 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . మార్మా సిప్ మార్ బండిం ముల్ సిివాయ్వాయాయా ములి బిటర్వా మార్గాయినతి. మార్గాయాయాయాయా కంరిఋరనం మార్కక. ఆరోత్రిదాండ్ స్నేనే సింన్వర్స్త్, సింన్మాఇీ క్క్ింనెట్రగాన్కార్సన్ర్శంగార్తూట్నో ఆ఼ెలి స్టికిహంద్రడిచికేసంగా. నికిత్విలించినించించినికించెనించిక్సి నినిటికేలుంపనికిటనంచిటి. మత౟ాట్యాదాపచి సీనైతెచోపక్రడల్ంపని. కంవట్విలు. me know, so in areas, like New York, it is very good it is much better yeah, its almost been normal for a few days but because of masking rules have i think been enforced again since yesterday and qual cuta? we are oblivious we are not masking ourselves so waiting for the third way to come anytime it's going to hit us we are having conflicting predictions some people say that it's going to be a furious and terrible wave but there are others who are saying that i mean you don't have to feel panicked don't panic as usual don't panic and then die yeah it is all we can do is be as careful as possible right yeah sure yeah so i feel better after being vaccinated you know i got both the vaccines so until then i was extremely careful i really went out yeah but is it phizer or what kind of vaccine i got moderna yeah i decided you know after all these technical things who knows right so i was going to get whatever is available that's the best thing so you surrender okay so much you can do from google as for more experts like us you know right right i guess joy it may be ready to start i don't know it it's not yeah yes yes almost yes okay okay just now let me check first all this in nabankur yes i did um i'm a rest assured on course name uh nice sir to join for a night and in sasani anyway so uh no no it's very nice to see you very nice to see you very nice to see you indeed yeah right much okay can you go there sir so i'll actually hosting the program sir oh my god that's very good very good yeah all right sir thank you sir as i said what is it we will begin we will begin and then this is sir got tied up with some meeting he has sent me a message so we can begin no problem so then inaugural address no inaugural i will i will do the beginning and also introduce no problem okay just start okay a hearty good evening to all and warm greetings from kk handic state open university i abhijit bhaiya on behalf of fujya kumar bhaiya school of social sciences of kk handic state open university take immense pleasure in welcoming our esteemed guests and all participants to today's lecture on the topic why history matters being organized by kujya kumar bhaiya school of social sciences of kk handic state open university i'm extremely pleased to announce that on the occasion of today's lecture we have in our midst professor sanjay borua professor of political science at bat college new york as the esteemed speaker and professor samir kumar das professor of political science in university of calcata as a chairperson it is indeed my great honor and privilege to extend a warm welcome to both our esteemed guests may i now request our director sir professor jyotip borua sir director of kujya kumar bhaiya school of social sciences to kindly introduce the esteemed speaker and the chairperson sir over to you thank you abhijit a very good evening to all of you and good morning to sanjay borua sir esteemed speaker for today's lecture professor sanjay borua chairperson of the program professor samir kumar das esteemed guests participants my colleagues and students good evening and welcome i take the pleasure and privilege of welcoming you all to this online lecture series organized by kujya kumar bhaiya school of social sciences krishnakanda hondiko state open university and this is the fourth lecture in the series and the idea of having these lectures entails impression as well as intention of providing a platform to interact with distinguished academics on diverse themes uh we in this he actually planned to host these lectures alternatively for each of the discipline and today's lecture is being hosted by discipline of political science by senseless uh professor kandropakumar das who are supposed to join us but he has sent a message that he got tied up in some meeting so he extends his greetings and also the best wishes for the program as well as greetings to sanjay borua sir and also professor samir kumar das as well i take the honor and privilege of welcoming professor sanjay borua as the invited speaker for this evening in fact the professor sanjay borua is too well known to require an introduction he is one of the most distinguished political scientists and commentators writing about north east india in particular and the political economy nation and nationalism asian borderlands south asian politics in general he is currently a professor and for political studies barred colors new work and he is well known for his books uh india against itself uh then the durable disorder then post frontier blues then uh in the name of nation which is very recent besides the other volumes like beyond counter intergency and ethno nationalism in india so i take the honor and privilege of welcoming user for this lecture i also am very happy and pleased to welcome professor samir kumar das to chair today's lecture who too is one of the highly regarded and very imminent political scientist making significant contributions in understanding the issues of north east region of india he is a professor of political science in university of kalkata and he was also the vice chancellor of north bangal university he specializes in and writes on issues of ethnicity identity security migration rights and justice and his important contributions include migrations identities democratic practices published in 2018 india and india democracy and violence in 2015 governing india's north east asian insurgency development and culture of peace in 2013 conflict and peace in india's north east role of civil society in 2006 and blisters on their feet the tales of internally displaced person in india's north east which came in 2008 among many other writings so without further ado may i request professor samir kumar das to kindly chair the event and then take the proceedings forward thank you thanks jojib welcome everybody it's really my honor that i will be able to chair this session really professor sanjib budwar doesn't need an introduction when i first read his book which came out from the oxford university press that was his first book on the north east everyone must have read it it was quite surprised i didn't know him subsequently i came to know him and i have read whatever writings i come across and i had the great opportunity of conversing with him discussing his book in the name of the nation which came out very recently i don't know whether the indian edition has come out it came out from stanford university press if the indian edition is expected to come out anytime soon i don't want to anticipate the course of the discussion but the title is very significant why history matters because for students of politics as we have been exchanging emails for the last few days sanjib budwar has actually said that for students of political science history doesn't matter because for us history begins from 1950 the day the constitution came into force i would rather take it back to 15th of august 1947 because that's what we were told during the undergraduate days that history ends on 15th of august 1947 and politics begins since then i am reminded of one of karl marx's famous statements thus there was history there is no more i think that politics which is not informed by history remains perpetually inadequate and that's the reason why history history matters whether we like it or not but it's important for us to understand why history matters how it matters and when does it matter does it matter at all does it matter on itself or we make it matter by way of writing it so history writing plays a very important role and i am delighted to note that it's only the recent years i don't know whether sanjib budwar will agree with me that historiography of the northeast catches the attention of many scholars it's only very recently i have come across for instance one of one of the essays which came out very recently in one of the sage journals written by a meso scholar besides these there are also other publications as well but i think that the that how is history to be understood becomes a methodological challenge i i don't want to stand between sanjib between the introduction and sanjib thus lecture so without further ado may i now request professor sanjib budwar to make his presentation thank you thank you and good evening to everybody and of course as you know it's early morning for me only nine o'clock first i want to express my profound thanks to everybody at the krishna kandakhandi co estate open university for this invitation i'm delighted to be here i'm always very happy to be in our sam and i'm only regret that this is not in person and zoom instead but thank you and thank you dean jojib budwar esteemed colleagues and chairperson for miras and i owe a particular gratitude and almost an apology to sanjib das because when he agreed to be a discussant i'm sure he expected there will be a paper and there isn't and i will and but he gave you a wonderful introduction to why i what i'm going to talk about and why yet though let me sort of start a little bit with the invitation i got from jojib so when we talked i soon understood realize that it'll be people from different disciplines and then i began thinking that rather than making a very academic topic i thought i should do something which will be of interest to a general audience there in our home right and i thought i should do something and since i have written about a home that wasn't a problem so i thought asam history will interest everybody and as mirdas said very wonderfully it was really till recently political scientists really did not get interested in in history very much and in my case what i've been reflecting actually in fact i have done all this over the last couple of months after i agreed to speak that almost moment i began writing about a home northeast i began reading history so a lot of it so in a way i'm reflecting on why that is the case and so i wouldn't thanks to somebody that i want him to get into further why political scientists weren't doing it before so but doesn't mean that i have become a historian but it's only that i read more history right so i will basically what i'll do today is is say you know talk about a few things uh and i'll give you a more sense of what i've been reading and how do i read them right and since in fact just about i'll share my screen soon and you'd noticed just about an hour ago i added an added a subtitle to the to the talk and so you will see now that it is a very particular kind of history i'll be talking about so here so here is my screen can you see it yes sir yeah wonderful so why history matches uh tea asam and the world so and sanjitha just a minute is it possible to expand it and make a full screen presentation of the slide full screen presentation of the slide yes sir at the top there is a slide show uh huh and then click there yes but then this okay all right click there and then go to the uh play from the start you know if you play from the start i'll do yeah slide so yes play from the start okay that's good yeah all right thank you thank you jojiborah knows that i need technical help on such matters thank you so as you can see now i have a subtitle and now let me go to the next slide where i talk about how i think about history and i'm going to start with a quotation that many of you would know from e h car and this is a book many of us have read and in fact thanks to the internet i was able to get the edition which is really um uh probably the edition i read three years ago right the cover of the edition so i think i'm here is a quotation that would help facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean and what historian catches will depend partly on chance but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to tackle chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use tackle of course is a little old-fashioned word i think in i can give you the asimis translation is because it's probably we'll call it mass more hosuli right it will be the right word in this context so in what tackle he chooses to use these two factors being of course determined by the kind of fish we wish to catch right so um and it would be interesting to many of you that e h car who wrote this very influential book himself was not a historian he actually that he didn't have a phd nor did he really teach history he was working in the foreign service in the british foreign service and then got interested in all that mainly in the russia and that's how basically he wrote this influential book and developed a lifelong interest in history so and then here i'm adding another person sorry uh uh the facts really do not speak for themselves so i don't want to pretend that you know i'm trying to be objective and i think i'm glad many historians now accept this right so his facts really don't speak for themselves it historians speak for them speaks on that behalf and they fashion the fragments of the past into a whole so obviously in a very preliminary way i'm going to i'm going to fashion the fragment of the past into a whole in a in a somewhat tentative manner and i hope you would you would be interested so and then i'm going to switch to a slide mainly because i approach politics history in a particular way and this nigerian novelist um sorry uh i think here i like his i like his performance a lot here there's a great proverb that until lions have their historians the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter uh that didn't come too much later once i realized that i had to be a writer i had to be that historian of course chin washibe was no historian he was a novelist but you know what he means historian in a more metaphorical sense is not one person job but it's something all of us have to do right so that um i think it's quite interesting his his we are putting it and very very obviously he's a very creative writer and many of you probably know his uh book uh uh book his book things fall apart right for which is very well known so that gives you a sense of sort of what sort of history interests me and why right in a way that i have a political take if you like on on on on on on the past so now uh here is my take on the sinkholes all of us know sinkholes were heavily involved in the quote and quote british discovery of tea but i more and more i'm convinced that we should think of them in the asams original tea drinkers east india company considered partnering with sinkholes ships for harvesting tea from the forest tea collected from the wild it was thought could be a potential supplement to the tea produced in the fledgling new plantations that idea was on for quite a while the partnership idea however was abundant but a distinction between tea forest in tea gardens had an enduring effect on the vocabulary of tea that is why tea plantations asama are still called tea gardens in english and sabagi sign essence which is of course often often surprises people by the way you may not realize we get used to it when people people visit abroad i know people are always surprised why do we call them garden they are really the plantations right and plantations really evoke slavery capitalism whereas garden doesn't and if you read about the historically you know it is not accidental right there's a reason why and so this is partly interesting because it is not obvious at all at the beginning whether they will really produce the plantations themselves because it took a while and there was an interesting 10-year period that i'll talk about where things were somewhat unclear so so that's why i think the sinkholes are actually more important than than people often realize in the tea story so here i'm giving us just a sense of of the sinkholes many of you know very few people today but you know that's not really saying very much these categories as you know uh in northeast india changes but nevertheless uh right now i think in the last census i looked up you have five five thousand six hundred in arunachal and two and two thousand three hundred forty two in asam but but most thing for activists i have spoken to say the number is actually much higher and of course they are known most famously as kachin in in berma the number about a million in berma yanmar and about hundred and fifty thousand in china so and what's interesting i actually learned from uh from uh from uh some of you would know uh minakshi war katoki's work she worked on the thangsas in that area around lido margarita and into the changlang district of of arunachal that actually the sinkhole was in fact the language actually was almost like a lingua franka until quite recently for a lot of the lot of the people there so the numbers are actually misleading in that sense not only that a number of place names are originally sinkhole including the famous town of lido lido of course is where the still well road begins so these are sinkhole words i wouldn't have known except for uh for minakshi's a wonderful book what's it called the dancing to the state the ethnic compulsion of being tangsa in in in in asa so uh so there's just a brief account of something but fortunately while we don't know very much about sinkholes in recent years there's been a lot of interest on the birme side and i was very happy to find and read a person called mandi southern an anthropologist who in fact some of you would know a year ago i had invited her to to go hunting uh but about that that time she was just beginning her work and now they say that she has a wonderful book so my next slide i will draw a little bit on her book so uh that's her book uh being and becoming kachin so this is basically for i'm drawing on her book sinkhole elites came in contact with east india company officials regarding their pre-plant even before asam came under british colonial rule that we know right this leads many southern to contemplate this interesting counterfactual scenario so if you look at it from the perspective of early 1820s it's not impossible to imagine the sinkhole elites could have emerged as a new broker in a transpakai tea trade she imagines a politically fluid zone with economic network enabling sinkhole jing pao elites and as you know this word is tricky that's why i mean i just stick into her term obviously sinkhole jing pao so people who study kachin sadhi sinkhole are very aware of the different variations of the term so they use brackets like that sorry hyphenator forms like that and uh jing pao i think is often the language sinkhole is the people but that in and these words really are actually relatively new if you like right so meaning that depends on how the british first began refer to it that's why more sinkhole not jing pao so it's quite arbitrary actually so but i love her counterfactual hypothesis of really thing for brokers and and a broken tea across a landscape dotted with verdant forests of tea bushes stretching from the eastern himalaya all the way to the trading gates of china so i thought and this too so strange to us to think like that but this map will make it clear right as you can see this is really a very close by we're talking about there's a campi sinkhole area and next to it is a kachin area and we are so used to our national borders that we don't think like this and and interestingly by the way that this particular map is from a very recent articles by berenice jing pao reshar called when legions thunder past so this article i think many many of you know probably her work she is very uh uh kind of a new historian but but has a very important book called shadow states india china and the himalas 1910 to 1962 but that book came out a couple of years ago and and and now i think she's getting very interested in the second world war and the patkay and patkay of course all of us in asa noda name patkay but we don't sort of where we thought we'd know it in the context of our homes came across the patkay but we don't think about the patkay enough but if you think about this second world war in a way happened in the patkay right after all the liddo road was built through punks of us right so patkay is extremely important actually and so uh so it's interesting to me that patkay in her account of the second world war acquires more and more importance and this map obviously is a very interesting one right so uh that i think in a way you know in terms of thinking counterfactually i find it interesting and i think it's important to that after all say if you i read recently a martesons new book new new memoir home in the world he has a wonderful chapter where he tries to do everything that well he makes an interesting distinction between globalization and coercive globalization he said he had no doubt that india was a globalized place very open to global ideas but it was nothing inevitable about inevitable about imperialism which he calls coercive globalization right so in a way his examples are after all uh japan globalized uh japan globalized with without imperialism and and were very open to open to um uh to ideas and certainly are somewhat very open to ideas so in a way thinking counterfactually is useful so i find uh mandi sadhan's way of thinking quite interesting right that that the t story could have changed uh very much very much if you think a little counterfactually so i want here to remind you about the important 10 years in the t story right which i really say bruce brothers we all know first observe the use of t in asam as early as 1823 three years before the asam was a british conquest of asam but the recognition of discovery by the company took longer left an andrew charlton who was the main military commander in hodya he identified tea leaves and wrote to his boss francis jenkins about the he just didn't say that he's available he he actually gave in details the techniques that the sink hose and companies use to transform tea leaves into a beverage that part i think we often forget that they were drinking tea they're not just tea in the wilds right so he gave actually details and so that i think in terms of our kind of nature of knowledge as we know we tend to underestimate kind of a knowledge knowledge of people who were looked down upon if you like right so it is important for interest in food to think about not just what they ate but the fact that they had their technology their knowledge they developed to really use that food material right so in that sense it is important to remember that companies drank tea and had a whole way of making tea right so what what of course andrew charlton did uh he sent the seeds and leaves to the newly formed tea committee and which announced in 1834 december that a tea shrub is beyond all doubt indigenous to apurasam right that of course transformed everything so just look at those years there right that's important from my point of view so then the tea committee which they formed recommended that the cultivation and manufacturing of tea should be left to the enterprise of individuals to pursue the the uh business as an objective of speculation so you can almost imagine right it to in fact the whole idea was that let capital come let anybody as a result the fact that tea in the 1980s 60s 70s 80s after expect regulators of all kind all kinds of companies come up right only began with or some company in 1839 jorhat company soon after and lots of companies begin coming up so it was really left to almost kind of a after all the british were not interested in really spending huge amount of money themselves so it was almost opening up making just this land available extremely easily available right and we have to think about that and so that new capital of british capital will come in and and and produce tea in plantations right so this i think will interest you i just go the book from 1839 how the how the discovery was treated right clearly it is hard for us to imagine because we live in a world of nation states but the fact that the whole geography in a geographical imagination was imperial it tells you how it was thought nobody was thinking about assam or sing pose anything like that right but the fact that was happening within the borders of the wide dominion of great brit right so when they in the so that's why underline those those so read carefully and underline the parts can the dormant energy of a country country there is of course brit right so the way they were thinking is very different at that time right it is really british energy british enterprise british effort right the fact that it was an assam only accident right all that disappears so that i think we tend to underestimate so i thought this this particular text captures it and 1839 right very early on really was right so a discovery was made extremely important and look at the way they put it the as if nature on its own planted the shrub in the in their territories right no talk about assam no talk about sing pose but you know nature was been lucky fortunate for to the british uh so now see from mandi sudden point of view who earlier on imagines how much thing changes in 1839 the creation of the asam company in london really change everything from point of view so uh i'm actually finding okay now i can read it yeah uh seem to be uh during the uh sorry i was trying to read the earlier one yeah in 1839 the creation of the asam company in london was soon to prevent the sing pole from becoming gatekeepers or indigenous bridgeheads for the trading of tea across the inland sea of a punching pole space instead many of these early team plantations absorbed sing pole lands while at the same time excluding sing pole communities from them other than as kooli labor so if you think about the tea gardens even now go to the area around you know lido tinsukia right that's basically the area that she's talking about right so but it was not inevitable 10 years earlier right then there's earlier was not a plantation thing so now moving our eyes lenses from the sing pole to the aham king you will see how those few years make a big difference right so my next plot is on the how what was being considered in 1833 and if you remember 1834 was the quote unquote discovery right so 1833 was still a little early during the early years of east india company rule apara sam seemed to be a remote region with little economic potential unlike lower assam that was geographically close to british rule areas of bengal the company showed no interest in bringing apara sam under his direct control thus in 1833 it installed puron dhokhing huh as ruler of apara sam in return for payment of a large annual tribute 1833 now see how quickly thing changes what happens then is in my next slide but land survey soon revealed that the tater is under puron dhokhing huh rule notably the districts of jorhat and kihagvar were highly suitable for producing tea not only where's the soil and weather conditions perfect the location by the brahmaputra river could prove a huge advantage for meeting the transportation needs of such an industry on the advice of monayam dawan the aham king expressed support for the tea enterprise and a willingness to form a partnership but once the potential for tea cultivation in those territories became apparent puron dhokhing huh shown itself came under threat it was ousted in 1836 and its tater is brought under direct british control right so um uh that i think by the way you know much of a lot of this history is well known but in more in another version i have my notes where i i have citations and this and for some of this i cite a johita karma's book empire's garden right so uh just to so next one i like this particular quotation because you'll see while massive things things change massively it seems to me that uh the story of the sing pose don't disappear this is from kalyan sarkar i will appreciate if anybody knows i would love to i think i have seen three important articles by him on tea all in 1986 epw right i don't know where his work before or after so some of you may know of him i'll be you know he seems to be more interested in the business side of things but he also has a has an article on the on the chargola uh thing in in kachar right of the whole huge tea worker strike and tea workers leaving but i don't know his work at all but this is that this article i read but i find is interesting so this is the asam company with a nominal capital of 500 000 for which both money and management expertise were provided by some of the top brains of the city of london and calcutta the asam company was unable to show any true profit until 1852 which of course only a business analyst will will will show that right he looks at their their financial statements sometimes profit could be distributed only out of capital gains made by the company on the sale of land and seeds of course we'll get to the land story they're going to land everything all land was available to them almost right again tea made by their sink post shifts were brought privately by the company and made out to be the products of its own gardens to bolster up its damn torturing image so you see how important how important the sink post were and also how not inevitable was the transition to plant to the plantation was right so in a way they were still getting tea from from the sink post shifts right and then selling it as if it was their own tea yeah so here i move to a political theoretical point right because we all know about the idea of wasteland we don't think enough about it and it's interesting and now wasteland is not the asam specific term so here is a discussion of john lock so i'll go slowly uh but many of you i'm most of you know john lock but the his importance about to the idea of wasteland we don't think about lock provided the definition of waste and wastelands it was formative in the evolution of british political economy which had a direct influence on land revenue and forest settlements of british india while lock criticized the conquest of already inhabited territories this principle did not apply to territories in his settled cultivation and individual property was considered non-existent and land was lying waste quote unquote waste i want you to think about this idea of waste right because after all all sorts of just think about the land use in pre uh pre british asam right so think about the fact that say after all uh say now when you think about things like uh uh reserve forest inner line forest right if you look at the id century conflicts many of them were hunting grounds right in fact the the if you look at important historical work on on on the misos called cookies etc there are lots of names are used but clearly there are sufficient evidence that really the initial attack on tea gardens was because of really uh uh that kind of dispute right their hunting grounds were taken away and think about even the ahomiya ahomkins work right after all not all land was waste after all in scotland or britain not all land is which is not used as wasteland used for woods for all sorts of gardens right but there everything if you're not having your own cultivar field is a wasteland so i would say think about the fact that ahomkins use some of the prahaputra flood plains as palm kitty palm kitty was walked right the meaning that it is not for settlement settlement culture right you use it for part of the year right part of the year and not not not permanent settlement so uh so as a result but in fact i was very struck right the fact that say the area in nonga where no where tejpur tejpur where tejpur universe is located it's called noh palm i would love to see somebody work what is the how does noh palm begin right palm right the same so clearly uh we need to really question the idea of wasteland so going back to the quotation from whitehead uh since wastelands existed in a state of nature where people enjoyed the fruits of the earth in common the inhabitants could not truly claim a property property rights over such territories to the equation between states of nature common land non-settled cultivation and wild wastelands the doctrine of enclosure trumped the rights of pre-existing inhabitants so same logic applies to asan to the takeover of land from native americans in north america to takeover of land in australia right so and wasteland is the concept actually so that that is where i think we tend to underestimate how global the history of tea is so then i have this interesting kind of a take by a historian a fairly recent article where he actually makes a direct connection which i found interesting between united states and asan same period the 1830s saw the rampant primitive accumulation of land in asan by the colonial state corresponding to the period of indian removals in jacksonian america right that period is called after jacksonian america as a period in america it's worst if you like right indians were expelled there you know the the the tear of the trail of tears so pushed to reservations to make the land all available right and then also the period of kind of a white supremacy slavery at its worst so imagine the correspondence of making between asan and and that period of jacksonian america corresponding to the period of indian removals in jacksonian america the east india company embarked on the widespread enclosure of wastelands and jungle and the forcible expulsion and sequestration of indigenous people from the land large source of terrain in aparasam that became came to be converted into plantation acreage and stone for asan the colonial government insisted on creating large plots of plantation lands setting the minimum enclosure at 100 acres so we can see how global the story is right and why why is he using those sequestration after all the inner line pushing the quote unquote primitives back to to to where they belong what really was enormous disruption of of of of of pre-capitalist kind of relationships pre-capitalist modes of living right and so the same logic by which you think land which is not land that is used for modern property is is is is just wasteland so let me sort of shift to some pictures from 90th century deplantations and all of you have to deplantations see how different it looks beginning this is thanks to jojita shalma by the way her her book she got in fact when i reviewed the book i made a special mention of the photographs which you will rarely do because she found this rare collection of 12 photographs of 90th century planet which are amazing right the beginnings of it that they really tell you so much so i thought it'll be nice to see some pictures of what what was happening to so called wastelands right immediately here is see right after all initially tea was going by boat right there are no railways nothing so all the way so you can see the location how aparasam was important your heart etc right right on the brahaputra all the way to kalkata to transportation and later on to tamto to chidagong as well right so and since i mentioned jojita shalma book i thought i should show you were at the cover that which also has another picture of an interesting picture so empires garden uh then here i'm moving to uh to basically think about the global nature of global plantation capitalism or such that even the recruitment of plantation management was global right we don't think like that of that period we think about today's global think of this you'll see right what how global the plantation owner class was and we assumed they were british but it was much more than that and look at this carefully especially the abolishment of slavery and the decline of sugar plantations in the british west indies in the 1830s and 1840s set in motion a chain of migratory movements of planters once slavery is abolished right they are less useful if you like right they need a different kind of managers so also they are so used to slavery so as a result they were looking for jobs what do they do to other parts of the colonial world planters from west indies were employed in natal of course in in south africa and salon some also went to malaya the sugar and coffee estates of province wellesley which in fact i think in the audience we have on hindi the dashkut of malaysia she would know province wellesley i think is the penang area the greater penang area now part of malaysia while the difficulties of coffee in the 50s also caused some of the salon planters to go to malaya when fiji opened up in the 1870s experienced sugar planters from moritius and salon were attracted there when coffee growing in salon suffered a disastrous disease which ruined thousands of acres most of the per planters turned over to tea the few joined the booming tea industry of us all right so global recruitment of the professional class almost like uh late 20th century right but it's equivalent of it if you like right and of course it produces a very different kind of professional class and i thought i'll show you a picture of that white plantation staff and whites and their whites well i think we tend to forget that i think it's important to absorb it what it was like this is certainly a yeah it was it was a picture taking an awesome uh then here i'm quoting from my own book uh i think joidy borough mentioned my my new books uh india ambition actually just come out this is the indian edition um so um so anyway so i'm reading now from the book where i could be a tea planner so tea planner george barker found asam in 1884 to be the last remaining district where any sort of respect is shown for europeans in all other parts of india the black man is as good as the white the fact that he speedily brought home to a newcomer so he continued it is here in asam that nearly all the old rights of servility that were exacted by europeans in the days of the east india company are still in existence if this doesn't make you mad i don't know what would and flourish to the general better feeling among the whole community where no have here no heavy babu swaggers pass with his umbrella up jostling you on the way but with courtly mean on seeing your pony coming along furls up the umbrella steps on the one side and salutes you with a profound salam this is the this is the description of many of our grandfathers or great-grandfathers not only that as some of you know i i my family yours already remember your heart i remember hearing from my father stories about how you always had to get up from your bicycle if there is a white man walking so now how was the story of tea told in in those days in by abroad right so here is an interesting account 50 a jubilee of indian tea was celebrated in the spring and summer of 1887 coinciding precisely with queen victoria's golden jubilee industrially does use 1887 to highlight specifically two key events in um in tea's commercial and imperial history the first moment tea arrived in britain from asa 1837 right and which are probably mostly sing for tea and the first and the first time april 1887 the tea from both india and china surpassed uh the imports from china so you can see what they are after right as clearly competition between these powers you know we are british thinking we're better in the french right we of course now you know who cares for chinese tea they make it in this very old-fashioned way we produce the real modern way right so that is what they've celebrated clearly right so there is important for us to remember that tea was part of the story of the industrial revolution asaam tea so the next one will tell you tea's story plays popular narrative about progress science industry and free trade with an imperial setting most notably it shared many elements with arnold toineby's account of cotton offered in his famous lectures on the industrial revolution published in 1884 tea and cotton revolutions both include the plantation agriculture the substitution of machines for domestic production an assumption that competition rather than regulations and monopoly was a positive force that lowered costs and thus naturally created mass markets this for example was how tea's history was told in the aptly title article revolution and tea which appeared in chamber's journal 1889 and that revolution is mostly about asaam right so just think right so in a way rather than thinking industrial revolution happened in britain one can say asaam was part of the industrial revolution but that is what industrial revolution was it doesn't happen in separate country separately right it is get some places get incorporated in very unfavorable ways into the industrial revolution story so this i'm quoting from my an article i wrote about a few years ago in the volume edited by aamid vasya and yasmin saikya so but it's just sort of how i think about how i bring together in my mind these things where does it leave us capital is globe hopping not globe covering so james Ferguson is his term i'm using meaning capital really hops from place to place wonderful mineral might be made from minerals you go there leave go somewhere else right but doesn't really give you comprehensively does anything so in 1900 look at viceroy kersen to vishra kersen asaam appeared to be an enterprise in a hopeful corner of the british empire amazing to read how optimistic he was about about about that area right he the area meaning apart asaam where tea was happening oil was happening coal was happening in 1900 to viceroy kersen asaam appeared to be an enterprise in a hopeful corner of the british empire because its tea plantations and oil and coal fields were becoming magnets for globe hopping capital the economic landscape of the global south today is dotted with many suspiciously segregated and socially thin enclaves of mineral extraction and plantation for production right what i mean by specially segregated clearly tea happens doesn't mean tea affects asaam's life in a big way right if some few jobs people get as clouds this that right so but transforms asaam but is very segregated right and socially thin meaning it really doesn't penetrate means of benefits of quote unquote modernization development right so so i would say so economic landscape the global asaam is not unique economic landscape of the global south today is dotted with many suspiciously segregated and socially thin enclaves of mineral extraction and plantation for production the actual impact of globe hopping capital on society surrounding these enclaves falls far short of the promises and desires generated by capital captured in aspirational words like development or modernization so i think of these as aspirational words right so i'm more interested in what development does not in these aspirations repeating words like development all the time so this is from a contemporary account right how contemporary economic historians and others the interesting global history looks at colonial air agriculture right where it fits so colonial agriculture was organized on export oriented cash crop production assuring in centuries of plantation economies to export commodity products as a sugar coffee chocolate tea and cotton around the globe the colonial transition to export agriculture involved taking control of people and land in australia africa asia and america and eastern europe plantations typically usurp the majority of arable land we don't tend to think about it very much best land in asaam is still occupied by tea plantations right so that will be the story about gaiana about british right lots of places right so clearly this was an amazing so we think about tea as you know we became indian after independence but this profound fact and when you consider this particular issue is actually a huge issue in some countries right after all south africa when you think of south african zimbabwe why is land an issue exactly for this reason but i guess in places like asaam we have wonderful amnesia right we celebrate the plantations more than anything else so here here is another take on i'm coming to my end of it so i hope we'll have lots of questions so here is basically about the whole legacy of plantation labor if you think of plantation in plantation capitalism in the 90th century globally right interesting we are looking at the legacy and here again i'm quoting a person who studies it called christian bates but the end of the colonial period probably close to four million indians have become a permanent settlers in the colonial societies of fiji moritius and caribbean south in east africa new lives for themselves and integrated into their host societies to a greater or lesser extent outcome should be marked markedly different depending on time and place some some diasporic indian communities became among the most prosperous sections of society as is the case of south africa gaiana or trinidad where they contributed enormously to the building of modern economy however in other places they were significantly marginalized and struggled to establish a foothold outside of the plantation for example in shrillanka asaam and myanmar what a global perspective so what i do in my last slide is to try to draw conclusions from it in fact this is not something i wrote for today i said this to in an interview that ornab hoyka scroll did with me couple of months ago that is what i said the adivasis of asaam are descendants of immigrants who came to asaam as part of the same 19th century migration that took indian laborers to plantations in various parts of british empire including fiji gaiana moritius in south africa the prabhasi bhartya divas now celebrates the indian diaspora and honors descendants of those migrants who rose to become presidents and prime ministers in some of those countries isn't it extraordinary that a descendants of those who were indentured to work in plantations within the borders of india are now reduced to defending their ordinary citizenship rights and seeking access to basic educational job opportunities to improve their life prospects with a borrowed idiom of background awareness and remembered tribalness this i'm referring to the fact that in adivasis politics now the idea that they want cellular recognition because jharkhandi dasa you'll try but when you can't think of it globally it is so amazing absurdity right after all tea workers were not recognized as tribe in 1900s in 1890 1891 19 hour census because they thought was modern workers how can workers be tribals and look at the shift i thought i think i will end up this note and and i hope you'll have comments and questions thank you thank you sanjibha for your wonderful presentation i guess that some questions and some comments have already been posted so may i request vijith to to read them out for us yes definitely maybe that sanjibha you don't have to answer them one after another so you just take a note of these questions and then maybe that you can make one single short kind of response and then we will have another round of questions maybe from the audience yeah so go ahead yes sir we could see a couple of questions being posted in the chat box so i'll read them one by one so the first is the first has been question has been asked by arman hazarika it goes like this in current india there is an attempt to selectively rewrite history refuting the existing history by saying it was written within western meaning british prerogative in this backdrop in today's new india does history really matter has history lost its relevance your comment please sir this is what he asks sir first question and should i go on to the next question yes yes you go ahead please yeah okay so then the next question runs like this this has been asked by silvia shiam sir if you don't mind would you please recommend some good books on history of asamsa this just a query on our part i mean she needs some advice from you sir regarding certain books then another question is from nidushmita dora sir kindly give your view on the colonial hangover on the plantation management personnel in dealing with workers and its impact on the present industrial relations scenario then we have one more question it says also if you could give your opinion on the role of the chinese the tea industry in asam so this is the second part of the same question sir also if you could give your opinion on the role of the chinese the tea industry in asam so these are the questions that we have received so far in the chat box thank you well sanjita just just a second to add to the last question in fact while traveling across different parts of asam particularly the foothills i have heard a story maybe you can scotch it off as a rumor that it's the chinese who actually have taught us the art of preparing tea because in asam tea plants really grew like bushes so those remained unpruned this technology of pruning actually came from china i don't know but this legend circulates widely in asam so i think that it's a very pertinent question and maybe that it's an alternative narrative and the years are very significant because you know that you have to you may link it up with what was happening in china if you considered it to be so thank you it's over to you all right thanks well first i'll let me go from the bottom in fact you know was interesting i will almost hesitate because an extremely interesting new book tea and capitalism andrew lew asam china together i'll strongly recommend this very new book andrew lew called tea and capitalism yeah so you see look i think that essentially the the the story you hear from in the whom it has talked about is not not not off really right british didn't know how to make tea right so as a result initially not only that east india company really did almost like what in today's language you'll call biopiracy they really they stole somebody into into chinese places so initially i think there's enough evidence to show that actually the they stolen things were brought from china is that they didn't be for early on clearly it took a while for them to know that tea is just the same tea which grows there right initially there was a huge effort to bring steel things from there from china and bring it to asam right so and there was a don't forget this bias right wonderful god chinese tea versus this tea growing around right so the fact that there was chinese presence right it was a very historically document right that the people were working in fact think about say even worse like sinabora right in clearly china there's sinna is that is a aparatasam word for china right so clearly and then you know so the fact that then i have also met people actually of chai years ago in the aparatasam area people who are descendants of chai chinese workers so the chinese worker are brought i don't know the period well well enough and especially since there's a new book i would not i would hesitate right because in a way we are fortunate now we can go beyond the guesswork right there's a there's a book by the book not entirely on the subject but you know his argument is a little different but still there's good news is that for those of us who are interested in history because the first question was a losing his relevance look the long term view of it how can it be i mean you know human beings are like this we get involved with something we move on and again we get interested right so i don't think history can be monopolized by some political ideology for a short period of time it looks like that at the moment but i certainly my long term view of history that this too will pass right clearly i would say with the we looked at kind of brilliant historical work that's going on all over the world now rethinking i can't imagine the kind of a you know silly world that you hear in in the name of new history right so good news is that smart people will always keep doing right you can't ignore them right so as a result there'll be good history being written so far from losing relevance i would say i only looking forward to i'm a little concerned about indian historical debates precisely because you know what is history right anybody can write is that all history right clearly this is tricky right after all you know i'm no i'm no i don't hold any card about as a historian after all but nevertheless clearly there are reasons to go to archives you know if you look at say berenice's work that i cited you know her work on on second world war right can you imagine she uses india office library she uses archives in gohati in ornasall in berma and she long think anything and compete with that kind of history no way right so i think so as a result i would say quality history will remain forever and this fashions will political fashions will pass even though i'm a political scientist i really have a very low view of how these political fads and fashions they say they come and go right so so i don't think this is anything long term so i'm not worried about that so you know i think the silvia shams question about recommending books on history as you can see right clearly my recommending books would mean i'm giving you one or two books right it's really not i think it's best not to think like that right because in a way people have to take charge and even ask question like why am i reading what i'm reading right so who job we are wrote about it is interesting right so in a way you have solved some facts but keep keep in mind everybody writes in a point of time with a particular perspective right so it is no don't look for authoritative history right i wouldn't claim any of my claims to be authoritative i'm i'm always happy when i see new people taking over and you know coming up with arguments but it's fun to build on all arguments as a result i would say read from people like who job we are to people like bodhisattva kaur you know who doesn't have a book jojita shalma's book is wonderful right and so that i think recently there's a book on tea by another ghanati originally ghani person on of day on of there's a lovely book called environment and i forget the whole title so there's a lot of good work right so that are coming up so you'll have to figure out what your particular interest is and then look for books some articles not all of them are books so then i would say have i yeah i think i've answered about about the duara's question about colonial hegemony look you know fads and fashions are cute and interesting to look at i love watching at the culture of the tea garden but i've noticed that that is also going right so you know that's interesting about time so i remember i'm old enough to remember the whole tea garden kind of a classy trying to be british kind of a culture of the 1960s 70s that is going now i suppose i mean if you look at tea managers now my theory is as tea managers at one time we are all white europeans then people began to think to manage the unit really public school educated sophisticated indians then he said no no no no you would really anybody can do it and then you have hamias nepalis now everybody's a tea manager i'm very glad about that right so in some ways you see with this mitza created along with this mitzi of this cultures that grow but time again takes care of it right look at the whole small tea farmer small tea phenomena right clearly though they also if we look at recent statistics small tea gardens produce about 35% of asams tea now it's extraordinary so things change right so as i get older i'm even more convinced things change so i do i'm not so i'm optimistic precisely because i guess we often can predict how things change right and i i i see it as a positive thing right we say say many of us are political so midas is political i am struck by the fact that i'm in u.s political science i remember in the 60s 70s not i wasn't here but reading almost the most of american political science resources were spent on understanding soviet union not a single person predicted the collapse of the soviet union it collapsed like a house of cars right nobody predicted it so look i think we do our work because of we are we are interested in ideas we all do our work so history changes that people approach changes so take that kind of a dynamic view right you so be intellectually interested in things and then try to read and see where it leads to right and get in touch with people like me and others who have who have done the walk the same path right and we're always happy to really help young uh help young people with their thinking about these matters okay i will stop here and then take more other quite more is that i have a conversation so we have another couple of questions yes we have a couple of more new questions coming up sir just been posted so the first one is from uh janavi devi she asks the tea sector has been a major player in the economy of india in general and asam in particular but the condition of the tea laborers is still very vulnerable right from the colonial period uh colonial period itself would you like to comment on the reasons behind their vulnerable positions and sir should i move on to the next question sir next question is from unmillan kalita unmillan kalita asks uh she in fact asks two questions first question is apart from the imperial motive to maneuver profit how can one look into the physical slash sexual and other related excess that occurred on the tea laborers in the baghans as most sources of colonial asam are imperial memoirs and anecdotes o bidehi bondu in sameli maim sam is a example is an example and how do you look into assessing such colonial non-capitalist excesses so this these two questions are from unmillan kalita and the previous one was from janavi devi sir okay okay there seems to be another question okay yes just scroll down yeah yeah scrolling down yes sir yes yeah another one uh this is the i think i don't see any name here sir maybe okay i think the question same unmillan kalita yeah maybe sir yeah this is not to justify the british speculation an acquisition of large spots of land in asam for setting up tea gardens but perhaps one uh reason it was more convenient for the british to label these vast land areas as wastelands was because when the colonizers arrived in asam large parts of asam had indeed turned into wastelands due to the chaos of the more than half a century long civil war followed by burmese attacks etc which had highly decimated the asamese population and even previously cultivated areas and villages had turned into forests slash jungles when the british arrived uh answer one another question i see from shardha one other question sir here professor borrower as someone who has worked so extensively on north east india what are your thoughts on the recent issue around the chapter for north east in indian history books and then the rest i think would be suggestions sir silvia asiam has actually thanked you for your suggestions and would keep your words in mind while looking for books to not go for author books and explore more writers she says and then again urmila kalita you skipped my second question i think i wrote out both your questions both the two questions i have already read out okay thank you so it's only to inform sanjivda that those who have asked questions and offered their comments have actually thanked you sir excuse me sir sir urmilan urmilan kalita actually has another question i could see it now right right now sir sir go ahead yes so question two also do you consider there is a lack of native accounts on colonial history of asam is there a need to have a normative assessment of asam's colonial and post-colonial political history pointing out the imperial biases so these are the two questions here's race sir thank you or widget there are some questions in the qna box as well qna box uh we will come to that a little later let's take a pause yeah a little later okay okay yeah look i think that on i think kalita's point on non-capitalist excess i don't think that is non-capitalist i think it is capitalist i think slavery was capitalism american slavery was absolutely the foundation of american capitalism so look i think that's what you get after all if you really have that kind of rights think about the kind of all the laws that british made possible of the because what they could do to a plantation worker clearly albus if you till much in indentured labor if you know indentured labor contract where really that they are contract by which the plantation owner was like your owner right look don't forget the indentured labor shift was from slavery was a very very slight one that's exactly why people who are who are earlier ran slavery ran to place like us off right so as a result the rights were enormous gradual changes happened right but as recently if you read places like people like rana rana behel and and uh prabhu prabhu's work maha prahu maha patra's work as recently as 1935 there were really government investigation that found people's in in in in anti garden workers backs signs of being bitten by the owners right so as a result if you have that kind of arbitrary rights right so clearly these things happen so no reason to glorify it and call it non-capitalist right so it is excess where uh but if you have that sort of you know after all slavery what was slavery right you clearly own the person and if you own the person the person have no rights you right so the whole set of laws that go with it makes it hard to claim it as non-capitalist right i would say like tea and cotton was part of capitalist production so that um then in terms of say uh tea workers condition clearly look i think that you know change is how it happens are really very hard for us to really even prescribe when we probably think as well should not always prescribe i think there are lot to be said for being you know um policy focus etc but it also narrows your vision somewhat it seems to me but just think after all the fact that plantations were clearly plantations where you know we the british call it tea garden we even kept the same word clearly decolonization didn't mean abolition of plantation right so clearly many places it does mean that so if i the quotation i was reading you earlier about how come tea workers i was immigrant workers did better in place like malaysian fiji some of them are workers right so clearly that there was shift from plantation to otherwise a production right otherwise a production so fact that we kept the same same motor production right uh just passed off to indian owners right and and the working condition etc right or you know laws as you know take a long time think about our many of other indian laws right which we now talk about from sedition to this law and that law like colonial laws right so plantation is your classic colonial crop so did really change enough so in some way it is not surprising that the condition will be so miserable right so in a way that if you have began thinking like that let look plantation capitalism cannot go on in colonial postcolonial india that kind of thinking wasn't taking place so clearly i would say for many of you it'd be interesting to think about the postcolonial moment what did we do in in the postcolonial moment what changed what didn't change right and to recognize and it's some way after all it's not surprising that the idea of decolonizing in fact is as alive as ever decolonizing certainly it doesn't mean a political change right lots of things have to be decolonized decolonizing imagination right decolonizing thinking how we think of these issues right so a lot of people are talking about that so in that that's it seems to me i think that's also one of the questions uh do i do i think new kind of accounts are needed yes they're needed but i don't think they come out of some magic some wonderful new book comes out it's not like that it's really about thinking i i find a lot of young people think differently so i would say a lot of different efforts will you know if you remember my chino achebe quotation it is not a historian's job all of us have to be historians if you like right so in a way some novel in a some SMEs may be much more of much more much more impact than some academic history i find newspaper articles in SMEs extremely sophisticated on some of these issues right so don't underestimate intellectual life so don't assume intellectual life happens only in universities in english right so fortunately seems to me so if you remember my last slide i read i quote from komal kumar pati an adibasi poet who is also a scientist so this kind of alternative thinking is happening its point is what do we do with it do we just think on research happens only in universities i'll only read something from Cambridge university press then it wouldn't happen if you assume that human beings really have an urge to think about these things right we are all like ideas you can't be a tea worker and now talking to think about these issues right read you know adibasi poetry right you will see decent all kind of dissenting voices are happening so i'm optimistic in that sense that ideas you can't stop human beings from having new ideas and those ideas are there i think sometimes institutions are not institutions don't do a good job of really encouraging good ideas all right i think i'll stop here i will i don't know i'm a little are there more questions or sir there is one more question that i could see in the question answer box sir one the first question has already been asked in the chat box has already been attended to posted in the chat box so like notice chapter notice india what it thoughts on the recent issue around the chapter for northeast in northeast in indian history books that that was already mentioned the chat box so so that is one and then regarding the other question as for the other question i'll read it also thank you for your wonderful this i could not read out t al i don't know what it is would you agree that the tea industry in the foothills and fertile river valleys of apurasam region was achieved through at times cunning and at times violent at times cunning and at times violent land disposed disposition for the indigenous communities does a sense of historical grievance inform certain assertions from some of these communities so these are the questions that we have here sir well i think i'll let you tie the two questions together you know look i think i'm all for studying areas like northeast in our classic history books but point is how even the category northeast after all right there's a thing my new book is called india and it's northeast i think the 1960s category right so point is that that kind of thinking about how did the category came about right and why did it come about other than important as including something inclusion doesn't you know it is like you include something including on anything right unless you think in interesting ways about it right why was it excluded what does inclusion mean right so what do you do with kind of a histories of people who really didn't have conventional history do you just look for archives and repeat your same cliches that they are primitive people they didn't didn't didn't write books or do you think differently so it seems to me look institutions can go only this far right so i i saw but i'm glad there is a move to include northeast india in in your history but uh but i would say what it would do as i imagine the whole process right discussion politics of the discussion what is you know what is indian history so unfortunately it seems to me that i i'm more you know i almost feel fortunate that the world of ideas is separate from universities right so i find indian intellectual life very alive when i pick up a ahamya newspaper i'm very i'm full i i i enjoyed very much and don't emphasize don't expect too much out of universities you know they do what they do right but ideas are are more important than universities so so i guess i mean that sense um i don't expect too much out of it but i'm glad it's happening so uh and uh just to have faith in ideas you know what happens in look i think i think you know our attitude to ideas are also important right when after all when you grow up we sort of think that you know some fantastic scholar is somewhere else other universities are happening but when i think about this it's just politically realized it is not just a matter of somebody in a fancy place somewhere else uh you know saying important things right all of us have important things to say right and people who really are that important thing say iphone instance say read humain borgo hi quite a bit humain borgo hi was wonderful in terms of understanding how he in fact points out how tea gardens he said in one place that they haven't they haven't spent them penny on building a well well in it in a in a in a village next to a tea garden right you can't get more extreme than that right not to speak of building schools not a penny on building a well right so you know look there are ideas all around i think that we really need to know how to think of them how to absorb them in our thinking right and i think fortunately a lot of new new new academic work really is open to such ideas right that really are not looking for only some standard history some standard archival knowledge right you can really learn from all sorts of sources so i'll i'll encourage you to take that attitude sanjitha if you are not too tired can we take a couple of more questions because maybe that we will there are people who'd be asking all right well i'll be happy i'll be happy to yeah okay yes sir there is one more question here sir professor borgo sir was a sam historically treated as an extension of bingo is the northeast burden for mainland is the northeast a burden for mainland india could you comment on it so this is the most recent question that we have received sir okay i don't think we have any more questions being posted okay you know look i think that uh was it treated as an extension of bengal but clearly there's a period if you like right after but don't underestimate our histories are longer both of bengal or our asaam right so there was a very short period connected to colonialism clearly colonialism was trying to be efficient right when they were ruling asaam as part of bengal after all before 1874 asaam was part of bengal right so the fact that the thought i did not interested in really education in the sense of starting huge university they wanted the few clubs in the gardens in the plantations so as a result they're not huge commitment to spend money on public education etc so the after all the the achievement of deplanation is achievement of colonialism with disasters right think of all the famines that happened right think of almost right as if i think i think amartha san it is new autobug here points out after a battle of plassi was a big famine and just before the british left there was a big famine right so so that don't forget you know all the railway building there's that are connected all of this railway building etc etc are all connected to sort of a that connected to to team the case of asaam then then think about the fact that even after all in terms of your question about bengal and asaam think of the fact that as recently as in 1905 when there was the partition of bengal for you know those six years asaam and bengal was one province it's called east bengal and asaam and why why was it named like that tea plantation lobby right tea plantation lobby insisted that look if you remove the by now asaam tea was getting well known so i wanted to make sure that asaam remained in the name of the province right so look the whole colonial period is awful in all kinds of ways economic cultural right as nothing was done in the name of cultural respect there was no but nobody's concern right so as a result you know was it considered as an extension of bengal yes but only in this british period in the long range there's really not very meaningful in it to do well all that it seems to me right so so that in terms of the is it is it a burden i don't know what to make of that question uh well i think that who's burden after all right look i think that you know don't i don't want to sort of a i don't exaggerate i don't have an exaggerated view of some wonderful well-meaning thinkers waiting in delhi to listen to one day what is good for india right that view of policy i don't buy that policy is that we're all smart people think about what is good that people waiting for good ideas i know that are good ideas nobody's waiting for ideas right so in some ways that is whose burden does that so look you know state is this peculiar institution that we create right all of a peculiar assembly of things come on the particular conditions right so i think whose burden makes it true anthropophobic you know it's somebody's burden i sort of i don't think it's very useful to ask thing like that right but it's certainly true in terms of historically that clearly the fact that a sum was ruled in my new book i talk about it as a colonial frontier province right which is important so as a result immediately after colonial frontier after independence there was a lot of kind of well just think Assam's big boy oil was the asia's almost earliest oil refinery still functioning so colonial period had no problem with oil in Assam but what happens after independence suddenly they get worried about having a refinery in Assam because of china right so clearly the independence early period was dreadful of such insecurity about having an oil right it was an oil refinery in 1885 till till i think about 19th till the gujarat oil Assam was still India's biggest oil producing place till about 1960s yet hesitation about about about an oil refinery so look i think that we probably i think one thing i will say out of all this discussion i think we don't interrogate the postcolonial moment enough right meaning what was what was independence right so clearly if you so many institutions stayed on that independence at least has to be studied more a more uh more radical if you like right what did it do what it didn't do right and not just an indian context right after all uh you know as you as some of you know i actually even though i write about all this i don't i teach actually trust relations comparative policies etc so when you think about then decolonization india may have had a huge anti-colonial movement but not every country had anti-colonial movement colonialism collapsed on its own weight right essentially after a second world war britain are dying to leave right so as a result think of a place that you're dying to leave so whatever was left the britain rule as a territory became an independent country right clearly we need to think about the idea of an independent country why is it that in the world of 191 states there are some places with 1 billion people some places with 100 000 people they all call countries are they all the same no so in some ways we need to think about these things more radically that colonialism was the extremely powerful force it collapsed like a house of cards that gave us the world of decolonization which is a really hurriedly put together assembly under the united nations it is not working yeah i think i'll stop there thank you i think that marks the end of the badaj of questions and comments as well i guess that it was a great learning experience i don't want to sum up because a a presentation like this and the discussion that followed probably summed up so easily but that we could raise some important questions which need to be addressed and would love to hear the responses from sanjeevda in future as well but i have one of two things in mind which i want to share with you maybe that at some point if we have time you can take a couple of minutes to respond to them one thing which which came out very cogently is this that the how a sum team for example became an integral part of global capitalism that story came out very eloquently but somehow i feel that the sinful story was lost in the sense that that a sum team became an integral part of global capitalism must have elicited some responses and we have some inkling of those evidences that the elicited sinful response as well and particularly some of the communities and these responses have been documented for instance in the travel logs in the tracks written by the british ethnographers come administrators so what was this thing for response i wonder this is this is a question in other words you know that you seem to track it's a methodological question because you seem to track the trajectory of capitalism along the axis of capital there is hardly anything in in terms of for instance tea labor in terms of for instance the tribal communities that were uprooted so that's one part of the story so i would say that you have told perhaps the half of the story where is the other half and maybe that at some point you'd be letting us know what the other half was doing so this is my first kind of reflection the i'm not very sure whether i make sense but i would sort of keep arguing the and as a corollary to it you know that it has a lot to do with the way for for example capitalism and plantation capitalism works because you know that it also has to do a lot with labor economy and how and and the question came out very well for instance that is there anything specific in terms of the labor economy which gave asante its global capitalist character so where is the story of the labor and particularly for instance in in current writings on capitalist development and how capitalism develops we have the stories of primitive capital we have also the stories of need economy quote unquote and how it gets integrated into the global capital the global capitalism i remember one of my colleagues book kolean sanyal's famous book rethinking capitalist development kolean died an untimely death but the book is very interesting in the sense that how for instance you know that the more capitalism progresses the greater the labor is thrown into penury and apparently you know that labor has a sequestered existence having nothing to do with the way capitalism progresses but he was the one who actually tried to establish a kind of linkages that that is shared between these two so i think that this is i'm not sure whether that can actually be sort of shedding light on a plantation economy of the northeast because he hasn't touched upon the northeast but i guess that that would be a good food for thought this is one comment the second is about this westland and the lockian idea of westland i think that plantation has also a lot to do with a lot lot to do with the lived land of the people as well and there probably colonial capitalism invoked the doctrine of eminent domain because land finally belongs to the state even if you know you own it this and that actually explains why for instance in 1894 that that law came into existence it says that the state can actually acquire law at any moment without showing any reason or showing the reason of public purpose so i think that the eminent domain is a very important concept in this context so this is my other thing the third thing coming which comes alongside the concept of westland is this that how do tea gardens or how are the gardens linked up with border conflicts for instance because after all you have to think in terms of expanding tea gardens and constantly expanding tea gardens and they are located in the foothills and foothills are the contact points between the plains and the hills and they are the burning issues as well and think of think of for instance the interstate border disputes in the northeast much of it has a lot to do with the way for instance the tea gardens expand or the tea gardens contract for instance i think that that's another important point and finally one important point the branding of asam tea for instance i think it's just my conjecture because i haven't worked on that that the way for instance asam tea is branded is different from the way for instance arjunic tea is branded the the thick volume of asam tea the we call it liquor now has a particular constituency of consumers in the world and the arjunic tea is basically for the elite so this branding becomes very important i remember having met a planter in upper asam many years back who actually vociferously disputed when i suggested to him that asam tea is very very sort of thick and dense and it doesn't have a flavor he disputed it he said that this is the way for instance the colonial branding has happened and he actually sort of made me test a kind of tea which is grown in one of the asam tea gardens and he said that now you're telling me whether it has flavored or not and in other words you know that this flavor liquor kind of dichotomy must have its impact on the way for instance asam tea got integrated into the global tea market i think that that could be one axis of inquiry i think i should stop here but let me in sum i must say that it's a great learning experience and maybe that we would be very soon sort of see the publication of some of your thoughts and would love to read them but if you have anything to say to respond you can because i always think that the the the speaker must have the last word to say thank you no no i think i will say a couple of short things you know one i would say your imminent dominant point is very interesting but this will interest you or not this book recent book on on i forget environment that plantation or whatever it's called as on asam basically what i learned from it is that actually when the asam forest department was constituted in 1870 forest department is extremely upset that they hardly had any land all land have already gone to replantations so that forest department was a late comer as he puts it to the wastelands of asam imagine right and that we tend to underestimate so essentially asam tea was the tea planters were the biggest land owners by the time forest department started in every district not every district he says every district but i think he means a particular way but what is interesting then is that as you know right it was made so widely available most tea plantation had way more land than they wanted to cultivate they still have more land than they cultivate right so essentially i would say it was really a free for all kind of a situation for so far european tea hold is a concern so tea planters got landed wasteland i would argue prior to the eminent domain idea right it was because very early on tea began so it didn't even have to start there right it would say you know the whole what they call the wasteland ag all the laws right when i read one or two of them i haven't really studied them closely you don't get a sense of eminent domain there right you get much more of a sense of the locky and wasteland idea if you like right so forest department etc by the time it comes yes you do get the idea of that state should be in charge of the public land right but our sounds you know plantation work is really kind of primitive capitalism well you know wild sense right our primitive capital without the state is the impression i get when i read about 1930s 40s 50s right that's why they have massive speculation so on your point about simpos extremely well taken however i would bring together two of your points the driver the point about say look there is no doubt that almost say after all we assume now the borders were given and as a result tea plantations are in the plains it wasn't in fact inner line bodhisattva's argument is that inner line was really a constantly fluid take right was extremely interested to make sure that they get more and more land duty plantations now may call it naga land asam etc but it's not clear at all that is so inner line was extremely fluid meant to protect tea plantations right i didn't want to spend money and administering those areas right so as a result you're absolutely right that the many of these border conflicts are indeed connected to the proper politics of tea right so earlier on it was simply really what if you read by 18 18 60 80 70s so what that time was really a primitive expedition against tribals quote unquote are in this modern formulation is border dispute precisely because we made the inner line into interstate border who would have thought look i'm completely convinced the british colonials will be turning on the grave they never thought they knew asam so well that the inner line will stay on for 100 years right so and then not only that we kept it and now we make it interstate border right it's bizarre if you think they would really i think they really were improvising constantly improvising they didn't think they know the place right and now we kept the laws kept the inner line kept the entire colonial territorialization right that tells you how problematic it is right but that though is connected your point about sympos i have been struck by the fact that in everybody in you know in say even the french visitor in 1750s chevalier or something i think i i read him everybody was interested in asam only because of what kind they are not interested in asam they wanted to they ever they heard about how much trade happens in asam right so and so that they were extremely that's why they all missionaries land up there far far north the east india company lands up there first hodya etc precisely because of that interest everything stops because once asam becomes a frontier of capitalism right then protecting tea becomes most important so in that sense the the the the sympos story gets blocked by the actual development of planetary capitalism but that's only a small part of it so you said i i said half the story i will say not even half the story not even a quarter of a story right there are many stories to be told right i just first of all i recently began to think about one particular angle to it that's all i will say thank you thank you sanjitha i liked the linguistic style i haven't said anything but i like your linguistic style and your point that we must learn history from everyone and history is nobody's monopoly history is not the monopoly of the professional historians within courts i like it very much i mean that's the greatest takeaway for from today's presentation thank you very much so it's over to janabee devi who will be proposing a formal vote of thanks to us thank you thank you very much on behalf of ujjokumar via school of social sciences i'd like to offer our vote of thanks to the five censor of this university professor kandepa das for encouraging and guiding us to organize such kind of academic events we are also very very thankful to professor sanjitha for accepting our invitation and delivering it off on a topic of great academic importance and i'm very sure that sir all of the participants are highly benefited from your observation thank you sir i'd like to also extend our hard work attitude to professor samir kandepa das for moderating today's session and we are also thankful to the artistel of the university for their technical support and lastly i'd like to express our gratitude to the participants who with their active participation have made this event a successful one thank you all thank you thank you sir thank you thank you very much i will stop here all the best thank you sir thank you thank you thank you