This book presents a hundred-year history of tea plantations in the Assam (Brahmaputra) Valley during British colonial rule in India. It explores a world where more than two million migrant laborers worked under conditions of indentured servitude in the plantations, producing tea for an increasingly profitable global market. Behal traces the genesis and early development of the tea industry; the links between the colonial state and private British capital in fostering plantations in Assam; the nature of the 'tea mania,' and its consequences, which led to the emergence of the indenture labor system in Assam's tea gardens. The book describes process of labor mobilization and the nature of labor relations in the tea plantations. It deals with the operational aspects of labor recruitment, which involved the transportation and employment of migrant laborers, from the 1860s until the the indenture system was formally dismantled. It focuses on the power structure that ruled over the organization of production and labor relations within the plantations. This power structure operated at two levels: around the Indian Tea Association, the apex body of the tea industry, and the tea planters' coercive authority. The book examines the role of the colonial state and provides statistics on production, while also telling the story of everyday labor life in the tea gardens, and of the resistance to the oppressive regime by 'coolie' laborers who had been coerced into generational servitude. It analyses the forms of their protests, and raises the question whether the transformation of these migrant agrarian communities working in conditions of unfree labor was proletarian in nature.

A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.

The range of the book: from wartime England to colonial Assam; from sapper training in India to jungle warfare in Malaya – Tea, Love and War tells the unique true story of the child of an exploited village woman gaining recognition and acceptance in suburban England. It is split into three parts: Stuart and Mary’s story, David’s story, and Ann’s story.Stuart, working on a tea estate in the jungles of Assam, fathers a child by a teenage native woman. Stuart’s letters to his family in pre-war England vividly describe his life as a planter in colonial India but conceal his secret love life. When war breaks out, Stuart joins the Indian army, trains as a sapper and is posted to Malaya, blowing bridges in the desperate rearguard action against the Japanese invasion. Back in wartime England, his sister Mary marries Stuart’s best friend, Arthur, who decides to train as an army officer. Mary, now a young mother pregnant with her second child, tells of the year’s delay in hearing news of her brother’s death at the fall of Singapore. Before the child is born, she learns that Arthur has been killed in action in Italy. The story switches to a jungle village in Assam where a small Anglo-Indian child named Ann fights her way through poverty and discrimination, always seeking the identity of her father and his family.Tea, Love and War is a gripping true story, narrated by Mary through her son David. “Much of the text is taken from the many exercise books that she filled with her memories, and whilst my investigations have expanded and updated her story, the history of the relevant elements of the Second World War, the Blitz and public perception of the Malayan campaign leading to the fall of Singapore are more eloquently seen from her individual viewpoint.” The book will appeal to fans of autobiographies, history and social history – Anglo-Indian culture and exploitation of women in India are key themes in the text – and has been inspired by Wild Swans.

Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agronomy in shaping the history of tea and its plantations in British east India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India.

Cousins and best friends, Sophie and Tilly are looking for love and adventure Sophie, orphaned at six, has been brought up by a radical aunt. Tilly meanwhile has lived a sheltered life in Newcastle. Tilly surprises everyone with a whirlwind marriage to a confirmed bachelor and tea planter, James Robson, following him to India. Thinking herself in love with the charming, enigmatic forester Tam, the independent Sophie decides to follow him when he also goes to India. Set against the vivid backdrop of post WW1 Britain and the changing world of India under the British Raj. THE PLANTER'S BRIDE is a passionate story of tragedy, loyalty and undying love

From award-winning author Ann Bennett, comes a heart-breaking story of love and loss set in World War 2 Burma. In 1980, Edith Mayhew, proprietor of the Tea Planter's Club in Calcutta, is preparing to sell up after years of decline. She thinks back to 1942 when her sister Betty vanished having fled over the mountains from Burma to Assam to escape the Japanese invasion. Whilst packing, Edith comes across some letters which may hold clues to Betty's mysterious disappearance. The discovery propels Edith on an epic journey to Assam, where she is forced to face devastating secrets of love and betrayal from the war years.

Lush, green, fragrant: the Indian hills of Assam are full of promise. But eighteen-year-old Clarissa Belhaven is full of worry. The family tea plantation is suffering, and so is her father, still grieving over the untimely death of his wife, while Clarissa's fragile sister, Olive, needs love and resourceful care. Beautiful and headstrong, Clarissa soon attracts the attention of young, brash Wesley Robson, a rival tea planter. Yet before his intentions become fully clear, tragedy befalls the Belhavens and the sisters are wrenched from their beloved tea garden to the industrial streets of Tyneside. A world away from the only home she has ever known, Clarissa must start again. Using all her means, she must endure not only poverty but jealousy and betrayal too. Will the reappearance of Wesley give her the link to her old life that she so desperately craves? Or will a fast-changing world and the advent of war extinguish hope forever? Revised edition: This edition of The Tea Planter's Daughter includes editorial revisions.