From the turn of the twentieth century until long after Indian independence from Britain, most of the tea plantations that shaped the agro-industrial landscape of India were owned and/or managed by large, British companies. These companies and their subsidiaries employed British management staff to oversee plantations with thousands of South Asian laborers, had representatives in leadership roles in planters’ associational groups, and exercised extensive lobbying power with the local colonial governments and international markets. Consequently, they had a major impact on how labor and plantation management was orchestrated on tea estates across the region.
The contractual obligations of both British management staff and South Asian manual laborers to the company plantations were reinforced through various external measures at the management level—including wage-fixing across the plantations and agreements not to “poach” another plantation’s workers. Several histories have examined the extra-legal coercive nature of South Asian labor contracts under the British colonial administration in India in the early twentieth century. Less have examined those contracts in comparison with (and in contrast to) the contracts of lower management employees at the same production sites, who were bound to the plantations and their co-laborers in other ways—albeit from a more privileged position. Examples in employee letterbooks and recruitment papers indicate that the contractual relationship between employees and laborers under company management was often tested by elements of control and coercion, and by gendered power dynamics.
This paper, adapted from a workshop presentation, examines in detail the correspondence and records of several companies’ lower management staff to elucidate close laborer/employee contractual engagement on these production sites in South Asia. By examining salaries, familial connections, behaviors, work evaluations, and more—this paper explores the politics of labor in the British tea company management structure in twentieth-century India.