bugs in the garden: tea plantations and environmental ... a quarter of a million pounds, of assam...

Cornell University Library = username$REMOTE_ASSR = IP address

Sun 25 Oct 2015 185543 = Date amp Time

Environment and History 21 (2015) 537ndash565 copy 2015 The White Horse Press doi 103197096734015X14414683716235

Bugs in the Garden Tea Plantations and Environmental Constraints in Eastern India (Assam) 1840ndash1910

ARNAB DEY

Department of HistoryState University of New York (SUNY) at BinghamtonBinghamton NY 13902-6000 USAEmail adeybinghamtonedu

ABSTRACT

This article rethinks the relationship between the tea plantation economy and its built environment ecological constraints and nature in fin de siegravecle Assam in eastern India It does this by analysing the historical role of tea pests and cli-mate that bedevilled the industry throughout this period If labour remained the long-term concern for planters (and historians) it argues that these ecological factors induced a critical impact on the working and character of these estates that has largely been overlooked Alongside labour nature was an important ally and obstacle that had to be understood ordered and disciplined This ar-ticle thus suggests that managing these estates was as much a biological and ecological challenge as an economic one

KEYWORDS

Tea planters pests natural world Assam colonial Eastern India

Assam tea has fabled beginnings By the 1820s European travellers to the easternmost province of British India began to take notice of a herb very simi-lar to the Camellia sinensis (tea) growing wild in the Singpho and Muttock regions of Assam If the exact circumstances surrounding the discovery of tea in Assam remain shrouded in historical intrigue1 it is well known that CA Bruce commanding a division of gunboats in Sudiya in upper Assam during

1 See Jayeeta Sharma Empirersquos Garden Assam and the Making of India (Durham and London Duke University Press 2011) especially Part I Amalendu Guha Planter Raj to Swaraj Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826ndash1947 (New Delhi ICHR 1977) Sir Percival Griffiths The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London Weidenfeld



ARNAB DEY538

Environment and History 214

the 1824 Burmese war lsquofoundrsquo these plants growing in abundance in the area The then Singpho chief was also reported to have presented Bruce with a large quantity of tea seeds and shrubs Duly apprehensive of their quality and authenticity Bruce forwarded some seeds to David Scott then Agent to the Governor-General of the North East Frontier After Assam formally became part of the British Empire in 1826 Scott dispatched some of these peripatetic seeds to the Chief Secretary of the Government of India (hereafter GOI) G Swinton and to the superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden Nathaniel Wallich It was Scottrsquos successor Captain Francis Jenkins 2 who along with Lieutenant Andrew Charlton of the Assam Light Infantry pressed the colonial government to give institutional shape to these experiments with the Indian tea plant In the run-up to Sino-Anglo rivalries culminating in the Opium War time was of the essence and Governor-General Lord William Bentinck set up a twelve member Tea Committee in 1834 to look into the feasibility of large-scale tea plantations in British India The first joint stock holding the Assam Company comprising factions of the Bengal Tea Association and pri-vate capitalists in London was thereafter formed in 1839 The experimental phase nonetheless lasted until about 1854 when the first respectable quantity over a quarter of a million pounds of Assam tea was successfully auctioned in London The stage was set for the expansion of the tea enterprise and Assamrsquos absorption into the networks of colonial capitalist economy and trade3 Within histories of plant colonialism and imperial botanising4 this represented the triumph of British science and mastery over Assamrsquos allegedly lsquoenchantedrsquo and lsquosavagersquo landscape

But empirersquos garden did not develop in isolation from or independent of its largely unknown and unstable natural setting This article re-examines the relationship between this plantation economy and its built environment during the first seventy years of tea in Assam It does this by analysing the histori-cal role of tea pests5 and climate that bedevilled the tea industry throughout

and Nicholson 1967) and HA Antrobus A History of the Assam Company 1839ndash1953 (Edinburgh T and A Constable Ltd 1957)

2 Colonel Jenkins was in a sense the first British official who proposed the large scale initiation of a plantation economy in Assam using sugarcane mustard mulberry and indigo among others It is recorded that Jenkins had proposed that lsquothe first duty of the Government hellipis to make monopoly impossiblehellipthat the great national tea-trade in Assam (should be) open to all as the indigo trade in Bengalrsquo quoted in HK Barpujari Assam In the Days of the Company 1826ndash1858 (Gauhati Lawyerrsquos Book Stall 1963) p 223

3 See Sharma lsquoBritish science Chinese skill and Assam tea Making empirersquos gardenrsquo Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (2006) 429ndash455

4 For an interesting history on the imperial culture of botany see Londa Schiebinger Plants and Empire Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 2004)

5 The words lsquobugrsquo and lsquoinsectrsquo might now seem interchangeable but this has historically not been the case May R Berenbaum writes lsquoApproximately four centuries after Aristotles Historia Animalium Pliny the Elder offered his interpretation of insect classification in



BUGS IN THE GARDEN539


this period and beyond If labour remained the long-term concern for planters (and historians) I argue that these ecological constraints induced a parallel and decisive impact on the working and character of these estates that has

the form of his magnum opus Historia Naturalis hellip despite its inaccuracies [this] was the authoritative source on natural history for the next 1400 years Medieval compilations borrowed heavily from his text and few innovations were made during the Middle Ages For example Bartholomaeus Anglicus (name notwithstanding a Frenchman) compiled nineteen volumes around AD 1230 entitled De Proprietatibus Rerum The work was intended to be a complete description of the universe hellip the word ldquobugrdquo dates back to this era and refers to a ghost or hobgoblin ndash something difficult to see and vaguely unpleasant (a term quite apt for most insects medieval people were likely to encounter) The word ldquoinsectrdquo on the other hand entered the English language only in 1601 when Philemon Holland published a translation of Plinyrsquos Historia Naturalis A year later Ulysses Aldrovandus an Italian introduced a few taxonomic innovations of his own Insects were divided according to habitat into Terrestria or land-dwelling species and Aquatica the water-dwelling species Each group was further divided according to the presence or absence of appendages (Pedata and Apoda accordingly) and then subdivided further according to whether wings were present or absent (Alata and Aptera respectively) hellip In 1758 Carl Linneacute published a book called Systema Naturaelig in which he used a binomial or two-name system consistently for the first time The system so impressed people that it was universally adopted no scientific names published before Linnaeusrsquos time are considered valid and all subsequent names have conformed (or must continue to conform) to the Linnaean systemrsquo in Berenbaum Bugs in the System Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs (Reading Mass Helix Books 1995) pp 3ndash4

Figure 1 Assam and surrounding areas British India



ARNAB DEY540


largely been overlooked It was the literal and proverbial bug in the gar-den that gnawed away at profits planter control and expert proclamations of agrarian improvement Indeed tea blights were not externalities eventu-ally triumphed over by imperial science but vectors that multiplied due to the natural conditions of the Assam estates (especially shade-trees and rains) and finally dispersed through the body of labourers winds plucking baskets birds and the very structures that supported the industry To be sure these are not bugs that came from afar6 While much was still unknown about tea plant pathogens in late nineteenth century Assam the late arrival of metropolitan scientific intervention on these matters led planters to forge discursive net-works of vernacular pest management tap lsquonativersquo knowhow and be sensitive to local environmental conditions as I go on to demonstrate in this article I thus suggest that managing these estates in fin-de-siegravecle Assam was as much a biological and ecological challenge as an economic one

This article draws much-needed attention to the symbiotic relationship between human actors and non-human participants7 that contributed to the making of one of British Empirersquos most coveted objects of desire8 Of course as May Berenbaum reminds us

wherever humans have broken ground whatever frontiers humans have explored they have discovered that they are latecomers following in the six-legged footsteps of insects Whatever resources humans have wanted to garner as their own insects have had a prior claim on9

Using pests and debates around climate and nature this article suggests that human designs about these plantations were circumscribed in terms of reach and attempts to control If faulty labour recruitment policies and high worker

6 See William Cronon lsquoThe Uses of Environmental Historyrsquo Environmental History Review 17(3) (1993) 10

7 See Richard White lsquoDiscovering Nature in North Americarsquo Journal of American History 79 (1992) 874ndash891 also White The Organic Machine The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York Hill and Wang 2005) Matthew Mulcahy Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean 1624ndash1783 (Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press 2006) JR McNeill Mosquito Empires Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean 1620ndash1914 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2010) Bruno Latour Reassembling the Social An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York Oxford University Press 2007) Robert E Kohler Lords of the Fly Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1994) Timothy Mitchell lsquoCan the Mosquito Speakrsquo in The Rule of Experts Egypt Techno-Politics Modernity (Berkeley University of California Press 2002) Scott Kirsch and Don Mitchell lsquoThe Nature of Things Dead Labor Non-Human Actors and the Persistence of Marxismrsquo Antipode 36 (2002) 687ndash705 Paul S Sutter lsquoNaturersquos Agents or Agents of Empire Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the construction of the Panama Canalrsquo Isis 98(4) (2007) 724ndash754 for an assessment of this emphasis

8 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes Environment and Empire (Oxford Oxford University Press 2007) p 10

9 Berenbaum Bugs in the System Preface p xii





mortality show the social side of this failed managerial ambition the continual resurgence of blights and pests demonstrates the material limits to knowledge and power

Methodologically the aim of this article is to draw into one analytic field the importance of the biological and the environmental in social histories of the tea enterprise In other words the attempt here is to bring the history of the plant and the plantation together The second section looks at two historio-graphical approaches against which this work is situated I suggest that neither histories of extractive capitalist relations nor narratives of social material mo-dernity facilitated by tea create space for naturersquos role and the organisational constraints it placed on actors in this commodity story The third section intro-duces the main tea pests in the history of the industry and examines their vexed and co-dependent relationship with the natural conditions of the Assam gar-dens In a history largely ignored I demonstrate the ramification of these tea pests to tea quality production and the emerging future of this imperial venture more generally Section four examines the response of planters in Assam to tea disease and climatic fluctuations throughout this period Using planter mem-oirs and correspondences I show both the trans-imperial exchange of ideas on pest control and attitudes to local methods of eradication and control The late government cognisance of this problem and the numerous handbooks manuals and treatises produced by the Calcutta scientific establishment and the powerful Indian Tea Association (hereafter the ITA) are also discussed The fifth section suggests that in addition to ecological constraints and nonhuman variables imperfect methods and ideological differences challenged plantation management and vision during the early years of tea in eastern India Section six concludes

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THEORY

Admittedly some of the most prominent scholarship on the Assam tea plan-tations has been on the question of labour and the capitalist relations of production driving the industry Methods of recruitment the nature of inden-ture relations between master and servant class formation and consciousness issues of proletarianisation and de-proletarianisation the role of middlemen and the preponderance of lsquopre-capitalistrsquo ties of kinship class and clan in these plantations figure prominently in these studies10 Hugh Tinkerrsquos re-

10 These include Rajani Kanta Das Plantation Labour in India (Calcutta Prabasi Press 1931) Ranajit Das Gupta Labor and Working Class in Eastern India Studies in Colonial History (Calcutta and New Delhi KP Bagchi amp Company 1994) Sharit Bhowmik Class Formation in the Plantation System (New Delhi Peoplersquos Publishing House 1981) Sanat Bose Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry (Bombay All India Trade Union Congress 1954) Muhammad Abu B Siddique Evolution of Land Grants and Labour Policy of Government The Growth of the Tea Industry in Assam 1834ndash1940 (New Delhi South Asian Publishers



ARNAB DEY542


visionist study of Indian indentured migration overseas is an unmistakable influence and for some of the historians of the Assam labour system genera-tional debt-servitude nominal wages fenced estates recruitment abuses high mortality and outright flouting of legal norms indeed signalled the return of slavery in these estates11 More importantly the provision of penal contracts in Assam (allowing planters to arrest absconding lsquocooliesrsquo without warrants) and discriminatory land colonisation policies were seen as extraordinary conces-sions by the colonial State towards the enterprise a feature not even shared by plantations in neighbouring Darjeeling

If sexual violence wage cuts and harsh work conditions formed part of the brutal regime in the Assam plantations the everyday operational challenges of the tea enterprise were hardly met and overcome by these inhuman measures alone The natural world of Assam tea and its bewildering array of contrib-uting factors also had to be continually assessed and managed Drawing on two specific examples ndash namely climate and pests ndash this article shows that the politics of profit were conditioned and constrained as much by these is-sues of practical cultivation as by matters of worker wages and recruitment Along with the lsquolazy nativersquo12 nature too had to be ordered superintended and disciplined I contend that as with labour these attempts were never entirely successful and often resulted in unintended consequences

The second approach to understanding the Assam plantations is what I call the historiography of lsquoImprovementrsquo In a recent monograph on the subject Jayeeta Sharma argues lsquothat a wide-ranging rhetoric of ldquoimprovementrdquo and ldquoprogressrdquo came to characterize both colonial efforts to order Assam into an imperial garden and local elitesrsquo responses to themrsquo13 Sharma mentions that

1990) JC Jha Aspects of Indentured Inland Emigration to North-East India 1859ndash1918 (New Delhi Indus Publishing Company 1996) Rana P Behal and Prabhu P Mohapatra lsquoTea and Money Versus Human Life The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840ndash1908rsquo Journal of Peasant Studies 19(3) (1992) 142ndash172 Rana Pratap Behal lsquoForms of Labour Protests in the Assam Valley Tea Plantations 1900ndash1947rsquo Occasional Papers on History and Society (New Delhi Nehru Memorial Museum and Library 1997) Behal lsquoPower Structure Discipline and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations Under Colonial Rulersquo International Review of Social History 51 Special Supplement (2006) 143ndash172 and Samita Sen lsquoCommercial Recruiting and Informal Intermediation debate over the sardari system in Assam tea plantations 1860ndash1900rsquo Modern Asian Studies 44(1) (2010) 3ndash28 to name a few see also Guha Planter Raj to Swaraj

11 Hugh Tinker A New System of Slavery The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830ndash1920 (London Institute of Race Relations 1974) see also Philip Corrigan lsquoFeudal Relics or Capitalist Monuments Notes on the Sociology of Unfree Labourrsquo Sociology 11(3) (1977) 435ndash463 Robert Miles Capitalism and Unfree Labour Anomaly or Necessity (London Tavistock Publications 1987) Nitin Varma lsquoCoolie Acts and the Acting Coolies Coolie Planter and State in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Colonial Tea Plantations of Assamrsquo Social Scientist 33(56) (2005) 49ndash72

12 See Jayeeta Sharma lsquoldquoLazy Nativesrdquo Coolie Labour and the Assam Tea Industryrsquo Modern Asian Studies 43(6) (2009) 1287ndash1324

13 Sharma Empirersquos Garden p 5





part of the East India Companyrsquos role in Assam during the transition from military adventurism to bureaucratic rule was in discovering classifying and generating knowledge about plant life She argues that

such activities were dictated as much by a new improving agenda as by their avowed scientific and material purpose Naturersquos bounty was to be discovered and thereafter improved upon by its dissemination through empire The case of tea offers a noteworthy illustration of how such changing economic and political imperatives shaped the East India Companyrsquos zeal for the pursuit of knowledge14

Drawing on the work of Richard Drayton15 Sharma suggests that the export-oriented tea venture in colonial eastern India engendered long-term structural transformations to Assam geopolitical and ethnic landscape lsquocultural con-structions of racersquo lsquosocial histories of resistancersquo and lsquolocal imaginings of modernity and nationhoodrsquo While Empirersquos Garden is not an environmental history of Assam tea Sharmarsquos overarching methodology has two primary limitations that we need to consider First in her analysis improvement and modernity are social corollaries of the plantation experiment an inevitable telos towards which it advanced and conditions that accompanied its advent They are never examined as categories that took shape and meaning within a variety of material environments ndash human and nonhuman ndash in the Assam es-tates Second this reading of plant imperialism and its socio-political impact imputes an a priori logic of technological triumphalism to the tea enterprise in eastern India Telescoped into concepts such as personhood nationalism ethnicity racial hierarchy and progress the effects of this capital-intensive economy appear aggregate unmediated and calculable16 But lsquonaturersquos jun-glersquo and the tea plantations it midwifed was a collection of many contingent factors including pests disease disasters and landscape transformations that conditioned (and were often created by) this imperial enterprise I argue that this historiographical method though useful severely restricts the scope of the natural world and its localised relevance to our understanding of this tea his-tory In Timothy Mitchellrsquos words

14 Jayeeta Sharma lsquoMaking Garden Erasing Jungle The Tea Enterprise in Colonial Assamrsquo in Deepak Kumar Vinita Damodaran and Rohan DrsquoSouza (eds) The British Empire and the Natural World Environmental Encounters in South Asia (New Delhi Oxford University Press 2011) pp 119ndash120 also Sharma lsquoBritish science Chinese skill and Assam tea Making empirersquos gardenrsquo

15 See Richard Drayton Naturersquos Government Science Imperial Britain and the lsquoImprovementrsquo of the World (New Haven Yale University Press 2000)

16 For instance Sharma argues that lsquotea discovery catalyzed the making of Assam as an imperial garden for which different groups ndash East India Company officials tea entrepreneurs Baptist missionaries and Assamese gentry ndash articulated their particular versions of improvementrsquo Empirersquos Garden p 25 The social acceptance of Assam tea (Camellia sinensis var Assamica) within metropolitan idioms of superior taste and refinement is often read as the techno-scientific apogee of Britainrsquos botanical lsquocivilizingrsquo of an otherwise wild and unrefined plant



ARNAB DEY544


The protagonists of the history of the nation of modernity of capitalism are people hellip it is not that social analysis necessarily ignores disease agriculture chemicals or technology but that these are externals ndash nature tools obstacles resources ndash whose role is essentially passive Even on the occasions when they are given a more independent force there is still a fundamental divide between human agency and the nonhuman elements Social science is always founded upon a categorical distinction between the ideality of human intentions and purposes and the object world upon which these work and which in turn may affect them There is little room to examine the ways they emerge together in a variety of combinations or how so-called human agency draws its force by attempting to divert or attach itself to other kinds of energy or logic17

The ecological underpinnings of the Assam tea story reveal many of these interactions and networks This article also shows that the techno-scientific ap-paratus of improvement and modernity in the Assam plantations encountered the empirical in highly circumscribed terms and often created imbalances in its wake Consider C Stricklandrsquos Abridged Report on Malaria in the Assam Tea Gardens (1926) that lists faulty site selection methods of drainage rice cultivation and labour housing arrangements as factors aiding the growth of malarial anopheline mosquitoes in the tea estates18 We need to historicise em-pirersquos garden within this messy world of idealised intention and actual impact projecting otherwise generates the unhelpful dichotomy of lsquonature on one side

17 See Timothy Mitchell Rule of Experts Egypt Techno-Politics Modernity (Berkeley and London University of California Press 2002) especially Part I Paul Sutterrsquos analysis of the role of entomological workers during the construction of the Panama Canal provide a parallel historical example Sutter mentions lsquomy argument is not that scientists give us an unmediated access to material environmental agency ndash that they are in a sense naturersquos agents Nor do I intend to imply that they are the only group in the imperial field who work across this gap between the material environment and idealized nature Rather my aim is to suggest that material environmental influence can be seen quite clearly at the points of tension between ideological predisposition and empirical observationrsquo lsquoNaturersquos Agents or Agents of Empirersquo Richard Whitersquos exploration of lsquoknowing nature through laborrsquo in the making and destiny of the Columbia river in northwestern United States provides yet another instance The Organic Machine The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York Hill and Wang 2005)

18 C Strickland and KL Chowdhury Abridged Report on Malaria in the Assam Tea Gardens With Pictures Tables and Charts (Calcutta Indian Tea Association 1926) especially pp 101ndash2 in fact in an earlier paper read before the Assam Branch of the British Medical Association on 2 March 1925 Strickland professor of medical entomology at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine places square blame on the practice of wet-rice cultivation in the periphery of tea gardens for inducing malarial anopheline mosquitoes As a mechanism of control he therefore recommends lsquoif rice-growing need not be considered then the situation can easily be dealt with by draining and oiling combinedthe bed-rock alternative is therefore which is preferable the rice cultivation and only perhaps a mitigation of the malarial prevalence or the rice given up and a non-malarious labour force the planter must clearly see that if he wishes to control his malaria either on economic or humanitarian grounds he has got to interfere with his rice cultivationrsquo lsquoThe Mosquito Factor in the Malaria of the Assam Tea Gardensrsquo reprinted from The Indian Medical Gazette LX(11) (1925) 25ndash26





and human calculation and expertise on the otherrsquo19 The history of tea includes human actors and nonhuman agents agrarian expertise and on-the-ground biological innovations metropolitan knowhow and local understandings of climate pest and land character In other words the Assam plantations were dynamic sites that combined social economic agrarian and ecological pro-cesses in complex and indeterminate ways20

To be sure the historiography of improvement has its share of critics Richard Groversquos pioneering work21 reminds us that the often too utilitarian science of colonial expansion and tropical garden Edens coexisted with para-doxical (and ironic) assertions to the degradation of earthrsquos natural resources and need for conservation He questions lsquomonolithicrsquo ideas of ecological im-perialism by looking at the lsquoessentially heterogeneous and ambivalent nature of the workings of the early colonial statersquo22 Groversquos study contends that even though broad patterns of environmental change were initiated and con-solidated by imperial rule this also created the epistemic and social contexts where critiques of the ecological impact of colonial lsquodevelopmentrsquo emerged For Grove then botanical gardens were complex and unsettled exemplars of scientific imperialism that straddled both these impulses of expansion and con-servation23 He suggests interestingly that

The garden and the island enabled newness to be dealt with within familiar bounds but simultaneously allowed and stimulated an experience of the empiri-cal in circumscribed terms24

In the case of the Assam studies have highlighted the difficult and often un-comfortable relationship between planters and forest officials in matters of conservation and resource management Richard Tucker argues that market pressures for an increase in tea acreage inevitably led to a corresponding

19 Mitchell Rule of Experts p 3620 For a fascinating study of the importance and agency of the cotton boll weevil the Vedalia

beetle the corn borer the San Jose scale and other pests in the history of American agricultural innovation see Alan L Olmstead and Paul W Rhode Creating Abundance Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press 2008) Olmstead and Rhode demonstrate that mechanical technologies and biological innovation did not follow each other chronologically in American agriculture but that in the two centuries before World War II steady (but non-institutionalised) advancement in biological innovation in crop and livestock sectors increased both land and labor productivity hellip that lsquoAmerican agricultural development was far more dynamic than generally portrayedrsquo p 16

21 Richard H Grove Green Imperialism Colonial Expansion Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600ndash1860 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1995)

22 Ibid pp 2 7ndash823 Grove asserts lsquowhile encouraged by the state ostensibly for economic and commercial

reasons the botanical garden continued to encompass less openly expressed notions of tropical environment as a paradise botanical or otherwise which most professional botanists were keen to protectrsquo in Grove Green Imperialism p 409

24 Ibid p 14



ARNAB DEY546


reduction in forest coverage Similarly the tea industryrsquos insatiable demand for timber (for tea chests firewood railway sleepers etc) led to an ever-increasing commercialisation of forest produce in Assam Tucker suggests that lsquothis pro-cess can be clearly seen through the work of the Assam Forest Department25 the plantersrsquo major European competitor for control of forest landrsquo26 Consider the case of Lieutenant Colonel D Reid executive engineer to the Public Works Department (PWD) of upper Assam who complained to the government offi-cials in Bengal about the difficulty of acquiring timber from the Nambor forest for departmental use Among other factors (destruction of forests for opium cultivation for example) Reid lsquowas convinced that the tea planters too were not far behind in damaging the forests as planters removed trees because too much shade hampered the growth of tea plantsrsquo27 David Arnold agrees with Draytonrsquos emphasis on the importance of the Kew Gardens in facilitating plant exchange and transfer but critiques they way it lsquooverlooks the extent to which improvement ndash in India at least ndash might acquire its own local impetus char-acteristics and constraintsrsquo28 Arnold further argues that Drayton makes little investment to understand the extent to which the regime of improvement might have impacted peasant agriculture in colonial India if at all Using the case of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (hereafter AHSI) Arnold probes the limits to this holy union of imperialism and improvement in the subcontinent Ostensibly set up to foster evangelical ideas of progress innova-tion and civilisation in agricultural methods Arnold suggests that the AHSIrsquos role in horticultural development remained mostly at the level of a lsquodepository of practical informationrsquo it rarely translated into matters of policy transfor-mation or as a major force of empirical innovation He would thus conclude lsquoImprovement and imperialism did not operate as Draytonrsquos argument might lead us to suppose entirely in tandemrsquo29

25 See also Dietrich Brandis Suggestions Regarding Forest Administration in Assam (Calcutta Superintendent of Government Printing 1879)

26 Richard P Tucker lsquoThe Depletion of Indiarsquos Forests under British Imperialism Planters Foresters and Peasants in Assam and Keralarsquo in Donald Worster (ed) The Ends of the Earth Perspectives on Modern Environmental History p 125

27 Arupjyoti Saikia lsquoState peasants and land reclamation The predicament of forest conservation in Assam 1850ndash1980rsquo Indian Economic and Social History Review 45 (2008) 81 see also his Forests and Ecological History of Assam (New Delhi Oxford University Press 2011)

28 David Arnold lsquoAgriculture and ldquoImprovementrdquo in Early Colonial India A Pre-History of Developmentrsquo Journal of Agrarian Change 5(4) (2005) 508

29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN

Tea pests and blights appeared almost concurrently with the establishment of the Assam plantations CA Bruce acknowledged pioneer of tea planting and manufacture30 remarks on the mole cricket in his famous 1838 account of the Singpho and Muttock tea tracts of upper Assam Experimenting with tea seeds and young saplings in the hot summer sun Bruce noticed the insectrsquos depreda-tions in nipping off the tender leaves and depositing them underground near its root 31 The tea plantrsquos prospects were observably bleak

The tea mosquito bug (Helopeltis theivora) the red spider (or tea mite Tetranychus bioculatus) thrips tea aphis and blister blight particularly vexed Assam planters in the period under review and continue to do so till this day This is not an exhaustive list of the major predators but certainly includes the most prominent

Samuel E Peal a planter in the Sibsagar district was perhaps the first to draw attention to the tea bug an arthropod that resembled the common mosqui-to32 He presciently cautioned that this pest was to be the tea planterrsquos greatest enemy in the years to come and had the potential to seriously cripple the indus-try and reduce yield The warning was clear lsquothose who are already indulging in dreams of thirty and forty percent will soon be roused up when they find their profits reduced to three or fourrsquo 33 With seven accompanying colour plates in the Journal of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (hereafter JAHS) Peal records his observation of the pestrsquos physiognomy and

30 Antrobus A History of the Assam Company p 2231 CA Bruce An Account of the Manufacture of the Black Tea as now Practiced at Suddeya in

Upper Assam By the Chinamen Sent Thither for that Purpose with Some Observations on the Culture of the Plant in China and its Growth in Assam (Calcutta Bengal Military Orphan Press 1838) p 15

32 SE Peal lsquoThe Tea Bug of Assamrsquo Journal of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (New Series) 4(1) (1873) 126ndash132

33 Ibid p 126 Samuel Peal is also reported to have written on the blister blight of tea as far back as 1868 but this source remains untraced quoted in Harold H Mann lsquoThe Blister Blight of Tearsquo Indian Tea Association Circulars No 3 (Calcutta 1906) 1 MSS EURF 17411 Asian and African Studies British Library London It is also important to note here that entomology and empire are closely connected In fact JFM Clark argues lsquoEconomic entomology achieved professional respectability between 1880 and 1914 through the creation of specialist educational programmes and acknowledged posts in the field The identification of insects as vectors of disease ndash the emergence of medical entomology within the rubric of tropical medicine ndash provided a further strong rationale for the study of applied entomology Experience of insect control and eradication in empire shaped the careers knowledge and practices of British entomologists As an institution or discipline applied entomology in Britain was forged from agricultural science and tropical medicine under the umbrella term of economic entomologyrsquo Bugs and the Victorians (New Haven and London Yale University Press 2009) p 188 while tropical medicine and diseases (both human and nonhuman) might have consolidated the respectability of entomology as science and practice its applied interface in colonial commodity production remains to be adequately probed



ARNAB DEY548


impact on tea leaves and shoots What worried him more was the bugrsquos eco-biology a vicious parasitism that allowed it to grow and draw sustenance from the tea plantation habitat He thus debunks the theory that excessive shade or lack of jungle clearing led to an increase in the tea mosquito pest Drawing on infestation case studies from gardens that were relatively open and from those recently cleared Peal provides the damning conclusion that the very conditions necessary for successful tea harvests created the host environment for the bug34 While Peal was in no position to offer scientific remedy he as-tutely recommended against adding labour-hands for physical removal of the pest or syringing tea leaves with medicinal decoctions The futility of these measures were not lost on Peal Assamrsquos torrential monsoonal rains regularly washed away these fluids and created the perfect moisture-base needed for the tea bugrsquos increase With resigned hope he writes lsquoI see no cure till Nature produces her own in good time and one is certain to come in the end though probably not under twenty to fifty yearsrsquo35

34 SE Peal lsquoThe Tea Bug of Assamrsquo p 128 35 Ibid 130 admittedly Peal was an exceptional figure in the pantheon of early Assam planters

As naturalist ethnographer ornithologist and geographer Peal distinguished himself in an occupation otherwise much debased in nationalist metropolitan and elite British imaginaire as that given to the pleasures of the body and mind It is interesting for instance to counterpose figures like Peal with Maurice Hanley Charles Webb or the fictitious Beth and McLean planter sahibs of Kuli Kahini and Cha-kar Darpan respectively see Maurice Hanley Tales and Songs from An Assam Tea Garden (Calcutta and Simla Thacker Spink and

Figure 2 Map showing tea mosquito blight (Helopeltis Theivora Waterh) attack on Ghazipore tea estate 1908 The dark shaded portions show areas affected with the darkest spots indicating severe damage C B Antram Bulletin of the Indian Tea

Association Scientific Department 1910





The mutually conducive (and occasionally harmful) ecosystem for tea growth and pest development remains a complex and historically interesting environmental backdrop to the Assam plantation story Size and capacity for damage were often inversely proportional In the case of the tea aphis for in-stance planters often wondered how an insect barely observable by the naked eye could propagate with such rapidity and inflict widespread destruction at the same time 36 The question of agency becomes crucial here and James Wood-Mason deputy superintendent of the Indian Museum Calcutta Peal and others stressed on inter-insect dispersion as partly responsible for pest occurrence in the Assam estates37 It needs to be reckoned with however that climate and nature in Assam were not always beneficial allies to tea pests and could turn capricious depending on circumstances Small tea pests like the aphis were regularly though not always washed away or killed by heavy downpours or periods of prolonged drought and dryness

The depredations of the tea mosquito bug caught the attention of the Calcutta scientific establishment almost a decade after Pealrsquos article Wood-Mason was instructed to carry out a detailed field study and his report was finally submit-ted on 8 June 188138 While repeating some of Pealrsquos observations verbatim Wood-Masonrsquos study was based more on laboratory cross-examination of

Co 1928) Ramkumar Vidyaratna Kuli Kahini ed Biswanath Mukhopadhyay (Calcutta Jogomaya Publications 1886) and Dakshinacharan Chattopadhyay Cha-kar Darpan Natak in Bangla Natya Sankalan (Calcutta reprinted 2001) for a discussion of these other characters Made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society Peal was eulogised as lsquoAn Assam Naturalistrsquo in his obituary of 12 August 1897 The contributor records lsquoit was perhaps a mistake that Mr Peal was a tea-planter at all He was essentially a naturalistrsquo in Obituary The Journal of the Polynesian Society 6(4) (1897) 216ndash218 reprinted from Calcutta Englishman 12 August 1897 for a fascinating extension of this point see the paper by Tony Ballantyne lsquoMr Pealrsquos Archive Mobility and Exchange in Histories of Empirersquo in Antoinette Burton (ed) Archive Stories Facts Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham Duke University Press 2005) pp 87ndash111 And these were no empty signifiers or unthinking sobriquets either Peal was a regular contributor to the JAHS the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society Science Nature the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and many others Journal contributions aside it is not surprising that Peal is also credited as being the discoverer of the Peal Palmfly or Elymnias peali classified by Wood Mason in 1883 cited in lsquoDescription of a new Species of the Lepidopterous Genus Elymniasrsquo J Wood-Mason quoted by Major GFL Marshall and Lionel De Niceacuteville The Butterflies of India Burmah and Ceylon (Calcutta The Calcutta Central Press 1882) p 277 and is even reported to have provided information on rich deposits of coal and petroleum in the Margherita region of upper Assam cited in Rajen Saikia Social and Economic History of Assam 1853ndash1921 (New Delhi Manohar 2000) p 151 In a way Peal was a planter only by default His occupational residence in Sibsagar afforded a rich and seemingly inexhaustible ecological laboratory that connected him to the world of tea science ethnography and entomology all at once

36 Reprinted in section on lsquoTea Blights and Pestsrsquo in The Tea Cyclopaedia Articles on Tea Tea Science Blights Soils and Manures Cultivation Buildings Manufacture Etc With Tea Statistics (London W B Whittingham amp Co 1882) 34j-66

37 Ibid p 3838 James Wood-Mason Report on the Tea-Mite and the Tea-Bug of Assam (London Taylor and

Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550


facts He suggested a vigorous and unremitting removal of blighted portions of the tea plant a move that required adding to the already demanding labour working hours of the Assam estates He also advanced the hypothesis that the olfactory quality of tea juice provided differential immunity from the mosquito bug The rasping and pungent liquor of the native Assam plant allegedly ren-dered it immune from attack while the milder extract of the Chinese variant made it more susceptible to damage39 These ideas were however to be vigor-ously disproved by successive waves of the tea bug assault on all species of tea in Assam In hindsight Wood-Masonrsquos report remained rather inconclusive and haphazard though it did provide some interesting insights and analysis of the tea mosquito bug More importantly this report introduced the tea mite (commonly known as the red spider) a more dangerous player in the history of the Assam tea enterprise

The effects of the red spider on tea growth were reported to be far more devastating40 Wood-Mason observed that the mite lived in small lsquosocietiesrsquo on the upper surface of full-grown leaves beneath a delicate web that it spun for itself as protection Providing shelter and survival from the heavy April rains this skein allowed the spider to continue unchecked and unnoticed While the intriguing relationship between rains and remedy in the Assam gardens have already been commented upon it was more amply evident in the case of the tea mite A long period of torrential showers often broke up the intricate web and led to brief periods of pest disappearance But this was hardly a workable curative strategy Wood-Masonrsquos report authoritatively demonstrated that the red spider although of genus Capsidae characteristic of Indo-Malayan fauna was not an alien import but an indigene of the Assam tea country41 This view also confirms Pealrsquos initial suspicion of the mutually beneficial host conditions of the tea plant and pest in the Assam gardens42 He would reiterate in The Indian Tea Gazette that the red spider was one of the oldest most universal and widely distributed pests in the pantheon ranging in operation from the sea level to snow-capped mountain ranges of the upper Himalayas43 A later

39 Ibid p 1840 For a scientific study on the red spider and its relationship to the tea plant see G M Das

lsquoBionomics of the Tea Red Spider Oligonychus coffeae (Nietner)rsquo Bulletin of Entomology 50 (2) 1959 265ndash274

41 Wood-Mason Report on the Tea-Mite and the Tea-Bug of Assam p 1342 A recent scientific study reiterates this by suggesting a further correlation between age

acreage and pests It demonstrates that the microclimate of the monoculture tea crop provides a continuous food source for various kinds of lsquophytophagous arthropodsrsquo reaching a saturation level after 35 years of growth Statistically the findings show that northeast India harbours the largest number of tea pest species (250) which directly corresponds to area (361663 acres in 1981) and tea age (138 years) The research suggests that most tea pests are recruited lsquolocallyrsquo with only about three per cent being common across regions See Barundeb Banerjee lsquoAn Analysis of the Effects of Latitude Age and Area on the Number of Arthropod Pest Species of Tearsquo Journal of Applied Ecology 18 (1981) 339ndash342

43 Reprinted in section on lsquoTea Blights and Pestsrsquo in The Tea Cyclopaedia p 38





study on the bionomics of the red spider confirmed that the mite continued to breed during the cold season and could be found at all stages of the tea plant growth44 This makes it clear that among the factors influencing the incidence of red spider and the intensity of attack weather conditions were preeminent45 The more insidious aspect of the mite was the manner of its dispersion within the tea estates wind cattle goats birds and other insects46 being among the chief agents of circulation Even labourers working on the plantations were indirectly responsible as the red spider spread unnoticed through clothing and tea baskets47 The entangled human and nonhuman history of this prized crop is more complex than one might otherwise appreciate

At the turn of the century blister blight proved to be a severe and crippling concern for planters in Assam A fungal disease it struck with particular viru-lence in April and May 1906 Dr Harold H Mann scientific officer to the ITA published a report on the blight that year after his visits to the affected upper Assam districts He noted that the impact of the fungus was localised in scope but epidemic in character Commenting on this peculiarity Mann observed that the climatic and soil conditions of the districts under siege (namely North Lakhimpur Golaghat and Jorhat) were directly responsible for the intensity of infection48 The relative immunity of the other tea districts from the blis-ter virus that year only made clear the challenges of adopting a region-wide approach to pest reduction and control Interestingly W McRae mycologist to the Government of Madras commissioned to study the outbreak of blis-ter blight in the neighbouring Darjeeling district in 1908ndash09 argued that the fungus was lsquonewrsquo to the tea region despite being lsquodetectedrsquo and lsquoconfinedrsquo to the Brahmaputra valley as early as 189549 Adding to our knowledge of the restricted nature of the disease McRae observed that the extent of damage was often dependent on the tea variety (or jat) ndash the high quality Assam and hybrids being the most susceptible and the Chinese and Manipuri variants rela-tively immune McRae reiterates and confirms Mannrsquos earlier hypothesis of the relationship between rainfall pruning and blister attack lsquothe greater loss is attributable to wet unfavourable weather in July and August hellip the worst dam-

44 Das lsquoBionomics of the Tea Red Spiderrsquo45 Ibid p 27246 Wood-Mason however disagreed on this widely-held notion of inter-insect agency by

planters He claimed somewhat emphatically in his report that lsquomites do not commonly occur parasitically on the outside of the bodies of the most diverse group of insectsrsquo in Wood-Mason Report p 10

47 Das lsquoBionomics of the Tea Red Spiderrsquo p 27248 Harold H Mann The Blister Blight of Tea Indian Tea Association Circular No 31906 MSS

EURF17411 Asian and African Studies British Library London49 W McRae lsquoThe Outbreak of Blister-Blight on Tea in the Darjeeling District in 1908ndash1909rsquo

ITA Circular No 31910 MSS EURF1741517 Asian and African Studies British Library London interestingly there is no mention about the 1868 article on the blister blight by SE Peal in McRae



ARNAB DEY552


aged piece of tea was a heavy pruned blockrsquo50 He also suggested provocatively that while the exact cause of the fungus in Darjeeling was not definitively known it might have been lsquoimportedrsquo from Assam valley by tea-seed transfer among other ecological and human factors51

In addition to the above the thrips insect also damaged tea in Assam and neighbouring districts during this period52 Reproducing exponentially in the shade of the tea bush thrips arrested the growth of young leaves and shoots The more worrisome feature of the insect was that it hardened the leaf and made it brittle thereby leading to a recognisable reduction and lsquoloss in flavourrsquo53 For a commodity that relied on taste as its distinctive hallmark this was a serious discovery

Beyond entomological findings and planter reports the proverbial bug in the empirersquos garden found its way into government correspondences revenue proceedings and annual tea balance sheets While many factors including political climate seed quality methods of plucking labour mortality and machinery contributed to fluctuations in tea production the trio of pests rain-fall and climate impacted relentlessly in terms of both quality and volume Interestingly reporting on the ravages of hailstorms and red spider blights in 1883 CJ Lyall then officiating secretary to Assamrsquos chief commissioner cri-tiques James Wood-Masonrsquos pest experiments as esoteric laboratory science far removed from the practical and pragmatic challenges to planters on the ground54 The situation spoke for itself consider the figures in Table 1 for changes in tea yields during a ten-year period (1884ndash1895) in some of the most important tea producing districts of Assam

To be sure the Assam tea enterprise was a vast and complex operation and no one component influenced variations in production and total output55 Amalgamation of smaller estates into bigger holdings finer plucking rise in labour expertise use of machinery demand and overharvesting among others significantly altered numbers in terms of acreage and outturn Three factors however remained consistently important in causing these fluctuations namely rainfall pests and weather conditions For instance unpredictable monsoons

50 Ibid p 651 Ibid p 752 CB Antram lsquoThe lsquoThripsrsquo Insects of Tea in Darjeeling Investigations During the Season

1908rsquo ITA Circular No 31909 MSS EURF1741516 Asian and African Studies British Library London

53 Ibid p 154 Cited in the Annual Report on Tea Culture in the Province of Assam for 1882 no 1207 p 5

IORV244278 British Library London55 The following discussion has been compiled from Annual Reports on Tea Culture in the

Province of Assam 1883ndash1895 (hereafter ARTC) IORV244278ndash9 British Library London and the Annual Reports on the Administration of the Province of Assam Assam State Archives (hereafter ASA) Guwahati Assam lsquooutturnrsquo here refers to amount of tea produced or crop yield





prolonged drought and mosquito blights in 1884 severely reduced the yield in Nowgong and Cachar while dry weather and selective plucking in Lakhimpur around 1887 changed tea yields by minus 287 per cent from the previous year Damaging hail and red spider in 1888 decreased output in Cachar Blights red spider attack damp weather and erratic rainfall were all reported to have significantly lowered tea production in 1892 and especially in the indicated

Table 1 Statistics showing tea yields per acre percentage increase or decrease and variation from previous years Note that returns are not shown for all districts and yields

vary greatly between regions in Assam

Year District Rate of outturn per acre (in lbs)

Total Yield(in lbs)

Increase (+) or Decrease (-) from previous year (in lbs)

Percentage Increase (+) or Decrease (-)

1884 CacharDarrangNowgongLakhimpur

272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821

1885 NowgongSibsagar

314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652

1889 GoalparaNowgong

302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172

1892 CacharSylhetKamrupNowgongSibsagarLakhimpur

310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258

1894 CacharKamrupLakhimpur

339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223

Compiled from Annual Report on Tea Culture in Assam for the years 1883ndash1895 Shillong Assam Secretariat Press



ARNAB DEY554


districts Outturn figures for 1894 in Cachar Kamrup and Lakhimpur districts were noticeably less than the previous year because of finer plucking blights and bad weather throughout the harvest season While the ecological under-pinning and constraints of the Assam plantations need hardly be overstated some figures are confusing and merit further elaboration For instance per acre yield figures for the districts of Cachar and Lakhimpur show an upward trend between 1884ndash1888 and 1884ndash1887 respectively as do those for in Kamrup between 1890ndash1891 Per acre outputs in Cachar and Kamrup between 1892ndash1894 show a similar increase Appearing counterintuitive at first this rise resulted from intensive machine use increase in labour skills and expan-sion of total plantation land area in these districts even as overall percentage yields continued to fall56

PESTS PLANTERS AND THE NATURAL WORLD

The persistence of pests and erratic rainfall posed an unprecedented challenge to planters in nineteenth century Assam As indicated metropolitan interven-tion in these matters though robust after 1884 remained itinerant and mostly pedagogic57 Despite numerous handbooks manuals and treatises on the subject planters in Assam were forced to share and consolidate practical expe-rience of pest management and control with each other Often local measures of control and eradication were tried and implemented even if unsuccessfully Correspondence of the period also shows vigorous and regular exchange of ideas between planters in Assam and peers in Java Kangra Darjeeling Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and California With Peal as trailblazer these planter letters memoirs and articles demonstrate a keen eye for participant observation and

56 Admittedly these figures and my point here might seem specious to scholars familiar with the history of the Assam tea industry To be sure the outturn of Indian (especially Assam) tea never markedly declined overall The point here is not to suggest that tea yields were quantitatively affected by these tea pests but rather that it remained a qualitative competitor to tea production plantation operation and the triumphalism of agrarian expertise For a contemporary reminder of this problem see lsquoRains pests hit tea output in Statersquo The Assam Tribune 6 July 2010

57 Among these J Wood-Masonrsquos Report on the Tea-Mite and the Tea-Bug of Assam (Calcutta 1884) MK Bamberrsquos A Textbook on the Chemistry and Agriculture of Tea Including the Growth and Manufacture (Calcutta 1893) EC Cotesrsquo An Account of the Insects and Mites which Attack the Tea Plant in India (Calcutta 1895) David Crolersquos Tea A Text Book of Tea Planting and Manufacture (London 1897) Sir George Wattrsquos The Pests and Blights of the Tea Plant (Calcutta 1898) Claud Baldrsquos Indian Tea Its Culture and Manufacture (Calcutta 1908) and EA Andrewsrsquo Factors Affecting the Control of the Tea Mosquito Bug [Helopeltis theivora-Waterh] (London nd Calcutta ITA rpt 1910) being some of the most important scientific investigations on the subject more recent contributions include LK Hazarika M Bhuyan and BN Hazarika lsquoInsect Pests of Tea and their Managementrsquo Annual Review of Entomology 54 (2009) 267ndash84





analysis that contributed to and complemented formal knowhow on the sub-ject The latter did not emerge in isolation as expert entomological science58

As with the other factors of production pest control measures were often prohibitively expensive or unavailable within tea districts For instance in re-sponse to the tea blight ravage in Assam one Darjeeling planter suggested salt at the rate of two maunds (roughly 80 kgs) per acre to be applied four times during the plucking season Dusting tea plants with lime was also recommend-ed59 Such measures though expedient were not always practical In the case of both salt and lime planters regretted that expense restricted experimental trials salt costing nearly a rupee per kilogram In addition they were rarely effective as long-term solutions pests usually returning after a period of tem-porary absence60 The politics of profit dictated that control mechanisms that did not interfere too heavily with the pocket or plantation plan were likely to be welcome and therefore tried For instance labour conditions and wages had long been the bone of contention between planters district officials and the colonial state Apart from justifiable notoriety it had not given the Assam plantations much else in a highly competitive labour market Planters were therefore less favourably disposed to pest control methods (such as heavy pruning and brush fire) that demanded changes to the estate rhythm and an increase in labour-hands working hours and pay Introducing lethal chemicals that destroyed pest and plant alike was a double-edged sword and its applica-tion against the red spider was much discouraged by Peal Wood-Mason and others61 Paradoxically inter-insect rivalry often contributed to pest control and acted as natural checks to single-species dominance Commenting on the red spider Peal remarks lsquoif anything eats the spider it will be another in-sect not a birdrsquo62 Sometimes the counsel was decidedly bizarre or outlandish From California came the suggestion that shrimp shells had been exported to

58 Even Sir George Watt MB FLS CIE Member Royal Horticultural Society of England and later Reporter on Economic Products to GOI (1887ndash1903) records in The Pests and Blights of the Tea Plant that among his many sources of information and assistance were the large circle of planters lsquowhom it was my good fortune to meet during my toursrsquo He also mentions that lsquointerest may be said to have been first prominently aroused in the subject of pests and blights by the late Mr SE Pealrsquos paper on lsquoMosquitorsquo or as he loved to call it the lsquoTea Bugrsquo Prior to the appearance of Mr Pealrsquos paper it had been vaguely designated lsquoBlightrsquo and was viewed as a mysterious visitation Mr Peal showed that it was caused by an insectrsquo The Pests and Blights of the Tea Plant Being a Report of Investigations Conducted in Assam and to some Extent Also in Kangra (Calcutta Superintendent of Government Printing 1898) p 180

59 See lsquoTea Blights and Pestsrsquo in The Tea Cyclopaedia60 Ibid p 4061 Though outside the scope of this paper it is noteworthy that pesticide use in Assam tea and

its contemporary impact on local habitat and ecology is a matter of much scientific debate and public concern See B Bhuyan and HP Sharma lsquoPublic Health Impact of Pesticide Use in the Tea Gardens of Lakhimpur District Assamrsquo Ecology Environment and Conservation 10(3) (2004) 333ndash338 for an example

62 The Tea Cyclopaedia p 39



ARNAB DEY556


Chinese tea growers as manure and remedy against pests Though unconfirmed as to its success rate this was urged as a possible option63 In the face of ad-vice helpful or otherwise planters regularly drew attention to pests that had gone unnoticed or were restricted to specific habitats and estates Writing from Cachar one planter sought peer response and remedy for a particular blight common in his garden a large species of the Psychida family that Peal had reportedly forgotten or was ignorant of64 A little insect lsquoof the ladybird tribersquo that allegedly struck at the pekoe tip and caused it to droop was also discussed as a noteworthy omission from available handbooks and planter accounts of tea pests65 The ubiquity of the pest problem was not lost even in memoirs of the Assam tea plantations Lady (Mrs) Beatrix Scott wife of a civil servant posted in Assam narrates how Daku a young boy from the labour lines often earned extra pennies picking off red spiders and blights from the tea plants66

Despite the localised characteristics of tea pests planters in Assam during this period looked far and wide for solutions to their everyday problems In the process they forged knowledge networks with peers across the imperial divide and became aware of similar concerns in competing agrarian landscapes In one such instance planters in Assam and Darjeeling discovered Mackenziersquos first edition book on the effects of mildew rust and smut on North American wheat The findings were chillingly comparable lsquoblight originates from moist or foggy weather and from hoarfrost the effects of which when expelled by a hot sun are first discernible on the strawrsquo67 The depredations of the red spider on English wheat were very similar to Assam tea and Mackenziersquos suggestions of control were seriously discussed Letters from tea growers in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) remarked that the effects of the monsoons and tropical weather variations were far more pronounced on their crop than in Assam68

Keeping a close ear to local pest vernaculars and methods of control was also necessary under the circumstances Under attack from a lsquopeculiar kind of small insectrsquo the manager of the sprawling forty-acre Ghyabaree tea es-tate sprayed his tea saplings with titapani Assamese for a bitter and pungent concoction drawn from the neem tree (Azadirachta indica) He reported that the measure though unsuccessful at the time had wide local acceptance as an insecticide and was thought to be an effective remedy against tea pests69 Pest

63 Ibid p 4564 Ibid pp 40ndash4265 Ibid pp 50ndash5266 lsquoDaku A Little Boy from an Assam Tea Gardenrsquo Lady B Scott Papers Box II Assam

19171926 Given by GP Stewart Center for South Asian Studies Cambridge University Cambridge

67 The Tea Cyclopaedia p 4368 The Indian Plantersrsquo Gazette and Sporting News 25 Aug 1885 p 182 Asian and African

Studies Microfilm Series MFMMC1159 British Library London69 Letter to the Editor The Indian Plantersrsquo Gazette and Sporting News 21 Sept 1886 Asian

and African Studies British Library London





identification was a complex process and local names and signifiers found their way in the plantation vocabulary of nineteenth century Assam Commenting on the tea grub that left damaged stems and limbs with a pale brown appear-ance one planter records that the Assamese called it lsquoBatea Banda Pukrsquo or the insect that made its own house or cocoon70 Planters were periodically compelled to consult with lower-level functionaries especially Bengali and Assamese clerks for suggestions and advice In the deeply entrenched and clearly defined hierarchies of power in the plantations such exchanges com-plicated the relationship between patron and client master and servant Harold Maxwell Lefroy appointed Imperial Entomologist of India in 1905 was not mistaken when he reportedly claimed that lsquomuch may be learnt from enquiries pursued by the Mamlatdar or Tahsildar (district revenue collectors) and espe-cially in regard to the attitude of the cultivator towards his pestsrsquo71 Indigenous formulas of control were often strikingly innovative and managed to check insect growth PRH Longley reminisced how his lsquonative clerkrsquo engineered a clever trick to kill ghundi pokas (green beetles) in the estate rice-fields It seems his method of deploying dead frogs on stakes attractive as diet but fatal when consumed worked beautifully in curbing the menace72 The case of the ghundi beetle though a paddy bug is interesting and relevant to our story Despite being a local staple the emergence of rice cultivation in and around the tea plantations had to do with significant managerial manipulation Dotting estate peripheries and often found alongside labour housing areas paddy cul-tivation was encouraged by planters as a cheap food source and was viewed as an economic sop to enlist new and contract-expired labour73 Its effects on the plantation world were however not unmixed As mentioned inquiries revealed that the wet-rice ecosystem led to the rise of malarial anopheles mosquitoes that adversely affected worker health in the estates74 The rise of rice pests only compounded planter problems in dealing with this scourge75

70 Lady B Scott Papers Box II p 5571 Quoted in JFM Clark Bugs and the Victorians pp 187ndash21572 Longley writes lsquoI can only advance the hypothesis that the carnivorous diet though tasty is

poison to the ghundi beetlersquo in PRH Longley Tea Planter Sahib The Life and Adventures of a Tea Planter in North East India (Auckland Tonson Publishing House 1969) p 108 The depredations of the red slug and the looper caterpillar are also mentioned

73 See Muhammad Abu B Siddique Evolution of Land Grants and Labour Policy of Government Rana P Behal lsquoPower Structure Discipline and Labour in Assam Tea Plantationsrsquo and Arupjyoti Saikia Forests and Ecological History of Assam for an assessment of this history Peal too comments on the green beetle in his article on the tea mosquito bug and writes that lsquoI have searched in vain for cures and the natives say that when lsquoGandhirsquo (the rice bug) attacks the paddy nothing can save the croprsquo in SE Peal lsquoThe Tea Bug of Assamrsquo p 130

74 See footnote 18 above 75 For the paddy bug see department of Agriculture Eastern Bengal and Assam Bulletin No

17 IORV25500229 Asian and African Studies British Library London



ARNAB DEY558


Interestingly the history of tea pest management in the Assam gardens also unearths subtle but little examined transcripts of labour resistance While more visible forms of labour protests such as physical violence and desertions have been well documented76 opposition often came in unexpected ways In one such instance planters had considerable difficulty using bone dust as tea fer-tiliser due to the caste regulations of workers Animal ash being lsquopollutingrsquo to many labourers struck work demanding alternative measures This fertiliser initiative succeeded only after planters hired lsquocoolies of low castersquo whose so-cial position permitted its use77

Natural calamities added yet another challenge to the functioning of these plantations Part of an active seismic zone earthquakes have been common in Assam since recorded history began The tremor of 12 June 1897 was par-ticularly devastating and impacted plantation life and landscape significantly WM Fraser recalled that the land heaved throwing everyone off balance It proved to be a terrifying experience for labourers and planting work effectively ceased in its aftermath78 The official report on the earthquake detailed huge storm surges and damaged crops livestock roads and property79 Almost five decades later the earthquake of 15 August 1950 caused widespread mayhem in the tea districts of Doom Dooma Panitola Dibrugarh and North Lakhimpur It led to landslides and an unprecedented damming up in higher reaches of the Dehing and Subansiri rivers These were eventually breached leading to wide-spread flooding damage to crops and plantations and flotsam of felled forest trees that impeded transport and inland waterways80 Wildfires were equally destructive On the morning of 7 March 1867 storms fanned an uncontrollable fire that burnt down a tea house and killed another labourer who attempted to douse it81 Many years later a virulent influenza epidemic in 1918 was reported to have alone caused a reduction of crops by half-a-million pounds82

Consider the exasperation of a planter that effectively sums up the vexed relationship between economy and ecology in these plantations

Donrsquot tell me about the benevolent order of Nature hellip here I am to be sacked because rain fell for three weeks out of every four and kept the thermometer at 68 hellip the wisdom of turning managers out because the meteorology of the

76 See Rana Pratap Behal lsquoForms of Labour Protests in the Assam Valley Tea Plantationsrsquo77 The Indian Tea Gazette reprinted in The Tea Cyclopaedia Articles on Tea Tea Science

Blights Soils and Manures Cultivation Buildings Manufacture Etc With Tea Statistics p 44

78 WM Fraser The Recollections of a Tea Planter (London Tea and Rubber Mail 1935) p 6879 See Report on the Earthquake of the 12th June 1897 No 5409GA4282 ASA Guwahati

India80 See Antrobus A History of the Assam Company pp 238ndash981 Orunodoi March 1867 34 in Arupjyoti Saikia re-edited Orunodoi Collected Essays

1855ndash1868 [in Assamese] (Nagaon Krantikaal Prakashan 2002) p 440 translation mine Originally published by the Sibsagar Mission Press Sibsagar Assam

82 Antrobus A History of the Assam Company p 201





province has been unfavourable to the anticipated growth of tea leaf is perhaps one of those things which my grandmother calls lsquoa curious non sequiturrsquo83

BEYOND PESTS IDEOLOGY IMPERFECTION AND THE UNKNOWN

In addition to pests and weather fluctuations the Assam plantations were pe-riodically constrained by speculation ideological differences mistrust flawed techniques and sheer ignorance and human conjecture The first four decades of the enterprise especially bear out the effects of these factors in tea cultiva-tion and manufacture

The early functioning of the Assam Company is a case in point Formally launched in February 1839 with a nominal capital of pound500000 the Assam Company remained the sole player in Assam tea manufacture till 1859 A joint stock holding with two boards of directors one in London and the other in Calcutta it took over more than two-thirds of the governmental tea stations with the sole purpose of stymying rival competition in Assam84 Despite the initial euphoria around the discovery of a Chinese alternative in eastern India the two boards were riven with suspicion disagreements and mistrust about each otherrsquos style of operations85 The London group of directors controlled the financial dealings of the company to a great extent and was therefore eager to have a greater say in its everyday functioning The ground realities were however quite different

The Calcutta entrepreneurs of the Assam Company had acquired a reputa-tion for sidestepping orders from home merchants Seen as lsquointerlopersrsquo these maverick Europeans (many of them India-born) were viewed as incorrigibly extravagant and thoroughly bankrupt in morals and character86 The financial and administrative dealings of its Calcutta field personnel aided in strengthen-ing these stereotypes Even before its legal Act of Incorporation in 1845 the Assam Company had invested vast sums of money in acquiring land men and property Indeed the sole rationale seemed to have been clearing up as much land as possible around the tea plants growing wild in Assam In a bid to outdo competitors it had taken up thousands of acres of land without considering its

83 The Indian Plantersrsquo Gazette and Sporting News 24 Nov 1885 Asian and African Studies British Library London

84 For the lsquoofficialrsquo history see Antrobus A History of the Assam Company85 For details see Kalyan K Sircar lsquoA Tale of Two Boards Some Early Management Problems

of Assam Company Limited 1839ndash1864rsquo Economic and Political Weekly 21(1011) (March 1986) 453ndash459

86 The Calcutta Review of March 1848 was scathing in its critique of the degenerate Calcutta businessmen lsquopublic confidence in Britain is destroyed The commercial morality of Calcutta is byword in every chamber of commerce in Europe hellip the character of Britain as a mercantile nation has been sullied and the name of Christian has been dishonouredrsquo cited in Sircar lsquoA Tale of Two Boardsrsquo p 458



ARNAB DEY560


suitability for tea production and profit By one estimate the Company had spent more than 149000 rupees by the end of 183987 But the essential bone of contention between the London and Calcutta boards was neither wholly financial nor unthinkingly moral It had to with ideological differences about the methods of tea planting and appointment of plantation personnel in Assam

The London directors wanted men of integrity and character at the helm of affairs in India whereas the Calcutta establishment repeatedly insisted on managers with agrarian expertise and practical experience in planting The class and race overtones were of course difficult to miss Walter Prideaux the London director even threatened peers in Calcutta with Company closure if directives from the metropole were not followed88 Despite persistent back-lash from metropolitan circles history shows that Calcutta men (namely Henry Burkingyoung JW Masters Henry Mornay his brother Stephen and George Williamson Jr) steered the company to a gainful turnaround In fact the bal-ance sheets of the company showed scarcely any profit until 185289 By another estimate crop yields in 1845 were short of the projected total by almost 55000 pounds90 Though persistent drought was blamed for the latter superintendent Masters had pointed out as early as 1841 that overpicking which reduced successive crop output was a regular problem in Assam91 Theoretical specu-lation also added to the problem during the early days Several tea planting techniques imported wholesale from the Chinese proved unsuitable and even disastrous for Assam tea during this period Harvesting the first flush of the season was one such faulty method in wide use in the Assam Company gar-dens The China tea plant Thea bohea initially transplanted to Assam as a test case also attracted a great deal of controversy In an interesting semantic twist Dr J Berry White of the Bengal Medical Service later called bohea a lsquomiser-able pestrsquo a disastrous mistake that sired an unwanted hybrid and eclipsed the native Assam plantrsquos true potential in the international market92 In any case the tea season of 1845ndash46 was a washout Under pressure to perform Burkingyoung who had taken over as director of the company in 1841 de-spite protests from London sent deputy secretary Henry Mornay to visit upper Assam93 Though Mornayrsquos 1846 report is unavailable in archival records it

87 Sircar lsquoA Tale of Two Boardsrsquo p 45488 Ibid p 45589 Ibid p 45390 Antrobus A History of the Assam Company p 6391 Ibid p 5092 Quoted in the Journal of the Society of Arts XXXV 19 Nov 1886ndash 11 Nov 1887 (London

George Bell and Sons 1887) p 73693 Antrobus A History of the Assam Company p 75 In factduring 1842 and 1843 the condition

of the tea was so bad that on one occasion out of a shipment of 289 chests the bohea was after much difficulty sold in London for 1frac12 d per lb and the compoi for 3d per lb Although these were the two lowest grades at such prices and in that quantity the loss was disastrousrsquo in Ibid p 65





is widely accepted that his personal tour was a turning point in the fledgling affairs of the company Mornay recorded his utter dismay at the lack of planta-tion knowledge and the haphazard manner in which tea was being plucked in Assam It seems from his account that pruning was yet unknown and all that mattered was random jungle clearing and bushes lsquobutchered with daos and bill-hooks in the process of which the branches of the main frame were split and brokenrsquo94 Mornay asked for an immediate stop to these practices and turned his attention to measures that ensured the successful growth of young saplings The results followed

Burkingyoung favoured regular visits to the plantation sites by his men and Mornayrsquos tour of 1845ndash46 launched this as a feature of the Assam Company in the years to come Much to the chagrin of the London shareholders the Calcutta board continued to champion lsquonativersquo plantation management and agricultural methods George Williamson Jr also embraced this attitude of practical super-intendence Fortunately Williamson Jr had time experience and training on his side He had been a sugar planter in Bihar since 1845 spoke Hindustani and had served in the Assam Company for nine months in 1849 under Stephen Mornay Well versed in the plantation world Williamson Jr highlighted the flaws of blindly adopting Chinese tea tactics in Assam He reiterated Mornayrsquos criticism on over-plucking Williamson Jr insisted that the tea bush should be first allowed to grow for the Assam crop to succeed internationally95 With other breakthroughs in the use of machinery land and labour he slowly turned around the fortunes of the company almost two decades after its start

To be sure profits did not accrue from agrarian innovations alone Harsh working conditions low wages and an even lower tolerance for labour in-transigence ensured that returns were in the companyrsquos favour96 All this notwithstanding the effects of reversing incompatible planting strategies on quality and yields can hardly be overstated Tea production grew by almost fifty per cent between 1847 and 185297 Often the London establishment took credit for these transformations where no recognition was due By this time however relations between the two boards had reached an ideological abyss Burkingyoung and his successor William Roberts promoted a rival venture the Jorehaut Tea Company in 185998 In its turn the Assam Company became an exclusively British firm by an act of the parliament in 1865 The Calcutta board was also abolished the same year The march of lsquoimprovementrsquo was hardly a smooth passage claiming many victims along the way In retrospect

94 Ibid p 7595 Cited in Sirkar lsquoA Tale of Two Boardsrsquo p 45796 For an assessment see Kalyan K Sircar lsquoLabour and Management First Twenty Years of

Assam Company Limited (1839ndash59)rsquo Economic and Political Weekly 21(22) (May 1986) M38-M43

97 Sirkar lsquoA Tale of Two Boardsrsquo p 45698 See HA Antrobus A History of the Jorehaut Tea Company Ltd 1859ndash1946 (London Tea

and Rubber Mail 1947)



ARNAB DEY562


the initial failure of the Assam Company cannot be explained in terms of the difficulty of implementing lsquomodernrsquo entrepreneurial skills in a lsquobackwardrsquo re-gion of empire99 As shown the birth pangs of Assam tea included a clash of ideologies tea knowledge and egos in addition to unfinished struggles over power and authority

Not everything about tea could be perfected by innovations agrarian or otherwise Nor was it a matter of ignorance alone Much was unknown about Assamrsquos topography hydrological patterns and tea-ecology even as lands continued to be parcelled out to prospective speculators and tea companies Consider the case of Messrs Duncan Brothers and Co around the turn of the century Having invested in enormous swathes of wastelands for tea they even-tually discovered that the area was incompatible with planting They petitioned the district administration to relinquish around 798 acres in 1901 and were finally granted the release in April 1902100 The company cited unsuitable soil conditions and unexpected flooding as two primary reasons for abandoning the property101 In their submission Duncan Brothers reported that initial costs had not accounted for extensive drainage works and soil treatment needed for any tea planting to take off Even after six decades of the Assam plantations tea cultivation remained an imperfect science Harold H Mann scientific of-ficer to the ITA reminded planters in 1907 that producing good tea depended on a great variety of minute factors and circumstances some in his control but mostly outside his power and beyond even his knowledge102

CONCLUSION

Tea formed part of the commodity frontier of British India connecting Assam to an ever-expanding network of export-oriented commerce and the political economy of capital103 The land and its brew became famous around markets

99 Sirkar raises but does not elaborate this point in lsquoA Tale of Two Boardsrsquo p 453 100 Letter No Rev8314375 dated 1 Apr 1902 Revenue Files Jorhat District Record Room

Jorhat Assam101 Petition No 1334 dated 26 Aug 1901 Court of the Collector and Deputy Commissioner of

Sibsagar Revenue Files Jorhat District Record Room Archives Jorhat Assam102 Harold H Mann The Factors Which Determine the Quality of Tea Indian Tea Association

Bulletin No 41907 2 MSS EUR F1741515 British Library London He argues lsquoours is a unique industry one in which we are treading untrodden ground and the study of every detail of the growth of the plant will well repay any attention given to it Our knowledge is as yet imperfect beyond measure but the methods which have led us so far will lead us further and I do not think we ought to rest content until we have reached a quality of tea in any place which we are satisfied is incapable of improvementrsquo Ibid p 29

103 Beinart and Hughes discusses lsquocommodity frontiersrsquo in their introduction to Environment and Empire pp 1ndash21 Also see John F Richards The Unending Frontier An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and London University of California Press 2003)





and households in Britain the Continent and eventually in North America Almost synonymously the Assam plantations acquired notoriety for planter tyranny conditions of labour servitude and untamed lsquowildernessrsquo Ideologically speaking it seemed as if the enterprise of transforming the jungle into a space of Edenic order had gone horribly awry 104 For the colonial state however tea was a harbinger of progress and its gift of modernity even if slow and uneven was beyond question For historians of these plantations of course it was a matter of deciding where to look

The natural world and the built environment of these plantations however mainly went unnoticed or were unimportant in these histories Interestingly this capital-intensive enterprise was largely an alien import Besides land all other factors of production (including labour) were brought in from other parts of India or metropolitan Britain By one estimate the total land area under tea in the province around 1901 was close to 338000 acres105 But land was not a benign object nor were ecological elements removed from the history of these plantations This article has shown that even as tea acreage continued to increase the industry produced its own constraints (tea pests being only one of them) and was conditioned by its environment ndash both human and nonhuman The lsquoeconomics of Edenrsquo106 it seems had produced its very own Frankenstein

As planters in Assam began to correspond with peers in Darjeeling Java Ceylon and beyond regarding pests and cures they cringed under the realisa-tion that the monoculture tea ecosystem acted as a beneficial host for insect growth Errant rainfall soil conditions topography and natural calamities also impacted on the functioning of the plantations and affected quality a distinguishing feature of Assamrsquos brew Socio-economic indices of profit and health (whether of tea plants or humans) were of course related Poor sanitary conditions and crowded labour housing meant that mortality rates remained staggeringly high in these plantations They averaged 532 per thousand of adult indentured labour during the thirteen years ending 1899 according to one study107 Malaria alone was responsible for an attack rate of eighty per hundred

104 See Dwarkanath Ganguly Slavery in British Dominion ed Siris Kumar Kunda (Calcutta Jijnasa Publications 1972) Sir JHS Cotton Indian and Home Memories (London T Fisher Unwin 1911) Mrs Emma Williams lsquoLetter regarding abuses on the tea plantations of Assamrsquo IORLPJ6749 March 24 1906 British Library London Report from Aborigines Protection Society on lsquoTreatment of tea labourers in Assamrsquo IORLPJ6193 January 17 1887 Rev C Dowding lsquoLetters and pamphlets on the illegal arrest of run-away tea-garden coolies in Assamrsquo IORLPJ6832 22 Oct 1907 and the numerous House of Commons Parliamentary papers on the topic

105 Cited in Guha Planter Raj to Swaraj 2nd ed p 28 See also his lsquoA Big Push without a Take-Off A Case Study of Assam 1871ndash1901 Indian Economic and Social History Review 5 (1968) 202ndash204

106 This is Draytonrsquos phrase see Naturersquos Government p 80107 Guha Planter Raj to Swaraj 2nd ed p 30



ARNAB DEY564


of the working population in 1920108 Though beyond the purview of the present article I have indicated that structural features of these plantations es-pecially embankment works and paddy cultivation contributed to an increase of malarial anopheles mosquitoes in and around the estates109 Managing the plant and the plantation were two sides of the same coin

The Assam planter is a much caricatured and historically reviled character Hardly the lsquobenevolent paternalistrsquo110 the labour regime of these distant plan-tations gave justifiable cause to the colonial state anti-colonial nationalists and the vernacular press to deride his actions While this facet of the planter is not the focus of this present study I have read him as a multi-dimensional historical figure In the case of Samuel Peal for example we see an astonish-ing variety of temperament ndash scientific artistic and ethnographic Always at the centre of the pest problem planter correspondences and memoirs suggest that empirical observations on the ground were more valuable than the dis-cursive lsquofixesrsquo of scientific manuals handbooks and treatises Though widely circulated and subsequently used by the planting community this expert met-ropolitan knowledge base was created with help from and in association with men on the spot

This article finally reveals that socio-cultural histories and attitudes are embedded in the story of pests in the Assam plantations Planters confronted labour protests when caste lsquoboundariesrsquo were transgressed while using fer-tilisers Sometimes indigenous methods of pest prevention and remedies were listened to and tried Ideologies and personalities clashed as the Assam Company commenced unrivalled in the profitable business of tea often with very limited success and faulty techniques of planting

Human expertise in these plantations during much of this period remained circumscribed by a variety of factors some created but mostly shaped by the plantation culture environment and surroundings Of course the last had not been heard of these pests despite advancements in agro-scientific research and techniques of planting A recent resurgence in tea blights and their growing immunity to methods of control (whether organic or chemical) is a bleak re-minder that history continues to repeat itself in empirersquos gardens111 Despite the triumphalism of progress and profits therefore the ecological imprint of the

108 C Strickland and K L Chowdhury Abridged Report on Malaria in the Assam Tea Gardens p 25

109 See footnote 18 above for an elaboration of this point110 See Rana P Behal lsquoCoolie Drivers or Benevolent Paternalists British Tea Planters in Assam

and the Indenture Labour Systemrsquo Modern Asian Studies 44 (1) Special Issue (2010) 29ndash51

111 See report on lsquoSuper Bugs Threaten to Eat into Vitals of Tea Industryrsquo The Assam Tribune 21 March 2011





Assam tea enterprise shows that it remains a contested legacy of improvement and lsquodevelopmentrsquo112

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Professors Dipesh Chakrabarty and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson for comments and suggestions on a very early version of this article I am grateful to my colleague Fa-ti Fan for providing detailed comments on the revised draft of this paper Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers at Environment and History and espe-cially to Drs Stephen Mosley and Karen Jones for their helpful feedback and patience I am grateful to Andrew Johnson for drawing the map of Assam and to Sarah Johnson for editorial assistance Archival research for this work in Assam was facilitated by the involvement of Shri Jishnu Barua IAS (Jishnuda) My sincere thanks to him Thanks to Professor Arupjyoti Saikia (Arupda) for his support and encouragement Financial support for this project was provided by The Nicholson Center for British Studies University of Chicago and Office of the Dean Harpur College of Arts and Sciences State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton

112 See James C Scottrsquos critique of State-led lsquodevelopmentrsquo schemes and the manipulation of nature knowledge and society among others in Seeing Like a State How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London Yale University Press 1998) especially Chs 1 8 and 9





ARNAB DEY538


the 1824 Burmese war lsquofoundrsquo these plants growing in abundance in the area The then Singpho chief was also reported to have presented Bruce with a large quantity of tea seeds and shrubs Duly apprehensive of their quality and authenticity Bruce forwarded some seeds to David Scott then Agent to the Governor-General of the North East Frontier After Assam formally became part of the British Empire in 1826 Scott dispatched some of these peripatetic seeds to the Chief Secretary of the Government of India (hereafter GOI) G Swinton and to the superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden Nathaniel Wallich It was Scottrsquos successor Captain Francis Jenkins 2 who along with Lieutenant Andrew Charlton of the Assam Light Infantry pressed the colonial government to give institutional shape to these experiments with the Indian tea plant In the run-up to Sino-Anglo rivalries culminating in the Opium War time was of the essence and Governor-General Lord William Bentinck set up a twelve member Tea Committee in 1834 to look into the feasibility of large-scale tea plantations in British India The first joint stock holding the Assam Company comprising factions of the Bengal Tea Association and pri-vate capitalists in London was thereafter formed in 1839 The experimental phase nonetheless lasted until about 1854 when the first respectable quantity over a quarter of a million pounds of Assam tea was successfully auctioned in London The stage was set for the expansion of the tea enterprise and Assamrsquos absorption into the networks of colonial capitalist economy and trade3 Within histories of plant colonialism and imperial botanising4 this represented the triumph of British science and mastery over Assamrsquos allegedly lsquoenchantedrsquo and lsquosavagersquo landscape

But empirersquos garden did not develop in isolation from or independent of its largely unknown and unstable natural setting This article re-examines the relationship between this plantation economy and its built environment during the first seventy years of tea in Assam It does this by analysing the histori-cal role of tea pests5 and climate that bedevilled the tea industry throughout

and Nicholson 1967) and HA Antrobus A History of the Assam Company 1839ndash1953 (Edinburgh T and A Constable Ltd 1957)

2 Colonel Jenkins was in a sense the first British official who proposed the large scale initiation of a plantation economy in Assam using sugarcane mustard mulberry and indigo among others It is recorded that Jenkins had proposed that lsquothe first duty of the Government hellipis to make monopoly impossiblehellipthat the great national tea-trade in Assam (should be) open to all as the indigo trade in Bengalrsquo quoted in HK Barpujari Assam In the Days of the Company 1826ndash1858 (Gauhati Lawyerrsquos Book Stall 1963) p 223

3 See Sharma lsquoBritish science Chinese skill and Assam tea Making empirersquos gardenrsquo Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (2006) 429ndash455

4 For an interesting history on the imperial culture of botany see Londa Schiebinger Plants and Empire Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 2004)

5 The words lsquobugrsquo and lsquoinsectrsquo might now seem interchangeable but this has historically not been the case May R Berenbaum writes lsquoApproximately four centuries after Aristotles Historia Animalium Pliny the Elder offered his interpretation of insect classification in










ARNAB DEY540





















ARNAB DEY542





















ARNAB DEY544



















24 Ibid p 14



ARNAB DEY546







29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS














ARNAB DEY540





















ARNAB DEY542





















ARNAB DEY544



















24 Ibid p 14



ARNAB DEY546







29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
















ARNAB DEY542





















ARNAB DEY544



















24 Ibid p 14



ARNAB DEY546







29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

















ARNAB DEY544



















24 Ibid p 14



ARNAB DEY546







29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


















24 Ibid p 14



ARNAB DEY546







29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS







ARNAB DEY546







29 Ibid p 516





BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS









BUGS IN THE GARDEN










ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS







ARNAB DEY548
















Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS














Francis) 1884



ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS







ARNAB DEY550






















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


















ARNAB DEY552



















Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS













Total Yield(in lbs)




272330332437

1257689943841413074115

11317813

-338097-149012-629360

-1013008

-261-328

-1699-821


314338

280594012854864

-268175-309885

-872-235

1887 Lakhimpur 487 13011899 -383892 -287

1888 Cachar 319 15 477 096 -1079202 -652


302340

920833521595

-10317-241449

-1008-642

1890 KamrupDarrang

194467

11520868433809

-11641-12107

-100-014

1891 KamrupNowgong

209310

10193783375417

-132708-447960

-1152-1172


310463168296358475

1650644418649385

7693843209496

1809455715567207

-3287107-1310052-249994-165921

-2370039-412119

-1666-656

-2452-491

-1158-258


339194465

18348061776495

17431270

-917495-158337

-1381526

-476-1694-734

1895 KamrupDarrang

136455

66032811036662

-116167-1537808

-1496-1223




ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS







ARNAB DEY554



















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

















ARNAB DEY556






















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

















ARNAB DEY558



























ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS




















ARNAB DEY560




















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


















ARNAB DEY562




CONCLUSION



















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

















ARNAB DEY564















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS










ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS





bugs in the garden: tea plantations and environmental ... a quarter of a million pounds, of assam...

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