Gendered Harm and Social Abandonment: Stories of the Dooars Women Tea Garden Workers

Abstract

The Tea Tribes of the Dooars in West Bengal are of the numerically preponderant culturally and socially dispossessed Adivasi population of Chota Nagpur and make up 80% of the tea plantation labour force. These tribes especially its women who form around 60% of the labour pool in the Dooars, serve as crucial social capital for the sustenance and burgeoning of the plantation industry. The tribes exhibit localised and hybridised social customs that have historically been in a dialectic relationship with the culture of commerce that predominates a capitalist bureaucratic organisation. This acculturation and an unfortunate reign of neglect have given birth to distinctive social arrangements, with the article examining the curious social currents of lone motherhood and abandonment of women shaping the household and thereby the social reproduction cycle of the tea industry. By invoking a feminist methodology, qualitative in-depth interpretive interviews of lone mothers and deserted women have been conducted to understand their renditions of gendered neglect and subliminal violence, while attempting to discover their position in the communitas of the tea industry. The study was conducted in the district of Jalpaiguri, with a heavy concentration of the Scheduled Tribe (62%) of the Adivasi subgroup found in its 89 registered tea gardens. The ‘thick’ descriptions of women’s narratives reveal nuanced notions of gender and intimate partner abuse, that shine light on violence characterised by its distinctive low intensity and its latent and subliminal nature evinced in the breach of a social compact. The nature of mistreatment and abuse that they describe opens up conceptual chinks in existing feminist literature on violence while providing further avenues to deliberate upon them. Imperfect, yet partial access to education, social media and government outreach as tools of modernity are however stoking aspirations for social justice, ineffectively handled by poorly trained and gender unresponsive socio-legal and bureaucratic agents.

Introduction

The Dooars, comprising the tea growing areas in the district of Jalpaiguri lie in the plains of the Bhutan hills. The Dooars tea industry commenced in the year 1874, resting on the notorious coolie labour drawn from the Adivasi communities of the Chotanagpur plateau, especially Dumka, Hazaribagh, Ranchi and Chaibasa. These served as catchment areas for tea gardens especially in the twilight years of the 19th century, with the numerically largest tea tribes comprising the Oraon, Mundas, Kharias, Mahalis and Santhals. The Dooars region lying in the foothills of Northern Bengal while geographically uniform, inheres a socially complex history of cultural dislocation through the mass exodus of Adivasis. Families were uprooted from their local cultural locales and forcibly acculturated to the logics of commerce and its concomitant sub-culture. The Oraons who form 40% of the tea tribe population in the Mal subdivision of Jalpaiguri District, are followed by the Mundas, a close second in terms of their numerical preponderance, who in turn are followed by the Lohars and the Mahalis. The language that guides everyday speech and communicative acts is Sadri. Declared as a non-regulated area, the Dooars land for tea cultivation was critical for the sustenance of the colonial economy. This violence of ‘development’ is the history of the Dooars Adivasi.

The Tea Gardens of the Dooars while seemingly communitarian social spaces, with family-oriented production processes, conceal the everyday precarity of its workers exacerbated by limited infrastructural facilities and weak social ties, rendering these areas insular and out of reach. Ethnographic enquiry brings to fore the curiously weak solidarity and lack of dense kinship ties with limited social safety nets amongst the Adivasi. In this, the condition of women as both workers and householders, impelled by the double burden of social production of the capitalist relations of industry and reproduction of the household has been accorded an academic blind spot. The condition of the tea garden workers, though documented from a labour economics paradigm, remains lacking in substantial feminist epistemology capable of retrieving the everyday lived and embodied realities of women tea garden workers. These workers are located at the interstitial crevice of intersectional oppression- where gendered disadvantage conjoins with ethnic and linguistic marginalization in the historical backdrop of cultural dislocation and a merciless acculturation. The intent of the article is to retrieve the silent voices of this disempowered subgroup overwhelmed by the babble of mainstream labour discourse and its hegemonic politics of malestream trade unionism. In their everyday renditions of social uncertainty and stories of abandonment are articulations of contemporaneous social currents of a fragile tea industry leading to gender and social imbalances.

The article addresses the increasing trend of desertion and social abandonment of young women and the startling rise of unwed teenage pregnancy, an indicator of the social ferment at work. In focusing on micro-level social patterns of exchanges occurring at the conjugal and familial level and the changing composition of the household, one shifts the gaze from the centre to the periphery, the home and the hearth, not divorced from the production space. Serving as ‘protective spaces’ for the deserted, the article fleshes out the several harms—social, physical, emotional and autonomy harm—inflicted by the tea garden’s very social arrangement upon the woman tea garden worker, rendering her dependent and even more vulnerable. The mutually constitutive relationship of micro-level conjugal practices to systems of production is the ambit of the article.

The increasing feminisation of labour in the tea gardens with as many as a million women in the Dooars forming the backbone of the tea plantations, with 70% of them from the Adivasi sub-tribes of the Chotta Nagpur region, while may deceptively convey an empowerment of sorts, conceals the social tensions of an imperfect cultural transition that beset the economically fragile tea industry of the Dooars. The Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association (DBITA) for instance in its 146th Annual General Meeting (2024) contends how at a time the wage has increased by 144% (2014–2022), the price increase has only moved up by 35%, with vital input cost also going up substantially. Production in the Dooars it is observed declined last year (January–November, 2023) by 7.46 million kgs. Multi-variants such as depressed prices, geo-political crises affecting exports, international competition from Kenya, import of low-quality teas, tepid domestic consumption, ineffective auction reforms, early closure and pending subsidies have beset the industry, rendering labour conditions more fragile. The tripartite moral economy in which planters provided welfare structures and allotted capital re-investments for the plantation landscape and workers (Besky, 2014) has frayed, with ramifications felt on the home and hearth, causing certain socio-demographic tendencies.

In this, the article also urges the State to reorient its welfare and policy ‘gaze’ to the ‘private’ lives of these women through an anthropological appreciation for the seemingly insignificant details described in their phenomenological terms set by the women workers themselves—that contribute to the everyday harms of the social world of the tea industry.

Permeable Carceral Spaces and Gendered Dependences

The extensive tea gardens of the Dooars underscore the social construction of carcerality (Ablo, 2022) affecting socialisation, patterns of interaction and relationships among the labour force and their families. Carceral socio-spatial control and techniques of the management are limiting the sociation of its largely female labour force consigned to the drudgery of low-paying jobs and the precarity of sudden managerial abandonment and lockout. Ablo (2022) observes how carceral spaces depotentialise the labour force and reinforce global political economic inequalities. The Dooars Tea Gardens within which the issue of gendered experiences of its Adivasi women are explored, are a test case for a flagging yet extractive industry that has mercilessly reneged from extending any moral care to its workers. The repeated flight of capital in face of subdued demand in both domestic and international markets (Singh, 2023) is causing deep social ferment in an already enfeebled and disempowered labour force. The political geographies of these tea gardens in turn underscore the micro-mechanisms of power inherent in labour practices of recruitment. Baruah (2018) observes how the distinct spatial organisation of the tea garden, with the factory and its particular territory, create a politics of difference regarding company and labour. Women’s work, away from the factory is regarded as ‘unskilled’, contingent and thereby inferior, despite their critical and time-consuming roles in plucking and tipping.

Relying on the ‘dustoori’ (customary) system of budlee (literally meaning ‘in lieu’ or transfer), the only requirement for a tea garden worker is to be from a family of workers from whom she takes after and that she (preferably) is medically fit, notwithstanding her age, education or explicit consent.

The plantation industry observed by Viswanathan and Shah (2012) is unique in terms of its dependence on a vast reservoir of captive labour force and a definite gender bias in its occupational structure. ‘There is also a strong predilection to perceive women as “settling” the workforce’ (Varma, 2017, 193). The colonial state in fact appeared to uphold the sanctity of marriage. The 1893 amendment to the Assam contract made the provision that the contracts of husband and wife should be synchronised (Varma, 2017). However, the patriarchal intents of the colonial law were made explicit in the 1901 Act which deemed that ‘single woman’ could not travel to Assam without the consent of a lawful guardian (husband/father). The family-based recruitment system has been advantageous to the planters in keeping socially and economically dependent captive labour, especially children (below 14 years of age) and women workers from the perspective of prospective recruitment as low-wage casual workers. In interactions with management, a careful distinction is seen to be maintained between the ‘white’ tribes and the ‘black’ tribes in terms of the extent of managerial control and supervision exercised. The ‘white tribes’, an awkward yet everyday cultural taxonomy refers to the hill tribes of Nepali origin residing predominantly in the Darjeeling tea belt along with the terai area, whereas the ‘black tribes’ in the tea gardens of Dooars refer to the immigrant Adivasi population historically subject to difficult acculturation in the tropical tea environment of the Dooars.

Of sociological significance is the historic and socio-political status of the community from which these lone mothers belong. The Adivasis unlike their more prosperous, socially mobile and robust Nepali counterparts have been disadvantaged in terms of access to resources, such as land, better living conditions, sanitation facilities, health and education. These lone mothers thus find themselves in an intersectional bind of a gendered as well as an ethnic disadvantage. A riveting reality soon emerging is the new and socially vulnerable female-headed familial unit of the deserted mother and fatherless child, granting this capitalist arrangement renewed social stability to operate. Cultural ideals of the mother as provider and economic agent, predominant in the Adivasi samaj, with internalised feelings of guilt are adapting with contemporary social realities of decomposed familial units in retaining dependent feminised labour. These single women comprise those who have been deserted by their husbands and partners, with most often children to look after. Many of the women are raising their children alone or with the help of family members other than the children’s fathers. Here the tea gardens seem to offer a social protection that extracts dependence out of their existing state of socio-economic vulnerability. The performance and reproduction of care in homes and fields are serving to mitigate the instability of the industry and the uneven circulation of capital (Besky, 2014). In many ways, the instability of the home and family life mimics the precariousness of the tea industry. Yet, dense kinship with plantation land and the collective memory of labour keep its women entangled with the tea plantation life.

Conversations with women reveal a profound psychological distinction and understanding of the spatial organisation of the tea garden. Terms such as ‘des’ (country of origin), gaon (village) are used to refer to the estate of a tea garden, historically delineated for local participation within which the ‘outside law’ and its systems cease operating. An insidious carceral conditioning is seen, where anything outside the purview of the estate is regarded as ‘pardes’ conveying not only a foreign and alien land, but a psychologically discomfiting perception of what lies beyond. The mechanisms, technologies, knowledge system, everyday socialisation that create this carceral continuum (Foucault, 1977) operate surreptitiously to create a precarious dependence for women and their families on the speck of basic sustenance support offered by a rapacious and oftentimes negligent management.

Contemporary concerns in relation to women tea garden workers have focused primarily on extractive and deplorable labour conditions and their interplay with plantation patriarchy (Hasan, 2014; Rasaily, 2014). The article, however, situates emerging social patterns of interactions between the sexes within the cultural and structural confines of the tea garden life, regarded as a ‘total institution’ (Goffman, 1952). The tea garden in terms of a total institution serves as a ‘social hybrid, part residential community, part formal organisation’ (Davies & Isakjee, 1989, 22). In fact, the capitalist bureaucratic organisation of the tea industry with its time-based regimentation governs the private lives of its labourers and their families in terms of their access to discretionary leisure time and opportunities for social exchanges and patterns of interaction (Bhattacharya, 2023b). Yet despite the insidious control and exacting regimen, there exists a ‘secret life’ (Goffman, 1952) as interstitial spaces between the home and the productive area (tea garden areas) allowing for cultural expressions and sanctioned modes of release for social sexual experimentation. The burgeoning cases of single and unwed mothers and their stories of social abandonment rather than being regarded as an anomaly must therefore be situated within the structural transitions of the tea garden as both an industry and a social world affecting and in turn being affected by the emerging social practices of conjugal and familial instability, expressed in cycles of unions and ruptures.

The subliminal gender violence (Bhattacharya, 2023a) of abandonment is explored in this article. Such violence is contested lies at the peculiar confluence of tribal social relaxation around marriage along with an ambivalent transition towards an imperfect modernisation and the concomitant rise of social aspirations, left unaddressed in the penury of the local economy and the careful indifference of the management. This social imbalance is not without gendered ramifications, creating footloose and vagrant male labour while providing a parasitic social refuge for abandoned women who have no escape from low-paying jobs that barely keep body and soul together. Abandoned women are women tea garden workers who have fallen out of favour with their men and are finally left by themselves, or sometimes with their children, to struggle for survival. Limited and cautious social mainstreaming due to linguistic barriers have further prevented widespread exogamous alliances, curtailing mobility, especially for women tribal tea workers. A salient social disadvantage impeding civic participation and social mobility is attrition and an increase in dropout at the school level. The crisis in the tea economy in the Dooars (Chakraborty, 2013) with the arrival of new entrants, ageing tea bushes, local and global economic shocks and a buyer-driven auction have left workers in the lurch with ruthless cost-cutting exercises leading to loss of livelihoods and unspeakable misery. The gendered costs of these, however, go neglected.

The discourse of gender, practically absent in labour conferences and tripartite negotiations (Baruah, 2018), must be resuscitated by recognising the exploits and hardships of women’s private and public lives, that exist along a continuum rather than a binary.

Methodology

Plantation feminist ethnography offers thickly textured stories (Baruah, 2018; Chatterjee, 2001) that weave together the personal and socio-political lives of women workers into a common fabric. Thirty-nine qualitative in-depth interviews and 150 surveys based on purposive sampling were conducted wherein a pre-identified group of single and unwed mothers in the tea gardens of Jalpaiguri District were identified by volunteers of CINI (Child in Need Institute), an NGO working with the District Administration and its very own Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) workers. The interviews were unstructured to begin with, followed later by a semi-structured interview guide that lasted on average one hour and was conducted in the interviewee’s first language, with Hindi, Sadri and some Bengali being spoken. Interviews focused on the fabrics and routines of their everyday life, as slow violence (Nixon, 2011) and subliminal violence (Bhattacharya, 2023b) is often experienced and felt at the banal level- eating, working, socialising, coexisting at the natal home, during cultural events, rituals. Their muted sounds while audible were softened, as these were limited and shaped by the management’s greater social power and control, exercised both individually and institutionally. Hence the conversations when initially unstructured on lines of ‘women’s talk’ (Spender, 1985) created a context of ease adapting to blends of power and oppression.

Initially a problem with no name, the category of gendered experience of desertion emerged without any explicit attention being given to the issue initially, but kept making mention in the qualitative open-ended and intensive conversations with women tea garden workers, for whom it was a category that defined their day to day activities and temporal identities. This talking and listening from women’s standpoint (Devault, 1990) through a feminist ethnography, elicited accounts that were ‘co-constructed’ and left out of dominant interpretive frames, especially labour-centric and statist paradigms. Indeed, the social organisation, including the management, the communitas, the state through the ‘sahib’, the ‘babu’ and the ‘sardar’ were very much ‘in the talk’, imbricated with the everyday lives and experiences of women.

The project of recovering unarticulated and undocumented experiences by ‘bringing women’ requires ‘listening’ to the incongruence of language, translations, hesitations, incomplete sentences and the uncertainty in everyday speech. Particular attention has been given to the articulation of embodied sentiments (Chatterjee, 2001) of grief that persist through the silences and bodily practices that escape the written word. To counter the mythology of ‘hygienic research’ (Oakley, 1981) the narrative genre was not moulded upon, with minimum interruptions. The author’s background in and knowledge of the Adivasi sub-culture, Hindi and Bengali language came to her aid, while regular assistance was also sought from local midwives and community workers, socially adept in understanding both the verbal and the unsaid cues, preserved in the transcripts. This collaborative process was aided partially by a cultural and gender congruity, while hampered in places due to the administrative position that was commanded by the author. However, a matter worth mentioning here is the complicated intersectional position of the women respondents, where apart from gender, their ethnicity and precarious working class position in the production hierarchy create a different narrative genre (Riessman, 1987). These made interpretive demands on the listener (Collins, 1990). In these, life events were recounted episodically rather than temporally, with narratives most often not organised by chronology. The role of the interviewer in this form of interviewing was therefore not passive, as non-lexical expressions were required to be employed to encourage a degree of coherence and cooperation in the narrative while attempting to create an environment of trust and reciprocity.

How might we recognise and conceptualise the everyday lives of these abandoned women tea garden workers and theoretically articulate what may seem to the observer as deeply individualistic personal musings? In answering this question, the article also proposes a conceptual framework drawing together sociologies of the everyday (e.g., Sztompka, 2008), slow violence of the everyday (Mayblin et al., 2020; Nixon, 2011), subliminal gender violence (Bhattacharya, 2023a, 2023b) and feminist standpoint epistemology (Collins, 1990; Narayan, 2004).

Theme 1: Courting, Alliance and Separation—The Winds of Change

Every day entails focusing on a level between ‘structures and actions’ (Sztompka, 2008). The unit here is the socio-individual praxis, neither completely determined, nor completely free. It is here where the emerging everyday rituals of social courting, interaction between the sexes and how sexuality is shaped in the tea gardens are understood in order to render the ordinariness of unwed motherhood and their abandonment analytically significant. These ‘everyday’ social relationships and interactions also reflect convergences and manifestations of wider social forces and structures. The tea garden area resembles in certain ways a social panopticon, offering limited opportunities to young people to interact, with sudden elopement ‘bhagaa ke le jaana’, an expression for those exploring sexual interaction and compatibility. In such cases of sexual and preference-based unions, parental approval is traditionally neither asked nor required.

Traditionally the Oraons permit a good deal of freedom to young people, with the traditional dhuku unions allowing for clan and village endogamy (Gallagher, 1965). Regarded as only a tribe in name due to a multiplicity of patrilineal clans with diverse cultural codes, the Tea Gardens of the Dooars as sociological contexts have allowed for the mushrooming of hybridised local social exchanges that bely any firm commitment to ancient traditional practices. Furthermore, stripped off their ancestral land, territorial contiguity, traditional occupation of rice cultivation and informal customary socio-political councils, the Oraon Adivasis of the Northern Dooars are a loose and heterogenous conglomeration of nuclear families accultured to the lifestyle patterns of the tea garden industry.

Like most Adivasis of Central India, the Tea Tribes observe few restrictions on sexual behaviour prior to marriage, with the practice of ‘living in’ not socially discouraged. The youth dormitory system (dhumkhuria) offering young people easy opportunities for premarital sexual courting and relationships has been a customarily recognised social practice. Young husbands and wives have a strong propensity for unencumbered lives by not assuming conjugal responsibilities (Gallagher, 1965), with easy relationships between the sexes. Yet, of contemporary sociological interest is the greater preference towards ‘rakha rakhi’ (a hybrid Bengali expression) or the ‘live-in’, instead of the formal dhuku unions in these tea gardens. These ‘live-in’s’ while prompted by mutual interest and consent are contorting into gender asymmetric relations premised on divergent gender expectations and conjugal loyalty. Unions now are bereft of social codes that would traditionally govern even the most short-lived of all unsanctified relationships. Indeed, the women interviewed were conscious and aware of the disregard and casual treatment meted out to them, with patterns of wooing, winning, consummation of the relationship contrasted with active neglect, polyandry, and sudden abandonment. This mechanistic transition is interpreted as betrayal, preceded by acts of micro-cheating. The idea of the self and ‘selfhood’ (victimhood) for these women is important, with such acts recognised as forms of ‘little violences’ (Scheper-Hughes, 2004).

‘Bhaag ke shaadi’ or eloping for the purpose of marrying was indicated by all respondents as a common occurrence in the tea gardens. Here young women observed how lack of parental approval or consent did not deter them from actively seeking out the companionship of suitors and moving out with their partners. Such elopement is socially legitimated given the prospect of marriage, but may not see such an outcome. In these cases, the young girls co-habit for long with their partners and often conceive, even accidentally. While legally not regarded as an alliance, the very practice of early cohabitation earns the social epithet of ‘bhaag ke shaadi’, giving it a certain degree of local credence and social approbation. Of importance is the social coupling of the man and woman in the eyes of the local community. Prenuptial sexual freedom is not unusual among primitive tribes around the world (Kundalia, 2020), yet there remain nuanced rules and etiquette that prevent either of the party feeling wronged in what is regarded customarily as a symmetric social compact. The cementing or severing of the compact is premised on the symmetric ‘razikhushi’ (enthusiastic consent) of the young pair, a result of a socially negotiated moral understanding and relational commitment. In fact, amongst the Santhals, a prominent tea tribe in the Dooars, the Kudam Bapla (a diversion from the ideal-typical arranged marriage) ensures that if the girl conceives, the young man by whom she becomes so, is bound to marry her. Indeed, untimely conception is regarded as an offence redressed by paying the bride price, sanctifying the alliance. The ‘Lota Pani’ among the Chik Baraiks and the Oraons, refers to the formal socially performed engagement ceremony, that sanctions cohabitation and premarital coitus. The involvement of the samaj as both an audience and a moral keeper of sorts is seen to act as a deterrence against unfulfilled conjugal promises and any violations as to the pact.

Recent times are however seeing the suspension of courting etiquettes, giving way to what is regarded as the masculine convenience of ‘falling in love and out of it’. Moreover, the younger age profile is indicative of recent changes in the marital aspirations of men and women and transition in the family resulting from larger socio-economic and structural factors related to the tea garden industry.

Casualties of Care

The cultural ideology among the Adivasis construct mothers as economic providers, who must divert their earned income in supporting themselves and their children. Women in the conversation reveal feeling morally obligated to care, especially when it comes to their dependent children. Deeply gendered moral requirements to take responsibility for children and to place their needs first (Ribbens Mc Carthy et al., 2000; Weeks et al., 2001) have determined separation and a quick induction into the production process revealing a kind of gendered moral rationality. Such gendered moral rationalities about combining employment and mothering (Duncan & Edwards, 1999; Duncan et al., 2003) was found in lone mothers’ identities. Indeed, many young women denied the eventuality of a future alliance or marriage, regarding parenting alone conjoined with work in the tea gardens as the right and responsible thing to do. Some went as far as to concede that a reason for final separation was their fear as to the fate of their child in the hands of a negligent and possibly even promiscuous partner. Participation in the tea garden labour market therefore serves as a rational decision for its many lone mothers. Also, given the garden’s embeddedness within a particular socio-spatial context, the mother/worker distinction was noted to conveniently blur, with social networks of the labour lines providing a cushion to the economic, emotional and social shock of a rupture. The increasing informalisation of the industry through the recruitment of casual labour in the backdrop of cost-cutting exercises on the part of the tea companies provides these socially precarious women with an interim foothold, soon becoming a way of life.

Theme 2: Failed Masculinities and Footloose Labour—Global Capitalism and Social Anxiety in the Tea Estate

Narratives revealed men in the local sub-culture to manifest their masculinity in three primary activities; ability to contribute to the household income, control over women and physical strength. The man is customarily required to supervise the ‘ghati badi’ (deficit-surplus) of the household notwithstanding the feminisation of the tea estate, and is still regarded as the typical breadwinner. The lack of ability to fulfil this customary duty is understood in terms of the looming threat and material reality of layoffs, irregular payment of wages, bonus, gratuity, sudden closure, distressed/sick status of tea gardens that sits incongruously with the burgeoning social aspirations of an imperfect cultural transition towards globalisation. The ubiquitous ‘smart phones’, with a luring social media were reported in the interviews to be the cause of an unsteady eye and a restless spirit among their men folk. This everyday sociology of our Adivasi women must be contextualised in the uncertainty of the no longer monadic tea industry of the Dooars in the wake of global capitalism. Reduction of the share of exports of the Indian tea in the world market due to rising international competition, trade barriers, plummeting prices and flagging profitability (Roy & Biswas, 2018) are seeing to frequent closures, affecting not only livelihoods but social arrangements, patterns of interaction and micro social institutions of the Dooars tea gardens. This is compounded by the ageing of existing tea bushes leading to the degradation of the quality of tea (Nathan & Sreenivas, 2014). Evidence shows that 16 tea estates of the Duncan Group alone had been virtually closed in 2015 in the Dooars region.

Invoking such cost-minimising strategies has spelt social disruption and household-level shocks for tea plantation workers, who find themselves ‘betwixt and between’ the seeming semblance of social security that the tea garden seems to offer and the ‘bewildering’ (bhool bhulaiya) ¹ and ‘unforgiving’ labour market for which they remain sorely unprepared. This has bred social anxiety, creating a dent on the expectations of ‘masculinity’. The gendered resolution for this has been outmigration on part of the younger men of the tea gardens, prompted by family, economic and aspirational factors. Such social anxiety has propelled an aimless and footloose exodus, often resulting in unsuccessful migration, especially for men. Some women recounted having been ‘forgotten’ by their men in their quest for survival, providing an easy avenue for polygamy. For those who ‘stay back’, tales of everyday deprivation and control by the management are described as ‘emasculating experiences’, with most being tongue tied and unable to retaliate, given the question of survival. Such verbal deficits are seen to intensify the need to exert power. It is pertinent to mention, that all the women interviewed, emphasised being subject to physical beating and assaults by their male partners in an inebriated state. Such chronic intimate partner violence must be understood as manifestation of reclaiming needs for power and control, which seems to be disappearing, associated with distortions in conceptions of masculinity (Gondolf, 1995).

To compensate for social insecurities about ‘manhood’ inextricably linked to livelihood and its performativity (Butler, 2010) the compact between alcoholism and intimate partner violence is not incidental. The issue of alcoholism in the tea gardens is often normalised as a cultural anachronism, woven with the Adivasi way of life. However, viewed from the gender perspective, recourse to alcohol may also be viewed as a coping mechanism from the drudgery of impoverishment and its subsequent emasculating experience of waiting and the precarity it brings with it.

Gender Codes, Descent and Patriliny

Mahilaye apne kaam mein dhyan deti hain

Purush log saara kaam apni patni ko dekar azaad rehna chahte hai, jhund banake

Women only focus on their tasks

While the menfolk simply hand over their tasks to their wives, wanting to remain free, with their own groups

Khushbu Oraon

Ghar ki Lakshmi toh aurat hi hoti hai

Uska maryada hai apne ghar mein rehna

Purush toh kahi bhi ghum ke aye phir bhi who ghar ka hi rahega

Kahi bhi ghum ke aye

The Lakshmi of the Household is after all the woman

Her feminine propriety requires that she remains within her home

No matter where the men go, they will always remain of the household

No matter wherever they go. (Ratiyo Kanwar)

Customary gender codes among the tea tribes of the Dooars attribute a certain stolid rootedness to the feminine, with procreation accentuating her territoriality. The mother and child connect is regarded as ‘pre-social’ and innate. While a wife or a partner may be regarded as replaceable, the mother is not. This bond culturally tethers her to the welfare of the household and the upkeep of its inhabitants. A sociologically riveting narrative of an Adivasi woman worker was her feeling of moral obligation of playing the ‘mother’ and tending to the needs of her male partner, whom she started living with, due to her feeling of empathy and ‘ma ka farz’ (maternal duty). She comments on how she cooked, cleaned, bought clothes for him and looked after his ‘kharcha pani’ (daily spending). Masculine culturally constructed nomos on the contrary indulge the idea of rootlessness, where sexuality and its expression although not denied to their female counterparts nevertheless triumphs over procreation. Men are described as fickle and naturally promiscuous, who have to be controlled, with existing forms of social sanction regarded as inadequate and feeble. Nonetheless, it is ironic that the man is still regarded as the ‘true’ and only head of the household, who must keep the descent group—the male line intact. The principle of non-descent however revolves around the woman, who must shoulder the responsibility of the illegitimate child, based on a simple denial of paternity.

Conversations also juxtapose feminine self-abnegation with masculine indulgence. A case in point is when a young Oraon tea garden worker Mamoni Kalindi informs ‘pita khata bhi bohot hain, humare mummy supari tak nahi khati hain’ (father also eats a lot, whereas my mother does not even touch betel nut). Here it is not so much the ‘eating’, but a veiled reference to the indulgence of consumption that is alluded to, with the betel nut symbolic of the banal joys that women remain deprived of.

A battered masculinity is observed in the tenuous linkage between descent, inheritance and succession in the tea gardens. In terms of inheritance, the impoverished conditions and lack of land and property, along with the lack of a permanent ontological identity to legally bequeath to an heir, peculiar to the tea gardens, appears to be weakening the principle of descent. Historical uprootedness of the Adivasis in the past and present conditions of limited legal succession along the male line, is diminishing the memory of lineal masculinity (King & Stone, 2010), sustained through collective memory of individual males’ achievements and the transfer of a masculine legacy.

I do not remember my grandfather and in what circumstances he came here to the Dooars, I do not expect my children to remember me … after all what have I really done for them. (An Adivasi tea garden worker, Pritam Khujur)

The inducements to socially reproduce are therefore limited in the tea garden, where life is still sustained in a hand-to-mouth manner. Moreover, it is not coterminious with an enhancement of their lineal masculinity. Reproductive behaviour ² can thus be economically rational and contingent upon the net intergenerational wealth flows (Caldwell, 2005). Here ‘wealth’ (or its lack thereof) comprises not only the inadequate economic benefits in terms of payments and conditions of living but prestige and the development of advantageous social networks. Hence claims to paternity remain tenuous due to the structural precarity of the life of a temporary worker. The increasing atomisation of the family, with weakening kin-based socio-economic obligations with an indifferent capitalist regime as an overseer, is in turn diminishing the social inducements for reproduction. In fact, a common complaint by single mothers was the retreat of the samaj (society) in protecting such moral and kinship transgressions. Patriliny, however, though weakened is not extinguished, with married brothers and their wives still the dominant unit, calling question to the social and legal entitlements of their unwed sisters.

A tipped gendered division of labour with women required to perform labour market work along with childcare and domestic work has in turn stripped men off their symbolic power (Bourdieu, 2000) in the partnership of an ‘economic rational trading’ (Duncan & Irwin, 2004). The construct of the ‘marginal man’ (Park, 1928; Stonequist, 1964) here is of heuristic relevance. Suspended between a bicultural situation of an Adivasi and a perennial immigrant in a relatively hostile social environment, the ambivalence of men and their shifting commitment must be contextualised in terms of their financial and social precarity. Marginality here is accentuated by harsh socio-economic conditions. The term for temporary workers in the tea gardens for instance is ‘faltu’ (literally, useless) which many male members of the tea gardens are. Not covered under the Plantation Labour Act (PLA), 1951; the denial of minimum wages, decent working conditions, lack of social security and entitlements is creating an uncertain and anomic condition. To counterbalance this collective plight, men have taken recourse to cliques (jhunds) prone to vagrancy, alcoholism and aimless loitering. Anita Oraon recounts how while she toils, her partner, ‘dost logo ke saath party sharty aur drinking karta hai’ (parties with his friends and drinks with them). Alcoholism here provides a major arena for male socialising and venting, especially for the younger men, coming off age.

An important outcome of women’s increasing labour market participation has been the inconspicuous development of increasing individualisation. ‘Usko dikhanugi, ki main bhi kuch kar sakti hun’ (I will show him, that I too can do something). Here the idea of the ‘self’ is strong and deeply interwoven with the identity of a worker, through which women are rethinking ways of partially writing their own biographies, yet ironically within already pre-determined social grids. The road to abandonment is preceded by incomplete formal education, lack of parental guidance, inadequate and misleading social exposure, unwanted pregnancy, limited legal and financial literacy, compounded by a carceral geography offering limited socio-economic options to these young single women, whose ‘arrival’ in such social precarity is not an accident. Biographies are thus deeply interwoven and contained through the genealogies of subordination that make such structural inequality an everyday actuality. Women negotiate, but not in conditions of their own choosing. A stark gender fault line is how these mothers create and articulate their subjectivity of the ‘responsibility to care’, notwithstanding their material constraints, unlike their male partners impatient to evacuate the identity of fatherhood, regarded as temporary and post facto. Class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality express themselves differently in terms of the response to care.

Theme 3: Silenced Lives—Contextualising Neglect (‘Laparvahi’) and Abandonment as Subliminal Gender Violence

A theme that deserves feminist conceptual deliberation is the area of gendered neglect, often conflated and enmeshed with abuse. Gender violence has often been conceptualised in terms of acts of commission. Neglect, however, inheres micro acts of omission difficult to specify, due to its heterogenous and slippery nature and reliance on qualitative subjective expositions difficult to codify in terms of always commensurable metrics. Responses from single mothers and abandoned partners however reveal a consistent saga of ‘unmet needs’, needs that are customarily recognised as a part of the social compact, despite the absence of the formal stamp of marriage. Cohabitation without marriage has its codes in the Adivasi samaj (society). Yet contemporary renditions reveal a persistent ‘gender maltreatment’ encompassing physical, emotional, medical neglect and economic manipulation, followed by a long phase of no contact, especially after the birth of a baby signalling additional economic and social costs.

Women tea garden workers confided to phases of courting to be dominated by emotional seduction and excessive attention, with promises of eventual formalisation on the part of young men. Some Adivasi workers interpret their attraction by accusing their male partners of jadu tona (magic or spell). Excessive affection followed by emotional and sexual estrangement stands in need of an explanation. Other women helped rationalise such sudden social abandonment to them losing out on their attractiveness and youthful allure due to childbirth. Khusbu of the Nidam Tea Garden is convinced that ‘baccha hone ka baad hum log khubsurat nahi dikhta hain’ (after childbirth we do not look beautiful any more). This was echoed by the other older women more tolerant to their husband’s revelries.

The ‘build up’ to this abandonment was however noted to be severe neglect, with emphasis on the repetitive nature of their partners’ unavailability, with chronic physical battery and assaults. Women in response to this would self-limit their strategies to the traditional ‘weapons of the weak’; with hidden subversions and resistance undertaken alone (Scott, 1990). In response to economic and medical neglect of the child, for instance, women would resort to covert strategies of scurrying away the ‘khuchra taka’ (retail money) and the remaining balance of groceries and vegetables. Anita Munda recounts how, ‘sabzi ke paise se balance chupa leti thi. aise time bachho ke liye paise lagte hai’. The criticality of the time, where nutrition was demanded for a lactating mother and a weaning baby, it seems never concerned her ‘laparvah’ (negligent) partner. Abandonment therefore in most cases was also self-initiated by women to ‘keep safe’ themselves and especially their children. Indeed, taking the decision to physically leave the residence of the partner with their weaning babies was cited as a ‘defensive manoeuvre’ (Stanko, 1985) to not only escape the physical and emotional assaults but to choose how to live. Her departure initiates her quest for emotional recuperation. Here the women sought refuge in the distinctive social system of the tea gardens, where their social productivity in terms of forming the bulk of the casual labour force remains a potent possibility. But whether her emotional recuperation linked intimately to her financial stability is achieved through an increasingly frayed social safety net remains a leading question.

The 150 surveys conducted, reveal 112 cases of women who have been subject to ‘torture’ (a term used by the women respondents) that is not only physical but entails financial and emotional neglect, interpreted as corrosive and insidious. Women workers described in layered and symbolic the emotional estrangement experienced from their partners with its immediate manifestation being economic and medical neglect, especially during pregnancy. Such neglect is exacerbated with the customary demand to perform labour so as to feed the household. Some even confided to have been half-starved.

He and his parents would not give me to eat properly, they would offer me stale food (crying softly) saying ‘Eat this and die’.

Anjela Oraon 25 years of age

Specific reference is made to the lack of child care and emotional reciprocity shorn by their partners, with women recounting their discovery of pregnancy to be met with frivolity, scorn and epithets that would deride or cast aspersions as to the authenticity of their claim. Khushbu, a girl from the Munda tribe for instance was mocked by her partner by saying ‘humare naam ka exam kyu diya, jab baccha humara nahi hain?’ (why did you have to take an exam in my name, when I did not volunteer myself). An inconsolable Elisaba Munda, another young woman recounts her horror when her partner outrightly told her ‘doob mar aur bacha ko bhi leke dub mar’ (drown and die, and take the child with). An important self-awareness that these women reveal is that to live ‘fully’ (puri tarah se) with the partner, requires talking about emotions and problems, with those who ‘didn’t give a lot’ regarded as unsuitable partners.

The natal home, a temporary social refuge for the lone mother too remains a site of vulnerability and neglect, with women recounting undercurrents of conflict and contestation of power with their brothers and sisters-in-law (bahu log). A feeble albeit potent patrilineal sentiment exerts frequently in ‘othering’ her presence, where she is continued to be seen as an unwanted ‘guest’. Hurtful comments such as ‘jiska bacha hai uske ghar mein kyu nahi rehti’ (stay with him whose child you beget) have been retold by many workers. One such mother recounts her angst by noting that her brother is a ‘lafanga’ (vagrant) and ‘nikamma’ (useless) who does ‘aavaragardi’ (loiter) and ‘mannmani’ (willfullness) while his wife toils like her in the tea gardens.

Dispersed and relatively weaker family and kinship networks among the Adivasi tea workers are noted to further accentuate the solitary social standing of these lone mothers. The traditional panchayats that would provide certain customary measures for handling such ‘problems’ are largely non-existent or feeble. The only temporary communitas women workers experience is during their task of plucking, where an onerous life and high daily targets bind them to an unspoken yet salient bond of sharing even if momentarily, each other’s pain.

The Power (Lessness) of Waiting

A unilateral separation, that follows conjugal estrangement is often cited to lead to an inexorable wait on the part of the women in these tea gardens. Poignant descriptions of patient waiting were mentioned. ‘Aaj ayenga, kal ayega, aya hi nahi’ (He will come today, tomorrow he will come, but he did not come at all). The idea of violent uncertainty (Grace et al., 2018; Phillimore & Cheung, 2021) and temporal waiting has been empirically evinced to have deep ramifications on emotional and physical health in medicine. However, the gendered significance of waiting in terms of increased everyday precarity, socio-psychological distress and slow violence (Nixon, 2011) are important ways of rendering these women’s stories as salient, as what over is overlooked are their embodied experiences of prolonged pain and uncertainty. The experience of waiting as Auyero (2011) notes is an act of subordination. Bourdieu in examining the linkage between power and experience of time hints to the gendered symbolic violence of ‘delaying without destroying hope’ (2000). This state of waiting has been described as punitive (Rotter, 2016). Yet who is waiting for whom remains an existentialist problem among the sexes in the tea gardens. Young and older men also experience long waits, especially in the realm of productive labour. Being kept away from the routine tea garden plucking, while inexorably waiting for employment prospects to show up, Adivasi men experience protracted uncertainty, with a sense of powerlessness, reflected in their everyday state of vagrancy and alcoholism. Many are even waiting for payment as to when might their daily wage, provident fund, bonus or gratuity be received for the years of labour they have rendered.

Dangerous Dependence and Gendered Harm

The tea garden environment is regarded by many as a safe sanctuary, with the availability of employment, albeit precarious regarded as godsend. Indeed, the recovery from the painful ordeal of separation is often attributed to the presence of the natal home and the possibility of recruitment. This misrecognition of ‘feeling at home’ (Bourdieu, 2000) is the essence of symbolic violence, ‘where violence is exercised over the agent, with her complicity’ (1992). Violence that limits social mobility and aspirations is often not perceived, with the situation appearing to be natural. The ontological hurt and vulnerable social status of these women also reduces them to the state of an economic desperation of ‘jo bhi kaam milega, kaam karungi’ (whatever work I get, I shall do). The compliance and ready acceptance of their subhuman conditions of work stem from their fear of losing their livelihoods, of starvation, of losing their children to illness and of being thrown out of their natal houses. The idea of solidarity that the tea garden creates in effect, remains a mirage, as their shared identity still seeks an inclusive platform for articulation. Moreover, these women workers especially the single mothers see their work in terms of family survival or livelihood, obfuscating the distinction between their market and domestic activities, further blurred by the distinct social geography of the tea gardens. The limited social stigma attached to such mothers given the distinct socio-cultural values and relative free mixing of the sexes among the Adivasis, has led to their condition being ‘invisibilised’. Abandonment remains concealed as not accompanied by destitution and homelessness. The violence that is occurring is thus gradual and out of sight, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all (Davies & Isakjee, 2019, 214). The deep emotional fractures and hurt are revealed in women’s avowed refusal to enter into other relationships with past traumas of severe neglect keeping them ‘single’. Indeed, most women conceded to their fear of their future partner ‘misusing’ (galat istamal) their children for other wrongful gains and quick money.

Informality also accentuates invisibility, with single mothers often working as temporary workers, bereft of the worker identity. Here the meagerness of the returns and the overriding preoccupation with the exigencies of survival may even push them towards perilous occupations, some finding themselves ensnared into human trafficking. Young Anita Munda recounts a neighbour giving her the reference of a ‘bureau’ that hires domestic help, with Nilam Munda being contacted by another such ‘bureau’. Other women recount of how some ‘bhaiyas’ (putative brothers) or ‘jee ja jee’s’ (putative affines) approach them, given the social stigma of wedlock from the majority Bengal community unlike the Adivasis themselves. Many are touted as ‘noshto’, literally meaning broken or destroyed, unlike their own perceptions of being complete. In fact, women’s so-called ‘fallen’ status is perceived as functional for the existing illegal racquets. Ghosh (2013) observes trafficking of abandoned women to be a potent reality, with especially those young and without children more easily ensnared.

Theme 4: ‘Kaun Sunta Hai’?—Who Listens; Accessing the Elusive ‘Justice’

Such abandonment, framed as ‘cultural’ and regarded as acceptable due to its conflation with the outsider prejudice of ‘sexual promiscuity’ goes most often unreported from the management. Women while describing the aftermath of such abandonment reveal to have actively sought help by taking recourse to informal and customary adjudication systems, of which a vestigial tribal panchayat remains. Unlike the formal Gram Panchayat, these extra-constitutional councils have historically served as institutions of social control and sanctions against acts of cultural transgression, commanding traditional if not rational-legal authority. The tea gardens of the Dooars in witnessing an ambivalent social transition towards modern participatory forms of democratic governance, is seeing these councils now become a stronghold for local Adivasi leaders (netas), party workers and especially the sardars (lone watchmen) in meting out petty punishments. The social violence on these women is framed as a reproductive liability, the ‘kharcha’ (monetary costs) for which needs to be borne by the deserter, culturally regarded as the ‘provider’. Yet, women lamented such judgements to be inefficacious, with men most often not ‘showing up’ or keeping to the terms of the customary diktats.

A culture of neglect alongside impunity prevails with even agents of law, including the police and civil authorities dismissing such complaints as baseless given the early premise of consensus, while also regarding such elopements as devoid of social sanctity. ‘Bhaag ke shaadi’ (marriage by elopement) unlike mainstream marriage of the majority Bengali and even Nepali community, continues to remain socially judged as inferior and non-serious. Interaction with frontline health and social workers of the government also revealed insidious patriarchal assessments that determine their outreach towards these women, with many judged as having landed in the quagmire as a result of their own sexual overtures. A tacit ethnocentrism also underscores the attitude of frontline health staff. It is interesting to note the comparison drawn by a Muslim ICDS worker, between their ‘nikah’ and the perception of a loosely defined marriage system of the Adivasi, where she points out ‘inka koi shaadi ka document nahi hai’ (they have no document as proof of wedding), referring to the ‘nikah namah’, of which the ‘gaon aur samaj sabut hai’ (the village and society are proof). Here the reneging of the social is seen to lead to an anomic state of moral suspension where even a private wedding is devoid of social and thereby legal standing. The cultural dismissal of the informal Adivasi social arrangement by the ICDS worker calls question to the casual treatment which an ethnic minority is also subject to with their current practices regarded as an inferior anomaly and hence a diversion from the norm. Moreover, the arrangement when perceived as premised on mutual consent tends to trivialise the violence within the relationship, based on the patriarchal opinion of such women having ‘asked for it’, no matter its later outcome. It is this ‘normalisation’ of chronic and latent violence that requires nuanced gender sensitisation and deeper advocacy, amongst our frontline workers.

The legal remedy to such desertion and early conception is often a disproportionate reliance by agents of law on the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, given the inadequate socio-legal instruments that specifically combat against the subliminal and layered gender violence of desertion in the tea gardens. The POCSO Act defines a child as any person below eighteen years of age, where consent is immaterial. While a strong deterrence to child sexual abuse, its tendency to lump together more complex cases of neglect and desertion, and criminalisation of the very act of customarily sanctioned sexual courting, reflects a dissonance between modern law and local social customs. When women well past the legally recognised age of adulthood face abandonment, a dearth of legal remedies is further seen. Conjugal desertion in Indian law is related to matrimonial desertion, described as a ‘complete repudiation of the obligation of marriage’ (Venkatachaliah, 2013). The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Divorce Act of 1869 and the Special Marriage Act of 1954 while recognise desertion, restrict it to parties who have entered into marriage and not necessarily partners in a social compact backed by tacit customary norms. Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 observes ‘any person who has sufficient means but neglects or refuses to maintain his wife who is unable to maintain herself can be ordered by a magistrate to pay a monthly allowance to her’. This category of the ‘wife’ vis a vis, the noshto mein (the broken woman) is an implicit ‘othering’ of the latter, regarded as an outlier and outside the purview of legal rights and entitlements, including maintenance and property rights. Understanding how such symbolic and subliminal gender violence, rooted to a cultural substratum may be addressed by generic legal and administrative systems, deserves deliberation within policy.

Policy Note

The Government of West Bengal, under the initiative of the Labour Department, is taking gradual yet salient strides towards creating relevant social infrastructure for its women tea garden workers, with primary health care centres and creches now dotting the many tea gardens of Jalpaiguri. The newly launched scheme of distributing pattas (land titles) amongst the landless tea garden workers along with financial assistance for housing would have both manifest and latent sociological effects that are yet to be witnessed and merit deliberation. Land being a point of contested access and exclusion is embedded in sociality (Sud, 2021). These land titles would bequeath a cultural identity to workers whose identity has been tenurial with a collective memory of subordination and forcible settlement. And while this labour welfare measure may handhold a crumbling moral economy, it may also portend a new history in the making for the tea gardens, with new possibilities for social exchange and commensality.

Conclusion

The social world of the tea garden creates a mirage of a haven and income security, yet women workers continue to experience conjugal instability and gender violence. Women as daughters are therefore not vacating their natal homes in the labour lines and retaining their corporeality. These women workers, however, also represent remarkable resilience in recrafting their roles as survivors rather than passive victims of intimate partner abuse and gendered maltreatment. In remaining single, one also observes a performative statement of not concealing their invisible scars underneath the social cloak of marriage.

The single women of the Dooars wear their singlehood as a memory of betrayal, but also as a memory of resilience, seen as important to their ontological identity in reclaiming and further propelling their personal lives as recounted in their stories. The emergence of ‘self’ and ‘selfhood’ as affixed to the individual must be seen in the cultural burgeoning of modernity and its forces in these tea gardens. The spread of basic formal education, government outreach, evangelism, electronic and social media are creating a curious awareness of entitlements as well as the social impatience to fulfil aspirations. In their explicit and avowed rendition of such desertion as unjust and wrong is woven the reality of an imperfect but potent modernisation at work.

The intentional focus on culture and history in this article revealed in the words of the workers to describe their life experience is a nudge for policy to be more historically guided and culturally embedded. Being ‘homeless’ and ‘abandoned’ for women has different implications along with the palimpsest experience of societal neglect. The invisibility of their existentialist wounds articulated from an embodied feminist standpoint seeks a gender-driven labour welfare approach missing from the dominant knowledge canons. Women’s concrete experiences provide the starting point from which to build knowledge and certainly, policy.