MATCHBOX

Andolan

Our Barbari is a small town with a big population. Over the years, it has grown into a commercial hub of the kind that dots most of mofussil Assam, intricately linked to the larger market but little known outside of its own district. The reasons why Barbari developed its commercial nature are many, but the most important is the small tea garden right outside our town. Or to put it more accurately, our town grew just outside this garden, Kalguri, which is the original name of the area that was taken over by the British for the tea plantation.

     On the infrequent evenings that he sat with us around the winter fire, or stretched out in the courtyard on the camp bed while us kids took turns fanning him as everyone sweated it out in the summer, my father would tell us tales about Barbari, Kalguri, and all the people that lived here. To our young minds, he was the custodian of the town’s living history, having been among its founders, and now its elder and community leader. It was probably from these tales that I developed my interest in studying history as I pieced together the chronicles of Kalguri and the tales of Barbari. Deuta told us that until the mid-1900s, there were only a handful of educated middle-class Axamiyā people employed by the British owners to work as babus in the plantation offices. He was one of them. The rest of the middle- and lower-rung white-collar employees were almost entirely brought in from neighbouring East Bengal. The upper-rung—the management—was primarily white. The Bengali babus were familiar with the colonial administrative machinery, having been in the system longer than us. When Assam became a part of the British Raj a century after the rest of India, their job market expanded. The perks of migrating to an unknown land to live among us—the savage lot—who spoke a corrupted version of their own superior language included spacious living quarters and a not-so meagre salary. So they came, the prospective babus, to the many tea plantations of Assam and lived in these quarters for generations as the jobs rolled down from father to son.

     ‘That Bolen, he sat in the same chair that his father’s backside had warmed for twenty years. And now there’s Bolen’s son. Three generations have farted in that chair, maybe we’ll match their record!’ Deuta had laughed his deep-throated, tobacco-infused laugh when his own son, my brother Akhyay da, joined the estate as a clerk.

     For Deuta, the annals of Barbari and Kalguri were his history, and his history became ours, even if we inherited it in different ways, my brothers and I. Kalguri, like all tea gardens, was a fortress in itself, and like every fortress, had its own rings of security. On the outermost fringes were the labour lines where the expendable workers were housed in shanties. The clerical and administrative staff—the babus—lived in sturdy, well-maintained quarters among the precious, picturesque tea bushes. And at the centre of it all was the management, entirely white, though towards the end of British rule, a little brown also entered the mix. The most privileged of the lot, the rich white owners, of course, lived among their own kind, in their faraway countries. The tiny sliver of the vast profits that these owners invested in our parts went into ensuring tight security and isolation from the outside world for the white managers, as well as for the expensive factory equipment and priceless tea. Barbed wires and guarded, forbidding gates sealed off the money-making machines and mechanisms from the world outside that was inhabited by the teeming natives whom they both loathed and feared, as all oppressors loathe and fear those whom they oppress.

     Within a couple of decades after India’s independence, the white managers were gradually replaced by ones with brown skin, but the tea estate remained a fortress, largely cut off from the real world. This isolation and insularity became a habit of those who lived within its limits.

     ‘It could have become our life too,’ Deuta would say, and sometimes take us to see the old house: the mud and bamboo hut he built with his own two hands in Nepali Basti, a 31-acre stretch of wasteland that he reclaimed and turned into his private botanical garden, planting any and every fruit and flowering tree he could collect. He had moved out of the tea estate and into this hut so he could dedicate more time and energy to growing his landholdings and adding to his labour force of agriculturalists. Then, he transported brick and mortar all the way from Guwahati to build the sprawling house where he brought Ma as a new bride and in which my brothers and I were born.

‘I wanted for you to grow up in society, among our people,’ Deuta told us. And because there weren’t enough of ‘our’ people—Axamiyā-speaking caste Hindus—he convinced people from his native village to come and settle in the vast tracts of uncultivated lands lying waste around the town. So busy were they building homesteads and cultivating their huge farms, that my parents and their kin hardly ever heard the murmurs of discontent that were growing louder in the centers of power. For not long after Assam joined the independent union of Indian states, political turmoil had begun spreading through our land. The people were angry because the promises of equal respect, political dignity, and equitable rights had been made when the new nation state was being constructed, but just a few years down the line, these were revealed to have been reserved for the people of the heartlands, while the peripheral people like those of us in Assam were alienated and exploited.

     This turmoil wasn’t discussed in our home while we were growing up—it didn’t really create any ripples in our self-sufficient, self-contented community—and what I came to know of it, I learned only after I had finished school and left Barbari. When I did, I also realized that Barbari had remained similarly unperturbed by the anti-colonial andolans and communist peasant rebellions that had raged across India earlier and eventually reached Assam. Through it all, my parents had clung on to the life of domestic ease and social influence they had built for themselves in Barbari. They refused to look beyond their immediate world and kept their focus on ensuring that they moved up in life as much as they could without inviting trouble.

     When we were growing up, we sometimes heard murmurs of malcontent from other places of more significance, about how our people had never really won freedom and had merely been handed over by the colonial British overlords to our Indian oppressors. We weren’t much bothered, though, because we didn’t feel oppressed—our days were carefree enough and spent swimming in the Krishnai river, fishing in its waters, climbing trees, jumping on haystacks and riding the elephants my father owned. It was fun to speak the language of the mahouts—aget, boit—and watch the elephants obey. No oppressor bothered us, brown or white. Now that the British Raj was over, our school textbooks only identified those with white skin as oppressors. The manager and a couple of senior staff at Kalguri were still British—sometimes American—but they rarely emerged from their sprawling bungalows and no one we knew seemed to mind them. The only time we saw them was when they came into town to make guest appearances for the community during Bihu and Puja celebrations. One year, my eldest brother, Rames da, went up to the manager, Johnny sahib, and shook his hand on a dare when the manager was being led out of the Bihu pandal by our father. Rames da did not wash his right hand for a week after, and even ate his meals with his left hand. That was the closest any of us children had gotten to any white man, and Rames da was our hero for years after.

     The rest of us only got to watch from a distance, surreptitiously, as though looking boldly, directly, was somehow transgressive. Sometimes, we would stealthily peek in through the hedges around the manager’s bungalow while making our way back home after plucking tea flowers for our cook so that she could make us fritters that tasted like fried eggs. The peepholes in the thick hedges would give us fragments with which our young minds put together a dreamlike montage: a deep blue swimming pool quietly shimmering in the evening light, or a tennis court waiting for the floodlights to be turned on, before the white masters and the occasional brown sahib and memsahib in tight white shorts and skirts came out to swim and play or relax after a long day at work—‘Lord, what monstrous work!’ a student leader would say sarcastically when I joined college, ‘Dealing with incompetent natives in the offices and drunk savages on the plantation. And oh, the heat and the damp!’

     Deuta caught us snooping one day. He made us run back home alongside his bicycle, our ears still red and ringing from how hard he had pulled them.

Excerpted with permission from The Women Who Would Not Die by Uddipana Goswami (Speaking Tiger, 2024)