Empire's garden : Assam and the making of India /
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| Author / Creator: | Sharma, Jayeeta. |
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| Imprint: | Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2011. |
| Description: | 1 online resource (xiii, 324 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Radical perspectives Radical perspectives. |
| Subject: | |
| Format: | E-Resource Book |
| URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11660021 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiii, 324 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Format: | Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780822394396 0822394391 1283252368 9781283252362 9780822350323 0822350327 9780822350491 0822350491 9781478091509 1478091509 |