildren scattered across Darjeeling and beyond. They had the money to do these things thanks to a bonus that the plantation provided to Lal Kumari each year during the fall Hindu festival season. In the layers of paint and wood, one could detect a sedimentation of kin and labor relations over time. Harvesting tea is not an annual or even seasonal activity, as with coffee or wine. Rather, it is plucked nearly continuously, 10 to 11 months per year. During the plucking season, women like Lal Kumari pass through the fields, coming back to the same bushes over and over again to find the freshest sprigs of tea. In the short dormant season, these women prune those same bushes to incite more sprigs to grow next season. Darjeeling tea workers describe bushes as having about the same productive life as human beings. A bush can produce tea for decades, but after 50 or 60 years, its output slows and eventually stops. Like a human body, a tea bush needs continuous maintenance. The question of how to ensure such maintenance has preoccupied colonial and capitalist interests for nearly two centuries. When colonial tea production began in India in the early 19th century, it mimicked a Chinese model of “family garden farming,” AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 617–631, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2017 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12561 American Ethnologist Volume 44 Number 4 November 2017 Figure 1. On a tea plantation in Darjeeling, India, potted plants sit outside of a kutcha (raw) house, so called because it is made of degradable materials (2008). [This figure appears in color in the online issue] distinguished by small production plots where farmers grew green leaf and sold it to intermediaries, who then took it to a processing location (Chamney 1930, 43–45; ITA 1915, 297; Ukers 1935, 297–308; Walsh 1892, 57–58; see also Ball 1848). Soon after they established tea plantations in India, British planters set out to intensify this model. Mobilizing “scientific methods,” they sought to make tea production more “efficient” (ITA 1915; see also Arnold 2006; Chatterjee 2001; Daniel, Bernstein, and Brass 1992; Drayton 2000; Sharma 2011). British planters held that the relative dispersal of production, manufacture, transport, and sale in the Chinese system put tea at risk of adulteration. The vertically integrated plantation, with a centralized processing factory, enabled the quick conversion of highly perishable green leaf into a drinkable and transportable form (Baildon 1882, 30– 34; McGowan 1860). But factories were not enough. To meet the demands of continuous production, planters needed workers with the skill to properly maintain tea bushes to live on plantations year-round, season after season. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, plantation owners in other parts of India forcibly conscripted laborers (Chatterjee 2001; Griffiths 1967; Sharma 2011). In Darjeeling, by contrast, workers were not forcibly conscripted. Instead, owners recruited them, mostly from Nepal, with some monetary compensation, but the bulk of their incentive was nonmonetary and included housing in what were called “labor lines.” From the plantation system’s inception here, laborers regularly maintained and invested cash in their houses, and this was central to the continued viability of tea and to the survival of thousands of marginalized people. Today, people like Lal Kumari describe themselves, and are formally categorized within the industry, as “permanent workers,” distinguishable from the temporary laborers hired to pluck tea during the rainy season’s spike in production. Small twoto three-room houses, just like the yearly cash bonuses, are now mandated for all permanent workers by Indian plantation labor law. And Nepali-speaking plantation workers have now lived in Darjeeling for generations. They did not move back to Nepal. In Darjeeling today, Indian Nepalis, or Gorkhas, are citizens of India, and Nepali is the lingua franca. While Darjeeling plantation workers have thus always been technically free to abandon their jobs, generations of workers have continued to remain and to pass down their jobs and attached houses to their kin. Lal Kumari, for example, inherited her job and house from Girish’s mother. Despite all the visible work she did to maintain the house, Lal Kumari did not have legal title. Plantation houses are sites that laborers inherit but can never own. This practice, which ties jobs to houses across generations, extends colonially rooted forms of ethnic marginalization into the present. On and off Darjeeling plantations, Indian Nepalis have long struggled for citizenship rights, even though they compose the region’s demographic majority (Besky 2014; Middleton 2015). The history of plantation housing, as told in the annual bulletins of the Indian Tea Association (ITA), the country’s main tea planters’ guild, founded in 1881 and still in operation, is one of meticulous legal and bureaucratic maneuvering. Colonial-era planters worked to ensure that tea workers’ inheritance of jobs (and attached houses) did not mean the accrual of property. Houses were intended to provide workers with minimally adequate shelter, which would entice them to continue working.