“Tea” could be considered the national drink of India. Whether it serves as a morning appetizer for some or simply as a snack break, tea is widely consumed across all levels of society. Yet few know the story of the workers who grow this tea and bring it to us. Such an innocuous drink is tainted with the years of forced labor of immigrant women that mainstream forces have attempted to “purify,” and it needs to be viewed from an intersectional feminist perspective. When we talk about women who made “history,” we often talk about upper-caste women. For example, Rani Lakshmi Bai, who fought in a war against the British, or women like Sarojini Naidu, who were involved in drafting the constitution. However, we rarely talk about working class women, such as “tea plantation coolies,” who also had to endure the economic exploitation of the patriarchy. Therefore, uprisings like the Chargola exodus of 1921, led by women of the Adivasi working class, are erased from history in the shadow of the great men of India’s nationalist freedom movement.
A system of exploitation of Adivasi women
One might ask why the 1921 exodus is a “feminist act.” To answer this question, we need to examine more closely how the plantation system affected women. The tea plantation industry in northeastern British India was more than just a business. It was a well-designed system of economic and sexual exploitation of Adivasi tribal women recruited from various parts of undivided India to work on the tea plantations, using various techniques such as false promises, kidnapping or forced marriages. While men were also recruited and economically exploited to work on the tea plantations, the story of these women is characterized by their exploitation for reproductive purposes. This was done to ensure that there was always a stable workforce available on the plantations, which cannot be guaranteed with an exclusively male workforce.
Plantation workers were abused in three ways. Firstly, economically speaking, from the British tea plantation owners for their work in the workplace; secondly, for their domestic work in their houses; and thirdly, sexually by the appointed tea plantation overseers.
Plantation workers were abused in three ways. Firstly, economically speaking, from the British tea plantation owners for their work in the workplace; secondly, for their domestic work in their houses; and thirdly, sexually by the appointed tea plantation overseers. Therefore, these workers faced patriarchal exploitation on all fronts of their lives, while constantly fearing sexual and physical violence at every misstep.
In this context, it is important to revisit the mainstream narrative of the 1921 Chargola exodus. When we hear about this event, the story goes like this: In May 1921, thousands of tea plantation workers in the Surma Valley (present-day Bangladesh) decided to quit their work on the plantations and join the movement after being “inspired” by Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Although this story is not entirely untrue, it is misleading as to the motivation of this exodus. It gives the impression that Adivasi women who actually led this exodus did so because of external inspiration from the leadership of upper-caste urban men, rather than because of the exhaustion of their own patriarchal exploitation, and were therefore deprived of their agency.
As an ultimate measure, protesting tea plantation workers marched to Chandpur railway station on the night of May 20, 1921 to catch trains to their homelands, hurling the slogan “Mulk Chalo”, which literally means “Let us go home”. As workers waited at the Chandpur railway station, desperately trying to quell the protest, the British authorities ordered a brutal police attack that resulted in a bloodbath. For the women who took part in the Chargola exodus, “Mulk Chalo” was not just a slogan of a larger national political movement, but rather a cry of women who could no longer take it and simply wanted to return to their homeland. Her decision to leave her workplace and march to Chandpur railway station to greet returning trains was a feminist act of retreat from an abusive system that commodified her work and sexuality.
History written for people in power
There is a disconnect between the lived reality of protesters on the night of violence in Chandpur and the way history has recorded it. As is often said, history writes the story of the powerful, and these Adivasi women who tried to escape an exploitative system hardly fit in. The use of violence in Chandpur against “poor workers” was seen by the political leaders of the time as a way to challenge the “civilized” image of British rule. On the other hand, the leadership elite was also threatened by the fearless workers who were ready to leave the system that exploited them. On this day the system was run by British plantation owners, but tomorrow it could also be directed against Indian landowners and factory owners – throwing power out of balance. By situating these individual, gendered acts of protest within the larger “national” struggle, they sought to maintain the existing social order, as poor women acknowledging lower-caste motivations for protest would raise questions about the larger Indian class and gender inequalities.
This is precisely why we should look at the local traditions and folk literature produced by the women who were actually part of this abusive system. Unlike popular history books that tell stories about those in power, these are tools for understanding the history of those who have been silenced under the guise of “larger national interests.” Even today, in the tea plantations of Assam, we hear about Mangri Orang, also known as “Malati Mem”. She was an Adivasi woman and became the first female martyr of the anti-colonial struggle in Assam, killed during the violence in 1921. However, her name never appears in the popular sources of the history of India’s freedom struggle, which still gives some honor (albeit occasionally) to upper-caste women who took part in the freedom struggle. This is because Mangri Orang was a woman on the wrong side of the caste and class hierarchy and her feminism was not about well-articulated debates but rather physical acts of rebellion.
We must acknowledge that the “nationalist” movement often suppressed subaltern voices to maintain a “united front,” leading to the erasure of some of them, and it is our responsibility to find them and include them in the larger Indian feminist story. Those who consciously seek to go beyond popular history and truly understand the feminist history of the Northeast rely on such oral histories and folklore. Her work shows that Adivasi plantation workers were considered powerless and “primitive” and therefore “amenable” to exploitation. Adivasi women’s act of leaving the plantation system that claims a right to their labor and bodies is a choice that the system does not otherwise offer, and therefore a powerful feminist expression, perhaps different from the upper-caste feminist notion of feminism to which we are more accustomed. To understand the history of the Indian feminist movement as a whole, it is important to understand its history and struggles. Otherwise, our feminism is exclusive and limited to the experiences of a select few upper-caste women.
Incorporating subaltern feminist history into the mainstream idea of Indian feminism is also important because history is not only about the past but also actively shapes the present. Even today, women workers on the tea plantations of Assam continue to fight for their dignity, fair wages and protection from violence. In this context, incidents like the Chargola Exodus of 1921 are important to remind us that this is a centuries-old struggle (whether against British or Indian owners), and we owe it to them to tell this story not as a footnote to a larger freedom movement, but as a headline in the history of Indian feminism.