Explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region's social landscape

In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.

"“Empire’s Garden creates a rich, rewarding, and multi-stranded appreciation of Assam’s modern history. It greatly enriches understanding of the history and politics of Assam while at the same time giving fresh insights into the processes involved in the making of modern India and the incorporation of its diverse regions.”" - Economic History Review

"“[P]athbreaking…. [T]his careful and thoughtful study is especially welcome…. Empire’s Garden provides a rich set of reflections on regions, regionalism, and the growth of nationalism in the modern world.”" - Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"“Jayeeta Sharma’s recent monograph brilliantly explores how the contradiction inherent in the integration of Assam with global capitalist modernity through the quasi-feudal agency of colonial capitalism transformed social and economic life in Bramhaputra Valley, one of the core regions of colonial Assam’s territories.”" - Labour/Le Travail

"“The author’s prodigious work illuminates and deals with the vast consequences of creating the Empire’s Tea Garden and the settlement of over a million migrants into the tea plantations…. Read this deeply researched and wide-ranging book.”" - Royal Society for Asian Affairs

"“This book is an important work exploring the history of Assam through the colonial era.”" - Pacific Affairs